Homage to Sebastian

I am reading, I suspect 10 years later than everyone else, Sebastian Faulks' 'Birdsong', his novel circling around and focusing on the First World War and, in particular, the Battle of the Somme. For a while, maybe for the first two hundred or more pages, I found it hard to comprehend the structure of the book with sections from different eras, linked as it were by emotion and circumstance rather than - as I thought - by a more coherent thread.

I am now beginning to understand that this is, as Faulks himself says in his introduction, an 'operatic novel' dealing with issues of love and loss, of death and survival and the fact that none of these leaves any of the players unchanged.

Faulks' description of that dreadful day, 1st July 1916, is as good as I can or could imagine. Unlike his character, Elizabeth, I have been to the monument at Thiepval on more than one occasion and I know something of the scale of the loss. But Faulks adds to this with vignette and with the broad brush strokes of a much bigger picture.

For example, I did not know that the slaughter was so great that some German machine gunners refused to keep firing, unable to accept the massacre they were inflicting. I did not know that two generals committed suicide when it became clear what carnage the day had reaped. But consider this passage on the bigger scale, and coming, in Faulks' narrative, at the end of that bloody day.

"It was dark at last. The night poured down in waves from the ridge above them and the guns at last fell silent.

"The earth began to move. To their right a man who had lain still since the first attack, eased himself upright, then fell again when his damaged leg could not take his weight. Other single men moved, and began to come up like worms from their shellholes, limping, crawling, dragging themselves out. Within minutes the hillside was seething with the movement of the wounded as they attempted to get themselves back to their line.

"'Christ,' said Weir, 'I had no idea there were so many men out here.'
"It was like a resurrection in a cemetery 12 miles long. Bent, agonised shapes loomed in multitudes on the churned earth, limping and dragging back to reclaim their life. It was as though the land were disgorging a generation of crippled sleepers, each one distinct but related to its twisted brothers as they teemed up from the reluctant earth.

"Weir was shaking.

"'It's all right,' said Stephen. 'The guns have stopped.'

"It's not that,' said Weir. 'It's the noise. Can't you hear it?'

Stephen had noticed nothing but the silence that followed the guns. Now, as he listened, he could hear what Weir had meant: it was a low, continuous moaning. He could not make out any individual pain, but the sound ran down to the river on their left and up over the hill for half a mile or more. As his ear became used to the absence of guns, Stephen could hear it more clearly: it sounded to him as though the earth itself was groaning.

"'Oh God, oh God.' Weit began to cry. 'What have we done, what have we done? Listen to it. We've done something terrible, we'll never get back to how it was before.'