Free Jack Firebrace's War by Sebastian Faulks

Jack Firebrace lay forty-five feet underground with several hundred thousand tons of France above his face. He could hear the wooden wheezing of the feed that pumped air through the tunnel. Most of it was exhausted by the time it reached him. His back was supported by a wooden cross, his feet against the clay, facing toward the enemy. With an adapted spade, he loosened quantities of soil into a bag which he passed back to Evans, his mate, who then crawled away in the darkness. Jack could hear the hammering of timbers being used to shore up the tunnel further back, though where he worked, at the face, there was no guarantee that the clay would hold.
    The sweat ran down into his eyes and stung them, making him shake his head from side to side. At this point the tunnel was about four feet across and five feet high. Jack kept sticking the spade into the earth ahead of him, hacking it out as though he hated it. He had lost track of how long he had been underground. He found it easier not to think when he might be relieved, but to keep digging. The harder he worked, the easier it seemed. It must have been six hours or more since he had seen daylight, and even then not much of it, but a thin green haze across the lowlands of the French-Belgian border, lit by the spasmodic explosion of shells.
    His unit had not been able to return to its billet in the local village. So intense was the activity in this part of the line that the surface troops would not stay in their trenches without the protection of the men underground. The miners had to sleep, for the time being, in chambers at the top of their shafts or in the trenches with the infantry.
    Jack felt a hand clutch his elbow. “Jack. We need you. Turner’s heard something about twenty yards back. Come on.”
    Evans pulled him off the cross, and Jack turned stiffly, easing the sweat-soaked vest off his shoulders, and following Evans’s crawling buttocks until he could stand. Even the murk of the timberedtunnel was bright to him after the clay face. He blinked in the gloom.
    “Over here, Firebrace. Turner said it sounded like digging.”
    Captain Weir, a startling figure with disarrayed hair, in plimsolls and civilian sweater, pushed him over to where Turner, a tired, frightened man, shivering with fatigue in the hot tunnel, was resting against his pick.
    “It was just here,” said Turner. “I’d got my head close up to this timber and I could hear vibrations. It wasn’t our lot, I can tell you.”
    Jack placed his head against the wall of the tunnel. He could hear the rhythmic gasp of the bellows in the overhead hosepipe draped from the ceiling. “You’ll have to turn off the air-feed, sir,” he said to Weir.
    “Christ,” said Turner, “I can’t breathe.”
    Weir dispatched a message to the surface. Two minutes later the noise ceased and Jack knelt down again. His exceptional hearing was frequently in demand. The previous winter, two miles south of Ypres, he had lowered his ear to rat-level in the trench into a water-filled petrol can and held it there until his head lost all feeling. He preferred the airless quiet of the tunnel to the numbing of his skull.
    The men stood motionless as Weir held his finger to his lips. Jack breathed in deeply and listened, his body rigid with effort. There were sounds, distant and irregular. He could not be sure what they were. If they evacuated the tunnel as a precaution and the noise turned out only to have been shellfire or surface movement then time would be lost on their own tunnel. On the other hand, if he failed to identify German digging coming back the other way, the loss of life would probably be greater. He had to be sure.
    “For God’s sake, Firebrace.” He heard Weir’s hissing voice in his ear. “The men can hardly breathe.”
    Jack held up his hand. He was listening for the distinctive knocking made by timber when it was hammered into place against the wall. If a tunnel was very close it was also sometimes possible to