A Long Long Way (18 page)

The gas boiled in like a familiar ogre. With the same stately gracelessness it rolled to the edge of the parapet and then like the heads of a many-headed creature it toppled gently forward and sank down to join the waiting men. These excellent gas masks instantly lost their excellence for Private Quigley, who at any rate had failed to fit it on his crooked face. One size fitted all, but he had a wondrous cabbage head, and the straps would not lie down. Father Buckley rushed to help, and Quigley now was spluttering and coughing, and started to tear off the mask. Father Buckley was signalling wildly for him to do the bloody opposite. Now two other men at the other end of the trench were having trouble likewise and behind their masks were coughing and no doubt going as red as ripe apples in a good August.

The evil gas lay down in the trench like a bedspread, and as more gas came over, it filled the trench to the brim and passed on then in its ghostly hordes to the support lines and the reserve lines, ambitious for choice murders. Quigley had fallen down on the mucky ground and was writhing there like a python snake, the mask was off, and his wide eyes were black stones in a beetroot face. He was screaming between the choking. He was calling out and when he opened his mouth Willie could almost taste himself the awful gas that rushed gratefully in. And pity struck him. Yes, in the midst of all, pity struck him for the thousandth time, and he was almost grateful for the pity. Father Buckley was in a paroxysm of helping and disquiet as if his own child were being horribly tormented. At least six lads now were entirely blinded and Captain Sheridan moved them roughly back to the parados side of the trench, and went from man to man remaining swiftly, to try to steady the group. Willie Dunne had just shat in his pants, he could not help it, no more than a man who was hanged could help the stiff pecker he showed to the mocking crowds.

‘Oh Jesus,’ he said to himself, ‘oh Jesus, protect us.‘

He wished his father’s lot could rush up now with batons drawn and dispel this horrible unruly gas, drive it off the page of the world.

‘Papa, Papa,’ he said. Then he found a picture in his mind of the gates of his grandfather’s house in Lathaleer, two big, fat, rounded pillars into the welcoming yard, with the mad hens going about the pack-stones, and his grandfather with his big white beard like a proper Wicklow man. ‘Grandpa, Grandpa,’ he whispered, ‘protect us.’

Two of the machine-gun crew were still untouched and they scrambled their gun up onto the ground just in front of the trench and started firing into the gas. This was reassuring to the others.

Now, on top of the released gas, gas-shells were being lobbed at them, exploding with their own particular signature of hurting noise. The artillerymen behind them were also firing now, and they could hear their own happy shells going over as swift as young house-martins, you would think, and that was also a little heartening. There were so many shells in the air it was a wonder that they did not simply smash into each other. Then the machine-gun was heard no more. Something that they could not see had silenced it. One of the gunners slid back down into the trench still holding the canister of water he was using to cool the weapon, like a dying gardener or some such.

Then, equally abruptly, the firing of shells ceased on the Hun side, though their own guns continued, shell after shell, shell after shell. Then for some reason that stopped too. Even in the awkward masks, the men tried to glance at each other’s eyes, to see what was happening. Pairs of frightened orbs stared out from the masks. No one knew. Quigley lay on the ground still as a sleeping tramp. This must be worse gas than the other stuff, Willie knew, if it could murder a man so quickly. The other afflicted men had the strange yellow froth pouring down from the mask itself, where a sort of bib folded onto the chest. They were staggering about so much that Father Buckley looked like a distracted mother hen, trying to tend to them. Maybe he was also trying to get them out of the way of the survivors. It was not a good thing to be facing God knew what with a poor bastard wriggling and thrashing in on top of you from behind.

Now there was that queer silence that was not a silence, because Willie could hear his own breathing like a water-pump, his heart pulsing and complaining in his breast from simple lack of air. All the world was close in and made of canvas; the level of distress in all his limbs was like a poison itself. Despite the masks now there was a stench everywhere, a stench in his mask, a stench in his blood, his eyes felt like they were peeling away Desperately he tried to keep looking upwards, up the steep wall of the trench. He got a thump in the back and he turned slightly and saw the sergeant-major passing roughly, gesturing for them to mount the fire-step. Christy Moran must have seen something above, for he had just popped his head up to see what had happened to that fucking machine-gun. What had he seen in the coiling mists?

A grey monster in a mask came leaping into their trench. He looked enormous. Whether he was or not Willie did not know, but he looked as big as a horse. He stood over Willie and all Willie could think of were Vikings, wild Vikings sacking an Irish town. It must have been a picture from a school book. He had never seen a German soldier before so close up. Once he saw three dejected German prisoners, poor maggots of men with heads bowed, being escorted to some prison camp through the reserve area. They had looked so sad and small no one even thought to mock them. They engendered silence to see them. But this man was not like them. He put his two hands on Willie’s shoulders and for a moment Willie thought he was going to rip off the gas mask and instinctively he put his hands up to hold it on. For some reason, without himself actually registering it, he had got the funny tomahawk into his left hand and when he raised the hand the spike at the top of the short stick horribly drove into the underchin of the German. The man now clawed there himself and to Willie’s surprise tore off the saving mask, which looked a very much more admirable design than Willie’s. Now Willie again almost on instinct struck at the man’s face with the hatchet and it opened the cheek from the side of the mouth to the eye above. But such a wound was probably superfluous, because his own gas now assailed the huge man, his face not three inches from Willie’s own, because the great soldier fell to his knees. He was roaring something in that German language.

There were three more of these soldiers now in the trench with them and, as if inspired by Willie’s German, the Irish lads were making it their business to try to pull off the masks of the attackers. One Irish man got a knife driven hard into his belly and the German held him there like a lover, until Sergeant-Major Moran cut off the back of his head with a vile-looking mallet. Hands clawed at faces and necks. Captain Sheridan had been driven back against the wall of the trench and a soldier was beating him with his bare fist in the face through the mask, hitting again and again. This man was killed by one of the new recruits firing his rifle in terror into the man’s back. The man fell backwards so heavily that his skull struck right into the back of Willie’s head and Willie went out cold.

Chapter Nine

When he awoke he saw nothing at first because his mask had pulled sideways and the eye-holes invited one of his ears to see out. In instant panic Willie tried to readjust it, thinking the gas would get him now for sure. But when he got the eye-holes right, he saw dimly Christy Moran sitting on the ground, like a drunkard in the small hours of a terrible binge, without his mask on. Christy Moran was sitting there and every few moments he was nodding to himself, as if he might be telling himself a story, and surprising himself with it.

Father Buckley was in his after-battle attitude, kneeling beside a dead man. The killed German who had loomed at Willie like a giant lay curled beside him, for all the world like a dead companion. The face was bruised and torn, the wound under the chin drying black. He was a little fellow like a whippet after all. Willie touched the man’s arm and the dead soldier seemed all bone and sinew. He wanted to push the man away but somehow he did not. Quigley was just being borne away by the stretcher bearers, and miraculously he seemed to be still alive, though his lungs must be like some old gruelly hash.

Captain Sheridan was standing absolutely still and quiet, holding his gas mask tenderly in his right hand, his nice Cavan face like an elaborately decorated cushion, the bruises showing red and dark blue in a curiously symmetrical pattern. Then, as if these men were waiting for an unheard order, the captain bestirred himself and roused the sergeant-major and nodded to him and plunged down into the dugout, no doubt to try to phone back a message. He re-emerged immediately coughing and watery eyed, because the intimate gas liked to sink into such places. He dashed out a message in pencil in his notebook and Willie was told to run back to headquarters if he could find such a thing and deliver it. Willie Dunne was not a runner, but then who was a runner now?

He found the communication trench thick with the wounded, the maimed, men crying openly, men shouting in pain, men sitting in dark stupors that heralded death. So Willie climbed up the parados and went that way over open ground. He hardly cared.

Then he looked back like Lot’s poor wife to where the gas had come from. They could shoot him now easily. There were a few fallen soldiers in no-man’s land, all of them seemingly Germans. Who shot them down Willie could not say Because the ground sloped ever so slightly he could see also a good way up his own zigzagging trenches. There were heaps of men there also. Up the jammed communication trenches moved those eerie lines of blinded, miserable men, a hand on the shoulder of the man in front, a cursing, still-sighted man at the head of all, leading them away Of the twelve hundred, how many remained? How many letters would Captain Sheridan write tonight if his wounds allowed and all the other line officers with such mournful tasks? How many hearts stopped beating, how many souls to their allotted places, how many in the crowds now also clogging up the way under St Peter’s gate, and did the saint wonder at these sudden hordes advancing on him with their Irish accents from the Four Green Fields to beseech the mercies of heaven?

The shit he had shat in his pants was hardening, making Willie Dunne’s backside devilishly itchy.

It was Easter Thursday in that realm of myriad deaths.

Company headquarters was in what remained of an old barn. You wouldn’t know something strange and dark had happened not much more than a mile away. The transport officers were shouting at the drivers just as they might anywhere at any time. The big munitions waggons were dragged forward by resplendent shires, as strong as engines, with huge, intelligent heads. They lifted their forelegs like dancers in a dance that had become stylized by repetition. They were almost ridiculously beautiful, like wonders in a story, and all about them ground on the columns of uniformed men.

Willie Dunne found the ruined barn nearly by instinct, thinking to himself, It must be this way, and eventually, mysteriously, so it proved. The missing wall of the barn had been shored up roughly and there was a torn canvas awning for a roof. The three officers at their table, which looked like it must have been dragged out of an estaminet bar, were nevertheless neat enough. Their cheeks were shaven, although one of them had old-fashioned dundrearies, despite his years, which blossomed out at his ears. He had seen the major before, a Major Stokes, but the two other men were new to Willie. He came in and held out the scribbled note to them, covered in mud and blood as he was and certainly not shaven.

‘What’s this?’ said Major Stokes.

‘Message from D Company, sir.’

‘Who’s the man down there?’ asked one of the other officers.

‘Captain Pasley — no, Sheridan, sir,’ said Willie.

‘Oh, yes, Sheridan. Right, Sheridan.’

‘Bent as a cart-spring, Sheridan,’ said Major Stokes.

‘What, sir?’ said Willie.

‘I wasn’t talking to you, Private,’ he said.

Major Stokes read the note and Willie knew the information hurt him. He could see that clearly. The man’s narrow face with a hundred pockmarks closed in on itself slightly. He put a hand to his forehead and tapped a finger there.

‘That’s another bunch of casualties,’ he said. ‘Christ Almighty.’ Then his face changed again. ‘What’s wrong with you fucking Irish? Can’t you take a bit of gas?’

‘Excuse me, sir?’ said Willie.

‘Would you take it easy, Stokes, for the love of Mike. Can’t you see he’s been down there with them?’

‘Now how would I know that?’

‘He’s covered in blood,’ said the officer. He looked like the sort of man you might see behind a bank counter, half his hair gone west, a soft grey pallor on his cheeks, which seemed to be squeezing his mouth like two puffballs.

‘I tell you, you smell like hell, Private,’ said the major.

‘Leave the poor bugger alone,’ said the bank-clerky captain.

Now the telephone was ringing and the third officer got his ear to it and listened, only grunting back replies.

‘Would you stop interfering, Boston,’ said Major Stokes vaguely. ‘Can I not talk to this soldier without you heckling me?’