alarmed, happy, fearful, overjoyed? In the toasted atmosphere surrounding his eldest son’s small face there are no black strokes, beneath it there’s no inscription. Aren’t you pleased? his father asked him, but the boy only shrugged, and now Busner thinks bitterly, I am Colonel Blink the Short-Sighted Gink not to’ve grasped that there was something seriously wrong — I’m a buffoon in Barney’s Barmy Army with a hastily inked-in moustache who’s been fooled by Jerry’s equally ill-conceived disguise. Still, if I hurry I can turn the tables on them by rolling the barrel full of explosives into their camp, so: DER BOMB, DER BOMB, DER BARREL IS RIGHT BESIDE YOU! and BOOM! A sight to gladden Freddy Ayer’s hooded eyes: the block letters surrounded with a yellow flash and the tannish cedillas of flying staves. Poor, fat, badly drawn Jerry, so much for his mainland bombing campaign . .Maurice, his homburg looking as tall as Tom Mix’s Stetson, pulls back one curtain and then the other, the cold light surges into the empty room with its lumped-up dust sheets and stacks of pre-war newspapers — the worms’ casts of the real family that hadn’t been cut in two . . — I stood there then, Busner thinks, as I stand here now on the twelve thirty-nine from Moorgate to Welwyn Garden City, on the eighth of April 2010: despite my closest living relative having been right beside me I was still alone . .a boy blown in half when the road was mined yet again at Le Sars had been taken down by some over-enthusiastic poilus up from the south, Michael happened to be there and heard his dying words — the usual sad guff, sweetheart, mother, sarsap-a-fucking-rilla — but also that he’d miss a concert party that evening at which — or so it had been rumoured — Miss Dorothy Ward would be singing. They went up into a curtain of drizzle some way behind Guedecourt: Michael, Stanley and five others in tankers’ uniforms that were clean enough to withstand scrutiny being fresh out of a Mark 1 tin that had ditched some way short of Le Transloy. It wasn’t so unusual for them to surface behind the reserve trenches — happened all the time, although mostly inadvertently when an unanticipated advance by one side or the other left the underground men marooned. With their German-improved Greathead shields, their powerful digging and boring machines, and their advanced Edisonian listening equipment — courtesy of the Byng boys — the troglodytes could outpace any topsiders’ tunnelling, achieving three times their velocity: chuffing through the earth as a train comes along a straight branch line, of an evening. . Jack the Ripper stole a kipper, Jack the Ripper stole a kipper . .the chucking back of the till sounding, beneath the ground, uncannily like the rhythm of wheels-on-bogies. . ch-k’ ch-kunk ch-k’ ch-kunk ch-k’ —. Extensions had been dug deep into the combatants’ territories — east to intersect with the mines of the Sambre-et-Meuse Valley, west to infiltrate those of the Pas-de-Calais. With so much more coal now available, a turning circuit was under construction beneath Ypres, in anticipation of bringing rolling stock down. Surfacing behind the lines, one or two of the troglodytes might take their chances, hoping they would be seized by their former enemies and so suffer no worse fate than imprisonment. But if a man were suddenly to come amongst former comrades — well he would either to’ve assumed another man’s identity, or else explain how it was he had survived — prospered seemingly — during his prolonged absence from his unit. It was strongly rumoured that the returnees of all armies were summarily shot — but this was not what kept them in their amenable Hades, bent to their boring, a shadowy force creeping under an advance, nipping at the heels of a retreat, burrowing far down below the shell holes of the new no-man’s-land and so re-establishing their subterranean liberty. No, Stanley understood the new law of threes operating in the sod: esprit de corps, a sense of justness, and this strange dialectic: There was one group of men here, a second over there, antipathetic to them in every way — and in the middle there was this third and better part, a combination of the two no longer trammelled by rank, king-emperor, kaiser or patrie in any shape — a hotchpotch, a linguistic stew, that, should a man partake of it, soon rose unbidden to his own lips: their happy argot. Grecian love also. It was Phelps — the resplendently naked subaltern who instructed Stanley in the latest principles of political economy — who had introduced him to this gentle comfort — in the dark, the holding of hands and the rasping of a bearded cheek upon its brother’s. Stanley was shocked only by his own perfunctory acceptance: This was the way you unfixed your bayonet in the eternal eventime . .’tho, thinking upon it, he realised what the conflict had done to him: rubbed away at all the corns of convention, so that once the abrasion of the barrage ceased to operate upon him the dead hard skin sloughed off, leaving behind pale naked forms entwined together in the bowels of the earth. . quite natural, tubers, mandrake roots . .Whether it be Tommy and Frontschwein, poilu and pointu, or a mountainous Senegalese twinned with a tiny Chinese coolie. Stanley wished Feydeau could have seen it — they coupled so casually, the underground men, and no one — or so it seemed — thought anything much of it at all, it was merely the promiscuous instinct for life: the only distinctions that they made between the topsiders was whether they could be saved, the sole ones amongst themselves, whether he could be loved —. Where the blazes did you spring from? says the muffled-up shape of an officer stood pissing against the oiled cotton that stretches high over the twisted ribs and spars which used to be Mametz Wood. The day is an elegant parasol tasselled with clouds, the night an umbrella with starry holes torn in its cover. Got ditched up by Le Sars two days since, Stanley says jollily, moving in closer so that the man can see the crowns on his purloined uniform and the crossed machine guns. — Oh, I say — the officer’s features are teddy bear in their woolly surroundings — you tank-wallahs’re bloody lucky to’ve come through that show, is that your whole crew? Stanley concedes that it is, concurs in their good fortune, asks of the officer if he knows where the heavy bunch are stationed. Oh no, he says, if’n I did I still wouldn’t flap my mouth. . he picks at his mitts. . best be gettin’ back to Division — they’ll set you arights. Down there’s Montauban, sunken lane from there goes back up the line — y’ll be happy in it. . as etappenschwein in shit . .Slogging along, Stan chides himself for not making the best of it: the night sky and the crescent nailed up on this — up there are moon-men holed up in its cheesy canyons, crash-landed balloonists prob’ly huntin’ ’em down with fowling pieces — the duffers! They should know their powder won’t ignite in a vacuum . .Behind the party the Materialschlacht goes on: dips, hooter, fusees, Very lights — the whole bang-shoot topped off by Jerry’s Big Berthas firing from below the horizon. Such illuminations! Gas-jets behind frosted glass — the world’s a pub, so set up the Dewar’s! He ought to enjoy it — but he can’t, so accustomed is Stan to the embrace of Mother Earth that with each step they take towards the rear the red man saws a little further around my scalp with his rusty bayonet, and he feels the chill night air on bare bone — which is the sky dome through which thoughts trail phosphorescent . . Shuttlecock, shuttlecock, if you don’t spin, I’ll break your bones and bury your skin . .Released from their clayey restraint, Stan’s arms begin to twitch, his shoulders to heave — he is compelled to swivel round so he can search the sky above and to the right. — At Division there is only an encampment of huddling Amiens huts and a big marquee that must have been pitched especially for the show. Lit from within, its barber’s pole stripes wriggle to the tinkle of ragtime piano played by a cheeky chappie, who, as the troglodytes enter, pulls off his boot and runs his heel along the keys t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-ting-a-ling-dring-drang-ra-drong-gong!