© Fatima Shbair/Getty ImagesStreaks through the sky left by Iron Dome system
The acclaimed novel
Birdsong tells a story from inside the grueling trench warfare of 1914-18. The trenches - mere mud, and rain-soaked corridors - were separated from the German lines, by the desolate hell of 'no man's land' - an indescribable flat wilderness of mud, mud and more mud, littered with broken bits of what once were men, whose remains no one dared retrieve, and the surreal black art of coiled razor wire twisted out into every imaginable shape and angle.
Across this Hieronymus Bosch landscape, the Germans laid down rolling wave after wave of intense high explosive artillery shells sending plumes of earth high up into the sky. Yet, in counterpoint to this dark and demonic backdrop,
Birdsong unfolds a story of human struggle, near death and deep compassion for injured friends.
But at the core, it is a story about tunnels - those who dug them; those buried in them, as they fell in;
and those who sprung out from them - as earth-worms rising - to surprise and kill the enemy.Tunnels were the secret weapon of WW1. They were the answer to the merciless aerial bombardment unleashed by the crushing mass of a superior military machine. Battalions would enter the trenches 800 strong, and emerge after the barrage, with a mere 100-200 living men. Yet on they went - volunteers digging tunnels through the mud to rise, like ghosts, upon a sleeping enemy.
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