bugles nightjarring from the British lines. What was it Luftie the country boy had said: suck on your John Thomas if they couldn’t get a cow’s bubbies . .The squad of Ally Slopers crouches twenty feet back from where the tunnel, unpropped, droops into a rheumy eyeful of evening sky . . We cannot march, we cannot fight, What fucking good are we? What might Willis or his friend Bertie make of this, Stanley wonders, for it’s surely all they’ve ever dreamed of — men of all classes, hues, tongues, gathered together in free association, and brazen in their lack of shame. . they rest, arms about each other’s shoulders, hand to hand, holy palmers of. . a fag, quietly conversing in their odd lingo — a crowdie of tongues, full of bits . .The barrage dies away, the night creeps from shell hole to shell hole, insinuates itself snakily through the wire. . Tonight will be no Crystal Palace firework show — nein aschpotten: the 180s have fallen silent . .and they squint at only the occasional Very light crazing up, then plunging down to burn its own tail . .Above ground they set to: following the night from muddy slough to ditch, taking a field dressing from one dead man’s haversack and attaching it to the wounds of his comrade who still lives. Triage, or so it would seem, comes naturally to Stan — haven’t I already been making these judgements for months? Of Feldman, of the Welshman, of the officer who grovelled in the bier two nights before the offensive. . back and back to Aldershot, where the epileptic lurched out of the makeshift ring blowin’ Palmolive bubbles, then dropped stone-dead at the RSM’s feet. Stan had had a half-sov’ on that bout — but here the most ardent weather-telegraphers got cured of the habit, for there was nothing to foretell, saving conflict without end. Cooling steel and drying blood — they orientate by these smells, not by the stars. They drag the seriously injured as close to the wire of either side as they dare, irrespective of which army paybook they carry — after all, the only allegiance worth bearing is to life . .Others they dispatch below — they don’t know it yet, but at long last they’ve caught a Blighty one that will make them at home. . in France. The troglodytes carry morphia with them, and when a man is too far gone they give him a dose sufficient unto the end. Michael — an archangel, and the last presence they see floating before them. . Warmer, realer, than that of Mons: no churchy phantom, conjured out of hunger, pain, thirst and fear — but a live man whose warm hand grasps torn wrists, rolls back blood-soaked cuffs, lets the needle in . .Once or twice as they go about their business in the short and moonless night, Stan thinks of his section, short two men — maybe more — withdrawn to a reserve trench, their umbrella neatly folded, there to lick their wounds, swollen tongues clammy on bully beef . .No reflection — in this tortured realm of shadows and shades the underground men needs must be as alert as any raiding party — and some of these they do encounter, whispering: ’Re you the FANY? The topsiders are halting, insensible, hair-trigger alert, bruised, raw, all at once. Observing them, Stanley wonders, Was I like that, shifting in an eye-blink from petrified terror to furious agitation? He watches them go by, feeling their way over the broken ground while fixed on this one prospect: their own deaths, under cover of which they mend their wire and drag back one of their wounded: a junior officer, hung about with stale whisky breath, a grim whiff of things to come — gas gangrene at the dressing station, the stench of his necrotic flesh. The topsiders have only one language at their disposaclass="underline" the infuriated muttering of the compelled — whereas the troglodytes twist whichever tongue may be required: reassuring whimpering Frontsoldaten that they will not be schaden, calming Tommies with cock-er-ney cheer and fucking oaths . .From the Germans’ salients on the ridge to the British forward trenches down in the valley, the troglodytes slip back and forth — they recover side arms and rifles, pull potato-mashers from belts, unfired Stokes ones from the very mouths of the newfangled trench mortars: all are spirited down into the underworld and cached in its caverns. Long before dawn flushes the underside of the thick cloud to the east, they have withdrawn, none of the topsiders any the wiser. The tunnel descends from this chaos into an orderly innards of galvanised iron, pit props and efficiently wired lighting — as they are being swallowed up, Michael sticks in the earthen gullet: They muss not know of uz — not now, not ever. Think on’t, Stan, iffen they knew they’d turn their goons on uz, winkle uz aht, drag uz oop. And when they’d every lass wunnuvuz they’d begin again wi’ their slaughter. No. . he turns and on they go, and they have regained the underground circus and dived inside their burrow before he resumes. . No, there’s only wun way t’coom dahn: by sheer blüdy chance, like wot you did. . There is the blackamoor waiting for them with hot tea, and most of the subterraneans cast off their motley kit: the drawling former-subaltern resumes the pomp of his nudity, the ottoman of his groundsheet and the solace of his Pater. I once met —. Stanley stops himself there, for the young man at his feet is looking down at him from below Schnauzkrampf. Up above the barrage resumes — one-eighty-league steel-toecaps tramping across the former fields. The electric surges, dims, surges again and goes out. It takes a while for the cook to find his matches and light a lamp — in the utter darkness the sandy trickles, the woody creaks, metallic ticks, all are amplified: the whisper and groan of premature burial. Stanley fears he may lose his sangfroid, but the others simply chatter away: Worked for a provision merchant ’fore I got the chuck. . Si vous soulevez un jupon vous ne devez jamais exprimer la surprise à ce que vous trouverez sous ce. . Went up from Saint-Denis to the Hotel de Ville and she was waiting for me. . My oooold Dutch . .Stanley’s eardrums, pummelled and stretched by blast after blast, have acquired a traumatised sensitivity, and as he turns his head this way, then that, these voices tickle across them, bristles on bare skin, mixed up with brass-band discordancies Ooo-eee oom-pah-pah! speech squeezing into and out of comprehensibility as the needle passes through its arc, sweeping over Luxembourg, Hilversum, Bremen, black bars in the sky that cut across the puce clouds bleeding mauve rain . .The aesthete on the burrow’s floor has kept ahold of watch and seals. He positions them carelessly around his lower belly, dumpy alpinists chained together for the ascent of Mount Cock. The idle yet systematic play of his fingers is