A Long Long Way (11 page)

They were danced, O‘Hara and himself, into a deeper room. Willie went crashing down onto a mattress that had lived a long and ruinous life - there were fearsome gashes in it all over and the hair of a dozen horse tails was spewing out. The room stank of powder, something like oil, and other odd, fierce smells.

But the girl who had pulled him up to dance was a beauty right enough. Truth to tell she was. He lay on the ancient bed and looked up at her. She wore only a loose shift and a long petticoat like a queer metal, and he glanced hastily at her fat, trim breasts, in case she would take offence at his staring. From the crown of her head dropped hair as black as a dark corner. Thick, thick black hair like a smudge of night she had, and clear, clever eyes the colour of the dark blue feathers in a magpie. My God, he thought, she was like a goddess. She seemed to Willie more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen.

‘Money for fuck?’ she said.

‘Hah?’ he said. But he knew what she had said, because she had said it very clearly, through her small, sharp teeth.

‘Shillings,’ she said. ‘Fuck shillings?’

He looked over at O‘Hara and he had wasted no time at all and had climbed up on the other girl. His bare arse was pumping in and out, but his trews were pulled only down to his knees. Two little footballs of lard, it looked like. Two other soldiers were at the same work indistinctly in other corners. The girl leaned down and took the hem of her petticoat in her brown hands, and slowly raised herself again, her breasts tumbling about a little in a way that made Willie’s pecker so hard it was trying to strangle itself on his under-drawers. As she straightened, the hem was raised, and her thighs revealed, the skin as white as eggs, and then the pitch-black shiny hair between her legs.

‘Mercy,’ said Willie.

She smiled and dropped the petticoat and he smelled the heat from there blown out at him. She unfastened his belt and trousers, and pulled trousers and drawers down with a rough yank. Willie glanced down at himself, the flattened wig of his hairs there, and his pecker lolling to one side but blatantly uncovered. He was suddenly afraid that O‘Hara would see him naked but he had no need to worry about that. O’Hara was deep in his own pleasure, and was gasping and giving out little shouts. The girl as beautiful and rare as a black rose hoisted her petticoat again and climbed neatly onto him, and leaned her face to his, and laid her soft cheek on his. She manoeuvred his pecker into herself and suddenly he felt that graceful heat.

It was remarkable, he thought, how tender he felt towards her. He sort of loved her for that while. He tried to gaze into her eyes right enough, but she wasn’t a one for gazing it seemed. When he came it felt like what he thought being shot in the spine might feel like.

Then he seemed to sleep and awake. It wasn’t like proper time passing.

The girl was over in the corner, sluicing her crotch out at a chipped enamel basin. He felt as if his brain were loose in his skull. O‘Hara looked very glum and was sitting wearily on one of the awful beds. He stared over at Willie now.

‘Will we go, Willie?’ he said.

‘Why you call Willie?’ said the beautiful girl, giggling.

‘Let’s go back to fucking billets and forget this ould shite,’ said O‘Hara. ’It’s all shite.‘

The woman beside O‘Hara had a long purplish rash down the inside of her leg. Willie could glimpse it through her torn stocking. She grinned at him, as if wondering if he was the boy for a second lap.

‘All right, Pete,’ said Willie.

They careered out into the bleak night. Amiens was teeming. The clanking matériel of war inched along the road, the men of the army passed like a river. There were new faces in the backs of trucks, all white from the sea-voyage and raw with ignorance, their eyes burning brown and blue and green under the awnings.

When they went back to the billet the sergeant-major was awake. He didn’t say anything to them. He was lying on his army bed staring out of the window.

Royal Dublin Fusiliers,
Belgium.
January 1916.

Dear Gretta,

I hope this letter finds you and yours well. I hope over the Christmas you were happy and peaceful. Here is another year! I am sitting in these support trenches and the wind is coming howling over Flanders like a lot of old ghosts. There is a very quiet sector ahead of us with little or no bombardment and I think it is true that everyone begins to be dying off from the boredom. Not that we want to hear the bombs, but I tell you a tin of maconochie is not like a friend, not a welcome thing under your nose day after day. But at least we have proper latrines here which makes a change from other arrangements we have put up with. But you won’t want to be hearing about latrines. I wish I could write to you about roses and flowers and love, and that I am coming home for good. We all do wish the war was over now, though make no mistake we will stand up to the Hun no matter what. I do feel I have seen the inside and the outside of war and you do end up here as hard as a nut, which is all to the good. Say hello to your father for me. The wind is howling tonight. I wish you could see the frozen snow that lies over everything, it is quite something when you lift your head a moment above the parapet, which of course is a very foolish thing to do as there are still snipers everywhere, but we have the front line ahead of us for protection. Somehow we seem to be going through a time of peace more or less. The land is locked fast in winter and generals as a rule wait for the spring to be thinking of further things. We live day by day, my friend O‘Hara and me get through the night-times chatting away like lunatics and when we have to go out to do this and that up on no-man’s land in the darkness, we try and stick together. He is a nice sort from Sligo, you would like him, and I hope after the war you might meet him. He is what is left of our little group of mates now. He has a reasonable voice and he likes to sing with me in the daytimes. We are mostly sleeping when not on guard duty but you can’t sleep all the hours of the day and when we are awake we are repairing the trench walls which is work I alone in this army quite like, because it reminds me of the work I did with Dempsey’s, trenching for pipes and the like, and it keeps my spirits up. Then we are grubbing down and O‘Hara has read his soldier’s small-book and likes to boil everything in his tin till the colour has gone out of it. I fear to tell you that I haven’t had a proper wash now for a week and God alone knows when we will get one, because we are told we will be going up into the front line in another week or two and then we will be away from washing rightly. Even the line officers smell like old clothes. This is all farms hereabouts, with little stone farmhouses here and there, and we are billeted in the nooks and crannies of our own trench. I have carved out a happy niche for writing to my girl in. That girl is deep in my heart. I wish, Gretta, I had words for what I think of you. How high you seem to be, like an angel in the high sky. Luckily in dreams I see you, all bright and yourself. I am afraid you do kiss me then and often, and I am glad of it. Do you dream of me? I will sign off now and just to let you know I am always thinking of you.

Your Willie.

He didn’t think ‘Your Willie’ sounded very good and he crossed it out and put, ’Your loving Willie.’ Then he crossed that out and put, ’Yours lovingly, Willie.’ He always had trouble with the ending of letters, certainly.

It was a long letter though, and every inch of writing it he thought should he say something about the fallen girl of Amiens?

A couple of days later Willie and Pete O‘Hara were at the latrines together. Poor O’Hara was yelping as he tried to piss.

‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ,’ muttered O‘Hara, with an oily sweat on his brow.

‘What’s wrong, Pete?’ said Willie.

‘It’s just like - oh, mother of fuck - someone’s lost a razor in my belly, and the bastard’s trying to pull the fucking thing out through my bollocking willic - Oh, mother of the good Jesus, save me. Oh, mother of the good Jesus.’

‘You need to get permission to see the good nurses, Pete.’

‘Oh, yeh, that’s great, Willie, I’ll go and bring this to the nurses. Nice Irish girls. They’ll be only thrilled. Of course. I just didn’t think of it.’

‘Well, Pete, what’ll you do, so?’

‘I’m after telling the sergeant and he’s going to fix it for me.’

‘Fix it for you?’

‘He’ll get me the necessary.’

The sergeant-major had laughed apparently and said that those women were dangerous girls, that had been driven out of Paris and Rouen and other points for one reason and another. ‘But aren’t they very fine girls?’ he had said, laughing.

All right,‘ said Willie. ‘Well, that’s good, Pete.’

‘Fucking bitches. I should go back and slit their throats for themselves. Of course, of course, lucky fucking Willie with his lucky willie, not a bother on you.’

‘Ah, here, don’t be giving out to me.’

‘And I’m after peeking into my fecking long-johns and haven’tIarash the shape of fucking England all down my leg?’

Ah, Jesus,‘ said Willie. ‘That’s bad luck all right.’

And so things went on and so they arranged themselves.

His company as promised went into the front line shortly but it was quiet in that cold sector of the world. About four or five men a day were lost to snipers.

One morning just after stand-to a lad from Aughrim put his nose above the parapet, not three feet from Willie. Willie Dunne was drinking a tin-mug of dreggy tea so he was not minding, trying to soak in every essence of surviving tea-leaf. To think it had come from China just to be boiled to death in Flanders. The lad from Aughrim had been only one day with them so far; he had been sent up among a group of replacements for what was called the natural wastage. Willie thought his name was Byrne and he meant to ask him shortly if he had any news of Captain Pasley’s family, because Aughrim was only a few miles from Tinahely where their house was situated.

As Willie drank his tea a shot rang out from over the way and for a moment Private Byrne stayed where he was, and then fell back onto the bottom of the trench. Willie stopped sipping a moment. Then he saw from the boy’s left eye, right from the centre of the eye it looked like, a bloom of red like the bud of a rose. Then it started to pump out fiercely, like a painter might try to paint vision itself, a conical jet of crimson.

The Royal Army Medical Corps could only come up slowly and after a couple of hours the boy still lay where he had fallen. He was alive and screaming non-stop. But Willie could not immediately give himself to the fact. He stayed put in his niche at first. After a while he couldn’t accommodate the screaming any longer and he crossed over to the lad and knelt beside him. But no one had any morphine and the ruined eye must have hurt like a coal. What could Willie do? He wished he had had the composure to stay in his niche and drink his tea. He was doing the lad no good and he was certainly doing himself no good.