Birdsong: Part Two: France 1916 Summary & Analysis

Englishman Jack Firebrace is digging forty-five feet below the French soil, excavating the trenches of World War I with Evans, a fellow miner. The men are attempting to brace the tunnels for the infantry soldiers, and Jack and Evans have lost track of how long they have been underground; however, the fighting is so intense aboveground that they don’t mind.

Evans tells Jack to back out of the hole he is chipping away at. Turner, another miner, has heard enemy sounds further back and Captain Weir, the miners’ commanding officer, has called on Jack’s impeccable hearing to identify the noise—he is adept at discerning normal shellfire from enemy digging near their trenches.

Turner claims that the sounds seem to be German digging, and Jack asks Weir to turn off the air-feed so that he can listen more closely. Jack determines the sounds to be surface shellfire and nothing to worry about. He is “as sure as he can be,” and Evans and Jack quickly return to their own digging.

Evans tries to light a candle, but there is not enough oxygen. The two men finish their shift of digging, and as Evans helps Jack out of his hole, a sudden blast rocks the earth and collapses much of their tunnel. As Jack, Evans, and Weir are blown to the sides of the tunnel, broken and destroyed bodies are thrown through the center of the remaining shaft, including a portion of Turner’s face and skull. The three men quickly exit the tunnel before the rest of it collapses.

Back on the surface, Jack receives a letter from his wife, Margaret, but he is unable to read it. It is difficult to think of home during the toil of the war, and Jack puts the letter away until he can better concentrate on it.

Jack informs the other miners that Turner has been killed. Jack shares a small dugout with Bill Tyson and Arthur Shaw, and the muddy hole serves as their home during the fighting. They have been together for nearly a year, each enticed by the promise of the six shilling pay for experienced miners and the likelihood of a quick war. Jack has reluctantly surrendered to the men’s friendship—with the rate at which the men die, Jack is weary of growing attached to anyone.

Weir approaches the men and orders Shaw and Tyson into the tunnel. Tyson had been previously ordered to sentry duty, but the platoon is short of men and Weir orders Jack to the post instead. Jack tries to sleep before his watch starts but the day’s events keep him awake. He doesn’t blame himself for misidentifying the sounds in the tunnel; he had done his best and explosions are common enough underground.

Abandoning sleep, Jack reads the letter from Margaret and learns that his son, John, has fallen ill with diphtheria. Margaret was nearly forty when the boy was born, and he is physically frail and simple of mind. Jack rarely thinks of his family on the front, and their life in England feels a world away—even though gunfire can be heard in London if the conditions are right.

At his sentry post, Jack is exhausted and falls asleep without realizing it. Captain Weir walks by and discovers Jack’s dereliction of duty. “It’s a court-martial offence. See me tomorrow at six. Your sergeant will bring you. You know the punishment,” Weir says.

After he is relieved by another miner, Jack sits quietly under a tree undamaged by shellfire. If he is found guilty by court-martial, it is possible he will be shot. The members of his own unit will line up with guns, some loaded with blanks, others not, and no one will know who actually fired the killing shot. Jack prays to God for his life and awaits to hear his fate.

Soon, Jack’s sergeant collects him to go before Lieutenant Wraysford, one of the “strangest officers” the sergeant has known. When Jack arrives in the muddy hole that serves as the Lieutenant’s home, he finds Weir is already there.

Lieutenant Wraysford declines to charge Jack and Weir doesn’t see the point in any further action. Wraysford tells Jack that he would like to go down into the tunnels, and he agrees to take him. Jack suspects that the two men are drunk, and while he has come to think of Weir as dependable, he knows little about Wraysford. He decides he doesn’t care; he is just happy that his life has been spared.

Later, Jack and the other miners are finally relieved and allowed to march to a billet for rest. Jack is exhausted and the long march feels unbearable. He suffers under the weight of his pack and twice falls asleep. He notices green grass growing on the side of the road and flowers blooming in the trees.

The miners arrive in a small French village and Weir negotiates with a local farmer to secure them a barn to sleep in. In the barn, Tyson finds a clean corner and invites Shaw and Jack to join him. While the men do grow tired of each other’s habits, they are “familiar with them and fear worse.”

Later in the day, Jack wakes and walks outside as an infantry battalion arrives in the village. Jack notes that none of the infantry men “would admit that what they saw and what they did was beyond the boundaries of human behavior.” It is hard to believe that these same men are responsible for so much killing, and that likewise, so much killing has been done against them. Jack too joins “the unspoken conspiracy that all is well, that no natural order has been violated.

The company food wagon arrives to feed the men, and Jack is too ashamed to admit that the meager meals supplied on the front are better than what he can afford at home. Next, the men line up naked near the washerwoman to bathe, and Jack notices Shaw’s “huge back” and muscular shoulders, along with the “dimple of the coccyx and the fatty swell of his hair-covered buttocks.” The men are issued clean clothes, although even these are covered with “immovable lice.”

The night before they leave to go back to the trenches, the men gather for singing. Weir plays the piano and Jack tells jokes, and Weir finds it difficult to enjoy the men’s company knowing that they are personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people. The men “know no shame,” and they sing on into the night.

Meanwhile, Stephen Wraysford’s section of the trenches have been shelled off for three days. He is exhausted, but his body is compelled by “some nervous chemical supplied by unknown glands.” Stephen is not a popular officer, and he doesn’t believe that there is a purpose to the fighting, nor an end in sight. It is Stephen’s education which has seen him through the ranks, and his own commanding officer, Captain Gray, constantly encourages him to become closer with the men.

Stephen has developed a close friendship with Weir, and because of this, he knows more about the miners than he does about his own men. His favorite soldiers, Reeves, Byrne, and Wilkinson are at their normal post, and just as Stephen approaches them, a young soldier named Tipper runs along the dugout.

Tipper screams as he runs, confused and lost, and the other men can “see the contortions of his facial muscles beneath the skin.” Tipper screams for his home and for his mother, and Stephen orders Reeves to get him out of the dugout. Stephen is left shaken, thinking about how “unnatural” their existence is.

Later, Weir arrives in Stephen’s dugout. He has run out of whiskey and he knows that his friend will have some extra. Weir is constantly afraid; afraid of the war, of the killing, and of dying, and he asks Stephen to talk to him as a distraction. “Talk to me, Wraysford,” he says. “Talk to me about anything you like.”

Stephen agrees and begins talking. He tells Weir that if the people back home in England saw some of the things they have done, “they would not believe their eyes.” Stephen sees the war as “an exploration of how far men can be degraded,” and he believes that the war has “barely started.”

Weir is disturbed by Stephen’s choice of topic and he quickly changes the subject. “I’ve never been with a woman,” Weir says. At thirty-two years old, Stephen can hardly believe his ears.

Weir admits that he wants to know what sex is like but now it has “become such an issue.” Stephen suggests a prostitute, but Weir isn’t interested. He assumes Stephen has been with many women, but says that for him it’s not that easy. Stephen corrects him, denying much experience, but admits to once being in love.

Weir engages the topic of love, and Stephen tells him about Isabelle. He says that after she left, he didn’t pursue her. Instead, he “let her go.” Weir asks him if he thinks of her often, and Stephen answers, “No. Never.”

Their conversation turns to their men, and Stephen claims that his men don’t respect him. “I’m irrelevant to them,” Stephen says. “Sometimes I think that I despise them,” he adds. Just then, another soldier appears and tells Stephen that he is needed in the trenches. There are multiple casualties, he says. “Reeves, Wilkinson, I think.”

Weir and Stephen run out to the trenches and begin digging through blown rock and dirt, trying to exhume their men. They pull Reeves from the rubble, “his rib cage missing on one side,” and nearby, they uncover Wilkinson, who had just been married. Another soldier, Douglas, has also been hurt, and while he is still alive, he is in bad shape.

Stephen comforts Douglas, whose femur is protruding from his leg. He asks about Douglas’s wife, and reminds him that he will see her again. He is covered in Douglas’s blood, and as the soldier loses consciousness, another blast rockets Stephen against the side of the trench. When the dust settles, Stephen is unhurt, and he calls for his men to take away Douglas’s body. “Get this man’s blood off me,” he yells to the other men in the trench.

 In the following days, Stephen’s company is relieved for rest, and he is billeted in a doctor’s home on the edge of the town of Béthune. The house boasts a formal, overgrown garden, and he reflects on the last few days. At one point, the gunfire quiets and a blackbird is heard singing. In the house, Stephen soon falls asleep.

In the morning, Stephen thinks about breakfast and wonders if there will be meat. He thinks of Bérard and his theory that English people eat meat every day for breakfast, and the house on the boulevard du Cange feels a world away.

He thinks of Isabelle, and while Stephen can still taste her flesh, he remembers little else about her. “What had gone completely was the memory of what made her human, her ways and her thoughts.”

Stephen had remained in St.-Rémy for an entire year after Isabelle left, in case she needed him, and when she never returned, he boarded a train for Paris. “The strain of his anguish lasted for another year, then went cold in him,” and when the war broke out, Stephen was glad for the distraction.

Stephen had considered joining the French army. After all, they would all be fighting the same enemy, but he felt a strange pull to fight alongside other Englishmen. He returned to London, and while he lacked the training to join immediately, the sergeant “turned a blind-eye” and Stephen found himself an instant soldier.

Stephen had assumed that the war would be “fought and concluded swiftly in a traditional way,” but over a year later, he had grown “used to the sight and smell of torn human flesh.” Since he couldn’t protest, “he turned himself to killing.”

 Later that morning, Stephen meets with Captain Gray, an odd Scotsman who spends most of his time reading. He asks Stephen how his platoon is fairing, and he tells him of the widespread death. “Yes of course,” Gray says, and then asks if he is getting along with the men. Stephen replies “yes,” although he is not sure that they really respect him.

Gray asks if the men obey Stephen, and when he answers in the affirmative, Gray questions, “do you think that’s enough?” Stephen thinks so, but Gray insists that he make his men love him, so that they fight better. He then asks Stephen if he loves his men, and he replies, “No, I suppose not.”

Stephen claims not to look down on the men, but because he doesn’t value his own life, he has “no sense of the scale of these sacrifices. I don’t know what anything is worth,” Stephen says. Gray reminds him that he could be a great soldier. “You aren’t yet,” he says, “but you could be.”

Meanwhile, Jack Firebrace has applied for leave to visit his sick son, but Weir denies him and instead orders him to begin a new tunnel. This time Jack will dig at a depth of seventy feet, but the shaft will be only three feet wide. Even Jack is uncomfortable under these conditions, and he tries not to think about the earth above him. He doesn’t “think of the roots of trees, stretching down through the soil.”

That afternoon, Weir goes to see Captain Gray and requests for increased defense underground. Weir’s men are not soldiers, and he fears the enemy will dig through their tunnels from the other side of No Man’s Land. Gray agrees and promises to put Wraysford in charge.

Stephen later asks his men for volunteers. “We’ll take a sewer rat to show us the way, but I need two others. We’ll be in a fighting tunnel. We won’t have to crawl.” When no one steps up, Stephen randomly selects two men.

Jack meets them underground and leads the soldiers through the dark underworld of the war. “I’ve heard German movement coming this way. We need to protect our men laying the charge and also the lower tunnel,” he tells them. The men in Stephen’s charge are terrified of the deep tunnel, and Stephen feels their “fear begin to infect him.”

One of the men refuses to advance deeper into the tunnel. Afraid that the soldier will get them all killed, Stephen asks him, “You hate the Germans don’t you?” When the man responds “yes,” Stephen orders, “Get in there.” Together, they move forward.

Jack tells Stephen that the men laying the mine are worried that Germans are tunneling through into their chamber. Stephen looks at his frightened men who are sitting down to rest. “We’re going to kill some Germans,” he says. “Get up.”

The men come across a section of the tunnel where German soldiers have obviously broken through, and a sudden explosion rocks the earth. They take off running, intending to cut the Germans off before they can reach their men, when gunfire erupts behind them. Stephen’s men throw grenades and fire their guns back down the tunnel, when Stephen is suddenly struck by the “sensation of having been hit by a falling house.”

The men evacuate the tunnel, dragging Stephen behind them. The regimental aid post has been blown up too, and the men do their best to apply field dressings to his wounds. Stephen is impaled with shrapnel and a rifle bullet is lodged in his neck. He is concussed and unconscious.

As he awaits medical attention in the mud, Stephen is aware of “a profound weariness” when infection sets in. By the time he reaches a dressing station, Stephen is delirious. He begins to hallucinate and calls out for his mother. “They always do,” notes the medical officer as he peels back the makeshift dressings.

After the bombardment, Jack and Shaw sit smoking cigarettes and drinking tea. Shaw asks Jack if he knows anything about the injured lieutenant. When he answers no, Shaw tells him to go find out and offers to cover for him if needed.

Down the trench line, Jack finds a medical tent and asks an orderly about Stephen. “They put him over the wall,” the man says. Jack asks if he is dead, and the man confirms, “It was only an hour ago.”

Jack wanders down to the ploughed field that holds the endless sea of decaying corpses and torn uniforms, and stands back to assess the death. Suddenly, a figure moves, and Stephen struggles naked to the surface. “Get me out,” he manages, and as Jack climbs into the pit of bodies, Stephen falls into his arms.

Meanwhile, at his usual billet, Weir tries not think about Stephen. He has heard nothing about his condition but he believes he is alive. To Weir, Stephen has an “untouchable quality of good fortune about him.” He decides that if Stephen is dead, he will write to his next of kin, “if such a person exists.”

One day while walking outside, Captain Gray comes to visit Stephen. He tells him he is being given a two-week furlough home to England when he is discharged from the hospital, and that he is being promoted to a desk job. Stephen refuses, and begs to stay. “Everyone knows we’re going to attack.”

Stephen continues, “I have no home in England. I wouldn’t know where to go.” He implores Gray to speak to the commanding officer. The company will soon be heading to Albert, and Stephen reminds Gray of his fluent French. “Indispensable,” Gray says.

Gray promises to advocate for Stephen’s place in the company if he agrees to “toe the line a bit more.” Gray continues and warns Stephen about the superstitious card games he plays with the other men. “I’ve seen that rubbish in your dugout,” Gray says. “Officers are not superstitious, Wraysford. Our lives depend on strategy and tactics, not matchsticks or card games.”

Stephen claims to not truly believe in the card games but simply does it for the men. Gray tells Stephen he does believe because of what happened to him as a child. When Stephen protests, Gray says, “If I help keep you here at the Front, God help you, you will do things my way in the future.”

Back at the Front, Stephen and Weir prepare to move out to Albert on Friday, and Stephen promises to take him into town on Thursday night before they leave. Weir guesses that Stephen is looking to find him a woman, and there is a mother/daughter team who will “work through a whole platoon,” but the thought fills him with anxiety. Weir knows these acts are natural, but he is in no hurry to have sex.

The previous heavy bombardment has led to “relative quiet,” and Stephen can hear the sounds of the German soldiers nearby. He hates them and feels “nothing but an urge of violence.” He harnesses his hate “as a means of saving his own life and those of his men.” In the starless night, Stephen hears the song of a nightingale.

Meanwhile, Jack Firebrace finds solace in thoughts of his son. The love he feels for John “redeems his view of human life and gives substance to this faith in God.” The next day, a letter arrives from Margaret, but Jack decides to open it later.

Later that evening, Stephen and Weir take a motorbike into town, and when they arrive outside the brothel, Weir becomes uncomfortable. “I don’t think I want to go on with this. Look at this place, it’s pretty squalid,” he says. Stephen urges him on. “It’s a woman,” he says, “not someone with a gun.”

An older woman arrives and leads Weir to the back of the establishment, and Stephen is left alone. When Weir returns, he looks “shaken and pale,” and Stephen begins to worry about the woman. “What have you done, you raving idiot?” he questions.

The older woman appears and leads Stephen to the back bedroom. He claims he isn’t interested; he only wants to make sure that everyone is okay. The woman begins to fondle Stephen, and then she kneels and takes him in her mouth. Once Stephen becomes excited, she stands and leaves him alone with a young girl on the bed. “Take you clothes off,” she orders.

Stephen does exactly as he is told, and he notices how beautiful the girl is. As he lays on top of her and enters her, he feels a tenderness towards her, and then, suddenly, nothing. Her naked body reminds him of the mangled bodies in the trenches, and he is filled with a “shuddering revulsion.”

Looking at the young prostitute, Stephen does “not know whether to take the girl or kill her,” and he removes his knife from his pocket. He trails the knife down her body and between her breast, and to the terrified girl, it is clear that he doesn’t know what he is doing. She gently slides the knife from his hand and throws it in a far corner, tenderly touching his hand.

Stephen looks at her, confused. She says only, “It is very difficult. The war.” Stephen apologizes. “I understand,” she says. He gathers his belongings and runs from the room.

The next day Weir receives new orders. They are to march to an unspecified billet, and move on to Albert the next day. At last, the attack is upon them. Weir “resigns to it.” His life is out of control and he is humiliated. “The guns [can’t] be much worse,” he thinks.

After his shift, Jack Firebrace takes out Margaret’s letter. Reading it, he discovers that his son has died. A part of Jack dies along with him, but he vows not to let it shake his faith. He prays to thank God for the time he had with John, but no words come. He sobs.

Once in Albert, the miners are dispatched to the Front and the artillery is allowed some downtime. Captain Gray takes Stephen to dinner at the house the Colonel is billeted at. Colonel Barclay tells the men he intends to “go over the top” himself, and when Gray introduces him to Stephen, Barclay refers to him as “the Somme expert.”

Colonel Barclay tells Stephen that they will be “the first wave of attack.” As they enjoy dinner in the elaborate dining room, Stephen thinks of his men in the trenches with lice and cups of tea, and he immediately feels guilty. He smiles, “aware that his brief flight from reality will soon end.”

The battalion marches into the village of Colincamps, and the men find a local billet for the night. With darkness comes gunfire, and the barn Stephen is trying to sleep in rocks and shakes throughout the night. Without sleep, the men set out for Auchonvillers in the morning, singing “marching songs with banal, repeated words of home.”

Stephen sees a group of men digging a mass grave, and the battalion moves on in silence. When they arrive in Auchonvillers, Stephen sees Colonel Barclay rallying the troops. “You are going to attack,” he yells. “The enemy will be relieved to see someone to whom he can surrender.”

The men cheer Barclay, but their enthusiasm is hampered by the military police shouting instructions. “Any man shirking his duty will be shot on the spot,” they are told. For effect, the MPs read from lists of names of men who have been “executed for cowardice.”

Stephen notices Tipper “smiling madly” in the sea of men, and he notices Weir standing with the miners. Stephen yells to ask Weir if he will be with them tomorrow during the attack. “Watching from a safe distance,” he laughs. “Our work is done.” Weir tells Stephen that a few of his men have volunteered to carry stretchers, but for the most part, they have all cleared out.

Gray calms the men and recaps the battle plan with them. They will be covered by artillery fire as they advance, and once they take their objective, the artillery will continue. “It provides protection for you all the way,” he says. “The German wire is already cut and many of their guns destroyed. Causalities will be ten per cent.”

Gray looks to Stephen and tells him that he wants him to take charge of the company should he be killed in the attack. “Because you are a mad, cold-hearted devil and that is what we are going to need.” He further tells Stephen that the German wire isn’t cut. A “staff cockup,” Gray says. “Don’t tell your men, Wraysford. Don’t tell them, just pray for them.”

That night, the men write letters home. Tipper writes to his parents and tells them that they “have been the dearest Mum and Dad,” and Stephen writes Isabelle, even though he knows the letter will never reach her. He tells her that “some crime against nature is about to be committed,” and he is scared that he will be killed.

The guns go quiet to reserve shells eight hours before the attack, and the men are told to go in at seven-thirty. They are surprised that they are waiting until daylight, and the men begin to drink. They hear German guns fire and, thinking that most of the guns have been disarmed, they are surprised to hear it.

The British shoot back and part of their trench explodes. Fire shoots into the sky, and Stephen thinks something must be wrong. “We must go now,” he thinks, but he receives no word to advance early.

There is still ten minutes to go before seven-thirty. When his watch finally reads the correct time, Stephen steps out of the trench and an eerie silence falls, cut by the song of skylarks.

Stephen presses on and a man missing half his face wanders by, his gun still drawn. Just as Gray had warned, the wire is not cut, and countless men are stuck, entwined in the barbed-wire, vulnerable in the open space. Stephen notes a gap in the wire and makes his way toward it.

Surprisingly, Stephen makes it through the barrage of gunfire, and he begins to laugh to himself. He enters the German trench and looks around. It is well crafted and clean, and when he moves further down, he finds one of his men firing toward the Germans.

A couple of hours pass, and they continue firing. They are trapped; they can’t move forward much towards the Germans (their defenses have barely fallen) and going back across No Man’s Land is impossible. Stephen senses movement under his feet and notices a badly injured man. His eye socket is blown out and he begs Stephen to kill him. He is from a different regiment, and Stephen hesitates. He thinks, “no one will know,” and he shoots the man twice. It is his first kill of the day.

Jack and Shaw watch from a distance and can’t believe the carnage. They expected a swift attack, and now they stand watching the men die. The hole they had blown earlier in the day has done little good, and they “clutch each other’s arms in disbelief.” Jack “thinks of meat, the smell of it.”

As Stephen looks out of the German trench he thinks, “Nothing is divine anymore; everything is profane.” He hears the roars of the Lewis guns, but he is driven to go on. First he must drink, and he has lost his canteen in the chaos.

As he searches for water, Stephen sees more of his men cut down, and he prays for night to fall. Once it is dark, he thinks, “the earth might resume its natural process, and perhaps, in many years’ time, what had happened during daylight could be viewed as an aberration, could be comprehended within the rhythm of normal life.” But this seems impossible now, and to Stephen, war is the “new reality.”

Stephen is finally is able to stagger down to the river for a drink, and while satisfying his thirst, he stumbles and is swept downstream, surrounded by German soldiers. As they are all helpless in the water, Stephen “tries to hate them now as he had hated them before.” He sees a British soldier standing on a bridge upriver, and he safely pulls him out.

An impact comes from nowhere and strikes Stephen in the temple. He wakes sometime later to Tyson, one of Weir’s miners, bandaging his wounds. “They stopped attacking,” Tyson says. He tells Stephen he has only a flesh wound and runs to get Weir.

The remaining men have gathered for roll call. The names of eight hundred men are called into the night, but only one hundred and fifty-five answer.

Weir starts to shake. The guns have stopped, yet he still asks Stephen if he can hear them. Stephen hadn’t noticed before, but in the silence is the low continuous moan of countless men dying. To Stephen, it sounds as if “the earth itself is groaning.” “Oh God, oh God,” Weir cries. “What have we done, what have we done?”

As Weir cries, he asks Stephen to hold him and call him by his name. Stephen pulls him close. “It’s all right, Michael. It’s all right, Michael. Hold on, don’t let go. Hold on, hold on.”