‘What did you do, Pete?’
‘That’s the thing, you see. I didn’t do anything. I helped to hold down her shoulders. Jesus Christ. And I don’t know why to this day.’
O‘Hara looked shriven now and contrite. That was plain. But Willie Dunne was no priest. The sound of the guns in the distance was very like the sound of the great waves down on the Great South Wall in the depths of winter when they came marching and crashing against the Half-Moon Swimming Club that was once the barracks of soldiers when soldiers wore red coats. Willie lay as still as a suspected mouse in the corner of a room. He looked at O’Hara’s face in the speckled moonlight. He must be twenty-three or four, Willie thought, an old man by some standards, a young man by others.
He had never heard a story so terrible. He had seen terrible things. He had buried Jesse Kirwan. He had been witness to that and the death of Captain Pasley. But now he had heard a story and all he could see in his mind’s eye was Gretta; Gretta in that dark blue skirt, and that stupid, vicious lad getting a hold of her in a ditch like a dog. Without knowing what he was doing, he sat up abruptly on the bed and reached towards O‘Hara and landed a serious punch right into his face. The face stared back astonished. Before O’Hara could speak again, he pummelled another closed fist into the shocked features. The lip was split by the blow and immediately started to bleed dark blood in the darkness. But O‘Hara didn’t say a word; all that could be heard were the faraway guns like wild, other-worldly horses ploughing through stony earth.
‘You black cunt,’ said Willie Dunne.
‘Will you keep the voice low,’ hissed O‘Hara. ’Do you want to have me lynched?‘
‘You deserve it, you bastard.’
‘I only told you the fucking story because your mate was fucking killed!’
‘What in the name of Jaysus are you talking about? You think I want to hear your foul fucking story? In the darkness?’
‘And you’d’ve done different, of course, the fucking policeman’s son!‘
It was tricky to have a conversation like this and keep your voice down and not wake another soul. Why Willie felt duty bound indeed to keep his voice down was a mystery to him, or would be if he considered it.
‘You just fucking tell me that’s not true, Pete; you just tell me that’s not true.’
‘Don’t be fucking self-righteous, brother, you fucker. Didn’t you fucking come with me with those whores just weeks past? Hah? You think you’re so holy?’
‘It’s not holy, it’s not holy, you’re talking about murder!’
‘We didn’t fucking murder her. We brought her back to the captain. It was the lieutenant was murdered, and the lads were murdered. And it’s fucking murdered we’ve been ever since. And who gives a fuck about us, Willie? No one. Doesn’t matter to them if we live or we die, there’s always another stupid bastard to take our place.’
And what happened to her, Pete?‘
‘Who?’
‘That Belgian woman, Pete, that you — just like the sainted Germans did, just like all those stories we were told, Pete, what they did to the women.’
‘Don’t be so holier than thou, Willie. You’d’ve done the same.‘
‘What happened to her, what happened to her?’
O‘Hara said nothing for a moment.
All right, all right.‘ But he didn’t seem able to say it for another few moments yet. Then he nodded his punched face. ’She died of what had happened to her. She was bleeding all those hours. She was not treated right. She was fucking torn to pieces, wasn’t she? And she died. And we tried to save her.‘
‘You think so?’
‘It’s just a story, Willie, a story of the war.’
‘You can keep your story, Pete. You can keep it.’
And Willie lay back trembling on his bed. The guns were silent now. He imagined the French troops climbing out of their trenches and heading off across the unwholesome ground. There had been hundreds, thousands of the people from all these ravaged districts killed no doubt, women like that woman, and old men and their women, and the children of Belgium, all swallowed up in the mouth of the war. And if O‘Hara and his pal did that at the start of the war, what would he be able to do now? What would Willie be capable of himself ? Were they not mirrors of each other, mirror after mirror, in bed after bed, in billet after billet, in battalion after battalion, in regiment after regiment, in division after division, all across this ruined place? What of such hearts and souls? Could the soul hold good, could the heart? Was O’Hara a child thrown among blood and broken souls? Was O‘Hara his brother too, if Jesse Kirwan was? Was the family of mankind in all of itself the enemy? Was there no friendly army left upon the unkind earth?
Chapter Fourteen
But everything, no matter what, no matter how vexing, ruinous, or cheering, could be brought into battle, with the rest of a soldier’s pack. It had to be; grief and horror could not be left behind. They folded to nothing and were carried like boulders.
They went, the lot of them, marching two by two, along that fierce road, with every step moving away from that makeshift paradise of the rear camp. No more the birds in the morning and the filthy work at fatigues, hacking and digging, and parades on the parade ground and those ‘fucking eternal press-ups’, as Christy Moran tenderly referred to them, especially ‘that fucking fancy one’, when you raised yourself on your arms and then lifted a leg ‘like a fucking ballet dancer’, first the left and then the right.
‘Just exactly when’, he asked the men rhetorically, ‘have ye found it useful in the fucking trenches to be able to lift your left leg backwards till your bollocks falls off?’
But it was all in the manuals, and a sergeant-major must be faithful to such things, like an agnostic priest. And God knows, when reason and mercy had fled out of the world, there was nothing like a manual. And it was a wonder to Willie all the same that the officers did seem to have a passion for those exactitudes, and he saw Captain Sheridan every day in his temporary office producing a thousand sheets of written paper, the Cavan hand patiently scratching across, line after line. And the runners came in and ran off, or he was yapping away on the telephone when the lines were good.
They knew, everyone, that the darkest year of the war was being endured all along the line from Portugal to the sea. But especially all around the River Somme, Death had been smiling his contented smile. There were days when the newspapers had three thick columns of men’s names in tiny type, special red-letter days a person might say, the red being the life-blood of thousands.
It was not just the Ulstermen of the 36th, not for a moment. It was Scottish Highlanders (some of them hailing oddly from Canada, Willie noted), black Africans, great clumps of Chinese workers incinerated while they worked, Australians and New Zealanders, in violent teems of youngsters faithfully plodding across acres to receive machine-gun bullets in their eyes, their brains, their cheeks, their breasts, their legs, their stomachs, their ears, their throats, their backs (more rare, unless the Boche came in behind them), the small of the back, the small of the knee, the small of the heart. There was no town or village on the anatomy of the human body — if the body could be considered a country — that had not tried the experiment of a bullet entering there.
Just now they heard queer good news, that sections of their own regiment had gained an objective against the doomy fusillades, and the mind-exploding explosions of shrapnel. They had gone through certain slaughter to take at last the flattened village called Guillemont, only days past, though they lost some hundreds of Dublin lads, and hundreds more gashed by bullets, faceless, armless, screaming in the hospitals. Perhaps no man could speak of victory when the bodies of his mates were visible and tormented in his dreams, and he was following after to the same sites of hurt and death.
And they had been at it, the Allied forces, since February of the year when the ground began to dry, uselessly, astonishingly striving. Guillemont itself had been assailed at least three times already and whatever poor men
they were — of the nations come innocently to war — had been hard driven back with bayonet and desperate ferocity, or added to the filthy ground.
But this recent death-laden victory was what brought Willie Dunne and his mates back towards the line, in the words of Captain Sheridan, ‘to consolidate the victory and attempt to follow on to Guinchy’, another mysterious and villagerless village. In the words of Christy Moran, ‘to thump the bastards back to Berlin’.
They came into a region of the dead. It was the strangest thing. The only spot Father Buckley could find for his little service before battle was a segment of a field that had been fought over some days before. The few hundred of Willie’s battalion stopped there in the darkness. Ahead it was as if some vast fairground were afoot, with wondrous rides turning and turning in the night, with some regal fireworks thrown in to delight the crowd. The noise of the bombardment at that distance, however, was not festive — the bombs thudded deep, one after the other, like a giant punching a stomach. They laid down their arms and their packs and looked about them. The whole area was strewn with killed men, and by their tags and bits they knew they were Irishmen. Some lay like fallen automatons, as if for a while on the ground they had tried to keep stepping along, in the slow dance of the attack. Machine-gun bullets had done their awful work, tearing into faces and bloodying the soiled uniforms.
But Father Buckley had to have somewhere to speak to them. He handed candles to a few men and these were lit so that there was some suggestion of a place of worship.
‘I want to speak to you all equally,’ said Father Buckley. ‘Many of you are new in the line and may find these experiences demanding. I want to assure you that Our Lord God is with you and watching over you. You are part of a division of astonishing men. I have observed the extraordinary piety among you men. Your sincere faith and your devotion to Our Lady in particular. You are fighting a holy war, not only in defence of the Catholic peoples of Belgium, but to attain a sure and incontestable certificate for the freedom of Ireland and her existence as a separate, proud and loyal nation. What unites us all is that certainty that God, who sincerely celebrates the goodness of every man, wishes only the best for you. That you will flourish as soldiers and as men. He understands your fears and wonders at your courage. And know, men, that wherever you will go, I will follow, and insofar as it lies in my powers to do, I will be there at your side in your hour of need, not just as a simple priest from the county of Kildare, but as God’s shadow on this earth, and I will whisper in your ear all that you need to hear. So, my good friends, fear nothing, for the good God flies by your side and breathes into your hearts untouchable joy and love.’
The candles shook and trembled as men breathed out, as though in the very act of trying to hear every word of the priest, they had held their living breath, as though in some strange fashion they were content to die a moment while they strained their ears.
It was indeed as if even the dead were listening and he was speaking also to the dead. It was all too clear and true that those other battalions of the 16th used to take Guillemont had been divided into three parts, like Caesar’s Gaul: the wounded who had filled every field hospital and were now clogging up drear Trônes Wood with their cries and pain; the living, exhausted and shattered; and the dead, who were here.
Father Buckley asked the Mother of God again to protect the men. The slight, stooped priest with the ugly face made soft and young in the moonlight and the rising and falling glares of explosions, recited the Hail Mary: ‘Ave Maria, gratia plenis ...’ The men strained to catch the words, though they knew them perfectly since earliest childhood. There was no Sunday indifference of men at the back of a country church here. Willie Dunne joined his hands together with the rest and felt the sudden balm of the priest’s prayer. The idea of a mother blazed out to him clear and new, as if he had never heard the word before, or knew there was such a thing. He thought of his own dead mother in her days of ordinary strength and, as if for the first time, wondered at the vagaries and mere chances of a life. ‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ said Father Buckley — this had a miserable truth where they stood, listening in those moments mostly with the ears of sons.
There were things he allowed himself to be thinking, he realized, and things he had grown to forbid himself. He stared about him at the other faces: O‘Hara over there with his secret, Christy Moran on one knee like a countryman though he was from Kingstown, Joe Kielty’s gentle face showing nothing but a sort of dreaming attention. Joe looked as relaxed as a sleeping baby. Willie had no words to tell what he was feeling in response to Father Buckley’s words. He wondered suddenly and definitely for the first time in his life what words might be. Sounds and sense certainly, but something else also, a kind of natural music that explained a man’s heart or heartlessness, words as tempered as steel, as soft as air. He felt his sore head clear and his back lighten and his legs strengthen. It was as strange to him as the sight of death. He hoped the words would work on the dead and be a balm to them also.
Meanwhile, the explosions up ahead seemed to be tearing at the stars themselves, sorely extinguishing them, ripping those buttons of timid light.
The approach trench was a reeking culvert with a foul carpet of crushed dead. Willie could feel the pulverized flesh still in the destroyed uniforms sucking at his boots. These were the bodies of creatures gone beyond their own humanity into a severe state that had no place in human doings and the human world. They might be rotting animals thrown out at the back of a slaughterhouse, ready for the pits, urgently so. What lives and names and loves he was walking on he could not know any more; these flattened forms did not leak the whistle tunes and meanings of humanity any more.
There were bombs falling everywhere now in an industrial generosity. Sadly these were their own bombs, fired out some miles back by their own artillery, whose gauges and sights were so worn by use that the missiles went either too short or too far — in this case, as they stumbled along under the cargo of their packs, too short. Willie tried to half close his eyes as he passed now over fresh bodies, the exterminated forms of his own mates. He didn’t want to see men he knew mangled like this for nothing. He wished he were a horse on the road with his leather blinkers doing good service.
Now they rose up in the violent moonlight and entered bizarrely a huge field of high corn, the frail stems brushing gently against their faces, and because Willie was a small man, he had to grip the coat of Sergeant-Major Moran in front or he would be lost, set adrift to wander for ever in this unexpected crop. The absurd bombs followed them religiously into the field, smashing all about the darkness, the stench of cordite and other chemicals obliterating the old dry smell of the corn. Willie heard men cry out, he stumbled through little sites of disaster, he could not help but see through his squinting eyes here and there a ruined face, or underfoot stumble on the wet branch of an arm or a leg. How easily men were dismembered ; how quickly their parts were unstitched. What this war needed, Willie thought, was men made of steel, who could march on through chaos so that when they were blown into a thousand pieces there were no mourners for them at home and no extremity of pain. He passed poor Quigley, no longer miraculous but with his arm sheared off at the shoulder, so there was only a bloody boil of flesh there. His face had been lifted by the blast and torn half way off, so that his awful jaw-bone was bare with bare yellow teeth.
They came to a series of barbed-wire lines, and here there were older bodies heaped, in places three deep and more, men of Ireland also in a hundred terrible attitudes. Willie knew the gaps they had left in the division would be filled. More men from old Dublin and surrounds brought out on the crowded boats and along the rail-lines and bussed over puzzling country and inserted into trenches and then on into these local and myriad infernos. The thought somehow panicked him further, as if he were responsible for everything, for the dead men and the men soon to die. He wanted the dead to be alive again and the living men to go back home. There was one battle in this war but the arm
ies were changing all the time, like a tube emptying at the top and filling at the bottom, so that no one man, he thought, knew what was afoot and no one man could feel he had done anything but piss his trousers in terror. For now Willie had the cold fingers of terror at his measly throat, he was starting to gabble, to pray not to God as it happened but to Gretta: Dear Gretta of the beautiful arse, preserve me, rescue me. He was chopping as best he could at the wire, as they all were, this cat’s cradle of death they must get through as quick as nifty rabbits.
‘What’s that you’re saying?’ said a voice behind; it was Joe Kielty.
‘Oh, forgive me, Joe,’ he said, hacking on at the wire with the clumsy cutters, ‘I don’t know what I’m gassing on about.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Joe Kielty, who after all was twenty-five years old and no spring chicken or chicken of any nature, ‘we’ll be all right, I am sure of it.’
‘I’m glad to hear that, Joe. I was urgently requiring to hear that.’
And when he said that in his best cheerful manner, O‘Hara looked over.
‘That’s it, Willie, you keep our spirits up.’
‘I will, Pete, I will, if I can.’
And there was no trace of the horror he had felt at Pete’s story.
‘What’s this fucking crop anyhow?’ said Christy Moran.
‘I don’t know, Sarge,’ said Joe Kielty, ‘you don’t see it in Mayo.’
‘Isn’t it rocks you grow there?’ said the sergeant-major gently.