page_title: Birdsong (novel)
section_title: France 1916
hierarchical_section_title: Birdsong (novel) / Plot / France 1916
caption_attribution_description: English: The Battle of the Somme, July-november 1916 Battle of Albert. Laying a charge in a mine chamber. Note the officer using Geophone. July 1916.
context_page_description: Birdsong is a 1993 war novel and family saga by the English author Sebastian Faulks. It is Faulks's fourth novel. The plot follows two main characters living at different times: the first is Stephen Wraysford, a British soldier on the front line in Amiens during the First World War, and the second is his granddaughter, Elizabeth Benson, whose 1970s plotline follows her attempts to recover an understanding of Stephen's experience of the war.
  Faulks developed the novel to bring more public awareness to the experience of war remembered by WWI veterans. Most critics found this effort successful, commenting on how the novel, like many other WWI novels, thematically focuses on the way in which the experience of trauma shapes individual psyches. Similarly, because of the parallel narratives WWI and 1970s Britain, the novel explores metahistorical questions about how to document and recover narratives about the past. Because of its genre, themes and writing style, the novel has been favourably compared to a number of other war novels, like Ian McEwan's Atonement and those in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy.
context_section_description: The second section rejoins Stephen, when he is a lieutenant in the British Army at the start of the war. Through his eyes, Faulks tells the reader about the first day on the Somme in July 1916 and the Battle of Messines near Ypres in the following year.
  Several episodes depict a downtrodden Stephen whose only respite is his friendship with Captain Michael Weir and his men. Stephen gains the reputation of a cold and distant officer. He refuses all offers of leave, because he is committed  to fighting  the war.
  His story is interleaved with that of Jack Firebrace, a former miner employed with the tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers in the British trenches to listen for the enemy and plant mines under the German trenches. In one expedition across No-Man's Land, Stephen is badly injured but survives.
  During these episodes, Stephen feels lonely and writes to Isabelle, feeling that there is no one else to whom he can express his feelings. He writes about his fears that he will die, and confesses that he has only ever loved her.
caption: Miners laying charges for one of the mines on the Somme in 1916. These men were of a similar company to the characters represented in the novel.
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