David Malouf: Fly Away Peter

The men who had been mining under Hill 60, just a few days earlier, had discovered the fossil of a prehistoric animal, a mammoth, together with the flints that had been used either to kill or to cut it up. Very carefully, in the rush to get the galleries finished before the Germans finished theirs (for the two lots of miners had for several weeks been tunnelling in one anothers’ path) the fossil had been uncovered and brought out, and now, with the battle barely over and the dead still being counted (fifty thousand, they said, on the German side alone) it was waiting to be conveyed behind the lines and examined by experts.

It was a great wonder, and Jim stared along with the rest. A mammoth, thousands of years old. Thousands of years dead. It went back to the beginning, and was here, this giant beast that had fallen to his knees so long ago, among the recent dead, with the sharp little flints laid out beside it which were also a beginning. Looking at them made time seem meaningless. Jim raised his eyes to the faces — intent, puzzled, idly indifferent — of the other men who had been drawn here, but they seemed no better able to understand the thing than himself. Some of them had come directly from the lines. Turning aside a moment, they regarded the creature out of crusted eyes as if it were one of themselves: more bones. Others, who could look at things from the distance that came with a fresh uniform and the brief absence of vermin, might be seeing it as it was intended to be seen, a proof that even here among the horrors of battle a spirit of scientific enquiry could be pursued, its interests standing over and above the particular circumstances of war, speaking for a civilization that contained them all, British and German alike, and to which they would return when the fighting was done.

In a field tent up at the hospital, where the dying were kept apart from the rest, Bob Cleese was in the final stages, fevered beyond hope. Jim regarded him with horror and was ashamed that he should feel disgust. Under Bob’s mild eyes, where the whiting had swarmed, gathered the yellow pints of fluid he was spewing up out of his lungs, four pints every hour for the past twenty-four. Jim stared and couldn’t believe what he saw. Yellow, thick, foul-smelling, the stuff came pouring out, and poured and poured, while Bob’s eyes bulged and he choked and groaned. At last a nurse came, and gently at first, then roughly, she pushed Jim away. The whole tent was filled with such cases. The noise and the smell were terrible. Only the dead were quiet, lying stiff and yellow on their frames. Outside at last, Jim staggered in the sunlight and gulped for breath. He began to walk back towards the front, under the great yellow pall that in all that quarter hung low over the earth.

That night they went back into the lines, and for five days and nights they dug in and defended themselves against counter attacks and were bombed and machine-gunned from planes and lived in the stench of the German dead. Two weeks later they were back. For eighteen days. They were half-crazy that time, and once, digging furiously, while the sky cracked and blazed and men all round were being sliced with shrapnel or, with an entrenching tool floating high above them, were lifted clean off their feet and suspended a moment in mid-air, Jim felt his shovel scrape against bone and slice clean through a skull. He heard teeth scrape against metal, and his own teeth ground in his head. But he dug just the same, and the corpse, which had been curled up knee to chin and fist to cheekbone was quickly uncovered and thrown aside.

He had begun to feel immeasurably old. Almost everyone he had known well in the company was gone now and had been twice replaced. The replacements came up in new uniforms, very nice, very sweet, very clean, and looked like play soldiers, utterly unreal, till they too took on the colour of the earth or sank below it. It was like living through whole generations. Even the names they had given to positions they had held a month before had been changed by the time they came back, as they had changed some names and inherited others from the men who went before. In rapid succession, generation after generation, they passed over the landscape. Marwood Copse one place was called, where not a stick remained of what might, months or centuries back, have been a densely-populated wood. When they entered the lines up at Ploegsteert and found the various trenches called Piccadilly, Hyde Park Corner, the Strand, it was to Jim, who had never seen London, as if this maze of muddy ditches was all that remained of a great city. Time, even in the dimension of his own life, had lost all meaning for him.

GOING UP NOW was a nightmare. It was late summer and the roads, in the scorching heat, were rivers of dust filled with the sound of feet falling on planks, the rumble of gun-carriages and lorries, the jingling of chains, the neighing of horses, a terrible clamour; and when the rain fell, and continued to fall as it did for days on end, they were a sea of mud into which everything was in danger of sinking without trace and which stank of what it had already swallowed, corpses, the bloated carcasses of mules, horses, men.

Packed again into a cattletruck, pushed in hard against the wall, in the smell of what he now understood, Jim had a fearful vision. It would go on forever. The war, or something like it with a different name, would go on growing out from here till the whole earth was involved; the immense and murderous machine that was in operation up ahead would require more and more men to work it, more and more blood to keep it running; it was no longer in control. The cattletrucks would keep on right across the century, and when there were no more young men to fill them they would be filled with the old, and with women and children. They had fallen, he and his contemporaries, into a dark pocket of time from which there was no escape.

Jim saw that he had been living, till he came here, in a state of dangerous innocence. The world when you looked from both sides was quite other than a placid, slow-moving dream, without change of climate or colour and with time and place for all. He had been blind.

It wasn’t that violence had no part in what he had known back there; but he had believed it to be extraordinary. When he was fifteen years old his younger brother, who was riding on the guard of a harvester he was driving, and singing over the tops of the wheat in his babyish voice I’m the king of the castle, you’re the dirty rascal , had suddenly lost his footing and tipped backwards into the blades. Jim had run a half mile through the swath he had cut in the standing grain with the image in his head of the child caught there among the smashed stalks and bloodied ears of wheat, and been unable when he arrived at the McLaren’s door to get the image, it so filled him, into words. There were no words for it, then or ever, and the ones that came said nothing of the sound the metal had made striking the child’s skull, or the shocking whiteness he had seen of stripped bone, and would never be fitted in any language to the inhuman shriek — he had thought it was some new and unknown bird entering the field — of the boy’s first cry. It had gone down, that sound, to become part of what was unspoken between them at every meal so long as his mother was still living and they retained some notion of being a family. He had never been able to talk to her of it and she had died looking past him to the face of the younger boy; and still they hadn’t talked.

There was that. And there was a kestrel he had found once with a tin tied to its leg, a rolled-up sardine-tin still with its key. He had wept with rage and pain at the cruelty of the thing, the mean and senseless cruelty. His hands had been torn by the bird, which couldn’t distinguish between kindness and more cruelty, and afterwards when it flapped away he had sat with his bloodied hands between his knees and thought of his brother. There , something in him had said. There ! But he had freed only one small life, and the kestrel, with the weight of the sardine-tin gone but still there, and the obscene rusty object lying in the dirt where Jim had kicked it, was too sick from starvation to do more than flop about in the grass and would only feebly recover its balance in the air.