![]() Deaths are narrated through the eyes of particular characters with a numbed factuality. The soldiers at the front have learnt not to be shocked, not even to be emotional, at any particular person's death, and the manner of narration has to reflect this. "Bodies were starting to pile and clog the progress." Stephen watches as a line of troops comes forward "in extended order" into the range of German machine guns, "which traversed them with studied care until every man had gone down in a diagonal line from first to last."Ĭharacters often die in novels, but in this novel deaths cannot be handled in any conventional novelistic manner. In the description of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, death comes so thick that the narrative cannot pause for individuals. Songs "die" and men will, almost as readily.īirdsong has to imagine mechanised slaughter. "The songs died on their lips and the air was reclaimed by the birds." Someone higher up knows what is coming. ![]() ![]() They were digging a mass grave." A moment later, his men see it too. What could be its agricultural purpose? "Then he realised what it was. ![]() ![]() M arching to the front on the day before the Somme offensive, Stephen Wraysford leads his company down a track across farmland and comes upon something odd: "two dozen men, naked to the waist, digging a hole thirty yards square at the side of the path". ![]()
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