The Soldier's Song (17 page)

‘Oh aye? I’m Welsh myself, as you may have guessed. Ifans is the name.’ He held out a podgy hand. ‘Griff Ifans. I’m from a little place called Trefriw, just down from Conwy, in Caernarfonshire.’

Stephen just smiled and nodded as he shook the warm hand. He could hardly make out a word of the mellifluous singsong flow that poured out of the man, but that didn’t seem to put Ifans off. For two hours he kept up an endless stream of inane banter, mixing personal details – he was something in animal feed, apparently – with a tour-guide commentary on the Welsh countryside passing by the window.

‘That’s Bala, see. Nice place, Bala. I knew a girl there once, Elsie was her name . . .’

The train was puffing asthmatically up a steep incline. After Bala, Stephen knew the next stop was his, and he silently willed it on with every ounce of his being. To distract himself from Ifans and his bad feet he stared out of the window. It was late September, but it felt like winter was already taking hold. The slate hillsides towered above the train, slick in the drizzling rain. Grey clouds were weeping over them and the whole country looked cold and inhospitable.
Christ Almighty! Where did the summer go?

At last the train seemed to run out of steam and shuddered to a halt, still on the incline, and apparently in the middle of nowhere.

‘Frongoch!’ the conductor shouted down the corridor, ‘Anybody for Frongoch?’

‘It was nice to meet you,’ Stephen said, snatching up his parcel and darting into the corridor before Ifans could get another word in. He found the door and jumped down into the rain. As the train squealed and puffed and started to grind uphill once again he looked at his surroundings. The same slate hillsides, the same weeping clouds. Only when the train was gone did he see the handful of stocky stone cottages and a much taller building with the forbidding aspect of a reformatory. Clustered around it were some wooden huts and barbed-wire fences. Joe had said in his letter that it used to be a distillery. No wonder they turned it into a prison camp. Who ever heard of Welsh whiskey?

They clearly weren’t used to visitors. The guards in their glistening gas capes eyed him suspiciously as he walked up the road with his parcel under his arm. They saluted, but they weren’t quite sure what to make of him, nor of the letter he presented. After whispering to one another they sent for an officer, and a yeomanry subaltern came at a run. The lieutenant looked from the letter to Stephen’s uniform, and then, with a polite ‘This way please’, led him to a damp room in the distillery building.

There was a rickety table with some chairs scattered around it, but Stephen stood by the window and looked at the prisoners drilling in the yard. He’d spent the summer training recruits at depots up and down the country and he knew by the look of them that these men weren’t raw. They were ragged, to be sure – only one uniform between three of them, the rest in civilian coats and trousers – but they moved with the fluid ease of long practice. They looked like soldiers, even without the uniforms.

Across the yard, a door opened and Joe came out with a guard walking behind him. Stephen watched him closely as he skirted the ranks of prisoners. He had lost weight: his green overcoat hung slack from his shoulders and even with his shirt buttoned all the way up, the collar looked loose around his neck. His expression was closed, stony, staring straight ahead, and he walked with a shuffling limp.

Still, better than the last time you saw him.
Would he ever forget the moans and gore in that hospital? A temporary affair, deep down in the cellars and filled with the mingled stink of cordite and ether and blood. But even getting him in there was a feat in itself. If it weren’t for Lillian fetching her sister, Joe would have been left lying in the yard with the other wounded rebels. Sheila had knelt down on the cobbles and gently felt around the wound while Stephen looked on, appalled at so much blood puddling in the panels of the door.

‘We’ll have to get him inside,’ she said at last. Then she looked directly at Stephen. ‘You’d best help me get his jacket off. They won’t even look at him if they think he’s a rebel. Lillie, fetch a blanket. Over there, near the door.’

With a blanket thrown over him, they carried him inside, still lying curled up on the door. Down they went, down stairs and along corridors littered with blankets and bandages and wounded men. They eventually burst into a makeshift ward and set him down on the floor, Stephen and Lillian waiting in nervous silence until Sheila came back, dragging a whey-faced doctor by the arm. There was another inspection, a whispered conference, and then a stretcher was called for. One end of the room had been curtained off for operations, and the last he saw of his brother was his blood-smeared bare chest, iodine, bandages and concerned doctors in grubby white smocks.

Joe came into the room and his sombre face brightened when he saw Stephen.

‘How the hell . . .’ he began, but looked uncertainly at the guard, who was hovering near the door.

Stephen waved him away. ‘That will be all, corporal.’

The door closed and Joe’s face cracked into a broad grin as he shook his brother’s hand.

‘By Jesus, it’s good to see you, Stephen. But how the hell did you swing this? We’re not allowed any visitors.’

‘I wrote a begging letter to the War Office, telling them you were my only family. Under the circumstances, they agreed to allow a visit.’

Joe’s face darkened again as he pulled out a chair and sat down gingerly.

‘Under what circumstances?’

‘They’re sending me to France next week.’

France – where the battle of the Somme was in its dying throes. They got newspapers even in this godforsaken hole.

‘Oh.’

The word fell into an uneasy silence. So much to say, but most of it didn’t bear saying.

‘I suppose you were expecting it.’

‘I’m only surprised it took this long. I passed fit ages ago.’

‘Did they keep you back on my account?’

Stephen nodded. There was no doubt about that. It had caught up with him in Gravesend, not two days after he arrived from Dublin. Just a few polite questions at first; a pleasant chat with the barracks colonel over tea in the mess. Stephen was more direct than the colonel, who was clearly uncomfortable in the role of inquisitor. He’d told him out straight, confessed right there and then. For penance he got Major Moffett from Military Intelligence. At least he said he was a major, but his uniform was a size too large and looked as if it belonged to somebody else. He had a rasping voice, chain-smoked, and tipped ash down the front of his tunic when he made notes in a greasy notebook. Stephen found him repellent, but was stuck with him in a small room for the best part of a day, glad of the fresh May breeze that wafted in through the open window. He’d made up his mind to tell the truth, but he took such a dislike to Moffett that he confined himself to answering only yes and no. He could sense the exasperation in Moffett’s voice, but he held his course. What could they do to him? Prison? Unlikely. Cashiering? Possibly. Well, let them do what they wanted. He was not his brother’s keeper. He had done nothing wrong.

‘It wasn’t that bad. They asked me a few questions, that’s all.’ He shrugged it off. But he wondered if, by delaying, they had kept him alive. All those weeks shunted from one depot to the next, training men for the meat-grinder across the Channel, but always there to meet the next draft. Never going himself – never sent. They didn’t trust him to die.

‘Anyway, how are you feeling?’ he asked, sitting down and putting his cap on the table.

‘How do I look?’

The old game from when they were kids: answer a question with a question.

‘You look shook.’

‘I feel shook.’ Joe grinned, ‘But it’s not so bad. I’m still on light duties. They’ve got me working in the kitchen – peeling potatoes, stirring soup. At least I get plenty to eat.’

‘How are they treating you?’

‘Decent enough. They don’t really know what to make of us. We’ve all got internment orders, but they don’t want to treat us as prisoners of war. Mostly they just leave us alone. The worst of it is the damp and the rats, but, sure, some of us lived in worse back in Dublin.’

‘Here.’ Stephen slid the parcel across the table, ‘I brought you something: smokes and chocolate. Should make life more bearable.’

‘Thanks.’ Joe nodded and drummed his fingers on the paper parcel. There was a question preying on his mind. ‘Were you there for the executions?’

No prizes for guessing where
there
was.

‘No, I wasn’t. I’d already been posted to Gravesend when it started. I left Dublin the day after the surrender.’

‘They shot Connolly, did you hear?’

‘It was all over the papers.’

And Pearse, and McDonough, and all the rest of them. The bastards put them all in front of firing squads.’

It wasn’t lost on Stephen that he was one of the bastards. He was wearing the uniform. If he hadn’t got out of Dublin it could have been him in charge of a firing squad. Thank Christ for small mercies.

‘That was . . . unfortunate.’

‘Unfortunate? They strapped him in a chair!’ Joe hissed angrily. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he couldn’t stand up with his wounded leg, so they strapped him in a chair and shot him sitting down.’

‘Well, Jesus, Joe. What did you think they’d do? They had a rebellion in their own back yard in the middle of a war. Did you think they’d just shake hands and wish you better luck next time?’

The moment he said it, he regretted it. He didn’t want another row. Not now, not after everything. But Joe just gave him a bitter smile.

‘He knew they’d shoot him,’ he said quietly. ‘One way or another, he knew he’d be killed. I heard him say it before we marched from Liberty Hall. He didn’t want the men to hear it, but I heard him say we were going out to be slaughtered.’

‘They shouldn’t have shot them,’ Stephen admitted. ‘It was a mistake.’

The first execution was a mistake. The fourteen that followed were madness, brutality, malice. He’d followed them in the newspaper with growing disbelief. He knew it was the letter of the law, but they’d gone too far. How could they do this after thousands of Irishmen had volunteered for the army? Even in England, people were horrified. That was why conversation often dried up when people heard his Irish accent. Some of them suspected him of harbouring rebel sympathies, but many of them were ashamed.

‘They lost Ireland when they did that.’

Stephen nodded. Billy had written to him just after the executions started and even he was lost for words to describe the sense of outrage in Dublin. A few days later he got a letter from Lillian that seemed to sum it up. The people who had blamed the rebels for destroying their city, who had pelted them with rubbish as they were marched down the street, had turned their anger against the government, against the police and the soldiers who were murdering men for standing up to them.

‘They made martyrs of them,’ Joe went on, more light coming into his eyes now, ‘and that’ll be their undoing. They’ll not beat us the next time because the next time the people will be with us. They won’t put up with this murder and oppression any more.’

Stephen got up and went back to the window. He looked at the men drilling in the square. They had turned their prison into a training camp.

‘The next time?’ He turned a sceptical eye on his brother, ‘The last time nearly killed you. Have you not had enough?’

Joe followed his gaze across the yard and then looked at his brother with a defiant tilt to his head.

‘We’re only getting started.’

* * *

4
October
1916

Another
flaming training camp! Still, at least this one’s in France, and I’m the one being trained. It’s the same old stuff: gas-mask drill, trench clearance, musketry, bomb throwing. But there’s a sharp edge to it here, because all the instructors are men getting a respite from the front. To them it’s a sort of rest cure. They entertain themselves by telling blood-curdling stories and trying to scare the living daylights out of the new men.

I have some immunity because I’ve seen action before, but some of them still make an impression on me. The devil is in the details. Take Metcalfe, for instance, who shares my tent. He has already asked me twice if we shouldn’t dig a hole for sleeping in. I assured him that we are quite safe – I’ve never even seen a German – but he is hard to convince. Every morning he steps out of the tent and cocks his head towards the distant rumbling in the north. Too early for thunder, he always says, and I can see the fear in his face.

Metcalfe was at Guillemont during the worst of the Somme and jokes that he was sent here because his CO couldn’t tell the time. It turns out the truth is much more serious than that. His battalion was supposed to attack a German position after an artillery barrage that would lift at the last minute. But with fifteen minutes to go, the colonel looked at his watch and decided that they were already five minutes late. Nobody knew why; perhaps the CO had taken too much to drink that morning – he drank like a fish, apparently – or perhaps his orderly simply hadn’t wound his watch. Whatever the reason, he flew into a terrible rage. Why had nobody told him they were late? They were skivers, cowards! And he ordered them to begin the attack immediately.