A Long Long Way (15 page)

The officer himself rode on regardless, never looking back, and it must have been three or four bullets were needed to bring him down, the skittering horse shot out from under him.

‘Jesus, are there Germans in that big place, or what?’ said Jesse Kirwan.

‘I don’t know,’ said Willie Dunne. ‘I suppose there must be.’

Now Willie Dunne saw some Dublin Metropolitan Police men here and there, and he called out to one he knew.

‘Here, Sergeant, hello!’

And the sergeant wheeled about and stared at Willie Dunne.

‘Ah, Willie,’ he said. ‘Little Willie.’

‘What’s going on?’ said Willie. ‘Is my da anywhere around?’

‘I haven’t seen the chief at all,’ said the policeman.

‘And is it the Germans have invaded us?’ he said.

‘I don’t know, Willie.’

‘Look it here,’ said another man, a mere citizen, proffering a printed sheet to Willie.

Willie took a step towards him, which seemed to excite the captain leading the column.

‘Step back in, Private,’ called the captain. ‘Don’t parley with the enemy.’

‘What enemy?’ said Willie Dunne. ‘What enemy, sir?’

‘Keep back away, or I will shoot him.’

And the captain hurried down and put his Webley against the poor man’s temple, a very grievous thing, it appeared, because a horrible rank sweat broke out on the civilian’s forehead. But the captain was content when Willie stepped smartly back.

The column was told to go on then, and they wheeled about across Sackville Street Bridge and on towards Nassau Street. They were hearing shots now in other sections of the city. Willie Dunne could not bring himself over the strangeness of it.

In proper order they were marched right through Trinity College, where there were students hanging from the windows, cheering them. But that mystery was ignored also, and on they went, out onto the lower corner of Merrion Square, then away along the swanky square towards Mount Street Bridge.

Here for the first time the familiar noise of rifle bullets passed overhead, and skipped up from the cobblestones, and as far as Willie Dunne could see they were being fired on from a premises just to the left of the bridge. They could see now others of their own troops coming up from Ballsbridge direction, marching.

His column was instructed to build a barricade across the street, and men smashed their way into the dwellings and pulled out nice sofas and hall tables, perambulators, mattresses. They made themselves as safe as they could behind these objects. Then they knelt to the gaps and were told to commence firing.

Meanwhile, the troops on the other side of the bridge continued to advance, line after line, and a machine-gun opened up from the premises and began to mow down the soldiers.

Willie Dunne could clearly see two second lieutenants urging them on from the front, and they were the first to go. Willie stood up now with open mouth. His own companions were firing as they had been bidden, and he was certain that some of the fire was going straight on over the bridge and adding to the murderous business afoot on the other side. The captain ordered them to stop firing.

Now they crouched among the furniture. ‘Made in Navan’, Willie Dunne read on the underside of a chair. Navan right enough was well known for its furniture making. Whose bottom sat there usually, he wondered? Private Kirwan was just beside Willie, sheltering behind a plump cushion wrapped in an antimacassar, probably not made in Navan, Willie thought. Somehow or other Private Kirwan had got hold of one of those pieces of printed paper blowing about here and there and was intently reading.

Actually he was intently weeping.

‘ Are you hit?‘ said Willie.

The little Cork man looked up at him. He didn’t say anything immediately.

‘ Are you hit, are you wounded? Will I call out for the stretcher bearers?‘

‘No,’ said Private Kirwan. ‘Oh, Jesus, Jesus.’

‘What is it?’ said Willie.

‘It’s our lot,’ said Private Kirwan.

‘How do you mean?’

‘It’s our fellas. James Connolly is out. And Pearse the schoolmaster.’

‘I don’t follow you. Who are they?’

‘It’s here,’ he said, rattling the sheet, ‘it says it here, you poor gobshite. What sort of a man are you? It’s a notice. To tell the people.’

‘What people?’ said Willie. About forty more soldiers across the bridge were added to the dead or wounded, and the rest were now lying in among the gardens of the huge houses on that side of the canal.

‘Here, give us a look at that,’ said another soldier, with a raw Dublin accent himself. And he started to scan it quickly. ‘Our gallant allies in Europe,’ the man read. ‘Who the fuck are they? Is it us against us? What in the name of Jaysus is going on?’

Now a sort of noisy silence descended, and Willie heard the groans and distant screaming of wounded men.

‘What’s going on, for the love of God?’ said Willie Dunne. ‘I have three sisters up at home.’

They were told to be ready now to charge, to relieve the men the other side.

‘ All right, boys,‘ said the captain. ’We won’t be long mopping these lads up.‘

Willie’s arms were weak and his rifle felt like an iron girder for some enormous roofspan. He lifted it painfully. They were poised to go, and Willie chose a convenient enough footstool to clamber over.

‘All right, boys, advancing now. Pick your targets. Watch out for the men on the other side. Fire at the building only.’

A machine-gun, which had been brought up unnoticed by Willie and positioned in a house on his right, started firing into the building some hundred yards away, as covering fire.

Just as they were all ready to go and in fact some strength was returning to his arms, suddenly from Warrington Place appeared six horses being led by a groom. They were beautiful horses, Willie could see, and he could also see the horror on the face of the groom who, whatever his mission was, was not expecting a war at the intersection of the canal and the Ballsbridge road.

The two horses in front reared up. For some reason the machine-gun started firing on the group. The groom went down immediately, his golden outfit blooming with red, and his horses in their panic started galloping up towards Willie and his fellows. Their order to advance was repeated, and over they went, running now towards the building, which was itself all bullets vomiting out of the windows.

Men were going down all around him. He had to dive into a doorway halfway down, and others were doing likewise. Of the hundred men who had come out with him there were three just at his boots lying dead almost on top of each other, their faces bizarrely staring at him. It was hopeless. The officer himself had been wounded in the shoulder. There was a little pipe of bone sticking out through his jacket. The charge broke up entirely.

He was standing there in the portico straining his eyes to the building. They would need guns bigger than machine-guns to get them out. He knew intimately the secret nature of that building, the two layers of granite in the walls, the brick facing, it was like a medieval tower for strength.

He heard something behind him, a clicking. Someone had come up behind him in the gloom. He turned about with his rifle raised and found he was facing a shivering man, a very young shivering man in a Sunday suit and a sort of military hat, and an ancient-looking revolver held in both his hands, raised towards Willie’s chest.

‘You’re my prisoner,’ said a trembling voice.

‘I’m not,’ said Willie Dunne.

‘I need you for a prisoner, Tommy,’ said the youngster.

‘No,’ said Willie.

The wounded captain behind Willie sort of reached in over Willie’s shoulder and fired his pistol. The bullet tore into the young man’s neck, and he fell to the marble floor.

‘Rifle jammed, Private?’ said the captain.

Willie stared at him a few moments. ‘No, sir. Yes, sir. No, sir.’

The captain issued a sardonic laugh and pulled away again.

‘Oh, God,’ said the man on the ground. It was a definite wonder he could speak still. There was a huge hole in his throat where Willie imagined his speaking equipment would be.

Willie thought it would be heartless not to attend to the man in some fashion. The old revolver had slipped from the man’s hands and had slithered along the floor, and the fellow was eyeing it hopelessly.

Willie knelt down to him.

‘I’m not going to shoot you,’ he said. ‘Are you a German?’

‘German?’ said the man. ‘German? What are you talking about? I’m an Irishman. We’re all Irishmen in here, fighting for Ireland.’

There was dark red blood leaking from the terrible hole, it was pouring onto the flagstones and soon it would be running out of the door and down the granite steps. It would cross the pavement, thought Willie, of Wicklow granite, and sneak along the cobbled gutter, and into the dark drain. It would leak down into the great Victorian conduit and go away and away to the river and the sea. It was his life’s blood, Willie knew, well he knew it. The young man gripped Willie’s arm nearest him through the khaki sleeve, but it was pain that drove him to it, animal pain.

‘Oh, God,’ said the boy.

‘There ought to be medical fellas around somewhere,’ said Willie, but he hadn’t seen any himself.

‘I have to say an act of contrition,’ said the man. In truth the blood was beginning to bubble in his throat, it was pretty horrible to hear. Are you Scottish, Tommy?‘

‘No.’

‘Well, whatever you are, Tommy, can you hold on to me while I say an act of contrition?’

‘Of course I can.’

So the young man said his act of contrition. It was as sincere and contrite as any priest could wish.

‘That sounded grand,’ said Willie. The man’s hand had a fierce grip on his arm; it was surprising, the strength left in him.

‘I only came out to win a bit of freedom for Ireland,’ the man said, laughing miserably. ‘You won’t hold that against me?’

‘No, no,’ said Willie, bizarrely, he thought.

‘I’m only fucking nineteen,’ said the man. ‘But what odds?’

His blood was vigorous and generous. It started to fill his throat in the wrong way and the young man began to splutter and choke, spraying Willie’s face and tunic. He was coughing now for dear life, for dear life itself. The grip began to loosen, to loosen and loosen, till the fingers fell away entirely. The man’s head tipped back and he was gurgling, in a nasty, metallic way, like a banging lid. Choke, choke, choke. The blood was thrown over Willie again and again like a fisherman’s net, again and again, and then the man was as still as a dead fish.

There was still a light in his eyes, just for a moment, and the eyes were staring into Willie’s. And then the light was gone, the eyes merging with the deep brown shadows of the hallway. Willie bent his head and muttered a quick prayer.

They were moved back out of position and then shunted back to the ship. They boarded it in the confused dark, as if perhaps there were also urgent things to be done by them elsewhere. They were all and everyone stunned and horribly hungry and thirsty. No one seemed to have the story straight at all. When Willie had come out of the hallway, he had not seen Jesse Kirwan anywhere about, but he found him again on the ship. Not everyone on board it seemed had been called back into Dublin, and there were a hundred strange conversations going on, people asking each other what the ruckus was, why there were fellas with light wounds being tended to by the nurses, what in the name of Jaysus had been going on.

When Willie found him, Jesse was away near the second funnel of the ship, sitting as alone as he could on a crowded troopship. The huge funnel reared above him, sending quite a timid streak of smoke into the darkening sky. There was that sense now of the deepening sea, and unfriendly cold, and the realms of other things besides mankind. But whether Jesse was aware of this Willie could not tell.

Willie sat down beside him as casually as he could. The chill off the sea was making his nose run, and he was wiping at the snots that started to seep down. Jesse turned his head and gazed his gaze again.

‘Snotty bollocks, aren’t you, boy?’

‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’ said Willie.

‘Do you want a fag?’ said Jesse Kirwan, pulling a clutch of small cigarettes from his tunic pocket.