David Malouf - Fly Away Peter

That was how it was, even in sunlight. Even there.

What can stand, he asked himself, what can ever stand against it? A ploughed hillside with all the clods gleaming where the share had cut? A keen eye for the difference, minute but actual, between two species of wren that spoke for a whole history of divergent lives? Worth recording in all this? He no longer thought so. Nothing counted. The disintegrating power of that cruelty in metallic form, when it hurled itself against you, raised you aloft, thumped you down like a sack of grain, scattered you as bloody rain, or opened you up to its own infinite blackness — nothing stood before that. It was annihilating. It was all.

Last time he had come up here there had been peasants in the field. Now the area behind the lines was utterly blasted. The earth was one vast rag and bone shop, the scattered remains of both sides lay all over it: shell fragments and whole shells of every size, dangerously unexploded, old sandbags trodden into the mud, a clasp and length of webbing, the head of an entrenching tool, buckled snapshots, playing cards, cigarette packets, pages of cheap novels and leaflets printed in English, German, French, scraps of wrapping-paper, bent tableforks and spoons, odd tatters of cloth that might be field-grey or horizon-blue or khaki, you could no longer tell which; smashed water-bottles, dented cups, odd bits of humanity still adhering to metal or cloth or wood, or floating in the green scum of shell-holes or spewed up out of the mouths of rats. They made their way across it. Once again they dug in.

One day when his company was back in support he was sent out with a dozen others to look for firewood in what remained of a shattered forest. All the leaves had been blasted from the trees and they stood bare, their trunks snapped like matchwood, their branches jagged, split, or broken off raw and hanging. They were astonished, coming into a clearing at the centre of it, to see an old man in baggy pants and braces digging.

A grave it must be , Jim thought. When the man plunged his spade in for the last time and left it there it had the aspect of some weird, unhallowed cross.

But it wasn’t a grave. The bit of earth he had dug was larger than a body would require.

The old man, who did not acknowledge their presence, had taken up a hoe and was preparing the earth in rows. It was the time for winter sowing, as any farmer among them would know, but it was a measure of the strangeness of all things here, of the inversion of all that was normal, that they saw immediately from what he was doing that the man was crazy. One of the fellows called out to him but he did not look up.

They moved round the edge of the wood gathering splinters for kindling, and Jim, as he stood watching the man for a moment with a great armful, thought of Miss Harcourt, whom he hadn’t remembered for days now. There was something in the old man’s movements as he stooped and pushed his thumbs into the earth, something in his refusal to accept the limiting nature of conditions, that vividly recalled her and for a moment lifted his spirits. So that later, by another reversal, whenever he thought of Miss Harcourt he was reminded of the man, stooped, pressing into the earth what might by now be a crop of French beans or turnips or beets; though in fact they never went back to the place — Jim didn’t even know where it was, since they never saw a map — and he had no opportunity of observing what the old man had been planting or whether it had survived.

Shortly after that, however, to keep hold of himself and of the old life that he had come close to losing, he went back to his notes. Even here, in the thick of the fighting, there were birds. The need to record their presence imposed itself on him as a kind of duty.

Saturday : a wryneck, with its funny flight, up and down in waves, the banded tail quite clear.

Wednesday : larks, singing high up and tumbling, not at all scared by the sound of gunfire. Skylarks. They are so tame that when they are on the ground you can get real close and see the upswept crest. I am training myself to hear the different sound of their flight paths; the skylarks that fly straight up and tumble and the woodlarks that make loops like Bert in his plane. The songs are similar but different because of the path.

Friday : a yellow wagtail. Can it be? Like the yellow wagtail we saw once at Burleigh that Miss Harcourt photographed. I wish I had the picture to compare. The sound I remember quite well. Tseep, tseep. The same yellow stripe over the eye. Or have I forgotten?

It was by then October. One night, lying awake in the old cemetery where they were bivouacked, just outside Ypres, he saw great flocks of birds making their way south against the moon. Greylag geese. He heard their cries, high, high up, as they moved fast in clear echelons on their old course. When he fell asleep they were still flying, and when he woke it was to the first autumn rains. All the damp ground, with its toppled stones, was sodden, and the men, lying among them or already up and preparing to move, were covered with the thick Flemish mud that stretched now as far as the eye could see and entirely filled the view.

THE MEN, HAVING stacked their rifles in neat piles and removed their packs, were taking their rest beside the road or had staggered off to where yellow flags marked the newly-dug latrines.

It was all so orderly and followed so carefully what was laid down in the book that it was difficult to believe, till you saw the racked and weary faces of the men, or observed the pain with which they lowered themselves to the earth, that they had already marched twelve miles this morning and were at the end of their endurance; or till you saw the terrible traffic that was moving in the opposite direction — sleep-walking battle survivors, walking wounded, men hideously mutilated and bloody, in lorries, wagons, handcarts — that there was a battle raging up ahead and that these men were making towards it with all possible speed; that is, at the precise rate, three miles an hour, with ten minutes rest for every fifty moving, that was laid down for the exercise in the army manual. Ashley Crowther knew these things because he was an officer and it was his business to know. He looked and marvelled. First at the men’s power to endure, then at the army’s deep and awful wisdom in these matters: the logistics of battle and the precise breaking point of men.

The traffic moved in a long cloud. Brakes crashed, horsechains clattered, men in the death wagons groaned or screamed as the rigid wheels bumped over ruts. Officers shouted orders. His own men simply lay scattered about in the dusty grass at the side of the road; prone, sprawled, dead beat. Very nearly dead.

A little way back they had passed the ruins of a village and he had been surprised to see that there were still peasants about. He saw a boy of nine or ten, very pale with red hands, who milked a cow, resting his cropped head against the animal’s sunken ribs as he pulled and pulled. Ashley had looked back over his shoulder at the scene, but the boy, who was used to this traffic, as was the cow, had not looked up.

Later, on the outskirts of another group of blasted farms, he saw a man mending a hoe. He had cut a new handle and was carefully shaping it with a knife, bent over his simple task and utterly absorbed, as if the road before him were empty and the sky overhead were also empty, not dense with smoky thunder or enlivened at odd, dangerous moments with wings. Did the man believe the coming battle was the end and that he might soon have need of the hoe?

That had been at their last resting-place; and Ashley, while he lay and smoked, had watched the man shape and test the handle, peeling off thin slivers and rubbing his broad thumb along the grain. He was still at it, minutes later, when they moved on.