Free Jack Firebrace's War by Sebastian Faulks Page A

hear the sound of spades or of bags of earth being dragged back.
    There was a thumping noise again, but it did not sound hollow enough for wood; it was more like the rocking of the earth under shellfire. Jack tightened his nerves once more. His concentration was interrupted by a noise like the delivery of a sack of potatoes. Turner had collapsed on to the tunnel floor. Jack had made up his mind.
    He said, “Shellfire.”
    “Are you sure?” said Weir.
    “Yes, sir. As sure as I can be.”
    “All right. Tell them to turn the air-feed on again. Firebrace, you get back on the cross. You two, get Turner on his feet.”
    Jack crawled back into the darkness, feet first, where Evans helped him regain his position and passed him the spade. He sank it into the earth ahead of him, feeling glad of the resumption of mechanical toil. Evans’s grubbing hands worked invisibly beside him. Toward the end of his shift he began to imagine things. He thought for a second that he was standing in the lighted bar of a London pub, holding up his beer glass to the lamp, looking at the big gilt mirror behind the bar. The bright reflection made him blink, and the flickering of his eyes brought back the reality of the clay wall ahead of him. Evans’s hand scraped. Jack struck out ahead of him again, his arms grinding in their joints.
    Evans swore beneath his breath and Jack reached out and gripped him in rebuke. Evans had tried to light a candle but there was not enough oxygen. The match burned bright red but would not flame. The two men stopped and listened. They could hear the roar of their breathing magnified in the silence. They held their breath and there was nothing. They had dug to the end of the world. Jack could smell the damp earth and the sweat from Evans’s body. Normally he could hear the timbers behind them being put into place by hand, pushed quietly against the clay. There was not even this cautious sound. The narrow tunnel closed round them. Jack felt Evans’s hand grip his arm. His breath rasped out again. Something must be happening behind them.
    “All right,” Jack said. “Get me off this thing.”
    Evans pulled the wooden support away and helped roll Jack over. They crawled back until they saw lamplight. Weir was half-standingin the low tunnel. He clutched his ear, then gestured them to lean against the side walls. He began to mouth an explanation but before he could finish there was a roar in the tunnel and a huge ball of earth and rock blew past them. It took four men with it, their heads and limbs blown away and mixed with the rushing soil. Jack, Weir, and Evans were flattened against the side wall by the blast and escaped the path of the debris. Jack saw part of Turner’s face and hair still attached to a piece of skull rolling to a halt where the tunnel narrowed into the section he had been digging. There was an arm with a corporal’s stripe on it near his feet, but most of the men’s bodies had been blown into the moist earth.
    Weir said, “Get out before another one goes.”
    Back toward the trench someone had already got a fresh lamp down into the darkness.
    Jack took Evans’s shoulder. “Come on, boy. Come on now.”
    “Letter for you, Jack,” said Bill Tyson. “Mail came this morning.”
    They sat huddled beneath a wooden frame with a groundsheet stretched over it. Arthur Shaw, the third man who shared their shelter, was trying to make tea on a primus stove.
    Jack’s letter was from his wife in Edmonton. “My Dearest Jack,” it started. “How are you keeping?”
    He folded it away inside his pocket. He could not bring his mind to bear on the distant world her handwriting suggested. He was afraid he would not understand her letter, that she would be telling him something important his mind was too tired to register. He drank the tea Shaw had conjured from the gloom.
    “Turner’s dead,” he said. “And at least two others.”
    “Didn’t you hear anything?” said Tyson.
    “Yes, but I thought it