Fallen (17 page)

‘It's nothing, only rough work and scribbles,' he said, putting the pad aside.

I scanned the newspaper. It gave a long list of places that had been taken by the rebels, but said many had been taken back already, and that the authorities had come out quickly.

The paper asked us to ‘trust firmly in the speedy triumph of the forces of law and order. Those loyal citizens of Dublin who cannot actively help their country's cause at this moment may help it indirectly by refusing to give way to panic, and by maintaining in their households a healthy spirit of hope. The ordeal is severe but it will be short.'

Hubie had been to Clanwilliam House, on the corner at Mount Street Bridge, on the town side of the canal. A large, end-of-terrace house, its windows were barricaded with furniture, but he'd managed a word with the gunmen inside. ‘They said no harm will come to anyone who stays indoors and minds their own business.'

‘But what will they do?' May asked.

Hubie glanced at the girls, who were busy dipping soldiers of toast into soft-boiled eggs.

‘Another time, May. Little pitchers!' Dote passed around ham sandwiches, and egg-and-parsley salad for the adults. She said it was the last of the eggs, but we may as well enjoy them, they wouldn't keep in the heat.

After lunch, May showed the children her music table. When the inlaid surface was lifted open, a Viennese waltz began to play. Paschal swayed to the music. He rolled his shoulders and played the air with his hands. May clapped her hands and the girls joined in. Tishy danced in circles and quarter-turns, her arms held up to an imaginary partner.

Hubie fiddled with marbles cupped in his left hand. I asked Dote about it when he went out of the room to get more cigarettes.

‘He's practising,' she said. ‘He wants to be as able with his left hand as he once was with his right. You watch. He's always using it. He even writes and draws with it, now, almost as well as he used to.'

Nan suggested a nap and took the girls upstairs. At last, the real talk could begin. I sat on the floor, my back against Isabel's chair. I was facing the window, with its orange curtains. We described the morning's journey across town. I couldn't resist talking up the danger, how exposed we'd been on the bridge, the watching crowd.

‘They'd have liked it better if you were shot to ribbons,' Hubie said.

‘Ah, now, Hubie,' Dote said.

I wondered was he right. The tension and uncertainty of waiting was giving way to a kind of impatience in me. I'd sensed it on the street as well. If something was going to happen, let it happen, and let it happen soon. Liam had written something similar, about wanting to get out to the Front so that he would know what he was facing and how he'd face it. I said as much. ‘But then, it seems, being at the Front was more of the same. Waiting. Strain. Boredom, even?'

Hubie dipped his head, but I couldn't tell if he was agreeing with me or simply changing position to ease out a strain in his neck.

Isabel leaned forward. ‘Tell us.'

‘Tell you what, exactly?'

‘What it was like,' I said.

He tilted his teacup and considered its contents. ‘Everyone asks. I'm not sure anyone wants to know.'

‘I do.'

He looked straight at me. ‘Do you? Because I'll tell you.' He drained his cup in one quick swallow, set it on its saucer on the low table in front of him and leaned forward to pitch his voice into the space between us.

Hubie's people were Westmeath farmers, but there were ancestors on his mother's side who'd left with the Wild Geese, made their fortune in France. His paternal uncles were in the Dublins, so he thought why not? He was the second son, there wasn't much for him at home. He wanted to see a bit of the world, took his commission in 1912. Shipped out at the beginning of the war, he fought in the early battles in France, at the Marne, the Aisne, Armentières, the last under the brightest moon he'd ever seen in his life. A killing moon.

When they arrived in Dover, thousands of men were milling around the docks and laying about in the sheds. It would take days to get them all across the water. But Hubie's battalion were leaving on the next tide and he was kept busy, giving out rations and checking kit.

The crossing was smooth. There was little sign of war when they docked, apart from the roads, busy with military vehicles. They passed a group of prisoners sitting on the ground, the first Germans he'd seen, a misfortunate-looking lot in dusty uniforms. He could hear guns popping and booming in the distance. They were about nine miles behind the lines.

They moved up the next day. The sun shone, the fields were green and gold, harvest-ready. It was all fine and good, marching down country lanes, past orchards bursting with fruit, red-roofed houses. Like a painting. The men singing, of all things, ‘One Man Went to Mow'. Nights when he couldn't sleep, that bloody song still drilled its heavy boots on his brain: three men, two men, one man and his dog … No meadows now, only a new and terrible Dead Sea.

That first day, they stopped in a town square. People brought them coffee. Apples were pressed into their hands, and bread. Children waved and women kissed them. At night he was dog-tired but couldn't sleep, his nerves strung taut as wire. He was on the brink of something huge. The immensity of the Continent stretched ahead, other continents beyond that. He'd had no notion how small Ireland was 'til he left. In France, even the sky seemed wider and higher than at home. And the sky that first night was spectacularly thick and lush, littered with stars, closer than he'd ever seen them. The ground hard as bone. There was a stillness, as though time itself had stopped. He wished it would. He wished the world itself would stop turning and hold them fast, right there, all that was to come held off and made harmless.

The next morning they moved up towards the Front. They passed a stream of people going the other way, the way they'd come. Leaving their homes, all they could carry bundled in carts or strapped to their backs, hanging in baskets from their shoulders. He wondered how long it would be before those people came back, what they'd find when they did. He pitied them.

What was left of their battalion passed through that place again, weeks later, after they'd been well and truly blooded. It was a waste land. Where there had been columns of marching men, now there were lines of dead. The next time Hubie saw people abandon their homes, he felt nothing. Why squander pity on people who were on their way to safety, while soldiers marched up the line to face death on their behalf?

People sometimes asked what it was like, to be in a show. It was impossible to tell. Confusion was the main thing. Confusion and noise. Hard to say what happened first, or next, or when; whether what he saw was real or phantom, smoke or demon. He couldn't always be sure if it was thunder and lightning come to earth he was dealing with, or war. Only the
screams were real – metal, men, beasts – everything jumbled. The earth turned inside out, clumps of it thrown around in a hot sour wind, and he just trying to make a way through it. When it was over, first thing he'd do was breathe. He'd take in one single breath. And, if he got away with that, he'd risk another. Then, when he was sure he was alive, he'd find out who else had come through. When the rolls were finished, he'd take himself off somewhere quiet, first chance he got. He'd go over it all in his mind, try to sort it into something like sense. He'd say goodbye to the lost, and let them go.

Another thing people asked was if the two armies had really played a game of football, that first Christmas. Hubie was on leave, but he'd heard the story. He could well believe it. In some places the lines were so close that at night they could hear each other singing. Sometimes, if they knew the songs, they joined in. Or set their own words to the tune, once they had it. Nights like that, you'd forget to be wary.

I told myself to breathe. I knew what was coming.

They knew there was a big push coming. There'd been heavy shelling for days, and rumours of gas. They'd written their letters, checked their kit, reviewed their orders. A corporal came round with the chronometer. Everything was set for the morning. At midnight Liam went around talking to the men and then went towards the latrine. Hubie was at the fire-step. The moon was just off full, the balloons were silver. Flares went up, trailing green and yellow lights. He heard the shots that got Liam. Jonesy saw it happen. He said Liam stood proud of the whole sorry mess, he just stood there. And they got him, twice. Two shots.

Hubie and Jonesy ran to him. He was still alive, asked had he a ticket home. Hubie said not to get ahead of himself. He held Liam's hand 'til the stretcher boys came, and that was the last he saw of him, when they carried him away.

We all stared at his gloved hand.

‘Did you keep track of what happened to him?' Isabel asked.

He flinched. ‘Later that morning, thousands were wiped out by gas. So many that
we
became the Front. Everything that had stood between us and Fritz was gone. Wiped out. And they came at us. I lost track of everything. So many died.'

He stared past me, fixing on the mirror over my head. ‘There was no let-up. We were so far outnumbered – they'd a field gun for every rifle of ours. They flattened us.'

When the gas came, they were blazing away, the guns roasting hot. Then yellow smoke billowed up around them. Someone, one of the Canadians who'd materialized by some miracle to fight beside them, roared at everyone to piss on whatever cloth came to hand – handkerchiefs or caps – to cover their mouths and noses and breathe through the saturated cloth. It worked, for some. And the gas rolled on, over their trench. Hubie was lucky. Some instinct caught him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him up out of the trench into cleaner air, sucking on urine, and the gas rolled on and left him behind. Hubie and a handful of others. Jonesy wasn't so lucky. They listened to him froth and hiss and choke. He drowned, right there beside them on dry land, and there wasn't a damned thing they could do about it. It took twenty minutes. Jonesy tried to speak but retched instead, spilling clots of matter on his chin. Coughing up his own lung. He clawed at his breast pocket and Hubie remembered he'd a locket in there, his wife's picture on one side, three gap-toothed boys grinning on the other. He took it out and wrapped the chain around Jonesy's fingers. His hands stopped flailing then. He clutched that oval of silver 'til he was dead.

When the gas dispersed they could see the wounded, lying out in the open. The lucky ones were dead. Some wriggled around, calling for help. One, both legs gone, was trying to get back to the line on stumps. Hubie took the locket out of
Jonesy's cold grasp and went to help the legless man. Later he sent it back to Jonesy's wife with a letter telling her it had been a comfort to him, when he died. Sparing her the real details. The twenty frantic minutes and the sounds.

There was no respite. They were straight into another show, and then another. They were gassed again a month later, and Colonel Loveband died and that was effectively the end of the Second Dublins. A proud battalion was diluted when the dregs of one unit were combined with the survivors of another, and then new drafts added, Kitchener's Mob, half trained. Months of stalemate and no ground gained in a barren landscape like a nightmare with no ending. The war would drag on 'til there was no one left to fire the rusted empty guns on the last survivor, who would have long forgotten what silence was, what it sounded like.

The sky outside darkened. I got up to help Dote pass around more tea. I was stiff from sitting on the floor so long, not moving. Isabel leaned forward, her eyes fixed on Hubie, her arms folded around her knees. She shook her head at the cup and saucer I offered, kept looking at him. A light rain drummed against the window.

A deep rumbling roar from outside was followed by another that cracked the world open. My cup rattled on its saucer. Someone moaned in the hall. I looked out, and there was Nan, sitting on the bottom stair, in the gloom, with her shawl up over her head and a weird sound coming from her throat. ‘Nan! What are you doing there?'

Her pallor was remarkable. ‘The childer are gone asleep.'

‘Don't be out there on your own.' I hesitated. This was not my house. But Dote was at my elbow, saying, ‘For heaven's sake, come in and join us, Nan.'

Nan looked up the stairs. ‘That last one might have woken them.'

‘I'll go and see.' I ran up to the bedroom Dote had assigned to me and the girls. There they were, top to tail under the eiderdown, their hair strewn around them, fast asleep.

When I came back down, Nan was sitting, stiff and straight, on a hard-backed chair that she offered to me.

‘No, stay there – I was on the floor before.'

Dote patted a cushion on the coal box, beside her chair. On her other side, May had taken her glasses off to polish them with her cuff. Her face had a blind cast to it without them. Beads of perspiration were visible on her forehead. The sound of distant shooting was more insistent. ‘Be a pet and close the curtains, Katie?'

I did as she asked and went to sit on the coal box, sideways on to the window. The drawn curtains gave the light an orange tinge.

Nan had a queer look on her face. She hunched over her knees, with her big feet planted on the floor. ‘Do youse mind, it'll be Bealtaine five days from now?'

‘The start of summer,' said Dote.

Mouth-of-fire. The orangey light in the room played havoc with my mind. It touched Hubie's face with amber. One of his ankles lay across the other. I found myself wondering what his legs might look like – would they be amber too? I looked down at my hands, spread my fingers. There were traces of dirt under my nails; they could do with a scrubbing.

‘One of the four corners of the year,' May said.

‘What do you mean?' Isabel asked.

‘The hinges of the world swing open. All manner of strange things creep through.' May pulled her cardigan tight around her narrow shoulders and shivered. ‘When souls cross over, either way.'