A Long Long Way (9 page)

The hole was filled with bodies, and to him they looked like dozens and dozens of garden statues of the sort you might see in Humewood, where his grandfather had worked, fallen down like figures from some vanished empire, thinkers and senators and poets unknown, with their hands raised in impressive attitudes, their stone bodies for some reason half clothed in the uniforms of this modern war. The faces were contorted like devils’ in a book of admonition, like the faces of the truly fallen, the damned, and the condemned. Horrible dreams hung in their faces as if the foulest nightmares had gripped them and remained visible now frozen in direst death. Their mouths were ringed and caked with a greeny slime, as if they were the poor Irish cottagers of old, who people said in the last extremity of hunger had eaten of the very nettles in the fields. And still the echo, foul in itself, of that ferocious stench hanging everywhere.

And down on the fire-step across the chasm of the trench, quite naked, his uniform cast all about him like the torn petals of a flower, with a face to match the other faces tortured eternally in a last agony, that decent man who did not wish to leave his post, heaped about everywhere with Algerians and Irishmen equally, a man that knew well the hard task that was in the liming: Captain Pasley.

‘God rest his soul,’ murmured Willie Dunne.

Then Willie found John Williams, Joe Clancy, Joe McNulty. A dozen men and more who had been bound to him by some bond he didn’t know the explanation of. Willie’s very stomach was torn by sorrow, his very eyes were burned by sorrow, as if sorrow itself were a kind of gas. He was so disgusted somehow he thought he might puke like a dog. In the disgust was a horrible push of anger that dismayed him entirely. Like an old man, he walked back over to stand stupidly by the captain’s body.

Father Buckley was down among the dead also, going from stiff head to head, choking himself from the residues of the smoke. Now they knew it was a filthy gas sent over by the filthy Boche to work perdition on them, a thing forbidden, it was said, by the articles of war. No general, no soldier could be proud of this work; no human person could take the joy of succeeding from these tortured deaths. Father Buckley muttered quickly at each set of unlistening ears; he was anxious it would seem to include them all in the roll-calls of the saved, to get them, in particular after such an utter ruin of things, to possible paradise.

‘Is that you, Willie?’ said Father Buckley, when he reached Captain Pasley.

‘It is, Father,’ said Willie.

‘Isn’t this the saddest thing you’ve ever seen?’

‘It is, Father,’ he said.

‘Who is this man here?’ asked the priest.

‘Captain Pasley from Tinahely.’

‘Of course it is, Willie,’ said the priest, kneeling to the naked form. He did not seek to cover him up; maybe he respected this simple aspect of a ruined man. ‘I wonder what religion is written in his small-book?’

‘I think he wasn’t a Catholic, Father. Most of the strong farmers in Wicklow there are Church of Ireland men.’

‘You are probably right, Willie.’

Father Buckley knelt in close. Of course, you cannot take a last confession from a voiceless man. But there must have been some small ceremony that could be offered, because the priest was mumbling in his little singing voice.

‘Do you know his family there in Wicklow?’ said the priest then, rising stiffly.

‘I think I would know the house. The Mount it is called, I think. He used to talk about the work there. I think he loved the bit of land they have there. My grandfather will know them, I am certain.’

‘He’s a farmer there, your grandfather?’

‘He was the steward on the Humewood estate. He is one hundred and two years old now. He knows all that world.’

‘Well, if chance should bring you down that way, Willie, will you go in and tell them how he died? Not this dreadful end. But that everyone knew he elected to stay so that no one could say he left without orders.’

‘I will say it to them if I am down there because that is what happened, Father.’

‘It is.’

‘How are you yourself?’ said Father Buckley.

They stood quite carelessly, not really thinking of their safety. They knew the Germans would not shoot today. Christy Moran opined that the gas had shocked even them. They were ashamed, he said, and would let them bury the dead. The awful gap in the line that the gas had made, which had the general shouting, it was said, back at headquarters, and swearing, was not molested again in any way by them. They did not seek to take their advantage. It was as if in the laden baskets of tragedy of this war, this one act had the weight of a boulder that no man’s strength could shift. Everyone was amazed and afrighted.

‘How are you yourself, Willie?’ said the priest again when he got no answer. He wanted to say that Willie would feel the death of his first captain the most sorely, that after this it would be easier, but he didn’t say it somehow.

Willie could find no useful words to offer. He wanted to say something, at least not to show him discourtesy or roughness.

They stood there two feet apart in all that vale of tears, one man asking another how he was, the other asking how the other was, the one not knowing truly what the world was, the other not knowing either. One nodded to the other now in an expression of understanding without understanding, of saying without breathing a word. And the other nodded back to the other, knowing nothing. Not this new world of terminality and astonishing dismay, of extremity of ruin and exaggeration of misery. And Father Buckley did not know anything but grief, and Willie Dunne on that black day likewise.

Five hundred men and more of Willie’s regiment dead.

As they stood there a strange teem of rain fell down from the heavens. It rattled, veritably rattled on their human shoulders.

That evening Father Buckley was around asking if anyone wanted communion. He had a little travelling communion thing he carried. And the priest asked Willie if he wanted communion and Willie said he didn’t and then the priest took his right hand and shook it and when that was accomplished Father Buckley went on his way.

After that battle where no one fired on them and not a shell was lobbed over at them, the survivors thought their thoughts.

Willie kept thinking a queer thought. That he was only eighteen years of age, nineteen this coming birthday.

‘He should have run like the rest of us,’ was Christy Moran’s comment. ‘Not run - I mean, withdrawn.’

‘How do you mean, sir?’ said Willie Dunne suspiciously.

‘He was a fool to stay there like that, Willie; he was a fucking eejit, as a matter of fact.’

Willie was steaming about that. He couldn’t bear to hear the sergeant-major say such things. Captain Pasley had made his decision and they had made theirs. It was a sacred matter really.

Willie wanted to say this as vigorously as he could. In fact he wanted to strike the sergeant-major for himself. It was the one time he thought maybe the sergeant-major was not just a bit of a bollocks, but a bollocks through and through. It never occurred to him that the sergeant-major might have spoken only out of his own version of sorrow.

They buried their five hundred men, five hundred vanished hearts, in yet another new yard in the general mire of things.

It was a while before they could fetch a lot of them in, because the Hun soon perked up, but they managed it. The Royal Army Medical Corps boys were fearless, and there was no glamour in the job at all. And the chaplains came and said their say. Father Buckley uttered familiar words, and the Protestant chaplain likewise. The little rabbi came out also, and said a few Hebrew words for Abrahamson from Dublin and a fella called Levine from Cork. Willie Dunne and his friends sang a hymn, ‘Yea, though I Go through the Valley of Death’. Christy Moran’s voice truly sounded like a kicked dog. The men who wielded the spades were thankful enough the summer was nearly there and the earth had dried but not hardened. They were small Chinese men with little moustaches and pigtails; coolies, they were called, a race of diggers that kept themselves apart or maybe were kept apart. The Chinamen dug the holes, five hundred of them. They were filled with Catholic, Protestant and Jewish Irishmen.

Soon the places were filled with new men from home. Flocks and flocks and flocks of them, thought Willie. King George’s lambs. It was just a little inkling of a thought.

Now summer was spent in the rearrangement and building up of their battalion - that was the official plan anyhow. Their sector quietened down. They blew the blue smoke of their fags up to the blue sky. They ate like dogs and shat like kings. They stripped to the waist and got black as desert Arabs. The white skins were disappearing. Mayo, Wicklow, it didn’t matter. They might be Algerians now, some other bit of the blessed Empire.

They knew violent battles were afoot in other parts of the line and they all heard the hard stories of the Irish soldiers in the Dardanelles. Again and again was rehearsed the horrors of the landing in April, when lads had tried to get out of the ship The River Clyde onto the beach, and been gunned down in their hundreds as they emerged from rough holes cut in the bow. Dublin lads that had never seen a moment of battle till that moment of their death. The story always ended with the detail that the water had turned pink with the slaughter.

‘So you can get yourself rightly bollocksed in any corner of the earth now,’ said Christy Moran.

‘Is that right, Sergeant-Major?’ said Willie Dunne.

‘Ah, yeh, it’s not just here, Willie, boy. Sure you have a choice now.’

‘Well, that’s handy,’ said Pete O‘Hara jocularly.

‘You see,’ said Christy Moran - he happened to be trying to pull a big stain out of his tunic with old tea, which was more or less making the stain worse - ‘you cannot keep news from an Irishman. In the old days, a new song could cross from London to Galway in a day and a night.’

‘Is that a fact, Sarge?’ said Pete O‘Hara, after a moment.

‘Anyhows,’ said Christy Moran, looking suspiciously at O‘Hara, ’a good song would cross from London to Galway, because the bellhops in the hotels would be singing it, from heart to fucking heart. It would be in Galway by nightfall. But now it’s not songs, but bad news that crosses, and crosses the world at that. From Irishman to Irishman. The fucking British army is full of us. It should be called the fucking Irish-British army.’