A Long Long Way (31 page)

Willie went back merrily enough to his own niche, neatly removed his uniform, neatly folded it, neatly folded himself into bed. The billet he supposed folded itself into the dark field, the field into the sky, the sky folded itself like a letter of savagely written stars into the armpit of the great God, if such a person there was, and God folded Himself into - what did God do in the night-time? He would not have known the answer as a child and as a man he did not know.

‘And it is a stupid question anyhow,’ he muttered to himself. All about him grew the busy, curious sound of his fellows falling into sleep. Their farts mingled with the startling smell of their feet and their folding and unfolding lungs breathed out like engines, the soft exhalations condensing on the cold window-glass.

And he thought these easy thoughts, and then quite abruptly his brain was rinsed by a queer pain, all the words in his brain were swamped by a black ink and obliterated, he dug himself as deep as he could into the shallow mattress, his teeth chattering, and wept.

The war would never be over. He had come out for poor Belgium and to protect his three sisters. He would always be there. The tally-sticks of deaths would be cut from the saplings for ever more. The generals would count the dead men and mark their victories and defeats and send out more men, more men. For ever more.

The hedgehogs were hidden in the leaves of the woods. The owls were in the sycamores and the ash-trees. And one more altered soul inside that winter in Flanders.

Chapter Sixteen

All too soon, they were back in the line, although it was one of the so-called quiet sectors. He hardly even noticed his birthday going by, though by some marks to be twenty might be a great thing. Maud didn’t forget him, though, and sent him a tin of cocoa. He ate the dark powder from the tin with his fingers without bothering to think of adding water. But the year died away and a new one came in fearfully enough. It didn’t look like there were too many fellas volunteering at home, only ‘a few soft-headed creatures’, said Christy Moran sardonically. Willie’s company was patched up all right with new men - but very few of them were Irish now.

The new leader of his platoon was from London, called Second-Lieutenant Biggs. Joe Kielty’s machine-gun detail had four new ‘jokers’ - again Christy Moran’s affectionate phrase - from all comers of England. They didn’t seem to mind too much that they were in a so-called Irish division, and in a regiment by the name of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, even if not a soul among them had been to Dublin in their lives. One of the lads was from Worcester - ’I never was even in Birmingham,‘ he admitted, ’till the day I went to see the recruiting sergeant there with my brother John.‘ But they didn’t seem so different to Kielty, or O’Hara, or Dunne - just young lads with the similar misconceptions, similar dreams of all young lads, war or no war.

None of the new-minted soldiers had seen the front line before, and the queer stagnation and all-whitening cold must have been a shock, Willie thought.

In Willie’s platoon now there was also a young sprat called Weekes, and he was a Londoner too.

‘There was seven of us,’ he said. ‘We were called the days of the Weekes.’

So that was a good joke to start with. Timmy Weekes’ father, the father of all the days, was a gardener to one of the big houses in Hampstead, and also kept the yard for the rector of St John’s.

‘He knew his bulbs. He knew all the names on the headstones too,’ said Timmy Weekes. But his father had been killed at Gallipoli, first day.

‘When I was a little boy he brought me to see the grave of a little chap like me, Joseph Lange, that died aged seven, in 1672,’ said Timmy Weekes. ‘And John Keats the poet is buried there and that was a thing started me reading books and I never stopped since.’

Willie Dunne tried to keep back as much as he could from these newcomers, in his heart, not because they were English, but because, as a rule, if not a golden rule, raw men were usually killed first. He was wanting sorely to keep back from that. But you couldn’t shun a man called Weekes when he had six brothers and sisters and could make a nice joke out of it.

Christy Moran did his best for them and made sure they could fire their rifles and tried to illustrate by imitation the different sounds that the different shells made. He told them about the principal types of gas and drilled them for the gas mask till they were blue in the face. Father Buckley knew from their small-books they were Anglicans but he made it his business to get chatting with them.

‘The padre’s not a bad sort,’ said Timmy Weekes.

‘Ah, he’s grand, yes,’ said Joe Kielty

‘I suppose he knows I’m a pagan?’ said Timmy Weekes.

‘Ah, we’re all pagans here,’ said Joe Kielty.

‘That’s all right then and dixie.’

Timmy Weekes turned out to be a great reader, right enough. Normally it would be the regimental paper going round for reading matter, novels picked up in stations on the way out, penny dreadfuls and other stories of the Wild West - the Wild West of America, that was, but was it as wild as this west? Not by half.

But now Dostoevsky started to circulate among the platoon, folded as it was in the folds of winter. The Idiot it was. He had Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman and that became a sure-fire favourite, almost every man liked that, in particular Joe Kielty, who thought Walt Whitman had the soul of a farmer, more or less. He said people in Cuillonachtan were always talking like that, or nearly - similar sentiments anyhow, or senniments, as he called them. Walt Whitman was a favourite certainly. But the book they all couldn’t get enough of was the Dostoevsky. It wasn’t about them at all, it was about the bloody Russians, but somehow it was about them. They devoured the book like it was beef or sugar. They were all Dostoevsky’s men now.

Willie Dunne was glad of them too; he started to relish a couple of hours secreted somewhere in a handy niche. He could disappear down into that tumbling world of Russia. He thought he might like to meet some of those real Russians who were fighting the Hun on the Eastern Front. They sounded, though, like they were twice as big as an Irishman, that was his impression - bulky, philosophical gents. He didn’t know if he admired the Idiot or not. He didn’t know if the Idiot was an idiot or a saint, or both.

The little library of books that Timmy Weekes had brought out under his armpit became grimier and grimier and more and more universally desired.

By contrast, Biggs was silent and efficient. It was hard for Christy Moran to be on his third captain - or, in this case, second-lieutenant, but third leader anyhow.

‘He’s all right,’ said Christy Moran. ‘I was getting used to Captain Sheridan, God rest him. I suppose a man might miss Captain Pasley the most.’

‘Do you think, Sarge?’ said Willie Dunne, almost grateful to hear the words.

‘Even though he was a fool not to run that time. An eejit.’

Yes, thought Willie. He was a fool. Because if he had run he might still be with them. What did he gain, with his lungful of gas? It was no heroic death in the mournful upshot. But then, Captain Pasley maybe wouldn’t have claimed it was. If he was an idiot, he was a holy idiot, for certain.

‘What was it like in your father’s time, at the Crimea?’ said Willie Dunne, as he contemplated in his mind the sore list of names of the men he had seen killed. ‘Was it all the same as this?’

‘The same as this. Smaller, maybe. Trenches just the same under Sebastopol, the arses freezed off them, Irish fellas frozen upright in them. The dead in their hundreds, horrible little battles. Army life, Willie. But, don’t we get our grub? Well, most of the time.’

‘Yes, Sarge.’

Of course, the sergeant-major was joking. No grub on earth, no pungent pheasants, the sweetest of puddings, no custard of Maud‘s, no particle of food of the fervent earth, could be set against the great, dark list of sundered names. The graves of vanished souls strewn across the broken woods and farms. Suddenly he wanted to say to his sergeant-major, that it was all an ugly, vicious, bullying trick, it didn’t fucking matter if it was a Plumer or a Gough, good general or bad, everything ended always in the ghastly tally of wrenching deaths. His head was heavy now, sore as a boxer’s, he wanted to have the matter explained to him, he wanted God Himself to come down to where they were talking there, and tell them what could be set against the numberless deaths, to stop their minds inwardly weeping, like cottages without roofs in a filthy rain.

‘King and country, Willie, King and country.’

‘Do you think so, Sarge?’

And I do like fuck,‘ said Christy Moran.

It wasn’t that they had never seen a winter like it, just that they were sorry to have to stand out in it. Many of the days the trench was just a white ditch of snow, the frost was in cahoots with the very clay, everything was frozen and slimy in the same moment, you could burn your fingers if you laid them carelessly on a gun so cold indeed it could not possibly have fired. They had welcomed the new year of 1917 the way soldiers do but now they heartily cursed it. Their hair frosted over so that they all looked like aged men. What could they do many days but stand on the duck boards like cattle in the mist, puffing out the dense flowers of breath? Men stood so still it was as if they had tuned themselves down into a near-lifeless state, like fish in a winter pond. The wind blew and hit their faces like hammers.

Then a day of sunlight would come and crack the landscape open like the shell of a huge egg and they could hear the trees in the woods making noises like gunshot. Here and there along the supply trenches, men found birds that had collapsed, small black deaths in the snow. They didn’t pray any more for salvation, forgiveness or rescue, just that the tea would be hot when it reached them. And yet they must have been the philosophers of that weather, because when they could get a word in or out edgewise, it was oftentimes a bitter joke, as if to try to give a little heat to another man, any way they could.

Now and then along the line shells blasted over and sometimes it so happened that one would land among the helpless sentinels, and streaks and splashes of red would appear on the whiteness, and rawness, and cries. In the nights little details might go over and try to nab a few prisoners, or the Germans would come over and try to nab a few of them. Even snipers cursed the general whiteness for sniperish reasons.

Letters were at a premium then but nothing was coming in for Willie Dunne. He wrote back faithfully to Maud and wrote to his father with chilled, stiff fingers. He wrote to Gretta every fortnight and tried to remember her face as he did so, and talk truly to her. He tried to rub the sticks of mere existence together and keep a sense of the future alive but it was very hard. If it had been proved to him beyond a doubt that his previous life was only something in a novel by Dostoevsky, he might have been tempted to believe it. Or maybe a penny dreadful, or a book with only white pages in it. He was living in a landscape that was only a white page and in the frost it was difficult to make a mark on that whiteness, it was hard to make his presence felt; maybe, he thought, his heart was shrinking in the terrible cold. Certainly his poor pecker was a pea; it had retreated as far as his stomach, he thought, the last warm part of him left. There were thousands and thousands like him, he knew, standing stunned in the darkening and brightening snows and frosts, the day coming and the night following, week in, week out. It was difficult for his head to love and think of the future when he could not feel his feet.

‘By the good fuck,’ said Christy Moran, ‘this is some war.’

Then something miraculous occurred. The lice in Willie’s clothes began to stir again, and one morning the music of the cold, with its piercing little notes, seemed to pass away. The greens and browns seeped back into the world. The fogs were blown away by little breezes and he saw the tower of Ypres crisp and clear in the distance. Men seemed more chummy again and it seemed to everyone that they had come through something impossible because it had been so simple and unvarying. That something was winter. The new something was just spring. But if he had been the first man in the first spring he could not have worshipped its coming more.