The Soldier's Song (26 page)

I didn’t say anything because even thinking about it gives me the willies. The Boche will be listening and, if they think we’re still working they’ll blow another mine, and another, until they bury us all alive. Our only hope is to get the job done and blow them all to kingdom come before they stop us. The strain is very bad. Another four weeks left and then I’ll be out of this hellish place and back above ground, where I belong. But every minute I’m down here I’ll have those words running through my head:

They won’t know what hit them.

And I’m not thinking about the Boche.

* * *

Stephen scrambled into the bright daylight with the desperate urgency of a newborn. The shock of it was overpowering. The sun stung his eyes and the air felt sharp against his skin, and he collapsed on the grimy duckboards with his chest heaving and his head spinning. He couldn’t breathe. He was choking and retching as he threshed around on the ground, but he could get no air. Then, at last, he coughed up a great gob of slimy mud and his throat was clear. He sucked the air into his lungs with an enormous heaving gasp.

Still he wasn’t right. There was grit under his tongue, earth in his nose, his clothes, his ears. He tried to get rid of it, shaking himself like a dog, spitting, pulling at his clothes. His ears were the worst. They felt blocked, muffled. He could hear his breath sawing in his chest, but everything else was muted, distant. Christ Almighty. Had he gone deaf?

He saw a pair of boots running silently towards him. It was Macmillan. He felt his hand on his shoulder and looked up into his worried, fearful face. His lips were moving.

‘What?’ Stephen bellowed, and even the sound of his own voice was muffled. He shook his head again, trying to dull the loud ringing in his ears.

‘What happened?’ Macmillan shouted. He was so close that Stephen felt spittle splash his cheek, but he could hear him. Barely, but he could hear him. Thank Christ! Another shake and something seemed to give way inside his head. There was a pop and he felt air in his ears.

‘I said, what happened?’ Macmillan shouted again, so loud it hurt.

‘I heard you!’ Stephen rolled away and pushed himself into a sitting position, still doggedly shaking his head. Behind Macmillan, he saw Page and Murphy lying together against the wall of the trench. Page had his round face turned up to the sky, blood oozing from his eyes. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

‘What do you mean? You must know what happened! Did it collapse?’

‘Of course it fucking collapsed!’

‘But what caused it? Think, man! Was it a camouflet? Did you hear an explosion?’

‘I can’t . . .’ he shook his head again, frowning. All he could remember was the sudden dark. The awful bloody blackness falling down on them. ‘I don’t remember what happened. I just . . . I don’t know. The lights went out.’

‘Oh, fucking hell,’ Macmillan rocked back on his heels and held his head in his hands. He was only a year or two older than Stephen, but he looked gaunt and aged. The work was wearing him out. Three of these mines were his, and the closer they came to completion, the more strain came onto him. Christ knew when he’d last slept. All he did was check wiring, test connections and fret about the damp in the galleries. He’d come so close to being finished – the mines were due to blow in the early hours of tomorrow morning. Thirteen more hours and his work would have been done. But now . . .

‘We must go down and see if the wires have been cut,’ he said decisively, and Stephen looked at the hole he’d crawled out of. There used to be a door, but the compressed air from the collapse had blown it off its hinges. The naked opening gaped at him like a wound in the earth, black and uninviting.

‘All right. I’ll go with you,’ he offered, though his stomach churned at the mere thought of it. Macmillan smiled and clapped him on the shoulder.

‘Good man. Back in a tick.’

When he ran off, Stephen sagged against the wall of the trench. The summer sun was warm on his face but he was seized by uncontrollable fits of shivering. Now that his hearing had returned all he could hear was the noise of shells thundering across the sky. It was the final bombardment, a prolonged battering that would keep the Boche in their deep dugouts. But anybody who was underground when those mines went up would almost certainly be killed. If their dugouts didn’t collapse then the concussion would kill them, and any survivors would be deafened, stunned and insensible when the assault troops charged across the craters.

Two stretcher-bearers came running down the trench. ‘Can you ’ear me, mate?’ one shouted at Page. Page just looked at him blankly, his head lolling. What the hell had happened? He’d had twelve men down there. If Page and Murphy got out that left ten unaccounted for. But they didn’t bear thinking about. He remembered the roof coming down, timbers hitting him, crumbling earth spilling over his shoulders. He could hardly believe he’d got out himself. Anybody behind him must have been buried.

Macmillan came back with his tool bag and a pair of electric flashlights in his hand, a rope coiled over his shoulders. ‘All set?’ he asked, and pushed a gas mask into Stephen’s hands. Stephen looked at it and felt his courage ebbing. Sometimes the Germans pumped gas into a breach – as if suffocation wasn’t bad enough.

When he stood up his knees were trembling, but Macmillan wasn’t much better.

‘After you,’ he cried with forced levity, and Stephen clenched his teeth as he stepped into the hole. His feet found the familiar top step and he started to descend mechanically. It was only when his feet thumped onto solid earth at the bottom that he realized he was holding his breath, and that he had his eyes closed.

Macmillan missed the last two rungs and stumbled against him. ‘Sorry, old man,’ he panted, and they switched on their lamps. The beams cut through the still air, motes flashing and disappearing as they swept the gallery. Not a breath, not a sound. The brand-new detonating wires hung from the roof like bundles of sinews, but otherwise it looked as if it hadn’t been disturbed for years. Stephen slipped his revolver from its holster and nodded to Macmillan before he set off along the tunnel.

Down they went, down and down, deep into the earth, cleaving the darkness with their lamps. How many times had he walked this path in the last four months? But it felt different now, more hostile. Even the air seemed menacing and black; cold on his face and closing in again behind him. Every few minutes he stopped and listened to the dark, but the only sound was the pounding of his heart in his chest. He could feel cold sweat running down his back and with every step forward he had to fight the urge to turn and flee.

Quite suddenly they came to the site of the collapse. A dense, uneven wall of blue soil filled the tunnel and swallowed the tangle of detonating wires dragged down by the collapse. Splintered timbers stuck out like straws, and the moment he stopped he could hear the roof creaking and groaning as if it hadn’t made up its mind whether to fall in.

‘Christ Almighty,’ Macmillan whispered. ‘How far are we from the charge, would you say?’

How the hell should I know? Stephen wondered silently, but he shrugged and found his voice after a moment. ‘I’m not sure. A hundred feet, maybe? It’s hard to tell.’

‘All right. I’ll test the circuit here. If it’s broken we’ll have to dig.’

He set to work and, for want of anything better to do, Stephen held his flashlight for him and watched his nimble fingers as they connected the battery and voltmeter. He saw the needle on the voltmeter stay doggedly still and knew what it meant when Macmillan shook his head.

‘Blast,’ he hissed, and the roof cracked and showered them with stones and lumps of clay. Stephen felt his knees go weak, but Macmillan just looked up and smiled, ‘I’ll get to work. Do you think you can find something to shore that up?’

They had passed some shoring timbers not twenty yards back. Stephen walked up the tunnel to fetch them, dry in the mouth and sorely tempted to keep walking. But he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, leave somebody down here alone in the dark. When he came back he had three stout timbers under one arm and a paraffin lamp in his free hand. Macmillan was kneeling at the wall, gently parting the earth around the wires. Stephen lit the lamp and eased the tallest timber under the sagging roof, inching it sideways until it was almost vertical. When he stood back in the circle of light it looked like a match in the mouth of a crocodile.

Macmillan looked up and nodded. Then back to his meagre excavation. ‘You wouldn’t give us a hand here, old chap?’

As he knelt down beside him the roof groaned again, but then seemed to settle onto the timber. It took an effort to look away – his throat felt tight and he shuddered as he thrust his hands into the cool earth.

It was easier if he concentrated on the work. They both dug until their fingers bled. Eventually, they had excavated a little burrow around the vanishing wires that was only big enough for one, and then they took turns until it was so deep that one had to pull the other out by the ankles.

When he wasn’t digging Stephen sat in the yellow globe of lamplight and stared into the darkness. The light gleamed on the leather of Macmillan’s boots sticking out of the earth as he worked at full stretch inside. Suddenly he heard muffled cries and Macmillan’s feet flailed wildly. Stephen dragged him out gasping for breath, shock all over his grimy face.

‘What is it?’ he demanded, and Macmillan made a sign that he should look for himself.

One flash of the torch and he could see what had startled him. Three fingers stuck out of the earth at the end of the burrow, curled upwards as if they were beckoning him on. They were white and lifeless, like the hand of a Greek statue freed from the earth. Stephen looked at Macmillan, holding his ashen face in his hands, and then took a deep breath and crawled in. It was one of his men, after all. Gently, he scraped away at the soil beneath the hand, folded it back into the earth, and placed a scrap of timber over it. He was suddenly aware that he was inside the earth, a burrow in a burrow, cold clay pressing all around him. He felt panic rising in his chest but fought it back and started to dig furiously, chasing the wires. Beads of sweat rolled down into his eyes and the heat of his breath huffed around his ears, but he dug harder, deeper. All at once his scraping hands felt something solid, and he quailed at the thought of an arm or a leg, an ivory face in the throes of suffocating death. But it was timber – a solid baulk, one of the main roof beams. He pulled at the wires, plunging down underneath, and saw clean copper ends glinting in the soil like traces of gold. That had to be it. He scrambled back out on his elbows and let Macmillan in with his battery and wire cutters.

Waiting again, he thought of the hand he had seen, following the limb to the elbow, the shoulder, finally finding the face. Whose was it? He hardly knew his men to look at. He was so used to seeing them in the half-dark that he knew them better by sound of voice. But that one wouldn’t speak again. And there must be others, all jumbled in with the earth and timbers. With a jolt, he realized it might be worse – they might be still alive and lying in pitch black on the other side, breathing shallow to spin out the dying air.

Eventually Macmillan scrambled back out, pouring sweat, but grinning. ‘All set,’ he said. ‘We’ve only got four out of five circuits, but the last one will go up when we blow the others. Come on, we’ve got two hours left. Best make sure of the wiring from here to the surface.’

Two hours? Stephen looked at him dully. He had no idea of the time because his watch had stopped. He pointed to the wall of earth, suddenly barely able to string the words together. ‘What if there are men still alive?’ he asked. ‘What if they’re trapped on the other side?’

Macmillan shook his head and the silver discs of his spectacles glinted in the light of the paraffin lamp.

‘There’s no reason to think they are,’ he said sympathetically, ‘and besides, we simply don’t have the time to dig them out. This mine is going up in two hours, whether we like it or not. On the bright side, if they are alive, then at least it will be better than asphyxiation. One moment, and it’ll be all over. They won’t know what hit them.’

It took them over an hour to get back out, Macmillan brushing the wires where they hung low, like Theseus and his silken thread. Every time they reached a turn he would stop and connect his battery. Then he would nod, satisfied, and they would move on again. Stephen kept looking back into the darkness as they went, listening keenly. Hearing nothing.

They emerged to find the trench packed with soldiers. Some of them parted to make way, but Stephen stopped for a moment and stood among them, feeling the jostling human warmth and drinking in the wide open sky. He could hardly credit that he’d been down so long. Night had come and gone, but the morning was only waking up. The eastern horizon was tinted orange, the blue-streaked sky still flecked with silver stars. In the dull, milky light the men looked like ghosts, as if they weren’t fully there. But he clearly saw the shamrocks on their shoulders and heard the familiar murmur of Irish accents.

‘Are you Sixteenth Division?’ he asked a small group, and a young man with red hair and a thick Cork accent answered.

‘Why yes, sir. Second Battalion, Munster Fusiliers.’

‘Are the Dublins in this attack?’

‘Sure, of course they are, sir,’ he nodded towards the rising sun, ‘They’re over that way, on our right.’

Stephen looked wistfully in that direction, thinking of Wilson, Kinsella and all the others. They were in for quite a show.