Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

BIRDSONG
Sebastian Faulks
A critical paper by
Arthur M. Stupay

Tonight I report on Birdsong, the second of two books we have read on World War I. What is amazing to me is that there are many similarities in how the books are structured and how the war is portrayed.

We are dealing with memories, personal histories and narratives in a war that continues to haunt many of us who have a personal connection to it as well as the following one, only twenty years later, that was far more devastating and horrible than the waste and slaughter of earlier one.

World War I should not be some distant conflict that consumed an earlier generation. But a war that has resonance now, with Syria, Iraq, and Iran, among others, created in the Versailles Peace Conference and later meetings to carve up the Ottoman Empire into some units that represent national aspiration and possibly logic. We have just-yesterday examples of how conflict follows its own logic. Russia strikes against the Sunni rebels to support Assad, who has given them naval bases on the Mediterranean Coast at Latakia. Turkey, an ally of the U.S., shoots down a Russian warplane sent to bomb our Syrian allies. Russia takes strong actions against Turkey, which is now allied with NATO, the EU and the U.S. What will follow, a scenario not unlike World War I? We can only pray, not.
Just last Sunday, Roger Cohen, a columnist of the New York Times had an article entitled, “World War III.” He begins it with a conversation between mother and child, “Mommy, please tell me again, how did World War I begin?” She answers, “Sweetheart, I already told you. That happened a long time ago. A century is a very long time.” The mother continued, “It’s a sad story. The world was organized in one way and that way collapsed and in the process millions of people were killed.”

After recounting the killing of the Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his wife in Sarajevo, the mother added, “Then Germany declared war on Russia who supported Serbia, whose friend was France, which didn’t like Germany. Soon, Germany attacked France through Belgium. “After a few years, over 16 million people were dead. The Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German and Russian Empires had collapsed.”   The daughter asks, “All because a couple was killed? Mom, that’s weird.” She answered, “Sometimes little things get bigger, people lose patience and perspective, there’s a spark and you get a big mess.” The child asks, “Mom, it couldn’t happen again, right?”  We can debate this. Cohen concludes his article with, “No,” but I think he sounded ambivalent.
Back to Birdsong and the related A Farewell to Arms. Birdsong starts in the zenith of modern Europe, 1910. We in the U.S. were in a backwater, with limited culture but unlimited land and opportunity.  A young Brit named Stephen, makes an appearance in Amiens, in the home of the Azaire’s, Madame and Monsieur, and their two children, Gregoire aged ten and his sister. Stephen comes to Monsieur as an observer from a customer firm in Manchester that buys cloth from Azaire’s plant, although similar material is available in England at lower price, but presumably not the same quality.  

Stephen is an interesting character, not unlike the other ex pat, Frederick Henry, Mr. Henry or Tenente, the lead protagonist in A Farewell to Arms, They have similar childhoods, neglected, abandoned, without firm roots. Frederick Henry’s education in Farewell was assured by his grandfather. In Birdsong, Stephen’s father abandons his mother soon after he finds out she is pregnant. His mother, a factory worker, leaves Stephen with her father, who was a scoundrel and arrested for a petty crime. Stephen too had a scuffle with a boy and was sent to a home, presumably like a reform school. A so-called rich man reads about it in the local newspaper and is moved to try to help the child, convinced, said the future guardian, “that he was clever and needed to be given a chance to prove himself,” which he did.

In Birdsong, there are subtle hints of key elements as the story unfolds. Thus, the gardens in Amiens border the river Somme as it broke up into small canals. Yes, the Somme, with its canals, so placid, near a series of water gardens,  “little islands of damp fertility divided by the channels of the split river, where flat bottomed boats are propelled by poles.” How idyllic and peaceful. Yet a mere four years later, several hundred thousand soldiers would be killed in these marshes, canals and fields, in mindless assaults against the German enemy from trenches that sheltered them for a while.

In another place Stephen, near the outset of the book, relaxes in the evening by keeping a notebook on daily events. He began it in childhood when a school master suggested it, maybe to calm his nervous disposition. To mask the contents from unwanted eyes, Stephen created a code using Greek and Latin he learned at school and if the subject was sensitive, he would change the sex of the characters and “note their actions or his responses with phrases that could not mean anything to a chance reader.” These notebooks become key in helping his granddaughter, Elizabeth, unlock his secrets, nearly a century later. There are many such artful hints of actions that become important later. 

As you remember Stephen falls for Isabelle, his first femme fatale, an unexpected French temptress while Frederick Henry in Farewell falls for Catherine Barkley. Both women have had a bad start in relationships. In Catherine’s case, her fiancée is killed in action. In Isabel’s case, it is her much older husband who abuses and belittles her, and whom she comes to despise. Both are disappointed women, feeling used and neglected at the same time, but for a time each flourished in their new relationship.

The romances in both books are torrid, but they end badly for both men, with Isabelle fleeing Stephen to return to her abusive husband, propelled by her conscience, on the realization that she abandoned his two children, whom she adores. Could this be, abandoning vulnerable children to join her lover, who was a welcome visitor to their home? Later, more improbably, Isabel flees her French home and roots to join a German major in Germany during the war. Hard to believe and is a weak part of the story.

I think that Hemingway’s Frederick at least had the possibility of living happily, but both his son by Catherine and Catherine herself died in the hospital. In Faulks’ creation, there is no hope with Isabel, but later there is some solace for Stephen when he meets Isabelle’s older sister, Jeannette. But it may not have ended well for Stephen who succumbs at a young age after the war.

What of the war itself. For Birdsong, the site is the Somme and the French borderlands. In Farewell, the war rages in Italy and Austria. In both books, only a few miles away from each battlefield, there is peace and order. In Farewell, it is Milan and in Birdsong, it is Rouen. Safe havens are absent in war stories about World War II, where it is waged on civilians as furiously as at the front.
What do we learn about the war and the possible differences between the Germans and the Austrians and their war techniques? My opinion is that trench warfare appears to be more demoralizing as the troops eventually realize that the chances of success are minimal, and there is no escape. In both books, there are major military failures, and lies perpetrated by commanders, dealing with conditions on the battlefield. Remember the incident where Stephen is told by Captain Grey that the German barbed wire has not been cut; there was a “cock-up.” As the men surged out of the trench most were mowed down by withering fire from the German side. Stephen notices that there was a soldier beside him missing part of his face, but he was ordered not to stop for anyone. The noise was unlike anything he had ever heard. I think Faulk  excels in battlefield description and feeling.
Much of Birdsong takes place underground. As Faulk writes, “Jack Firebrace lay 45 feet underground with several hundred thousand tons of France above him.” In the last part of the book, Stephen heroically tries to save Jack after an underground explosion. For me, it is a bit contrived, especially the part about the finding sandbags and the discovery of explosives. Yet, it is effective, even if incredible. Stephen again confounds the odds and survives, a man with several lives, a man with a lucky streak, a lucky charm to his men. The same for Frederick in Farewell. Both persevere to the end, at least, the end of the book.

Surprisingly, both books also end in a similar way. In Farewell, there is a bloody scene of the childbirth of Frederick and Catherine’s child. As you may remember, the child dies from strangulation by his umbilical cord. In Birdsong, there is a similar scene, but Elizabeth gives birth to a live baby, as its umbilical cord is carefully and successfully severed by a nurse.

Another similarity is that both books deal with ordinary people, who in extremis rise to hero status. They grow in compassion for their men and in leadership qualities, maintaining basic human decency under the most appalling circumstances. Remember how Stephen overlooks Jack Firebrand falling asleep on guard duty.      

What to make of the many similarities of these books: humble and tragic beginning for the protagonists, ex pats fighting in foreign countries, both succeed in surviving despite the odds and seem to be of a class that death does not come to them as in Death Comes for the Archbishop. Also, there is the similarity of the aborted loves of the heroes and the births that close both books. It might appear that Birdsong was an homage to Hemingway’s Farewell and to his hero Frederick Henry. Also, the action is in the same war, about the same time, with different venues, but the characters could be interchangeable. I’d be interested in your view.
Just a word about the title, Birdsong. In an interview, Faulk was asked about the significance of birds in Birdsong. He answered that “I think above all, I was trying to suggest that birds singing as the bombardment continued showed nature to be utterly indifferent to the machinations of humans.” Are humans chosen by God or just another species thrown up by natural selection, only more destructive than other primates?” That remains a question for many of us.