Tom McCarthy - C

“You’re listening to my sigs beneath the ground?”

“You wouldn’t have an audience for long if we stayed over it,” the man tells him. “The German kite-balloons pick our flashes up once we start firing, range their batteries on us. Here’s what we’ve got.”

Leaning against one of the burrow’s earth-walls, sitting on a wooden table, is a small Mark 4 receiver.

“Pelican crystals?” Serge asks.

“Two,” the operator says. “And two dials: aerial condenser and signal. We have to keep the first one turning constantly; then once we’ve caught your clicks, we crank the condenser up to max. Makes our ears bleed.”

Serge looks at the man’s ears. He’s not exaggerating: his drums are caked with dried blood, and red streaks run down both sides of his neck.

“Sorry,” Serge murmurs.

“Not your fault. Wouldn’t hear them otherwise.”

“Oh, look,” says Serge, “the gas hasn’t killed all the insects.”

The wall behind the receiver has lice on it. So does the receiver, and the table, chair and floor.

“Curse of the trenches,” shrugs the operator. “Still, I wouldn’t swap with you people for all the world. Need to feel ground beneath my feet. Over my head as well, these days. I get all anxious if I’m in the open for too long-even way back from the lines, on leave or what have you: like something’s going to come and land on me…”

The man’s words give over to coughs. Serge runs his eye around the burrow. There are passages leading off from the main chamber, presumably to other chambers which in turn have passages connecting them. This chamber has a bed in it; beneath the bed, two tins of pork-meat and a tattered copy of A. E. Housman.

“You too?” asks Serge.

“Calms me down,” the operator tells him. “When the ordnance is falling, or taking off from here, or both. I think of Shropshire hedgerows…”

This is what the 104th men say as well. They’ve got at least two copies there-one in the mess, one on his houseboat. He saw a soldier reading Housman on the boat over from Folkestone too. Half the front must be thinking of Shropshire hedgerows. Serge doesn’t get it, and one day finds himself arguing the case out with the other officers, holding his ground against first one, then two, then three opponents.

“It’s deep,” Watson insists indignantly. “He looks at the cherry tree and has a vision of time passing.” Straightening his back and dropping his voice to a solemn register, he starts reciting:

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

That only leaves me fifty more…

“Seventy minus twenty equals fifty,” Serge replies. “That’s deep.”

“You have no sense of poetry, Carrefax,” Baldwick joins in. “These things can take you away from all the rage around you, keep you safe…”

“Why would I want to be taken away?” asks Serge. “Where danger is, there rescue grows.”

“What?”

“Hölderlin.” He tosses Cécile’s copy onto Baldwick’s lap.

“This is a German book!” Baldwick gasps, recoiling.

“He was a German poet,” Serge replies.

“You could be…” stutters Baldwick, “I mean, it’s virtually…”

“It’s virtually treason,” Dickinson helps him out.

“You should read it,” Serge informs them. “Learn some phrases: help you if you get shot down behind enemy lines and they don’t understand what Shropshire hedgerows are…”

None of them take his offer up; the book lies around the mess unopened for one week, then gets returned to Cécile. Serge takes some of its lines into the air with him, though: they start jostling for space with the ones from the Pageant. He still hears the latter every time he shoots his gun; but when Gibbs turns, or dives, or pulls up suddenly and catapults him backwards to the sky, he hears the opening words of “ Patmos ”:

Nah ist

Und schwer zu fassen der Gott…

He feels the schwer inside his stomach, tightening like gravity; the Nah is a kind of measuring, a spacing-out of space in such a way that distant objects and locations loom up close and nearby ones expand, their edges hurtling away beyond all visible horizons to convey and deliver the contents of these to him. The Gott’s not a divine, Christian Creator, but a point within the planes and altitudes the machine’s cutting through-and one of several: the god, not God. And fassen… fassen is like locking onto something: a signal, frequency or groove. The word speaks itself inside his ear each time he taps his spark set or amends his clock-code chart. When arcing shells respond and hit their target, another phrase of Hölderlin’s hums in the struts and wires, its syntax rattling and breaking with the pressure from the rising blasts: the line from “Die Titanen” about der Allerschütterer, the One Who Shakes All Things, reaching down into the deep to make it come to life:

Es komme der Himmlische

Zu Todten herab und gewaltig dämmerts

Im ungebundenen Abgrund

Im allesmerkenden auf.

He thinks of the sky he’s held in as an Abgrund: an abyss, a without-ground-yet one that’s all-remarking, allesmerkenden, scored over by a thousand tracks and traces like the fallen earth below him. Which makes him der Himmlische, the Heavenly One, calling down light, causing it to burst forth and rise upwards, to the partings of the Father’s hair, so that… wenn aber… und es gehet… Here the sentences fade in and out, like wireless stations, before climaxing in a stanza that Serge once spends a whole night sitting on his houseboat’s deck translating:

und der Vogel des Himmels ihm

Es anzeigt. Wunderbar

Im Zorne kommet er drauf.

and the bird of Heaven

Makes it known to him. Upon which,

Wonderful in anger, he comes.

These lines, and others, echo for him on another occasion too: his visit to the sounding range near Battery F. This visit’s not directive-prompted. Quite the opposite: it takes place by accident and, Serge suspects, against the orders of Headquarters, who have always maintained an air of secrecy about what goes on in the woods just north of Vitriers. He’s being driven in a Crossley truck to Nieppe one afternoon, to buy spare aerial copper from a local metalworker (ordering it up from England would take months) when the driver announces, on the way back, a short detour to drop off some piano wire in Sector Four.

“They’re playing pianos amidst all this racket?” Serge asks him, incredulous.

The driver smiles. They leave the road and slalom between tree trunks, pulling up eventually beside a small cluster of huts. As the driver carries the looped coils to one of these, Serge wanders off among the trees, unzips his trouser-fly and starts to urinate onto the ground-only to be chastised by a voice that issues from the foliage around him like some spirit of the woods:

“Don’t piss against the wire!”

“What wire?” he asks. “Who said that?”

The wood-spirit emerges: a short man with slender fingers.

“Just under the earth’s surface,” he says, before adding, no less obscurely: “You’ll cause interference from the mikes. Who are you?”

“Observer from 104th Squadron,” Serge tells him. “I stopped by to drop off the wire.”

“The wires are already in place,” the slender-fingered man says, pointing at the ground. “Six of them, running from the microphones to here.”

“Microphones in the woods?”

“Yup: six mikes, one for each wire. They’re in cut-out barrels arranged in a semi-circle quarter of a mile away.”

“Attached to piano wire?” asks Serge.

“You brought new piano wire? Why didn’t you say so? Where is it?”

“Being carried into those huts,” Serge tells him.