The Evening Chorus (2 page)

O
N THREE
sides of the camp is a wire fence with wooden guard towers at each corner. The fence is twelve feet high and made of double-thick barbed wire. Fifteen inches inside the fence is a tripwire set a foot off the ground. Any prisoner who steps over this wire, even to retrieve a football, is shot.

Everything possible has been done by the Germans to deter prisoners from escaping. The bunkhouses are raised on wooden pilings, to discourage tunnelling. The guards in the towers are armed with machine guns and searchlights that sweep the compound in random patterns, so there is no predicting where the safe pockets of darkness will fall if someone dares to make a run for it. At night the guards are doubled and unleash their Alsatian dogs, which race around the compound, sniffing out any hidden escapees.

Prisoners are locked inside the bunkhouses until morning roll call, which happens at sunrise, when all two thousand men are roused from their bunks to stand in the muddy yard that separates the bunkhouses from the more spacious quarters of the Germans. The men stand in a long line facing the Kommandant, who remains on the verandah of his office during the procedure, strutting up and down, his chest puffed out like a winter robin’s. In the evening after supper, there is another roll call.

By the laws of the Geneva Conventions, officers who are prisoners are not required to work, and this endless stretch of leisure time is hard on those who do not have a pursuit or passion to occupy them. For the men who seek activity, sport and gardening are favourites.

But escape is the most popular pastime.

From the moment he arrived at the Oflag, James was given the information he needed to escape, the arithmetic of the camp.

It is three hundred feet from the corner of the closest bunkhouse to the wire, and another thirty feet outside the wire to the ditch. The ditch is ten feet across. Beyond the ditch is the forest, beyond the forest the road, beyond the road the town. If a man were able to dig a foot an hour, undetected, during the available daylight hours between roll calls, it would still take three months to get outside the wire.

James has no desire to escape. He doesn’t think it’s an accident that the nearest bunkhouse to the wire is still three hundred feet from it. The Germans have also done the arithmetic, and they have calculated that three months is just long enough for them to discover any tunnel under construction.

It occurs to James that perhaps the Germans want the prisoners to attempt escape, that this little game of cat and mouse keeps both sides interested and occupied during the months of mind-numbing boredom in the prison camp.

Prisoners who tunnel are called “moles” because they work like those animals, digging with their hands to fashion a tunnel barely wider than their own bodies, using their hands as flippers to push the freshly dug earth behind them, where it is gathered up by other prisoners. What to do with the soil remains the biggest problem in escape attempts, as the newly dug earth is not the same colour or texture as the pale sand that covers the surface of the camp. It cannot simply be blended in. A certain amount can be distributed in the gardens, but the rest has to be hidden in the rafters of the bunkhouses or under the floorboards. Often the discovery of the soil leads to the discovery of a tunnel.

Moling is suited to the smaller men. But even if he were shorter and slighter, James would have no interest in tunnelling. For one thing, he has decided that the Germans are simply playing with the prisoners, that they know all about the digging and wait until a tunnel is just a foot from the wire fence before exposing it. And for another thing, James has suddenly become interested in remaining inside the prison camp.

T
HE FOURTH
side of the prison camp is a river. Across the river there is an old stone wall, and before the river there is a tripwire and a fence topped with barbed wire. Unlike the barren landscape of the camp proper, the river offers vegetation, some trees, and a little grass. The slight slope from the camp to the river makes it a pleasant spot to linger in the warmer months and a good place to go for those seeking some respite from the constant society of their fellow prisoners.

James Hunter was captured in the winter of 1940. When the season turns and spring has started to show itself, James comes down to the river at every opportunity. He stops bashing the circuit when he realizes that he has spent weeks walking the perimeter of the camp and the ground is now as grooved as a furrow from a succession of footsteps endlessly tamping down the earth. Now, in the evenings before the prisoners are locked in their barracks for the night, James comes instead to the fence near the river and stands under one of the three trees on the bank, watching the water roll slowly downstream, towards the town that he knows is there but will probably never see.

The river is perhaps ten feet across, the water tea coloured and not over a man’s head. In the middle of the day, when the sun is directly above, James can see the rocks and sand on the bottom of the river, all of it murky through the sepia filter of the water’s hue.

The volume of the river changes with the season. With spring it has widened, and all the rocks that protruded above the surface in winter are swallowed by the increase in volume. When the river flows deep and wide it is largely silent. When James first arrived at the camp, the river was barely a foot deep and it rattled with its own emptiness.

It is a fast-moving river. James has watched a leaf, blown onto the surface of the water, drift downstream and disappear around the bend before he has counted to thirty, the leaf moving at roughly one foot per second. The current is swifter in the spring, when the river is deep, the flex of the water more powerful.

At first, James thinks that he will make a study of the river, that it would be good to attach himself to a purpose while a prisoner in the camp. He doesn’t want to dig useless tunnels, is not much interested in gardening or sport, prefers not to lie around in his bunk like Harry Stevens, waiting for the war to end. The men in the camp do not need him to teach them grammar school science, the only worthwhile skill he has on offer. The prison camp is filled with highly educated officers. In his bunkhouse alone, there are fourteen men who have been to either Oxford or Cambridge.

But the trouble with the river is that James has no real access to it. He can stand near the wire and watch the little bit of it that flows past the camp, but he cannot wade through it, examine the banks in detail, plunge his hand into the current to feel the temperature and pull of the water. He can visit it, but he will never know it. As a study, it will ultimately be inadequate and disappointing.

It is a warm spring day in 1940 when he thinks this, standing as close to the wire as he dares, feeling the breeze on his skin and watching it move the branches of the trees on the opposite shore.

It is in this exact moment that he hears the song of the bird and all his thoughts are silenced.

The beginning of something is easy to recall because it signals a change in direction. James Hunter came down to the river, which was one side of his prison, and he saw the redstarts on the stone wall, and the beauty of their song and the splash of red on their tails made him decide to study them for the length of time he was to be kept in the camp.

T
HE BIRDS
were singing down by the river. Two redstarts on a grey stone wall. One was singing more beautifully and more often than its fellow, and James wondered then if some birds were simply better singers than others, and if this constant song was a rejoicing in their abilities.

The song of the redstart begins as a melody and ends in dissonance, as though the song itself comes undone in the process of singing it, finishing up with all the right notes presented in the completely wrong order.

James had no paper down by the river. He made no notes. He carried the memory of the song back up the hill to his small wooden desk in the bunkhouse, but when he sat down to write what he had heard, the words unravelled like the song of the bird, and he was left with nothing.

He returned to the river the next day. The male birds were still there, still singing and trying to attract a female. James realized that if he meant to watch them with purpose, he would need to document them. He would need to bring a notebook and pencil with him to the river and find a place to sit under a tree, as near to the wire as he could without drawing the attention of the guards.

I
N HIS
room in the bunkhouse, James has secured a top bunk near the only window. None of the other men had wanted this spot because the window is drafty, but James doesn’t mind suffering the cold in exchange for the opportunity to watch the changing sky and weather, or to feel the sun on his face in the afternoon because the window faces west.

The men in his flight crew have been allocated to different bunkhouses and different camps, and as they were never his friends, James doesn’t miss them or seek them out. The seven other men in his room are nice enough fellows. They pool their Red Cross parcels so the food will stretch further, and they share books and jokes, but the only one of them to whom James is remotely close is the man who occupies the bottom bunk, Harry Stevens.

The second morning he observes the redstarts, James charges back up the slope to his room to get a notebook and pencil so he can begin documenting the birds. When he bursts through the door, Harry Stevens is lying on his bunk, reading a book. Stevens uses his books as a screen to avoid talking to his cabin mates, a trait that James understands, being often overwhelmed himself by constant human interaction. But sometimes he is disappointed when Harry chooses to use his book as a screen against him as well.

“There are redstarts by the river.” James scrambles up the ladder to his bunk, where he keeps writing materials on a small shelf near his pillow.

“Red what?” Harry peers over the top of his novel.

“Birds. Two males. They’re trying to attract females. I might get a breeding pair.” James grabs a notebook and two pencils from the shelf. “I’m going to make a study of the redstarts. It will keep me busy here, and with luck, I can turn it into a book after the war.”

“Best of British, then.” Harry has already lost interest in James’s pursuit. He turns a page of his novel. “Make sure you pull the door tight on your way out.”

The deprivations of the Oflag make men’s true natures rise to the surface fairly quickly, and what James had initially liked about Harry Stevens—his aloofness and polite reluctance at having too much to do with his fellow prisoners—has to be respected in every instance, even in circumstances where James would have preferred Harry to act a little more out of character.

T
HE BETTER
singer of the male redstarts entices a female to join him, and it is not long before they start to build a nest together.

In the spring, when most of James’s observations are taken, the days carry both promise and heartache. Often he shivers down by the river, and the birds huddle inside their feathered coats. On the days when it is sunny, they bask in the warmth together.

James had seen redstarts in Britain, but never a nesting pair. And back in that other life, which seems to fade more with each passing day, he didn’t have much time to watch the world. He was too busy moving through it.

From his position near the fence, James can observe the redstarts building their nest in the stone wall across the river. They are about thirty feet away from him, near enough that he can make out most of the details of their courtship and nest building. He would love a pair of spyglasses, to observe their activity more closely, but spyglasses, for obvious reasons, are not permitted in camp.

The redstart nest is constructed with twigs and roots as its foundation. To this is added an insulating layer of dead grasses, feathers, wool scraps, animal hair, blanket threads, string, paper, moss, and what looks to be part of a bandage made of cotton wool. The birds make use of what is on offer to them, which means they avail themselves of the prisoner’s scraps, the evidence of life in the Oflag forming the foundation of their little home.

James watches the building of the nest for eleven straight hours, interrupted only once for roll call, and in those eleven hours the female redstart brings building materials to her nest a full 239 times.

The time it takes to build a nest and lay eggs varies from couple to couple, and much depends on the weather, as no bird likes to use wet materials to build a nest and so will wait out rain and inclemency. The redstart pair that James is watching is lucky in that it’s dry for their nest building and so it takes them only four days to complete the task.

James doesn’t know what observations will matter later, when he looks through his notes, so he writes everything down. In between the notations on the redstarts’ activity, he writes larger questions about the birds’ behaviour—questions he thinks about when he lies in his bunk at the end of the day.

Are some birds more strong-willed than their fellows? Do they push forward in times when
other birds would wait? What is the greater imperative, I wonder, in all enterprises—desire or circumstance?

What is particular to the species in terms of the redstarts’ behaviour, and what is a matter of individual temperament? Is it reasonable for this pair to represent all redstarts, when perhaps the necessity of being themselves is of more relevance than the fact that they are redstarts?

B
EFORE LONG
, James’s vigil by the river is judged suspicious, and he is marched off between two guards to the Kommandant’s office.

James has not been inside the German quarters before, and he is surprised to find them as barren as the bunkhouses. There is the same rudimentary wooden furniture scattered through the room. No rugs. No decorations on the walls. The walls themselves, being stone, make the Kommandant’s office seem colder, and the lack of personal effects makes it appear a good deal grimmer than James’s own room in bunkhouse 11.