Fly Away Peter: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

Sliding across the battlefield on his stomach, Jim tries to find his company, which has been separated in the black of night while the air thrums with machine-gun fire and corpses lie about in all directions. Jim finds a shell-hole and takes cover, shielding his head with his arms and taking a moment to catch his breath, relieved to have found shelter. Before long, though, he realizes that staying in this shell-hole near enemy lines is more dangerous in the long run than venturing forth and risking getting shot. With this in mind, he moves to leave, but a hand grabs him by the heel. As he turns around, he immediately falls into a deadly struggle with an “unknown assailant,” flailing brutally in the dark.

After struggling for several moments with this unknown antagonist in the dark trench, Jim realizes he knows the man. “Wizzer!” he shouts, “it’s me, you mad bugger. Jim. A friend!” Astonished, the two men separate, both of them embarrassed that the other has found him hiding from the battle. Jim insists they get out and find their fellow soldiers, but Wizzer refuses. Jim tries to explain that it is safer to leave, but Wizzer won’t listen. The large man even begins “to quake,” his shoulders shuddering and jaw chattering as an “odd moaning sound” escapes from deep within his body. Jim finds himself wanting to “join Wizzer in making that noise,” but “some sense of shame” keeps him from doing so. 

Jim tells Wizzer he’s leaving. Lifting himself toward the lip of the shell-hole, he looks back and says, “I wish you’d come Wizzer,” but the man simply shakes his head. Giving up, Jim leaves the shell-hole and runs partly crouched through the chaos until he finds—to his great joy—Bobby Cleese, who joins him in running for safety. Eventually, the two men find a group of others in another ditch. One of them is an officer, though he looks young and inexperienced. Still, he takes control, telling the group that they’re going to venture forth. “It’s a mistake,” Jim thinks. “This kid can’t be more than twelve years old.” Nonetheless, he follows the boy out of the ditch and watches as the officer is shot in the belly.

After the officer dies, Jim and Bobby Cleese find cover in another shell-hole, and this is when they wind up trapped for an entire night and day. Bobby tells stories about Deception Bay, and the two men listen to the Germans move about in their trenches, which are only twenty feet away. In the daytime, birds fly overhead, and Jim identifies them. Later, the two men fall asleep. Having been able to “put to one side the notion of the danger” they’re in, their sunny afternoon feels almost “idyllic.” In any case, both Jim and Bobby survive this episode. Bobby doesn’t die until June, and by then Jim is a weathered soldier and “a third of the battalion ha[s] disappeared and been replaced.”

Bobby doesn’t die a swift death. Instead, he is poisoned with tear gas and phosgene, which takes several days to finish him. By this point, Jim’s company has returned to their old post in the support lines. On the day that Bobby dies, Jim visits him in the hospital. On his way through the trenches, he comes upon a group of soldiers crowded around something that has been unearthed: “the fossil of a prehistoric animal, a mammoth, together with the flints that had been used either to kill or to cut it up.” By the time Jim sees it, the fossil has been fully excavated. As Jim looks at it, he reels at the fact that it is “thousands of years dead” and yet has been lying in the ground “among the recent dead.”

Looking at the mammoth and the flints used to “kill” or “cut it up,” Jim feels as if time is “meaningless.” When he finally enters the hospital tents, where the dying are “kept apart from the rest,” he is horrified to see Bobby Cleese’s “fevered” eyes, and he watches his friend until the man takes a turn for the worse and begins his last moments amongst the living. That night, Jim’s company goes to the frontlines for five days before returning for another eighteen.

“Half-crazy,” Jim and his fellow soldiers dig through the ground, their shovels scraping against corpses and bones. It is around this time that Jim begins to feel “immeasurably old,” since almost everybody in his company has been killed and “twice replaced” by new soldiers in clean uniforms. He feels as though he has been “living through whole generations,” as even “the names they had given to positions they had held a month before had been changed by the time they came back.”