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SKYLARKS Within the slim purse of pure silence after the barrage and before the whistles sent the first wave over the top, they heard skylarks singing. In real life such things rarely happen: such marriages of violence and small mercies. But the men in the trenches knew exactly where they were. It took only a moment—the skylarks singing and rising and rows of faces pivoting skyward and then madness, bitterness, man after man boosting the man before him up the ladder where their bodies blew open, throwing themselves everywhere like dark mist or dust. The mold that bloomed on everything. The body’s priceless rubble. The terror and sheer bad luck of a man pinned down in no-man’s-land, where, as the dead cooled down, their lice, moving house, became his, proving how generous the dead can be. Rattle and witter of gunfire. In the shattered fields skylarks flustered back into song. In the dugouts, the masturbating and the weeping that followed. Choose, says history, as if there is ever any difference between the weeping and the singing. 74 ...

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