‘They think we’re from the circus. A battalion of pals from the circus, I bet,’ said Clancy. He was as plump as the day he had come in, despite the training, and as confident as a robin in winter.
‘You can’t tell a man’s length sitting down,’ said Willie agreeably.
‘That’s not what Maisie says!’ said Private Clancy. Clancy was from south Dublin somewhere.
‘I don’t think there’s anyone called Maisie where you live,’ said Williams. ‘They’re all Winnies and Annies there!’
Now, Willie Dunne’s middle sister was Annie, so he didn’t quite follow the friendly insult here. But he thought it might be a rural reference.
‘Ah well,’ said Clancy. ‘It’s a saying. I pay no heed to anyone but Maisie - she bakes the currenty cake. Did you never hear that, Johnnie?’
‘What in the fucking world does it mean?’ said Williams.
‘I couldn’t tell you. A saying isn’t supposed to mean anything. It’s supposed to - what in the name of fuck is a saying supposed to do, Willie?’
‘Jesus, don’t ask me,’ said Willie Dunne.
‘Too many cooks spoil the broth,’ said Clancy inconse- quentially.
‘There’s no hearth like your own hearth,’ said Williams.
Willie in his mind’s eye saw for the thousandth time his three sisters milling in the pantry, Annie getting under Maud’s elbows and Dolly getting under any elbows going. And his father shouting from the front room not to be roaring at each other. And the fire of Welsh coals roaring in the big black iron grate, speaking of the collieries. And the chimney howling in the wind, and the skies blowing about outside in the deep winter.
And it was not a world he had thought he would ever leave; you didn’t think that at the time - you didn’t know.
He thought he knew what a saying was supposed to do, despite his denial. A saying, since a saying arises always from the mouths of adults when a person was just a listening child, was supposed to carry you back there, like a magic trick, or a scrap of a story, or something with something else still sticking to it. But he had no inclination to bother his pals with such a winding thought.
The seats of the train were made of wood; it was really a fourth-class carriage in its civilian days. There must have been a hundred trains rushing across all the old shires of England, coming down out of the highlands, from the dirty north, from the sedate south, bringing all the boys to the war. And some were more than boys, men in their thirties and forties, even a few aged ones in their fifties. It wasn’t all a young fella’s game.
When he went to the jacks to piss he thought he was pissing with a new dexterity. He could think of only one word to describe everything, bloody manhood at last.
In that strange six o‘clock when the sun just began to mark the dark horizon.
‘See,’ said Clancy, ‘they don’t mean a blessed thing, bloody sayings. They’re not supposed to.’
They went through from the French port in real transports, big, groaning lorries the like of which he had not seen before.
As they approached the war, it was as if they went through a series of doors, each one opened briefly and then locked fast behind them.
At first it was the miraculous and shining sea, like some great magician was trying to make a huge mirror out of dull metal, and half succeeding, half failing.
Then the salty farms and then the flat chill fields, with little modest woods and high straight trees along the grey roads. Well, the roads were almost white, because the weather had been unusually dry. So one of the lads said it looked like home except with the mountains flattened out and the people were in queer clothes.
It was thrilling to travel through that foreign place. Willie Dunne was ravished by the simple joy of seeing new places of the earth. He sat up in his seat so he could peer out through the planking of the truck and thrummed with pleasure. He found himself comparing this serene landscape to the country place he knew best, the fields and estates around the home place of his old grandfather in Kiltegan. There was nothing here to compare to the mysterious heights of Lugnaquilla, the folds and folds of its great hills, like a gigantic pudding not ever to be entirely folded in, that would bring a traveller at last into the city of Dublin.
But sober as it was, the landscape overwhelmed him.
He sat with his new companions Williams and Clancy. Across the gap sat his company sergeant-major Christy Moran, a wraith of a fellow from Kingstown with the face of an eagle. If there was fat on that body, Willie was not a Christian. The man was all sinew, like a carpet at the mills in Avoca before they start to work the loom at it. He was all long threads going one way only.
Willie had been pleased to discover also as they had boarded the Dublin train at Limerick Junction that their platoon leader was a young captain from Wicklow, one of the Pasleys of the Mount, and Willie’s father when he wrote to tell him was pleased also, because everyone knew the Pasleys and they were highly respected people and had a lovely garden there around their house. Willie’s father indeed was sure the captain would be a chip off of the old block, just as he himself was a chip off the old block of his father, who had been steward of Humewood in his heyday, and just as Willie was a chip off him.
The big transport lurched on towards the war. He felt so proud of himself he thought his toes might burst out of his boots. In fact he imagined for a moment that he had grown those wanting inches, and might go now after all and be a policeman if he chose, astonishing his father. The men of the decent world had been asked by Lord Kitchener to go and drive back the filthy Hun, back where they belonged, in their own evil country beyond the verdant borders of Belgium. Willie felt his body folding and folding over and over with pride like the very Wicklow mountains must feel the roll of heather and the roll of rain.
It was this country he had come to heal, he himself, Willie Dunne. He hoped his father’s fervent worship of the King would guide him, as the lynchpin that held down the dangerous tent of the world. And he was sure that all that Ireland was, and all that she had, should be brought to bear against this entirely foul and disgusting enemy.
The blood in his arms seemed to flush along his veins with a strange force. Yes, yes, he felt, though merely five foot six, that he had grown, it was surely an absolute fact, something in him had leaped forth towards this other unknown something. He could put it no clearer than that in his mind. All confusion he had felt, all intimations that troubled him and unsettled him, melted away in this euphoria. He was full of health after the nine-month slog in Fermoy. His muscles were like wraps of prime meat to make a butcher happy. The lecturers at Fermoy had described the cavalry engagements that would soon be possible, and there would be no more of that miserable retreat that had made the beginning of the war a horror, killing indeed so many of the old Dublin Fusiliers and making prisoners of heroes. The enemy lines would be burst asunder now by this million of new men that had come out at Lord Kitchener’s behest. It was obvious, Willie thought. A million was a terrible lot of men. They would smash the line in a thousand places, and the horses and their gallant riders would be brought up and they would go off ballyhooing across open ground, slashing at the ruined Germans with their sabres. And good enough for them. Their headgear would stream in the foreign sun and the good nations would be relieved and grateful!
‘Why are you lashing your arm about?’ said Clancy playfully.
‘Was I, Joe?’ he said, laughing.
‘You nearly had my head off,’ said Joe Clancy of the village of Brittas in County Dublin - not the seaside place, mind, as he often was driven to point out. The other Brittas. Without the sea.
‘The other fucking Brittas!’ Williams had said when this litany was first rehearsed. ‘For the love of God!’
‘I’m sorry, Joe,’ said Willie. ‘Isn’t it a fine, long-looking country?’ he said.
Then suddenly a hand of fear dipped into his stomach. What a curious thing. One moment as brave as a young bird. Well, he felt as if he might even throw up his br
eakfast, truth to tell. And that had been three gristly black sausages murdered into life by the cook, so he didn’t want to see them again.
‘Jaysus, what’s the matter, Private? You have gone very green,’ said Christy Moran, the sergeant-major.
‘Ah, just the rocking about, sir.’
‘He’s not used to travelling in style, sir,’ said Clancy.
The truckload of men laughed.
‘Don’t be puking this direction,’ said another lad.
‘Someone open a window for the poor bollocks!’
‘There’s no fucking window!’
‘Well, you’ll have a lapful of warm puke if you don’t!’
‘No, no,’ said Willie, ‘it’s all right, lads. I feel better now.’
‘Poor fucker,’ said Clancy and gave him a bang on the back. ‘Poor bloody fucker.’
And Willie brought up the sausages, though they didn’t look like sausages, and they spread like a little plate of guts on the wooden flooring.
He’d have been fine if he hadn’t been banged on the back like that.
‘Oh, you little bollocks,’ said the sergeant-major.
When they came into their trench he felt small enough. The biggest thing there was the roaring of Death and the smallest thing was a man. Bombs not so far off distressed the earth of Belgium, disgorged great heaps of it, and did everything except kill him immediately, as he half expected them to do.
He was shivering like a Wicklow sheepdog in a snowy yard, though the weather was officially ‘clement’.
The first layer of clothing was his jacket, the second his shirt, the third his long-johns, the fourth his share of lice, the fifth his share of fear.
‘This fucking British army, I hate it,’ said Christy Moran, in the doubtful glamour of his own mucky British uniform.
They were all gathered, the platoon, around a small brazier with weakling coals. But the murky twilight was fairly warm and the bombardment had stopped.
The last three murderous, racketing hours Christy Moran had been on watchful duty with a fiddly mirror. It had been enough to drive a sane man to madness. The angle and catch on it had been driving him spare, some patented piece of genius to serve the brave man in the trenches. He had been trying to scope out across the tormented acres for any sign of grey figures rising from the reasonably distant trenches. Those mysterious strangers, but in the same breath neighbours, the fucking enemy. And now on top of that there was no sign of the hot grub that would make the long night bearable, not to mention the rum ration, the most essential bit of kit outside tobacco, chewing or smoking.
Christy Moran was talking now to himself, or the mirror, or the men of the platoon. It was to put something against the dirty silence. A sort of whining silence it was. He was white in the face from lack of sleep.
Willie Dunne couldn’t even hear him right; it was a muddle and a trickle of words. But it did a good thing, it dispelled that fog of panic that he had begun to know, at all turns of the days.
It was Christy Moran’s heartfelt creed, his inner understanding, his root of joy. It was not talk for captains or second or first lieutenants and not meant to be, either. It was for the ordinary Irish philosopher that the generality of enlisted men in this stretch of forlorn torment were, men of the Dublin back streets, or the landsmen of some Leinster or Wicklow farmer, the latter being fellas that might not even understand the thrust of Christy Moran’s argument, being often loyal, unthinking and accepting sort of men.
‘The same fucking army that always done for us. Held me head down in all of history and drownded me and me family, and all before, like fucking dogs, and made a heap of us and burned us for black rebels. English bastards, bastards the lot, and poor people like me and the father and his oul da and his again and all going back, all under the boot, and them just minding their own business, fishing out of Kingstown Harbour till they were blue in the teeth.’
But Christy Moran had no truck with diatribe just for the sake of it. He paused, dug a hand into the seam of his jacket, pulled out a pinch of lice, crushed them in a hopeless manner, and said: ‘And I’m out here, I’m out here fighting for the same fucking King.’
And indeed it was a known fact that Christy Moran’s da had been in the army before him, and in a different mood the sergeant-major might tell them about that same da in the trenches under Sebastopol in the Crimean War.
But it was quite pleasant eating the tinned maconochie then, instead of good hot grub, all of them there, and shaking their heads at the sergeant-major’s energy and lingo. Because you could be shot for less, they knew. But they knew it was just the fiddly bloody mirror and the noise that had annoyed him, and the fact that the ration detail hadn’t showed - or the blessed rum.
‘It’s fucking stand-to in five minutes, Willie,’ said Christy Moran, ‘so lug your arse to the latrine and do your business, and then mount the fucking fire-step for a lookout before the captain comes out of his fucking dugout and has your arse for a handbag.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Willie Dunne.
‘Williams, Clancy, McCann, all you buggers, likewise,’ he said. And the men of the platoon stirred like disturbed woodlice. ‘I’ve a horrible feeling the captain has plans for us tonight, I do,’ he said.
McCann was a quiet sort of a sourpuss of a man from Glasnevin, with a face that looked like it was spattered with smuts of soot, but that was only because it was perpetually unshaven.
So while one man kept a watch, the rest went round the traverse to the latrines. There were four nice big buckets there with wooden planks above for seats and the men eagerly took their turn. It was like a drug, when the shit left them, the body seemed to race high into happiness. It might have been the poisonous, but hopefully nutritious, stuff in those tins.
Christy Moran however merely suffered. He sat like an afflicted saint on the wooden seating. He scowled and moaned. Little lines of red and blue seemed to gather on his thin cheeks. He looked like a whiskey drinker that hadn’t had a drink for ten days. He was the very picture of suffering.
‘If a man could have a wash and steam his poor bollocks in a tub of hot water, that would be some recompense for this fucking torture of pissing fire,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Clancy helpfully.
‘I didn’t fucking say anything,’ said Christy Moran, genuinely surprised.
‘You did, Sarge,’ said Clancy, ‘you said -’
‘I never spoke,’ said Christy Moran.
‘You did, sir,’ said Clancy, in a friendly way.
And Sergeant-Major Moran looked at him with real fright. It was a fact that the sergeant-major had a little problem. He thought he was only thinking his thoughts and not speaking his thoughts. It was odd. But they were beginning to get a handle on their sergeant-major. They certainly liked him, all guff and gristle that he was.
‘Mother of the good Jesus,’ said Christy Moran, and he pissed at last like a free man, and his bowels mercifully opened.
‘Hallelujah,’ said McCann, quietly, and lifted up his big square hands to the skies.
Now at least they understood the purpose of the bombardment. That night not a crumb of fresh grub reached them from the rear.
The unwearying Boche had worked out where those supply trenches were, not merely because they had been their own trenches in a previous time, but because a watchful airplane passed over yester-eve. That pilot must have bollocking returned the information to his artillery, like a gillie guiding huntsmen.
Now those bombs had fallen, right on top of the supply boys. Not only were those lads incinerated, blown out among the atoms of Flanders, but the vats of soup had been spilled and ruined. The rum was roasted. The tobacco was turned to ashes.
By the fucking boys of East Bavaria.
Chapter Three
In those days, as chance would have it, or the striving plots of generals, they did not rise up and crest the parapets.
They were dug in God hardly knew where, although wise maps had their numbers, and t
he river was said to be not too far off. But what river Willie never was sure. His ear wasn’t attuned to the strange, harsh names. Their trench was called Sackville Street anyhow; that was enough to be going on with.
Willie and the other lads knew there had been a great battle hereabouts, because coming up to the line they had passed little clusters of graves, on fenced-in patches of ground, and oftentimes little posies - a man’s idea of a posy, a few wilting wildflowers - left on the gradually sinking mounds. So they knew companions had briefly mourned there, and gone on, maybe to death themselves.
So they wondered about that in their private minds. They had their own company padre, a long, pained-looking man called Father Buckley, who darted among them like a spaniel dog, his back bent like an old woman. He petted them like sons.
But grief was as common as whistle-tunes in that place. It wasn’t just their own crowd.
Willie knew that the French soldiers in the defence of their beloved country had lost half a million souls already, young fellas like himself who had leaped forward into bullets and bombs with the passions of loyalty and youth. He supposed they lay all about their afflicted homeland like beetroots rotting in the fields. He tried to imagine what it would be like if this war were being fought in Ireland, across the plains of black Mayo, across the mountains of Lugnaquilla and Keadeen.
Later that night Willie Dunne’s hands were shaking. He was looking at them, these hands of eighteen summers. They were shaking slowly, but he was not causing them to shake.
Willie was not thinking of the killed supply party exactly. But his hands were.
‘Jesus,’ said Christy Moran, ‘I wish I was meeting some girl at the monument on Kingstown promenade.’
He lit a lovely woodbine and sucked at the skinny cigarette. He hoped tomorrow some weary bollockses would make it up to them with supplies, because he had only thirty fags left, and that wouldn’t do a man a night.