Employment ends when Simon Cousins has a rare thought and is thinking to follow not the herring no more but the bits of his family that have taken the ship to America, from the deepwater harbour of Killinghome Creek. Indeed and the herring are a poor show in that year and there is growing talk of the new war coming that will be fought mostly at sea, and Simon Cousins hare-brained or not has no desire to fish among fighting ships. He did not like that great ship of doomed souls bearing eastwards. He and Eneas and some other lads heel up the old boat in the yard above the fishing harbour, against a time when Simon Cousins might tire of walking the pavements of gold in New York and return to fish the darkest waters on God’s dark earth. Then there is a curious and wordless party, with silent drinking of good Grimsby ale and a sort of truncated goodbye and fare thee well, with a hand as hard as a turtle placed on Eneas’s shoulder, and a brief ‘Good man,’ briefly spoken.
‘C’ Company Depot
Berkshire
Dear Mam,
Here I am in my uniform writing to you and I hope you have received my letter of the last summer where I was letting you know of my change in employment. The herrings are quite gone out of the northern grounds they say because they know the war has come. I hope you are fit and well at home and I read that you are all to be on short rations like the English though you do not go out to fight. Many here think the Irish President is a poor man not to help Europe but who is to have the say of that, not me. I am in the King’s clothes again and God knows it will not help my case in Sligo but then I believe surely I am beyond help there. Please do write to me here as regular as you like and Pappy too if he has a mind and I wonder what Jack will fix to do in the present emergency will he join up or what. I suppose even Tom is an ould fella like myself and might do likewise but I know in other letters you say he is a busy man and well up in Sligo and why not. But I am thinking that there is work also to be done out there in France and other places and I will go there to do that. We are fixed to go shortly. Mam, you are ever in my thoughts and Pappy too, keep well and dry as they say, and remember your fond son always.
Love,
Eneas.
And out he goes indeed, ever mindful of those old fields of France, but also now of that strange ship he saw strangely gliding over the cold waters to Germany as if in the sunken morning of a terrible dream.
10
AT LAST AFTER MUCH DRILLING and training and some understanding of the philosophies of officers, the latter the darkest task of all, he is sent with his new comrades to rescue France from the threat of Hitler. He is put in a high wide boat and he sails to the cherished shore as if upon a daytrip, except there is little ease, the crowd of men anxious or light-hearted as character dictates, but all itchy and steaming in the pitching holds. And France looks immaculate in her fields and towns, with her high skies and the heavy flush of flowers upon the thoroughfares. And he goes about with his companions whither he is urged by the flustered officer.
In the fullness and the dread of time the imaginary and tender line of Maginot is sorely broken, and Eneas and all the army of the King is driven back to the shore. And to reach that shore they pass through districts livid with fear and death, and through columns of lost people they pass, men and women without homes and deep in rags and, he supposes, an echo and a remembering icon of those perished souls along the Irish seaboards a hundred years before, when the hag of Famine showed her dark face and dripping bones.
There is only terror at the shore. Most terrifying of all, inducing in all his comrades and himself a sort of madness, a ferocious dizziness and misery of the heart, is the heaving and fantastically flinging and extravagant lobbing of bombs and the deathly singing and whine of bullets, and when the sand is reached at last, and he and his fellows are miraculously intact, it is a misery, a depth of horror, to witness the broil of milling men, and death coming suddenly amid clumps of soldiers, like children killed at the hems of their mothers’ skirts. For Eneas can see that there are a hundred craft heaving on the pitiful tide, fishing boats like in Grimsby days and other unnamable boats that look like pilot-boats and estuary pleasure-boats and even dainty yachts show gaudy colours in the white surf, and it is as if some tremendous holiday, some longed-for visit of a royal yacht, was taking place on the sea, and just beside it, on the bloodied sand, the filthiest and most wretched of wars, with nothing between but the unheard thundering of the waves. And everywhere along the torn material of the tideline, soldiers are trying to reach the affectionate craft, though the seas ride high against them. And by God many a man is drowned in the murderous surf, weighed down by his freight of arms and kit, by the panic of his own soul. There is the screaming of human extremity and the deepest cacophany of bombs and in all instances and through the gaps of all, Eneas lends an ear to the weak music of his officer ever failing to give his charges guidance. And there is sad panic and blood torn out of bodies in a savage system of fountains, the drops bursting and falling, slowly, slowly they fall, and ravaging disaster. Eneas surveys the miraculous carnage and destitution of the beach, a shocking and afflicted painting utterly without the mercy and wisdom of women, and France is a field of fire and the German guns wherever they lie make a firmament of fire. And when a bomb, machined not for mercy, splits its belly open violently two hundred yards from Eneas, there is an extraordinary silence suddenly for him, he stops still, useless, dark, and stares into the bleakest silence. His companions are abruptly dying, their living forms ruptured, boys of England and Ireland are dying, the excited officer himself is erased by a shard of shrapnel removing his gabbling head, it lies on the simple sand complete with neat hat, there is fire, darkest fire, and then silence, and then deeper silence. Eneas stands on the beach arrested by this triumph of killing, with the orchestra of war soundlessly roaring.
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life. He is thinking these thoughts. Was cast into the lake of fire. Hours have passed. Eneas McNulty looks to the west where he imagines more ships may be, to bring home the ruined men. Perhaps no more will come. The living have been taken off the shore but the dead are left lying. His own face is a mask of dark putty. A thousand years of English ships bringing bright soldiers to these shores of France, and now, everything backwards and destroyed. Seemingly the saving of France was never to be done. A moon blowing like a flag hangs in the lower sky, clambering about you would think in the distant copses. A little acre of the strand is on fire from a leaky vehicle that got halfway down the beach and probably exploded. Anyway it is blazing away now. There is no smell of death exactly because all the boys are too newly killed. He wouldn’t care to have a dekko at the faces in case they are late pals, but there is a hundred, two hundred must be, corpses set near him on the beach by death — in the places they found individually death. And all along the sand no doubt in the darkness are hundreds more. He has stood there fixed as a post for hours, and deaf as a post into the bargain. He feels queerly as if he has been away somewhere flying through the bright gold of the ether that glues the stars but truthfully he has not budged. Now in the lonesome aftermath everything is wildly still, and for all the world you might say that the sound of burning might be the moon herself, trying to get out of the tangled trees. Now she rises. He is standing near the slight lapping of the oily waters and surveying in a calm manner the burning beach and the ruined men. Liverpool, Manchester, London, Newcastle, Belfast, Sligo, Dundee, Cardiff…
The moon rises over Eneas’s France. He is forty, no, he is forty-two or three, he can’t say any more. Time is a dark puzzle, certainly. No sense saying he knows where he is because he does not, damn well does not. Even the name of the beach eludes him and when he heard the name first it had a Scottish sound to it but he has forgotten it now. Even if he could remember the name what help would it be?
He moves his shoulders in his tunic against the black chill of the night air flooding across the calmed sea. He checks in his head for a song but there’s nothing going on there, in his head. Usually he finds a littl
e music there, a little scattering of notes from his father’s fading repertoire. ‘The Lass of Dunloe’ or ‘The Merry Merchants’ Reel’. ‘Peg Vallelly’s Leg’ or ‘The Nights of Armagh’. Looks like they’re gone now for sure. He wishes these youngsters would rise up and shake off the wet sand and gather their clothes about them and he would go on down the beach with them in the absence of the broken officer. In the passionate but quiet fashion of soldiers. Everything had been against them, the food, the weather, the officers, their innocence of the world, but nothing of that sort could have killed them. Eneas carries his own sergeant major’s stripes on his uniform. They said when he volunteered that an older man was worth three recruits and indeed without a word of a lie he would lay himself down in blood and misery now if three of these young fellas might rise. Maybe another man might tell you that these two hundred souls are rising as sweetly as the moon through the diesel fumes and floating up against the colours of the moon and travelling away up into the darkening heavens like balloons that have escaped the hands of children. To go back to the points of light they came from, some eighteen, twenty years ago. What is a life, to be ended like this? What is a hundred? Eneas hasn’t a notion. Nor can he allow that his own life has been worth saving. He doesn’t even know what his life has been, whether it has a weight or a value. Any damn priest looking for his soul would say it had if he asked him, but Eneas is no questioner of that kind.
The fields of France, they have been killed for the saving of the fields of France. That’s the why and the what of it.
Assured in his heart of the truth of that, Eneas turns about and, setting his back against the sea, walks again up into the selfsame France. In the caves of his ears he hears all the oceans of the earth bellowing with storms and crying sailors. Though he can see through his eyes well enough, yet he walks like a blind man through the remnants of confusion, and goes on into some lonesome woods by the mercy of Shank’s pony, walking straight forward, like a small child in a meadowland or indeed a forest, straight, with some purpose unknown, and never looking back.
The night sky is bluer than a beetle’s back. Now in a hayrick, growing ever more lonesome, he has a go at resting. The hayrick is very brown and damp from sitting there untended and the grasses at its circling base are tall, all a mockery of husbandry. The lasses who built the rick were maybe dead under the same grasses somewhere or gone away down the white road to Dieppe or wherever they considered a refuge. He thinks of the girls in some lost evening after a day or two of excellent driving weather — no, France had ever an embarrassment of that, he knows — but he thinks of them with their dresses tucked up into their fabulous drawers and their thick brown arms and their laughter and talk, there in a gap of happiness in the war, a hedgegap of happiness. Of course he is imagining the girls, maybe a mere man and his labourers built it, and set it up new and fresh when this darkened field with its hedges grown out like a simpleton’s hair was cut to the very yellow stalks of the grass, deep where the sun had not reached, and you could not walk over it in bare feet for fear of tiny cuts, and all the weather of that day was lambent and telling the men lies of ease and hope as they worked. He is rustling in the rick like an exhausted dog, a dog that’s been run too long through the hills after rabbits and such. He is afflicted now by these trembles. He nips out onto the thick grass and shits very quickly and neatly and is back in his nest before he knows where he is. Half of his thinking head is still out on the grasses, half is back in the hayrick. There’s a big aching in the roots of his brains. He is like a poisoned man before the poison starts to make him sick — discombobulated and swimming in the head. The souls of his friends are washing against his face and chest like pigeons, they are kind of clamouring for his attention, he does not fancy it at all. Yet at the same time he is fervently spreading his arms and sweeping in the souls close to him to nurture them and to nurture himself, a blanket of souls. The night sky just some moments past so peaceful, so blue, is speckled with gold faces nattering at him, talking loudly, like travellers in a great station. There is fierce goodbying and waving and promises. He wishes he were not the fool in the hayrick but instead going off with the noisy men to whatever Dieppes and Dovers heaven could boast of.
The solemn night entirely perplexes him. He discovers that having seen the dead he can scarcely retrieve a sense of himself as a living man. The enduring grasses and the murdered daughters of the rick seem more real, infinitely so. The night breeze with its cargo of cold plays in the rick. There is purpose in everything except him, one of the saviours of France. Once as a living boy he learned the world, so how has he now unlearned it? Where is the schoolmaster of the lessons of this night? Backward lessons. The trembles stop and a decent moon rides up above the unruly clouds in the low night. What he feels is a pure panic. He wants to leap from the rick and gallivant about the ruined meadows, darting through the broken farms like a friendly ghost, a playful familiar. It is sickening in his belly with all the jumble of things in his rowdy head, he does not even feel he owns his head and belly. The things of his life gone by and the present push of the day just gone are ganging up against him. God help the wanderer. God help the trained soldier with his stripes, and this the pass he has come to. There was no particular training for disaster, annihilation and blind panic. With a proper leap he ups and drags out through the flying straws and waves his arms and jumps up and down with good bangs of his boots on the roasted earth. He twirls about like a bloody dancer. High in the lonesome batter of the sky the souls of his friends are well and truly departed. Then a demon comes at him through the murk of the field’s edge, a veritable demon all small and hard and he gets a terrific blow against his head with a weapon he does not even see. As he goes down falling like a treetrunk he is laughing, never a man to forgo laughter. After all he is a living man amid the dead in the occupied lands and there would be no sense in a peaceable night in a hayrick, like a farmhand waiting for a straw-headed belle. Out, out go the lights of the dark.
Cocoa, sugar and cold water. You have to take these ingredients very carefully from their niches without your mother seeing. Now you are under the kitchen table in the safety of the shadows with the heat from the kitchen stove to delight you. And you mix the sugar against the cocoa and stir in a spoon of water and you eat it slowly, secretly, grandly, and are so overwhelmingly comforted that you don’t mind now when inevitably you are caught, or the pilfering is detected …
He’s deep in this dream of a forgotten safety, deep in it, all coiled and happy in it, when he hears against the brittle walls of the dream a voice trying he believes to wake him. The voice is like a hard old blackthorn stick to prod a cow along a way with. It’s prodding him now, prodding him away from that precious concoction. He’s struggling because the dream is excellent and the voice is nail-hard and real. Unfortunately now the voice is paired to a broken old face that looms up as he opens his eyes. For a moment he is at one with this mystery, contented, interested. Then his head booms about like a hungry seal on a ledge, there is a filthy tide rushing through his ears, and he sits up and throws up sudden bile from his empty stomach. The old man with the hard voice and the harder face hurls himself back. But the devil’s laughing.