A Long Long Way (20 page)

And so in that manner they filled the holes with men and on the Sunday were taken out of the line and dragged themselves back to billets far behind the ugly terrain of death.

Chapter Ten

The pigeons were walking on the glass roof, making a small tapping noise, and coo-coo-cooing. Of course, it was a miracle that a glass building had survived thus far. But it was an old building with an old job to do, to clean the crust and filth off the workers that used to create the slagheaps, and cut along the earth to harvest the anthracite lying innocently there.

There were twenty big white enamel baths in two rows. They stood on the floor of green flagstones with their regal curlicues and big, fat brass taps. All the water knew how to do was gush out at a tremendous rate, thick, ropy water with its twirling cloths of steam. The taps were left hot enough to put a red mark on your palm. Willie Dunne could not tell from where they piped this miraculous water.

He had stripped down as nature put him on the earth and his fellows likewise, Christy Moran in the bath next to his, O‘Hara then, and Dermot Smith from Cavan, and the others. There were, of course, a good few men quite new, and Smith, a farm-labourer in former days in Kilnaleck, was one of them, and McNaughtan, a lofty, spare fella with a strange face like a bag of dumplings, another.

They had all climbed into the water with eagerness, wincing at first as the scalding stuff touched their skin all weals and rashes and bites, and dancing from foot to foot, and McNaughtan was so burned he had to leap his feet out and perch himself on the sides of the bath. Soon enough they all got used to it and sank into the soapy world. Only their pale faces showed among the suds, because the baths were deep and wide. The water held them gently, warmed their inmost marrow, and if they had forgotten what it was to bathe, and some of them maybe never had a proper bath in their born days, they soon had it high on their list of sumptuous things to experience on God’s earth. They would be devotees in their private minds of this immersion. The water touched them like a mother, soothing their backs and legs, and flowed around their genitals like the long hair of a lover.

‘Jesus, that’s better,’ said Christy Moran.

‘Fucking hell,‘ said McNaughtan.

‘Holy Mother Church and all her saints,’ said Smith.

‘For the love of Jesus and his Divine Mother and the Holy Ghost too into the bargain,’ said another slightly submerged voice. It might have been O‘Hara getting into the game, but Willie’s head had sunk below the level of the bath and he couldn’t see anything except the walking pigeons.

‘The Pope in the Vatican and the love of God, and Joey Lambert the handballer.’

‘Who?’ said Christy Moran, laughing.

‘And Patrick O’Brien the great Bulleter and John Johnson the boxer and your man the famous clog-dancer,‘ said Willie.

‘Oh yes, your man the famous clog-dancer definitely,’ said Christy Moran. ‘You mean Dan Leno, you fucker.’

And the Bohemian Girl and the Lass of Aughrim,‘ said Private Smith.

‘Oh yes, oh yes!’ cried the men in unison more or less.

‘Could someone go and fetch the Lass of Aughrim, please,’ said another contented voice. ‘There is room for her and more in here. In fact, I think I could fit the Bohemian Girl too at a pinch.’

‘Pinch is right,’ said Willie Dunne.

‘Pinch is right!’ said Smith.

‘Who in the name of fuck is Pinch?’ said McNaughtan.

‘Pinch? Why Pinch is Bovril’s brother,’ said Smith.

‘Invigorator for businessmen,’ said McNaughtan, his baggy face chuckling.

‘Exactly,’ said Smith. ‘A strengthening food for ladies.’

‘That’s a fact, that’s a fact,’ said Christy Moran, ‘the strongest stock for soups.’

‘Restorative for invalids!’ shouted a man from down the line.

‘Exactly!’ shouted Smith in triumph.

‘One thousand guineas will be paid if this statement can be refuted!’ shouted the company sergeant-major, the water slopping out from his bath.

It was all nonsense, of course. Now they lay in perfect silence, a silence perfected by the show of bonhomie and common knowledge. The fact that they all knew what was written on any Bovril advertisement seemed to drive them deeper into contentment. If they had been young priests quoting the Bible they couldn’t have felt a greater command of the things of the world.

‘If the Huns were to go dropping a bomb on us here we would have a merry time of it picking the bits of glass out of each other,’ said Smith from the pit of his bath.

‘I’m not picking nothing out of you, you bollocks,’ said McNaughtan. ‘You can pick out your own glass.’

They, all of them, every man, broke into laughter. It was not that the joke was very funny; it was that the last week had been very dour of visage.

They laughed, and the pigeons seemed to quicken their steps above. The glass very naturally was speckled with green, mossy stuff, and though once it might have been possible to see up to the sky, no more was it so. They were in a slightly darkened underworld, and the steam had completed the job.

To amuse himself, Willie rearranged the baths in his head, and instead of two rows he put them in a continuous circle, like on an Irish tombstone from a thousand years ago, so that the men were like water disappearing down a plug. Then he put them all in a wandering row, so they were like a river of some one hundred and forty feet, he reckoned, with a salmon in each pool.

Now the great Lord of everything wielded His high fishing-rod — with the strength to fetch out a man, should the terrible hook in his mouth hold — and He cast across the waters of the baths, and he would catch and eat them all, Willie feared, one by one in the underworld.

‘Sing the “Half of Mary”, why don’t you?’ said Christy Moran.

‘That’s kind of a religious song,’ said Willie Dunne. The ‘Half of Mary’. He would not dream of correcting the sergeant-major. ‘And it’s in Latin.’

They were having a bit of a party; it was called a concert but there were no real entertainers. They had been given the little shed where these things took place, so they had a platform and four dozen chairs. Men who could find no place to sit were standing happily at the back, and most of them had found at least a bottle of beer.

Then a man got up with that sudden air and manner that seemed to characterize an Irishman’s idea of a singing party. Everyone hushed immediately. No one needed to be urged to silence.

The man threw his head at an angle and put his hand to his face. It was very strange. Perhaps he was the sort of man who would usually have preferred to sing behind a door and not be seen by the company. Some of the best singers were behind-the-door singers, Willie in life had observed.

The soldier struck his first note and passionately gave a ballad from the days of the Crimea. It was very lonesome, tender, and bloody. There was a young girl in it, and a soldier, and a death. The listeners were stilled because in the song there was a melody that brought from their own memories coloured hints and living sparks of the past. The past was a valued thing but it was also dangerous to them in the toxic wastelands of the war. It needed a box of safety round it, and this small room for concerts was as good as they had found.

Each man to his own inward thinking, glimpses of the beloved faces left behind, shadows of arguments unfinished and regretted, the sense of youth not vanishing but being submerged in a killing sea from which no one might emerge, bathed in the acid blood of bomb or bullet.

Stretch of road loved and itemized, fold of field, loved turn of shoulder in a wife, her feet crossing the boards of a bedroom, her clothes thrown across a chair. The voice of a singing child, the sound of a child peeing in the pot, the tremendous affection of son or daughter, soft hair, big eyes, the struggle to find meat and cake. For single men the memories of their Grettas, foul words and good words, failed words of love and triumphant. How human nature fell ever short, but could be summoned to illumine the dark tracts of a life nonetheless. All the matter and difficulty of being alive in a place of peace and a place of war.

The man finished the song and there was another kind of silence, the silence of men whose heads were seeing old pictures and their minds were thinking old thoughts, and then there was tremendous applause. It was the silence before the applause that had pleased the singer most.

‘That is a beautiful song,’ said Christy Moran. ‘Fair play to you, Private.’

Christy Moran himself longed to sing ‘The Minstrel Boy’ but he was gripped by a kind of horror and unseating fear. He had sung that song for his wife many times and she had been kind enough not to complain of his croaky tones and that, oftentimes, he had forgotten the words and stumbled.

He wanted to sing it because he suddenly desired greatly to converse with his companions, to communicate to these men under his command his gratitude to them, and his love. It was not a thought that had come to him before. He wanted them to stand in place of his listening wife, with her sharp, long features and her ruined hand, lost in a miserable accident in their house. He wanted to tell them about his wife, obscurely desiring to, desiring, but terrified they might laugh at him, worse, laugh at her, for what had befallen her, a laughter that would be worse to him than bullets.

How guilty he felt when he thought he had come out to the war because he could not live with such trouble. The distress of his wife was worse to him than any charging Hun or gas attack. He could not look at the murky vista of such matters although he adored her in his heart, but adoration in the heart did not necessarily allow a life that he could bear.

He wished suddenly he could come down away from what he was to the men, and say these things, and sing the song that was most special to him.

‘A beautiful song indeed,’ said Private O‘Hara.

O‘Hara was a bit of a musician, because his brother had a band in Sligo, called O’Hara’s Orchestra, and sometimes he used to fill in for the piano player, who was consumptive. The sea air of Sligo was heavy with rain and moisture and that was good for neither houses nor people with a consumption. The rooms sweated with dew-like damp and the lungs of sufferers flared up, and blood was spat. The piano player was a giant of a man, he could walk to the top of Maeve’s Cairn and place his stone on top of all the others with the best of them, as tradition bid him to, but those little insects had got into him, or whatever it was gave a man consumption, whatever it was loved the damp air and living inside a giant. So when the giant was indisposed and at home with his mother coughing his life out, Pete O‘Hara sat in with the sheet music and banged out the tunes and the ballads with his brother, the dapperest man in County Sligo, with a straw hat as neat as a cake.

So O‘Hara rose now like a prince coming into his kingdom, with a bit of sheet music being extracted from his army jacket, and, much to the friendly jealousy, the painful, friendly jealousy of Christy Moran, in that ordinary spot of Flanders, he placed the music on the piano and scanned it short-sightedly and sang a new song that they hadn’t heard, although it was all the rage in the music halls of England. It was called ’Roses of Picardy‘. It was a song written by a magician, Willie thought, designed to slay the hearts of simple men:

Roses are flowering in Picardy,
But there’s never a rose like you,
And the roses will die with the summertime,
And our roads may be far apart,
But there’s one rose that dies not in Picardy,
‘Tis the rose that I keep in my heart!

sang wily Private O’Hara, as plain as he could, so the words would pierce home with proper violence to the composure of his mates. They had never heard the song before. Many at song’s end were weeping openly.

‘My God,’ said poor McNaughtan. He was mopping at his eyes with his sleeve like a bad actor. His big, doughy face was melting and as red as a red arse.

Smith looked at McNaughtan and then Smith patted McNaughtan on the shoulder. It was an extraordinary matter and one that Willie vowed in his heart to remember. How softened they were by the song. It was as if for those moments they felt queerly vindicated, all doubts and sorrows abating. That was O‘Hara’s strange work that Flanders night — in Picardy itself. There’s one rose that dies not in Picardy.

There was a long silence then again in the room. Maybe there were sixty men there, all Irishmen of the battalion. The Royal Dublin Fusiliers. And many had seen hundreds killed, and many had killed; Willie himself had killed. Was the song a memory of what they were, or was it still possible they might be ordinary, loving, imperfect fellas again, in some other guise of peace?

‘Well, Jesus,’ said Christy Moran, ‘I don’t know if I can stand it, or if any of us can stand it, lads, but Willie Dunne, for fuck’s sake and the love of God, would you give us your “Half of Mary”, please.’

‘Come on, Willie,’ said O‘Hara, ’and I’ll cut the tune out on the piano, if you like.‘

‘All right,’ said Willie. ‘But it’s kind of religious.’