‘God rest his soul,’ murmured Willie Dunne.
Then Willie found John Williams, Joe Clancy, Joe McNulty. A dozen men and more who had been bound to him by some bond he didn’t know the explanation of. Willie’s very stomach was torn by sorrow, his very eyes were burned by sorrow, as if sorrow itself were a kind of gas. He was so disgusted somehow he thought he might puke like a dog. In the disgust was a horrible push of anger that dismayed him entirely. Like an old man, he walked back over to stand stupidly by the captain’s body.
Father Buckley was down among the dead also, going from stiff head to head, choking himself from the residues of the smoke. Now they knew it was a filthy gas sent over by the filthy Boche to work perdition on them, a thing forbidden, it was said, by the articles of war. No general, no soldier could be proud of this work; no human person could take the joy of succeeding from these tortured deaths. Father Buckley muttered quickly at each set of unlistening ears; he was anxious it would seem to include them all in the roll-calls of the saved, to get them, in particular after such an utter ruin of things, to possible paradise.
‘Is that you, Willie?’ said Father Buckley, when he reached Captain Pasley.
‘It is, Father,’ said Willie.
‘Isn’t this the saddest thing you’ve ever seen?’
‘It is, Father,’ he said.
‘Who is this man here?’ asked the priest.
‘Captain Pasley from Tinahely.’
‘Of course it is, Willie,’ said the priest, kneeling to the naked form. He did not seek to cover him up; maybe he respected this simple aspect of a ruined man. ‘I wonder what religion is written in his small-book?’
‘I think he wasn’t a Catholic, Father. Most of the strong farmers in Wicklow there are Church of Ireland men.’
‘You are probably right, Willie.’
Father Buckley knelt in close. Of course, you cannot take a last confession from a voiceless man. But there must have been some small ceremony that could be offered, because the priest was mumbling in his little singing voice.
‘Do you know his family there in Wicklow?’ said the priest then, rising stiffly.
‘I think I would know the house. The Mount it is called, I think. He used to talk about the work there. I think he loved the bit of land they have there. My grandfather will know them, I am certain.’
‘He’s a farmer there, your grandfather?’
‘He was the steward on the Humewood estate. He is one hundred and two years old now. He knows all that world.’
‘Well, if chance should bring you down that way, Willie, will you go in and tell them how he died? Not this dreadful end. But that everyone knew he elected to stay so that no one could say he left without orders.’
‘I will say it to them if I am down there because that is what happened, Father.’
‘It is.’
‘How are you yourself?’ said Father Buckley.
They stood quite carelessly, not really thinking of their safety. They knew the Germans would not shoot today. Christy Moran opined that the gas had shocked even them. They were ashamed, he said, and would let them bury the dead. The awful gap in the line that the gas had made, which had the general shouting, it was said, back at headquarters, and swearing, was not molested again in any way by them. They did not seek to take their advantage. It was as if in the laden baskets of tragedy of this war, this one act had the weight of a boulder that no man’s strength could shift. Everyone was amazed and afrighted.
‘How are you yourself, Willie?’ said the priest again when he got no answer. He wanted to say that Willie would feel the death of his first captain the most sorely, that after this it would be easier, but he didn’t say it somehow.
Willie could find no useful words to offer. He wanted to say something, at least not to show him discourtesy or roughness.
They stood there two feet apart in all that vale of tears, one man asking another how he was, the other asking how the other was, the one not knowing truly what the world was, the other not knowing either. One nodded to the other now in an expression of understanding without understanding, of saying without breathing a word. And the other nodded back to the other, knowing nothing. Not this new world of terminality and astonishing dismay, of extremity of ruin and exaggeration of misery. And Father Buckley did not know anything but grief, and Willie Dunne on that black day likewise.
Five hundred men and more of Willie’s regiment dead.
As they stood there a strange teem of rain fell down from the heavens. It rattled, veritably rattled on their human shoulders.
That evening Father Buckley was around asking if anyone wanted communion. He had a little travelling communion thing he carried. And the priest asked Willie if he wanted communion and Willie said he didn’t and then the priest took his right hand and shook it and when that was accomplished Father Buckley went on his way.
After that battle where no one fired on them and not a shell was lobbed over at them, the survivors thought their thoughts.
Willie kept thinking a queer thought. That he was only eighteen years of age, nineteen this coming birthday.
‘He should have run like the rest of us,’ was Christy Moran’s comment. ‘Not run - I mean, withdrawn.’
‘How do you mean, sir?’ said Willie Dunne suspiciously.
‘He was a fool to stay there like that, Willie; he was a fucking eejit, as a matter of fact.’
Willie was steaming about that. He couldn’t bear to hear the sergeant-major say such things. Captain Pasley had made his decision and they had made theirs. It was a sacred matter really.
Willie wanted to say this as vigorously as he could. In fact he wanted to strike the sergeant-major for himself. It was the one time he thought maybe the sergeant-major was not just a bit of a bollocks, but a bollocks through and through. It never occurred to him that the sergeant-major might have spoken only out of his own version of sorrow.
They buried their five hundred men, five hundred vanished hearts, in yet another new yard in the general mire of things.
It was a while before they could fetch a lot of them in, because the Hun soon perked up, but they managed it. The Royal Army Medical Corps boys were fearless, and there was no glamour in the job at all. And the chaplains came and said their say. Father Buckley uttered familiar words, and the Protestant chaplain likewise. The little rabbi came out also, and said a few Hebrew words for Abrahamson from Dublin and a fella called Levine from Cork. Willie Dunne and his friends sang a hymn, ‘Yea, though I Go through the Valley of Death’. Christy Moran’s voice truly sounded like a kicked dog. The men who wielded the spades were thankful enough the summer was nearly there and the earth had dried but not hardened. They were small Chinese men with little moustaches and pigtails; coolies, they were called, a race of diggers that kept themselves apart or maybe were kept apart. The Chinamen dug the holes, five hundred of them. They were filled with Catholic, Protestant and Jewish Irishmen.
Soon the places were filled with new men from home. Flocks and flocks and flocks of them, thought Willie. King George’s lambs. It was just a little inkling of a thought.
Now summer was spent in the rearrangement and building up of their battalion - that was the official plan anyhow. Their sector quietened down. They blew the blue smoke of their fags up to the blue sky. They ate like dogs and shat like kings. They stripped to the waist and got black as desert Arabs. The white skins were disappearing. Mayo, Wicklow, it didn’t matter. They might be Algerians now, some other bit of the blessed Empire.
They knew violent battles were afoot in other parts of the line and they all heard the hard stories of the Irish soldiers in the Dardanelles. Again and again was rehearsed the horrors of the landing in April, when lads had tried to get out of the ship The River Clyde onto the beach, and been gunned down in their hundreds as they emerged from rough holes cut in the bow. Dublin lads that had never seen a moment of battle till that moment of their death. The story always ended with the detail that the water had turned pink
with the slaughter.
‘So you can get yourself rightly bollocksed in any corner of the earth now,’ said Christy Moran.
‘Is that right, Sergeant-Major?’ said Willie Dunne.
‘Ah, yeh, it’s not just here, Willie, boy. Sure you have a choice now.’
‘Well, that’s handy,’ said Pete O‘Hara jocularly.
‘You see,’ said Christy Moran - he happened to be trying to pull a big stain out of his tunic with old tea, which was more or less making the stain worse - ‘you cannot keep news from an Irishman. In the old days, a new song could cross from London to Galway in a day and a night.’
‘Is that a fact, Sarge?’ said Pete O‘Hara, after a moment.
‘Anyhows,’ said Christy Moran, looking suspiciously at O‘Hara, ’a good song would cross from London to Galway, because the bellhops in the hotels would be singing it, from heart to fucking heart. It would be in Galway by nightfall. But now it’s not songs, but bad news that crosses, and crosses the world at that. From Irishman to Irishman. The fucking British army is full of us. It should be called the fucking Irish-British army.’
There was a long silence then as the listeners imbibed this notion.
‘Well, there you are, Sarge’ said Pete O’Hara.
And winter came in then like a hawk to afright the mice in the fields, like a wolf to test the stamina of his foes. Like a travelling salesman it brought all its white cloths and laces and spread them everywhere, on mucky trench sides, on battered roads, on the distant stubbled fields, it laid its stores of rime and frost in little luckless pockets, in turns of earth, it tried to go one better than the spring, giving the girlish trees long coats of glistening white, tenderly and murderously gilding the lily of everything, the autumn’s wildflowers bravely putting out a few mad flags of red and yellow. Thunderously without a whisper it drove the sap back in every green thing such as remained after the long destruction of the warring men.
Now Willie’s lot were shunted back almost to the edge of the true world where there were quite peaceful-looking farms all frosted and beautiful under the moon, crisp and familiar as some stretch of Irish midlands under the struggling light of day. Even woods were impressively standing. The roads were all cobbled with mere fieldstones as you might find in a Wicklow yard, and they were rough ways to walk upon, in your hobnailed boots. But they marched the roads in three stages, and although they were weary from the stretch in the trenches, nevertheless they took some pride in their marching. Exhausted boys were carried by their pals, so as not to hinder the rate of progress. It was good to get the blood going round and it was better than sitting in trenches with the frost threatening fingers, toes and noses without cease. There was a timetable for everything and it pleased the men to make their distances on time.
Maud had sent him out a sheepskin jacket for his nineteenth birthday and Willie wore it gratefully in the fierce air. His legs thumped along the roads. He thought time and again of the gangs of men that would have lain these cobbles in. He wondered did they batter up a mix of clay and ashes like they would at home, and spread out the slush till it rose about two inches from the required level, and then on their knees, had they pressed in the cobbles and tamped them level with a decent floor beam? He didn’t think there could be a hundred ways to do such a job. He began to think indeed that the methods of building were common to men everywhere, the ways of the ants and the ways of the bees were known to ants and bees wherever they might range about. He saw that the roads had been given a nice camber, so that the rain would run off quick and not cause mischief. There were miles and miles of it, with oftentimes highly pleasing stands of poplars for miles also.
The people in the farms seemed indifferent to them.
O‘Hara marched beside him, and O’Hara wasn’t a bad fellow by any gauge. His red hair burned out from under his helmet.
Captain Sheridan, the new man in after poor Pasley, had a very merry way about him. He might have been thought handsome but that he had two queer-looking blooms of red, broken veins or the like, on his cheeks, which gave him the air of a circus clown at first sight. But he liked to hear the men singing anyhow.
And it did Willie Dunne more good than food to open his mouth and heart and sing ‘Tipperary’, the long line of men bawling it out.
Every man Jack of them knew ‘Tipperary’ and sang it as if most of them weren’t city-boys but hailed from the verdant fields of that county. Probably every man in the army knew it, whether he was from Aberdeen or Lahore. Even the coolies sang ’Tipperary’ while they dug; Willie had heard them.
The men near to him liked to hear Willie sing because his voice reminded them of the music hall. It was as good as any of those tuppenny tenors they had there. Pete O‘Hara too, it was noted, had a decent voice.
Then they sang ‘Your Old Kit Bag’. And they sang ‘Charlotte the Harlot’, which was a good song, and they sang ‘Take Me back to Dear Old Blighty’, even though none of them were from dear old Blighty, but how and ever.
‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ was a favourite but not on a march; that was for some quiet evening in the reserve trenches.
Then, by request of the captain, they sang ‘Do Your Balls Hang Low’. It had been a revelation and an especial delight that Captain Sheridan, unlike Captain Pasley, who had been a little restrained in such matters, favoured this song above all other marching songs:
Can you sling them on your shoulder
Like a lousy fucking soldier
Do your balls hang low?
Like Dan Leno dancing the fucking clog dance, Willie sang it - with infinite passion. It was a wonderful odd thing to see Captain Sheridan up on his horse, his head thrown back, bawling out those happy words to the lowering winter sky. Under his hat he looked like a boy, did Sheridan. And that passed a mile or two just nicely.
The only thing different now was that when Willie sang too mightily he felt a dire need to cough. It was the little bit of gas remaining, he thought, in his chest, some little whirling marble of wretched gas that was upsetting his means of singing. But the men didn’t mind a bit of spluttering and for the most part he got through without too much impediment.
He was gay enough, in such singing times. But he couldn’t shake off the feeling of being knackered, knackered somewhere deep in himself - something going wrong, in the very centre. In the corner of his eye there was always a black shadow now, something, someone, some afflicted figure looming there, like an angel or a meagre spectre. He couldn’t quite make out the features of the spectre but he thought it might be Captain Pasley. It chilled him. And in general terms now he found it impossible to get truly warm, which was, he knew, an affliction of old men.
The sorrow he had felt at the death of his captain, and Williams and Clancy, something had happened to that sorrow. It had gone rancid in him, he thought; it had boiled down to something he didn’t understand. The pith of sorrow was in the upshot a little seed of death.
Sometimes he wanted to cry out against his officers, his fellows, even his own heart, and he didn’t know what stopped him, he didn’t.
Chapter Five
They were adjudged to have been through a bit of bother and then a long time left in trenches and were being rested conscientiously in Amiens. It would not last more than a few days, and they had to make the most of it.
Willie Dunne and O‘Hara went forth one evening from their billet to see what they could see. The sun was falling off the edge of the world like a burning man. The sergeant-major had given them good directions and they had a scrap of paper with the name of a street on it, which brought them to the best estaminet in Amiens, for a private soldier, anyhow. And it was bursting with private soldiers, of many different regiments, strangers to Willie and Pete O’Hara, but also, being marked by the shadows of the same war, not strangers. The drink of the place was a shit-coloured beer.
Willie Dunne had not been a man for drinking in his short life and yet he had taken his ration of bleak rum now every day this last few months, and he
found the beer was like water in his mouth.
But he liked the bolts to be loosened on his concerns like any other soldier. He liked the warm swill of the beer and the heat in his stomach and the thoughts it prompted.
‘Well, Pete, this is not so bad now!’ he shouted to O‘Hara above the din of the estaminet.
‘What’s that?’ called O‘Hara.
‘Not so bad now!’ shouted Willie.
‘Not so bad!’
This wasn’t a spot he could have brought Gretta, anyhow. He wished so deep in his heart that she had been able to take up her pen more often - or even once, for the love of Jesus - and write to him. Maybe she had written and the letters had gone astray, as any letters might in the strange ‘streets’ and ’avenues’ of the trenches. The first time he ever saw her she had been writing, so he knew she had the alphabet and all the rest; of course she did, she had brains to burn.
‘More beer, Willie, more beer!’ shouted O‘Hara.
‘More beer, more beer!’ called Willie.
The ruined face of Captain Pasley hung over all like a moon. The man in the moon was Captain Pasley with his twisted arms and his dancing hands.
Willie’s head was rushing now.
Maybe there was a poison in this tepid water. Maybe there was worse than poison, maybe there were dead men’s destroyed dreams milled down into powder and scattered in these bitter glasses.
Now the room was a wash of colours, as if the room itself were a glass of suspect beer. The khaki jackets smeared in long trails, the laughing, shouting faces likewise, like the balls of comets foretelling neither good things nor bad, empty omens, horribly empty men.