Tapestry of Spies

“Ah, poetry. Yes, poetry before battle. How English. And I’m supposed to be rather good at poetry, aren’t I? How about, ‘In the end, it’s all the same/In the end, it’s all a game.’ Hmmm, no, all wrong. Somehow it doesn’t feel much like a game about now. What about, ‘We are the hollow men/We are the …’ No, that’s not appropriate either. Er, ‘If I should die, think only this of me, there’s some corner of a foreign field that’s forever POUM.’ Good heavens, how appalling! Trouble is, they don’t write any good war stuff anymore. It’s out of fashion. They only write antiwar stuff, no help at all to a bloke about to go over the top, eh? I feel like something cheerful and powerfully seductive, something that would make me hungry to die for somebody else’s party and someone else’s country.”

“I don’t believe that poem has been written.”

“Hasn’t, has it? Well, you haven’t read the great ‘Pons’ yet. If I ever can put a tail on the beast, it’ll move me from seventh greatest living poet on up to third. And if bloody Auden should drop dead of a dose of clap from some Chineeboy, why then I’m second. Gad how exciting!”

“Recite a line, then.”

“Hmm. All right.

Among the Druids, in the Druid hall,
the fire flickers, shadows fall
The past, an icy castle, slowly settles,
while they boil the future in their kettles.
And death was inches, dark was all.”

Florry waited. “Go on.”

“Out of words, old man. That’s where it stops.”

“God, it’s brilliant, Julian.”

“What’s it mean, Jules?” said the man on the other side of Julian.

“Now, Sammy, don’t you worry. It’s just words.”

“Ready boys,” came Billy Mowry’s call through the rain. “It’s almost time.”

“How’s that for inspiration! At least in an aristocratic army, the officers can quote a line of verse at the key moment. ‘These in the hour when heaven was falling’?”

“That’s about mercenaries, old boy,” Florry said through chattering teeth, “who took their wages and are dead. We are not mercenaries. At any rate, if we are, the pay is bloody low.”

“Au contraire, chum, it’s bloody high. A clean soul. Freedom from one’s little secrets, eh? From the little men inside one who are always clamoring to get out, eh?”

“All right, lads,” Billy sounded calm in the rain, “it’s time.”

“Good heavens, it is, isn’t it?” Julian said. He reached inside his tunic and pulled out what appeared to be a ring on a chain, brought it swiftly to his lips and kissed it. “There, now I’m all safe,” he said. “My old dad was wearing it at the Somme day he cashed in. Wedding ring. It’s my lucky piece. Never done me wrong. Care for a smooch, Stink?”

“Thanks, no. I don’t think my lips are working.”

“Tally-ho, then. Good hunting, and all that rot.”

“Luck to you, old man,” said Florry, unsure how he meant it. “I’ll tell you my secrets one day, too.” And he became lost in the struggle to get himself up the wall ? he’d lost some strength ? but with a sliding, grunting kind of athletic twist, he suddenly achieved it, staggered onto wet but solid ground, and found himself standing up, pretty as you please, in front of the trench in which he’d cowered for weeks. It was both a curiously liberating and curiously vulnerable sensation. All up and down the line, in the ghostly mist, men were rising, shaking themselves off like wet terriers, unslinging their rifles, and facing their death. They were like the children of the Hydra’s teeth, Florry thought, his fancy education delivering him a fancy metaphor at just the right time: half-mythical creatures slouching out of some dimly remembered far ago time and place. A hideous joy cut through Florry as he slid the great bayonet-heavy Mosin-Nagent from his shoulder and brought it to the high port. Bombs ? grenades ? hung on his belt and he wore his Webley at his hip.

“Pip, pip,” said Julian, next to him, with a wicked smile that Florry could see through the murk. “I do believe the glorious adventure is about to commence.”

Indeed it was. The line, like some kind of creature itself, began to move out across no-man’s-land.

* * *

Florry no longer felt the cold or the wet and once or twice stepped into a huge cold trough, the water slopping over his boot tops, but it meant nothing. They moved steadily through the mist, toward the Fascist lines. He could feel the incline beginning to rise under him and the heavy, sloshy weight of the clinging mud grow at his feet.

The plan was simple yet dangerous: to approach silently ? the rain helped them here ? to the wire at the outer limits of the Fascist lines, cut it, get inside it, and hurl a wave of bombs, then leap into the trench before the Fascists had a chance to recover from the blasts. It all, therefore, depended most fragilely on surprise, but the soldiers moved like knights to Florry’s ears, clanking and lumbering in the dark. Yet from beyond there was no response.

They seemed to have been walking for hours. Had they lost direction like souped-in aviators and now headed the wrong way? These thoughts nagged at Florry as he fought through a mass of brush and up a little gulch; for a moment, he was entirely alone. He felt as if he were the last man on earth.

“Jolly fun, eh?” Julian, close at hand, muttered in a stage whisper.

At last they got through the vines and Florry realized with a start that they had covered the ground and had made the wire, which curled cruelly before them in the steady rain. It all had an underwater slowness to it, the steady pelt of the rain, the soaked, heavy clothes, the mud-heavy boots, and now men crouched with the deliberation of scientists to ready themselves for the final few feet. In the slanting sheets of water that descended out of the sky upon them, Florry made out the figure of one fellow scurrying ahead with a kind of lizard’s urgency. Billy Mowry, a hero as well as a leader, took it upon himself to scamper up the slope to perform the most dangerous task, the cutting of the wire. He lay on his back under the evil stuff and Florry could see the snippers come out and begin to twist and tug at the strands. Florry knelt, the fingers of one hand nervously playing with his rifle. With his other, he pulled a bomb off his belt. It had two pins. Cradling his rifle against his shoulder, he pulled the easy one out and let it drop. Now he had only to yank the hard one and throw it in four seconds.

With each snap of Billy Mowry’s clippers another strand of the wire popped free. Florry could feel his own breath rasping in his chest. His knees felt like warm jelly. How could he be so hot and so cold, so dry and so wet, at once? He could feel each raindrop individually strike against his skin; a million, a trillion of them. And from the Fascists, there was still nothing, though they were less than thirty-five or forty paces away, gathered about their cooking fires.

Hurry, damn you, Billy Mowry, Florry thought.

Sylvia came into his mind suddenly. We had a night, didn’t we, darling. Whatever there wasn’t, there was that. He could feel the tension in his thighs like steel springs cranking tighter and tighter. The bomb was growing in weight, deadening his arm. The rifle leaning against him seemed a long ton of coal.

Hurry, damn you, Bill Mowry, hurry!

The last snip sounded and Billy Mowry pulled himself up, peeling back the wire. He wore heavy engineer’s gloves. His face, even in the dim light, shone with mad excitement and zealotry. He looked insane, like Jack the Ripper.

Julian dashed through the gap first. All right, that’s one for him. Would a spy risk the first bullet, the first thrust of bayonet? Florry rose and scrambled after, feeling a singing in his ears. He could feel men clumping through behind him, slipping and straining in the mud. A wonderful strangeness passed over them all: it felt like some huge opera, all stylized and abstract and mighty with song and mass and chorus. It seemed incredible; they were doing it! The excitement poured through Florry’s veins and a great hope blossomed like an exotic flower in his imagination and ?

The first shot seemed to come from very close by. It was a spurt of flame just at the horizon, accompanied