A Long Long Way (41 page)

When the enemy became visible they were only fifty yards off. The machine-guns of three or four nearby points to right and left fired directly into them. There were, to their wild eyes, hundreds and hundreds falling.

‘We’re going to keep these fuckers off, lads,’ said Christy Moran. ‘Don’t let them say nothing bad about us! Keep firing, Private Weekes, Mills bombs lads, and when they’re close, feck them at the fuckers!’

Willie was firing and firing. His face was a bloom of sweat and the very sight of the Germans was an assault. The very vision of them was oppressive and terrible. You couldn’t be more terrorized than this, not if a gun was put to your head and the trigger pulled again and again to find the full chamber.

Then of a sudden Christy Moran seemed to change his mind.

‘Come on, lads, we’re pulling back.’

He said it in such a businesslike way, even in the midst of that furore, that Joe Kielty said: ‘Right, I’ll cover you, lads!’

And Christy Moran, Willie Dunne, Pete O‘Hara, Smith and Weekes went tumbling along the trench and into the supply trench, and as they belonged to a system of forward points, who were authorized to fall back, other sections of their company mingled with them, like a river gathering strength towards the sea.

They got into a wood they had not the name of, and yet the Germans were there too and came against them immediately. So they fired and they fell and they fought, and it was the second time in his life that Willie was so close to those soldiers. By whatever merciful chance, ‘nothing much to do with us’, as Christy Moran put it, the attack on them seemed to be quenched for the moment. Then it was lying in against the trees and panting, and wondering if they should be digging like moles, and what the cure for that violent thirst might be.

Pete O‘Hara had a hole in his side the size of a coconut. If only Joe Kielty hadn’t remained behind, he might have shown him the size of a coconut, he thought.

It seemed to be evening now or nearly. Of course, the Germans were in such numbers they would soon find them out again. They wondered what was happening to the rest of the division, spread about in that disastrous place. The stench of gas moved about the wood like the children and spirits of evil. They had nothing to eat but the few stumps of iron rations they had with them. They had sucked their water bottles dry long since. Through the trees and beyond on a little slope, the sun had gone down, leaving on the lower sky a long, crisp mark of yellow-green light, very bright and lovely.

Willie Dunne heeled himself like a cart in beside O‘Hara.

‘By the good fuck, Willie,’ said O‘Hara. ’Will they know where to come and get us?‘

‘Who?’ said Willie.

‘Mammy and Daddy,’ said O‘Hara.

‘What’s that?’ said Willie.

‘No, not Mammy and Daddy, no, I don’t mean that.’

‘That’s all right, Pete,’ said Willie.

‘I’m going to die, Willie, I wish Father Buckley was here to send me off.’

‘They’ll put a patch on that,’ said Willie. ‘It always looks worse than it is.’

‘It’s all right, Willie, I’ve had my run. You know, I’m too fucking scared to be at this war any more. It’s a stupid fucking thing to say, but I can’t fucking do it.’

‘Well, and you have to, Pete. Didn’t you sign up for the duration? Didn’t you promise the King of England, Pete?’

‘Ah, you’re right, Willie, I should hang on, for him. You’re making me fucking laugh now, Willie, that’s not fair.’

Then Pete O‘Hara went through a few minutes of panting hard like a dog.

‘Sure the King of England’s not the worst. You haven’t a drop of water, have you, Willie?’ he said then.

‘Not a drop,’ said Willie.

‘You know it was me, don’t you, Willie?’ said Pete then.

‘Go way, it wasn’t, it was never you, Pete, you wouldn’t do such a thing.‘

‘I wouldn’t do such a thing, and I did it, it was a foul thing I did, Willie, and I want you to know, if I could’ve called back that letter the very next day I would’ve, I would‘ve, Willie.’

Of course, Willie Dunne knew what he was talking about. Ah, he had known all along, but couldn’t be thinking what he knew was obvious. This O‘Hara had caused him the chief grief of his short life. The darkest and the chiefest among all the wretched griefs. For a moment he thought he might stick his hand into O’Hara’s side and see how he liked it, pain beyond measure. He had lost Gretta for ever and ever, as Father Buckley would say, amen, and it was this bastard who had done it — this poor dying bastard, his friend.

‘Why did you send that fucking letter, Pete, in your rotten black writing?’

‘When I told you about that other poor girl, Willie, with no tongue, you remember, God forgive me, I was so fucking angry with you, I felt as small as a pin, indeed and I did, when you hit me. I said to myself — ’

But Willie Dunne never heard what Pete O‘Hara had said to himself. With his mouth open on the next word, with his eyes wide open, he died.

As the sun came up the shelling started again, though it was not directed absolutely at them. Them was Christy Moran and Timmy Weekes. There didn’t seem to be anyone else.

‘How’s O’Hara?‘ said Timmy Weekes.

‘Pete’s dead,’ said Willie Dunne.

He put his head back against the tree behind and inadvertently knocked his helmet down forward over his face. Then he was in a moment of exhausted, calm stupor. Then a huge noise ate him like a whale. Then, as if in the next moment, he awoke in a rattling room, which was not a thing he expected. A rattling room it was, though, and he was strapped down to a seat — or was it a stretcher on a seat? — and he was trembling and shaking and he had a feeling that his breast was aflame and his legs were screaming at him with real voices.

He looked about him frantically. He was terrified. In the seats were a dozen women, beautiful young women in lovely dry and well-cleaned dresses. Dry dresses on a dozen lovely, lovely girls. But they were girls, they were girls, they were girls with no tongues.

Then it was all blackness and dark again.

Chapter Twenty-Two

A little sweet-smelling nurse — that was what he noticed about her, the smell, not that he was much competition for sweet smells, as his skin healed — bathed him every day in some kind of stinking oil. That was, she rubbed at him with a sponge. Of course, the effects of the shell exploding so near him had done something to his engine, and he couldn’t stop his head jerking about, and his left arm had a mind of its own, the mind of an arm that wanted to dance a jig all the blessed day.

Her father had a butcher’s shop in Clonmel, she told him, which had aroused an interest in medicine. They were afraid to wash him in water, he supposed, in case his skin fell off like a dress. She rubbed him all over, but especially on the chest, where he had carried the main wash of the blast. By a miracle it had left his face alone. His helmet must have fallen down in front, he didn’t know. But he was very glad of it, as it happened. There were scores of burns in that hospital that had turned nice-looking fellas into the fearful faces in a child’s blackest dream.

Christy Moran wrote him a nice letter to say he was fucked if he would carry him so far the next time, and hoped he was getting on well anyhow, and that it has been very sad about that business, and that that bomb may have fucked up Willie Dunne but it had killed poor Timmy Weekes.

‘They say the old 16th has “ceased to exist”,’ he wrote. ‘But Christy Moran is still here! The Mutineer was given his marching papers.’

An officer did come round to see him. When Willie asked him about the battle he was told that a huge swath of the 16th was gone. The officer was from Leitrim himself, he said, so he felt it very keenly. But the Irish soldiers had not shown their backs. The French army had mutinied the year before, but you’d never see an Irish regiment refuse the fight.

There was a huge row at home, he said, about conscription that the government was trying to establish in Ireland. The officer said very bitterly that no one cared about the war now in Ireland, they didn’t care if the men that were in already lived or died, and they certainly wanted no more going in. There were riots threatened and all sorts of wild disobedience. It was like Russia now, the officer said. It was like Germany itself, except the German people had some excuse to resent the endless war, since they were starving in their shoes.

Mothers in Ireland said they would stand in front of their sons and be shot before they’d let them go, and that was a change, the officer said. They could raise one hundred and fifty thousand men immediately, he said, and that was a great number and would win the war. But the Nationalists wouldn’t stand for it. Said King George could find lambs for the slaughter in his own green fields from now on.

Whoever said that, it was well enough said, Willie thought, but didn’t say it out loud. What was the point?

The officer expressed immense satisfaction that the Irish Convention — Willie didn’t know what he meant — had failed. Home Rule, he avowed, was a dead duck.

‘Poor Father Buckley wouldn’t like to hear that, sir,’ said Willie, his words thrown about like a baby’s food.

‘Who, who?’ said the officer, for all the world like an owl. ‘I tell you, Private, your contribution has not been unavailing. The Sinn Fein is on the rise, but when the war is over, we’ll go and show them what’s what. When the war is over we’ll show them what we think of their treachery.’

But now Willie’s head and arm were shaking so badly the officer couldn’t see the point of comforting him further, and off he went, his duty accomplished.

The newspaper that the little nurse read to him said it was thought the 16th hadn’t fought well. It was feared they had thrown down their arms and run at the first sign of attack. Even Lloyd George had said something the same. So it wasn’t just the parlour maids; it was the master of the house as well. You couldn’t trust the Irish now. Hadn’t fought well! The sorrow of such a phrase! Willie would have shaken his head at that except it was already shaking.

Only King George himself seemed to have a good word for his Irish troops. That fella had a heart anyhow, Willie thought.

There was no point saying anything about it. Something had come to an end before even the war was over. Poor Father Buckley. The aspirations of poor men were annulled for ever. Any fella that had come out in the expectation of Home Rule could rest assured his efforts and his sacrifice were useless. For all that his father would think of it, Willie thought that was very sad. Very fucking sad. And very mysterious.

The doctor, who was in his own opinion a great wit, had greeted Willie Dunne with: ‘Well, here’s the Sinn Feiner.’ There wasn’t wool enough in the basket to knit socks for those feet.

In a month or two the top layer of skin was healing pretty good. He knew in his bones he was lucky. He had stood there, a human person, right in the middle of a bomb, and though it had lacerated his arms and legs, and burned his breast, all the scores and marks were slowly disappearing. In his delirium under morphine the streaks and fierce red blotches looked to him as if hell were painted on his body, the city of hell and all the roads leading to it. Slowly, slowly, under the ministrations of the little nurse, the map of hell faded.

Then the day came when the little nurse put her hand against his heart.

‘You have a tattoo here, Private?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I was never a sailor, Sister.’

Sister seemed a very pleasing thing to call another person.

‘Well, you do, Private. It is very small but I am sure you do. A little harp and a little crown.’

Willie couldn’t think what to make of it. He was days and days thinking about it, as he hadn’t much else to contemplate, and he tried to peer down his chest and see the little yokes, but he couldn’t keep his bloody head still enough.

A few days later, the little nurse brought in a mirror for him to see them with. Willie looked in the mirror with his jumping eyes and saw his bearded face. It was a thick, black beard the like of which even a Wicklow hill-farmer might fear to sport. He laughed at himself. He laughed. His head lashed about and he roared.

Then the little nurse turned the mirror inward and he glanced at the little marks. It was a harp and a crown, right enough.

‘Oh, Jesus, I know what that is. It’s Christy Moran’s medal. By Jesus, Sister, the heat’s after branding it into my skin. The heat of the explosion. I had it in my pocket there.’

‘Did you ever see the like?’ she said, shaking her head, but in her case with perfect control. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You’ll carry that to your grave. I have no oil will wipe it off. It is just like you’d brand a young calf.’

‘I don’t mind them at all, Sister, not at all.’

‘Well, who would ever have thought?’ she said.

‘They’ll never believe us, Sister.’

‘ And they will not,‘ she said. ’They will not.‘