A Long Long Way (8 page)

Captain Pasley was in his new dugout writing his forms. Every last thing that came in and every last thing that went out was accounted for. Items and bodies. Captain Pasley, of course, was obliged to read all the letters the men sent home, and he did, word for blessed word. He thought it might break a man’s heart to read them sometimes; there was something awfully sad about some of the soldiers’ letters. They didn’t mean to make them sad, which gave their efforts to be manly and cheerful a melancholy tinge. But it had to be faced. God help them, they were funny enough efforts sometimes. Some men wrote a letter as formal as a bishop, some tried to write the inside of their heads, like that young Willie Dunne. It was a curiosity.

The yellow cloud was noticed first by Christy Moran because he was standing on the fire-step with his less than handy mirror arrangement, looking out across the quiet battlefield. That little breeze had freshened and it blew now against the ratty hair that dropped out of Christy Moran’s hat here and there. So the breeze was more of a wind and was blowing full on against Christy’s hat and mirror, but it was nothing remarkable.

What was remarkable was the strange yellow-tinged cloud that had just appeared from nowhere like a sea fog. But not like a fog really; he knew what a flaming fog looked like, for God’s sake, being born and bred near the sea in fucking Kingstown. He watched for a few seconds in his mirror, straining to see and straining to understand. It was about four o‘clock, and all as peaceful as anything. Not even the guns were firing now. The caterpillars foamed on the yellow flowers.

And the grass died in the path of the cloud. That was only Christy Moran’s impression maybe; he hoiked down the mirror a moment and wiped it clean with his cleanish sleeve. Back up it went. The cloud didn’t look too deep but it was as wide as the eye could see. Christy Moran was absolutely certain now he could see figures moving in the yellow smoke. It must be some sort of way of hiding the advancing men, he was thinking, some new-fashioned piece of warfare.

‘Would you ever fetch out the captain,’ he said to O‘Hara. ’All right, boys, stand now in readiness. Get those rifles up here. Machine-gunners, start firing there into that bloody cloud.’

So the gun detail leaped to their machine-gun, Joe McNulty and Joe Kielty the loaders as ever, Mayo men and cousins too, that joined up somewhere against the wishes of their fathers they had confessed, and the bullets started clattering away from them, the water-man keeping the gun well cooled, the shooter firm on his knees and expecting all the while to have the top of his noggin shot off.

But this was a very curious advance. Captain Pasley came out and stood contemplatively by Christy Moran, who had abandoned his mirror and was standing up on the fire-step, such was his puzzlement.

‘What’s going on, Sergeant-Major?’ said Captain Pasley.

‘I couldn’t tell you, for the life of me,’ said Christy Moran. ‘There’s just this big fucking cloud about fifty yards off, drifting along in the wind. It doesn’t look like fog.’

‘It might be smoke from fires the Boche are burning.’

‘Might be.’

‘You can see them coming on?’

‘I thought I could, sir. But there doesn’t seem to be anyone. No shouts, no cries. It’s as quiet as a nursery, sir, and all the babies asleep.’

‘Very good, Sergeant-Major. Cease firing, men.’

The Algerians to the right were a little ahead of them, as the trench twisted away there in a slight salient. All the Irish were on the fire-step now, all along the length of the trench, some fifteen hundred men showing their faces to this unknown freak of weather, or whatever it might be. The commanding officer was rung up and told what was afoot, but there wasn’t any coherent order he could think to give, except to be cautious and shoot anything that came creeping.

There had been no warning barrage and the dense smoke didn’t look too threatening. It was beautiful in a way, the yellow seemed to boil about, and sink into whatever craters it was offered, and then rise again with the march of the main body of smoke. There were still birds singing behind them, but whatever birds had been singing in front of them were silent now. Captain Pasley removed his hat and scratched his balding pate and put the hat back on again.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Like a London fog, only worse.’

The big snake of turning yellow reached the parapet of the Algerian stretch of the trench far over to the right and now strange noises were heard. The soldiers seemed to be milling about haphazardly, as if invisible soldiers had fallen in on them, and were bayoneting without restraint. That wasn’t a good sound. The colonial men were roaring now, and there were other frightening cries, as if the unseen horde were throttling them. Of course, the Irishmen could not see into the trenches as such, but in their mind’s eye ferocious slaughter was afoot. Those men from country districts must have thought of pookas and fairy hordes because only such tales of childhood and firesides seemed to match these evil miracles. Horrible laments rose from the affronted Algerians. Now they were climbing up the parados and seemed to be fleeing back towards the rear. The smoke came steadily on.

‘It’s the smoke,’ said Captain Pasley, ‘there’s something wrong with the smoke, gents.’

Now, in his old house at home in Wicklow there were seven fireplaces, and two or three of them were as leaky as old buckets, and when they were lit, smoke poured forth into the bedrooms above them. And that was an evil smoke, but it would not drive you back as if you were cattle, as was happening to those poor men of Algiers, now for some reason tearing off their uniforms and writhing on the ground, and howling; howling was the word for it.

The Dublin Fusiliers took the smoke at the furthest right tip beside the Algerians. Exactly the same thing happened. Now the men were possessed of an utter fear of this dark and seemingly infernal thing creeping along, seeming to make the grass fizz and silencing birds and turning men into howling demons. On instinct the men pushed down along the trench, as anyone would do in the same circumstance, crowding into the next stretch suddenly, so that the men there for a moment thought they were being attacked from the turn of the trench. These men in turn were panicked and poured on into the next section, and because the line of the trench was at only the slightest of angles to the line of the smoke, they had to move proportionately faster to keep ahead of it. Soon the third and fourth stretches were in a hopeless tangle and the smoke poured in upon them. In the sudden yellowy darkness awful sounds sprang up like a harvest of hopeless cries.

O‘Hara started to scramble up the parados behind and it was only Christy Moran’s bark that made him stop. The sergeant-major looked to the captain. Captain Pasley’s face had turned the colour of a sliced potato; there was the same bloom on it also of damp.

‘I need to ring headquarters and ask them what to do. What is this hellish thing?’

‘No time for that, sir,’ said the sergeant-major. ‘Can I let the men fall back, sir?’

‘I have no earthly orders for such a thing,’ said Captain Pasley. ‘We are to hold this position. That’s all there is to it.’

‘You won’t hold nothing against that smoke, sir. Best to fall back to the reserve trenches anyhow. There’s something deathly and wrong.’

But before such a sensible conversation could continue, the smoke was slipping down the parapet about a dozen yards ahead, itself like dozens and dozens of slithering fingers, and there was a stench so foul that Willie Dunne gripped his stomach. Joe McNulty came tumbling down from his emplacement, gripping his Mayo throat, like a dog done in by poison meant for rats.

‘Get the fuck out,’ said Christy Moran.

All right,‘ said the captain. ‘I’ll hold the fort here, Sergeant-Major.’

‘You will on your fuck, sir, begging your flaming pardon. Come on.’

Willie Dunne and his comrades scaled the parados and everyone started to stumble back across the broken ground. It was astonishing to be up, out of the trench and going along at the level of normal things. Ghosts of soldiers plummeted out of the smoke up to the right and tottered screaming along, falling to their knees, their hands around their throats like those funnymen in the music halls that would pretend to be being strangled and it was their own hands at their necks doing the throttling. Now there was no question of order or retreat; the soldiers that had not had a dance with the smoke just went tearing away towards what they hoped was safety. After some hundreds of yards they reached one of the advance batteries who without a word caught the horror in their faces and began to shout and pull and jostle to try to get up the horses quickly to bring off the guns, for it would be a fearsome disaster to let guns be captured. But it was all aspiration, when the scores and scores of suffering men were beheld, staggering towards them like an insane enemy, the artillery men scarpered too; there was nothing else to be done. Anyone that lingered tasted the smoke, felt the sharp tines in his throat raking and gashing, and he was undone. Now and then miraculously a man seemed to run unscathed from the gloom, running all the faster for his escape. Rifles were scattered now across the pounded fields, as if some proper battle were being fought after all.

Willie Dunne ran with the rest. There was a bottleneck ahead where the ground had been fought over a few weeks back and the men had to get up on a rough road to make any progress at all. This, of course, engendered the wild fear of being prevented from escaping at all, and still the vile smoke came on behind. Men were slushing into craters to try to swim across and could not get up the other blessed side. No act of virtue or rescue was possible; every man had to do for himself.

Now three or four battalions seemed to be mixing themselves together: there were the remnants of the Algerians and some regular French soldiers and the Fusiliers themselves and there were lads from some Lincolnshire regiments that must have been driven across from the left. Everyone was gripped by the same remorseless impulse: to flee the site of nameless death. If it were a battle proper, these men would never have turned tail. They would have fought to the last man in the trenches and put up with that and cursed their fate. But it was the force of something they did not know that drove them shoving and gasping away from that long, long monster with yellow skin.

There were officers now along the road trying in a bewildered and puzzled fashion to get the men to turn around. They did not know what was happening and all they saw was men that seemed to be deserting wholesale. A rout like this was unheard of, unless a man was a veteran of the terrible push back from Mons to the Marne in the first months of the war. Battalions in reserve had to conclude that there had been some mighty breakthrough by the Hun, but this seemed entirely mysterious, as no one had received the least message in this direction, and no massed bombardment had been heard and endured. Furthermore, no bullets even followed the retreating and desperate men.

Now a weakened version of the stench seemed to be everywhere. It was getting into every niche and nook in creation, into ears and eyes, into mouse-holes and rat-holes.

But the danger then was at last passing. Men dropped where they found themselves, soaked in sweat, already exhausted men further exhausted by such a hard gallop across ruined ground. Willie Dunne was visited by a tiredness so deep he lay where he had fallen and plummeted further into a dreamless sleep.

He awoke to a yellow world. His first thought was that he was dead. It was the small hours of the morning and there were still torches and lights being used. Long lines of men were going back along the road, with weird faces, their right hand on the right shoulder of the man in front, about forty men in a chain sometimes. He thought horribly of the Revelation of St John and wondered if by chance and lack he had reached the unknown date of the end of the living world.

Smeared across the faces was a yellowish grease, the men’s uniforms had turned a peculiar and undesirable yellow, and all the acres of the world had been seared and ruined afresh. Even the leaves of the trees, so fresh the day before, seemed to have gone limp on their natural hinges and twisted about sadly, not making the usual reassuring music of the poplars along the roadside, but a dank, dead, metallic rustling, as if every drop of sap had been replaced with a dreadful poison.

It was two days before this shocked stretch of Flanders could be restored to ordinary war. All the first day for seven miles it was said there was not a soldier in the trenches. The reserve battalions were marched up as quickly as it could be done, and the survivors went back to see if they could group up again with their platoons. Willie Dunne, frightened as he was, felt doubly distraught that he was alone in all this crowd of dour-faced men. It was then that he felt slight enough in the world, a creature of low stature. He wanted his sergeant and his captain and his mates the way a baby wants its home, no matter how provisional. And he felt a fool for feeling like that, but there it was.

He wandered back along the way of fear and no one said a word to him. Soon there were bodies everywhere strewn about, and burial details were busy composing them into sudden little graveyards. He passed through the wretched bottleneck and the drowned men in the craters floating face-down, and though he was fearful of what he would find he pushed his legs on to the lip of his trench. He half expected despite everything to see his pals crouched down and easy, drinking their tea, scuttling along to take a crap in the latrines, someone on sentry duty, someone singing, but all he saw was a place that had turned into a mere pit of death.