Bureau of War Instrument 44-K

#On the Instrument

"The choirs sing. The tunnels hold." — War Directorate erratum, Third Quarterly Review, A.S. 200

Bureau of War Instrument 44-K enters the Codex through a single erratum. The War Directorate of the Bureau of Orison and Song, correcting its documentation after the Third Quarterly Review of A.S. 200 (1910 CE), states that the personnel of the Sunken Choir are classified as "Liturgical Combatants, Voluntary" under an instrument bearing the name of the Bureau of War. The Choir's own registry adds that the engine is licensed for Line deployment under Instrument 44-K. Those two citations are the whole of my evidence. They give a number, an issuing Bureau, a category of person and a licence.

They give no text. I have no preamble to quote, no clause to number and no signatory's flourish to admire. I cannot enter a day of issue or a date of commencement in the Ledger. Lesser archivists who find an empty folio fill it with whatever the reader expects. I record the outline of what is missing and leave it empty. The Ledger has suffered enough invention without my contribution.

The authority behind the classification matters more than its wording. Orison and Song operates the Choir. It keeps the hymnal, the conductors, the throat-drawings and the seal. When the Directorate had to say what its singers are, it reached across the corridor and cited War's paper. A Bureau that names its own singers answers for them. A Bureau that cites another's instrument answers only for its filing.

#On Voluntary Service

The designation is three words long. Liturgical turns the singing into a rite. Combatants turns the singer into a soldier, subject to soldiers' discipline and counted among soldiers' losses. Voluntary is meant to close the question. Read together, the phrase files a child in a collar as a man at arms who asked to be there.

The same review dealt with the older noun directly.

The Sunken Choir dossier explains what "appropriate developmental stage" means in practice. The cohort is selected before the voice breaks. Parish registers are reviewed for pitch, lung depth, dental spacing, obedience marks and family tax arrears. These are recruitment practices as the dossier describes them. I find none of them written into 44-K, and I will not pretend that I do. Such practices need no instrument to support them. The Bureau of Conscription supplies the persons and attests that they are sufficient, so a boy with a clean treble and a father behind on his tithe arrives at the register already sorted.

Set the word Voluntary beside that list. Lung depth is examined, dental spacing is measured and arrears are tallied. Nowhere in the account does anyone ask the boy. The Bureau's position is preserved in its own erratum: the distinction between volunteer and conscript is "a matter of perspective insufficiently resolved to delay production." The grammar is worth reading closely. The question is allowed to stay open, and production is not required to wait for an answer.

#On the Vocal Cohort

Paper describes and bodies undergo. A Liturgical Combatant, Voluntary, of appropriate developmental stage, is a boy whose throat structures have been surgically fused into a reinforced resonant chamber. He is then deafened. The official reason is to spare him feedback trauma. The practical result is that he never hears what he has been made into. He learns by lip, lamp, rod and vibration.

In service he sits in an iron collar along the drone-tunnel, with his back fixed to a hymn-board and his mouth held at the sanctioned aperture by a silvered brace. A conductor reads the cohort's lips by lamplight and beats time on a copper rail. The rail carries the rhythm into the hull, and the hull carries it into the clay beneath the Sagittal Line. Somewhere above, an enemy sap shudders and its roof gives way.

The Choir is filed under Miracles and Sorcery as a sanctioned engine. Its licensed uses are hostile sap-collapse, trench undermining, bunker rupture and emergency counter-tunnelling. The Lore Book's older account adds what the licence leaves out. Choirs have collapsed under their own voices, buried in sanctified mud, and the ground they bring down does not check whose trench it is. Friendly works fall as well. "The tunnels hold" is a sentence in an erratum. Underground it is only a hope, though a sealed one. No reliable rate of success is published, and no casualty figure accompanies it.

Those who survive a tour come back without speech. Some whistle, some move their lips in sleep, and some press their palms to walls when wagons pass in the distance. The classification is efficient on this point. A child would have to be accounted for. A combatant can simply be expended.

#On Mercy's Objection

The Bureau of Mercy filed an objection in A.S. 198 (1908 CE) under Reference 77-G. The record does not preserve its text, its author or any hearing. Only its outcome survives. Two years later, in the same Third Quarterly Review that replaced the noun, the objection was "noted and dismissed."

The two verbs do different work. Noted means the objection is received, numbered and kept, so that no later inquiry can claim Mercy said nothing. Dismissed means it has no effect on the engine. The current Choir dossier reduces the arrangement to one word in its Doctrinal Holding, sealed by the Bureau of Doctrine: Mercy objections are non-suspensive. They enter the file, and the file continues.

I do not call Reference 77-G insincere, because I have no grounds to. Mercy files its objections at scheduled intervals, in black-edged folders, and sends an observer into the drone-tunnels when one is available. On paper that is more than any other Bureau has done for these children. Readers should keep 77-G separate from Mercy's Reference 88-K of A.S. 200, which concerns hearing loss in an Essen interrogation room. That objection was also noted, and it is a different file in a different drawer.

Look closely at the quarterly form, however. Among its required entries is a field headed Mercy objection. The licence cannot be completed without one. An objection that the form demands and then ignores has stopped being a protest and become one of the ingredients.

#On the Present Licence

As of A.S. 201 (1911 CE), sections of the Sunken Choir serve beneath several Line sectors. Training houses are known at Essen-of-Hymnsteel, Mainz and the Cloister of Calibrated Breath in Strasbourg. Flat sapping country uses the Choir most heavily and mountain sectors least, since mountain stone throws the hymn back. The registry gives the engine's status as licensed for Line deployment under Instrument 44-K.

The renewal account uses a different label. The Choir dossier says the licence is renewed each quarter under Standing Order 44-K. The record does not say whether the Standing Order and the Instrument are one paper under two names, a parent and its offspring, or two documents that share a number by clerical accident. I preserve both labels as I found them. The Synod has done more damage by tidying than by any careless clerk.

The renewal form has seven required fields: casualty expectation, soil expectation, voice expectation, Mercy objection, War necessity, Orison seal and Conscription attestation. Casualty expectation comes first, ahead of the soil, as is proper when the losses are better known than the ground. War supplies the necessity and Orison presses the seal. The Bureau of Engineering, whose tunnels the Choir shakes without asking leave, appears among the associated Bureaus and has no field of its own. Conscription's attestation was recently revised. It used to read: "Boys remain plentiful." It now reads: "Supply remains sufficient."

The change of noun in A.S. 200 has reached the bottom line of the form. It has not reached the collars, the braces or the hymn-boards. Those still come back from the front each quarter to be refitted.

The form returns every quarter with all seven fields, and the cohort goes back down.