Willie Dunne saw these sights, blinkered though he was by the hood. But you had to try to see ahead. How would he ever describe this to Dolly? He could not. She would wake screaming from her childish dreams all the rest of her life. It would topple a gentle mind over into craziness. How could a verdant land come to such an August? Even old Dostoevsky couldn’t have imagined such a thing; no mind of any dreaming or waking person could have.
Timmy Weekes was trudging along beside him. He had Joe Kielty on the other side and a new man he didn’t know, a frail little chap of nineteen. Nevertheless, he was keeping up well enough, that was the main thing. It had been intended as a march of two hours but already they were four hours going, in the bleakest dark that God had ever conferred on his strange earth.
‘I was just thinking, Timmy’ said Willie Dunne, ’ould Dostoevsky would’ve taken fright at all this.‘
‘Dante is the chap for this,’ said Timmy Weekes.
‘Who’s that, Timmy?’ said Joe Kielty.
‘Italian bloke,’ said Timmy Weekes, ‘called Dante.’
‘That’s a nice, interesting name,’ said Joe Kielty.
‘Or Tolstoy,’ said Timmy Weekes. The rain suddenly lashed into his face like it could make an angle for itself, so there was a pause. The wind was like bulls. ‘Now, Tolstoy wrote about wars. But not like this war. In his war you could still go home and fall in love with a lady.’
‘Can you not go home and fall in love with a lady?’ said Joe Kielty, and the four of them laughed, a line of laughing men in the midst of a human nowhere.
‘I wouldn’t say no,’ said Timmy Weekes.
‘A warm bed, a few bottles of beer, and a lass,’ said the new man.
‘Now you said it,’ said Timmy Weekes.
Then they didn’t say anything for a while, slogging on as they were.
‘And how is it different now?’ said Willie Dunne nevertheless. ‘That other fella’s war and this ould war?’
‘Well, maybe it i’n’t so very different. Maybe not. Anyway, they don’t write books about the likes of us. It’s officers and high-up people mostly.‘
‘So the battles maybe were the same?’ said Joe Kielty.
‘The same. Maybe so, Joe,’ said Timmy Weekes. ‘You put out a crowd of lads on the field, and the other side put out a crowd of lads, and you had musket shot and cavalry, and then the low lads like ourselves were shunted down the valley or whatnot, and fought like fucking lions, I suppose. And when everyone was dead on the other side, you had a victory. A victory, you know?’
‘Well, and that’s not the same with us, then, is it?’ said Willie. ‘Because we only had a victory the one time, at ’Whitesheet‘, unless you count Guinchy. And even then we were fucked to hell. Other times you had a rake of our lads killed, and a rake of the old grey-suited devils, and you wouldn’t know who had won the fucking thing, sure how could you tell, boys?’
‘Well, that’s a difference, i’n’t it, right there?‘ said Timmy Weekes. ’But they might be adding us up after, and if more of us is left standing, then they might be calling that a sort of victory, i‘n’t that it?’
‘Some fucking victory,’ said Willie Dunne.
‘Some fucking war,’ said Timmy Weekes.
‘And so say all of us,’ said Willie Dunne.
And that was strong talk. And that was all right for a while. But as that strange silence that could descend on you, even among your companions, descended on Willie Dunne, all ease and that tincture of happiness like the sweet juice in an orange left his brain. It began to throb with that all too familiar throbbing. A dash of grog might take that away. An ill thought, a curse, or a good sleep might also.
Christy Moran seemed to know where they were supposed to be, and after five hours of that ‘merry march’, as he called it, he pitched them into some curious ditches. They may have been trenches once. The new officer was only a first lieutenant and he didn’t know how to read the maps, so Christy was helping him along. It behoved them to tackle the trenches straight away because it would be daylight in a few hours, so even after their march they all started stabbing at the black soft clay with their entrenching tools, trying to fling the stuff back onto the parapet and parados. But it was like porter on their spades. They didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and did both generously. Still the rain cascaded with an intense passion that bespoke something that could think and breathe. It wanted to know every nóok and cranny of every man, till every man was drenched and shivering.
The dawn came and stand-to was a sort of humourless jest. There were no firing steps, no duck boards, and, what was more imminent and sad, no breakfast to speak of. They nibbled at their iron rations, like rats themselves. Their trench was in full view of someone that bore a grave antagonism towards them, because the parapet was continuously strafed by buzzing bullets. Some crowd of geniuses somewhere had a mortar and were sending mortar bombs liberally over. Even when the shells exploded yards off, great chill sheets of filthy water came pouring victoriously down on their crowns. It was stupefying, withering. Willie Dunne could feel his very soul shrinking away in despair. Two days they suffered there, with the water to their knees, and not a bite came up behind them, not a scanty suggestion of fresh water, nothing. And always the ruckus of the shells, the machine-guns, the evil stenches. Even in the walls of the trenches hung the sad bones and fleshy remnants of other souls, as if some crazy farmer had sown them there, expecting in the spring a harvest of babies. At this point Willie would have believed anything. For those two days they pissed and shat where they stood, because the word ‘latrine’ belonged now to another era. It was said that even the first-aid post in a trench behind, where Father Buckley held his station over the wounded, was a sort of pigsty of blood and entrails. And there was nothing anyone could do. Father Buckley had been reported to be roving about in the darkness, with a spade, and, even under that morass of shells above and in the vile muck beneath, had been carefully finding the dead, and, with a few flashes of his spade, burying them into the entirely unstable ground, and praying over them with full and passionate prayers.
Willie Dunne never knew the first lieutenant’s name but he led them into battle on the third day.
There was another tremendous expense of shells from their own artillery far behind which served to transmute three feet of mud into five feet of mud. Nevertheless, at the appointed hour Willie and his fellows rose up and started to grapple with the ground, for the ground itself was an enemy. The mud took a hold like very hands of their boots and pulled and held them. A nasty sucking noise, and they could hazard another step. There was in that place a veritable mile to cross to reach the objective that the Mutineer had in mind. To the right again in the miserable version of daylight the men of the 36th dragged their destitute forms through the same mud. Was this what poor Willie Redmond had in mind, thought Willie Dunne? It was only a brief thought. All his other thoughts were of wetness, violent noises, hurting joints. It was as if the whole battalion had been changed into hundred-year-old men.
Great numbers were falling. Others were finding where the quagmire was even more mired than other places and the mud was just swallowing them whole. The heads of men were being taken away by the low shells, and a million bullets searched out that struggling flesh, chests, groins and faces. They were fighting for nothing now, only breath and safety, a dream of safety, and after half a mile many would have settled for death, and did. The vilest fates were reserved for the wounded, half subsided in the mud, and receiving bullet and bullet again, as if all manner of human hope were now forbidden on the earth. This was a crazy walk of death, the terminus of all lives and wishes.
All about the German area they could see no trenches. Nothing familiar at all. At set intervals in the wild mud had been built neat little concrete houses, and the machine-guns were blazing out of them. No one could storm them, because the black morass forbade it. In all truth, Christy Moran didn’t have a clue how to deal with them. He just pushed his platoon through, wh
at was left of them, and in a low voice howled to himself in the howling air.
Willie Dunne, Christy Moran, Joe Kielty, Timmy Weekes, by some weird chance that they would never be able to explicate, came up to what Christy believed was the first allotted line.
‘Where’s the others?’ said Joe Kielty, not expecting an answer.
‘Did you see where that first lieutenant got to?’ said Christy Moran with utter weariness.
Now the battalion in reserve was supposed to appear behind them in a bit and surge on wonderfully to Langemarck. Not a soul living seemed to be near them, nor a soul behind. All was a blank, black sheet of murderous nothing. It was daylight and the war had fogged the world.
Maybe it was minutes or hours but the air thinned a little about them and they saw that they were not in fact entirely alone. There were clumps of khaki uniforms all about. There seemed to be some hundreds coming behind, even thousands, as so greatly desired, and they could watch the shells dropping among them, and see in the distance the ruined soldiers falling. Every now and then Joe or Willie fired up the slope, when they thought they saw some leaping grey, like strange deer. Then a truly nasty thing - if such were possible of nasty matters further that day - happened. Willie’s stomach felt as if it had fallen out of its place and dropped down somewhere into his feet. Because over the hill in front came line after line of grey uniforms, a sight of the normally invisible enemy in horrible formation.
The few clumps of their own British troops up ahead started firing at the Germans coming down. Then Willie saw a thing that amazed him. It was Father Buckley just ahead on the wrecked ground, with his stupid shovel, digging quietly beside a corpse.
‘Father, Father!’ he called, wild in the head from this addition of fright to fright.
‘Shut up, Willie Dunne, shut up,’ said Christy Moran. ‘What in the fucking name of Jesus are you doing?’
‘Father, Father!’ he called.
The mass of German soldiers seemed to veer away down the hill to the left. They were stopping to kill everything in their path. Their own soldiers in the distance could be seen rising up out of lurking places and vainly trying to defend themselves. Some of the Irishmen tried old trench cudgels. Willie saw German and Irish with hands at each other’s throats, both squeezing and yelling out strangled cries.
By some mercy of things the battered battalion started to come up behind. The new first lieutenant found them too, much to Christy’s exhausted surprise, with some stragglers in tow. No one knew exactly what to do then, but it was true that they were now officially, as it were, relieved. The men who had just crossed that mile of destruction were screamed at by the remaining officers to go on up, and go on up they did. Christy and his companions started their weary way back. They weren’t five minutes of the way done when a wild, strange sound made them turn. They looked back where they had been. There were hordes and hordes of Germans now, pouring down on the second wave.
There were dozens of the dead along the way at every step. The stretcher bearers had come out in groups of eight because of the mud. There were shouting, screaming men being ferried back roughly, and quiet faces with closed eyes.
Next day the dread truth was shared by the survivors in little groups. They knew one of the battalions had been reduced to one wounded officer. All the rest, those very men, Willie guessed, who had passed through them at the line and pressed on ahead at the behest of their officers, were dead or missing, believed dead. And yet orders kept coming to renew the attack. A mustard-gas bomb made a lucky hit right into the field headquarters of one battalion and turned three officers into green, smoking corpses, their skins eerily crackling and sparking in the ruined aftermath. And still along the lines of runners came the orders, to the dead and the dying and the wasted hearts, ‘Renew the attack, renew the attack.’
‘Where’s Father Buckley?’ said Willie Dunne.
‘Killed in that pigsty of an aid post,’ said one. ‘He was there the whole day, giving the last rites to lads brought in. It was only a bit of corrugated iron, that fucking place. Shrapnel came right through and killed him. They buried him somewhere.’
‘But I saw him up where we were,’ said Willie Dunne. ‘I swear.’
‘He never left the aid post till they took him out to bury him.’
‘That’s the saddest thing I ever heard,’ said Willie Dunne.
‘Aye.’
At least Major Stokes struggled down eventually to see them. Otherwise they were forgotten men, in an aftermath both insane and silent. By the time he reached them even he was covered in mud up to his armpits. He was bizarrely smiling when he came round the traverse. He looked about carefully at the strange arrangements.
‘This is a terrible fucking trench, Sergeant-Major,’ he said to Christy Moran.
‘Terrible, sir. But it’s home.’
The major laughed his odd, flinty laugh, like a sheep coughing in a mist.
‘You fucking Irish. You always see the joke, at any rate.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Christy Moran.
‘Which one of you mud-men is my friend little Willie, Private Dunne?’
‘I’m here, sir,’ said Willie.
Major Stokes came sloshing over to him. Willie was perched on a little makeshift raft of ammunition boxes.
It was odd. The major took off his tin hat and put it under his arm in an official kind of fashion. It was peculiar, the formality of it. Major Stokes’ hair was quite white. It had certainly not been white the last time Willie had seen it.
The major kept his voice down now. ‘No hard feelings, Private?’ he said.
Willie was surprised but he knew the answer straight off. He didn’t really know what the major was talking about, but he knew the answer. It could have been a number of things, a number of dire things. But he knew the answer. It was the only answer in that place.
‘No, sir. No hard feelings, sir.’
Major Stokes gazed at him; it was the only word for it. He gazed. Maybe he meant to say something else, different things, maybe he would have said different things in a different place.
‘That’s very kind of you, Private,’ said the major. You couldn’t just quite tell if there was still a hint of something in the words, a flavour of insincerity. But maybe that was his tone and always had been. Maybe at the age of two with his own mother he had puzzled her with that sardonic voice.
Anyhow, the major must have felt he had said his say and sloshed away again round the next bend to see the lads further along and how things were with them.
For fifteen days they stood in the water. The Royal Army, Medical Corps boys had cleared the wounded and the dying, with a thousand curses and taking the name of the Lord their God foully and continuously in vain, but now the dire wasteland before them bristled with poor dead men and the foul air drifted against them. Liberal shells of gas and shrapnel and high explosive were thrown their way. The airplanes were all German in the sky, and they puttered down along the Allied trenches, throwing out bombs.
‘This is a right fucking war,’ said Christy Moran. ‘A right fucking war all right.’
Only in the dark of the night, the rain firing down, was there any semblance of safety, but it was a tricky, slight, little safety at best. They often thought that headquarters had forgotten them. That even their own supply battalion had forgotten them. Rare were the victuals that made it up to them; they had often to risk the horrible water that lay about everywhere if they were to have a chance to slake a thirst.
‘We were heroes only a few weeks back. Now they don’t give a kicking mule what happens to us. Bastards,’ Christy Moran kept saying.
The new first lieutenant did his best for them. He was cranking the field phone all hours of the day, half-begging for orders to get them out of there. There were only scarecrows and ragged souls of men left along that part of the line. It was a wretched state of things.
Finally there seemed to be some hope of being pulled back. It was said that a battalion of the Gloucesters were
going to relieve them.
All good things come to an end,‘ said Pete O’Hara, and his damp, cold and hungry companions laughed. Not a man among them but hadn’t thought once or twice of shooting himself in the foot, or eating a raw rat or the like, anything to be ferried away nicely. And what were they watching for now, only Death himself? If the Hun could rouse himself, there wouldn’t be much to offer him by way of warlike spirit.
The Gloucesters never did turn up. Maybe the great Leviathans of that mud world swallowed them up. There was talk of new creatures fashioning themselves from this chaos, horrible, fanged whale-like monsters that could eat a soldier in two ticks.
They read the po-faced information in their soldier’s small-books for the laugh, especially the stuff about keeping the feet dry and clean. And ‘clean dry socks’.
‘I like that bit best,’ said Willie Dunne.
There wasn’t a clean dry anything for ten miles around, he thought.
Then Christy Moran pulled a rabbit out of the hat, for Willie Dunne, anyhow.
All right, Willie,‘ said Christy Moran. ’You’re not in debt and you’re not on a charge, so I think I can spare you. Poor Father Buckley said I had to see pronto if I could get you a little home leave.‘
‘What’s that, sir?’ said Willie.