A Long Long Way (22 page)

4 May.

It is a little while later, Papa. We got the news now about the three leaders shot. Some of the men think it is a good thing. Myself, I cannot say what I think hardly. How I wish I were at home now and was able to talk these matters over with you. I wish they had not seen fit to shoot them. It doesn’t feel right somehow. I don’t know why. What does John Redmond say about it? When I came through Dublin I saw a young lad killed in a doorway, a rebel he was, and I felt pity for him. He was no older than myself. I wish they had not seen fit to shoot the three leaders. It is the thought of it all happening at home in Dublin too, where nothing bad should happen, that has got me unhappy. By heavens, Papa, I hope you are not angry with this letter. I am proud to wear this uniform and I am doubly proud of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Please give my love to Maud and Annie and tell Dolly I saw a blackbird, or maybe it was a crow, yesterday, building its nest in a chimney. A chimney all up in the air and on its own! That was all there was left of the house, and still and all faithfully he was collecting twigs and bits of string and whatnot, to make a nest for his wife. I wish I had not come through Dublin the way I did, and just was in Flanders all the while.

Your loving son,

Willie.

Darling Gretta, thank you for your kind and interesting postcard showing poor Sackville Street in ruins — who would ever have thought — thinking of you — here’s one they make here of poor Ypres — old Wipers as we like to say — the Cloth Tower etc. — With all my love —
kisses —
Willie.

He nearly had no room for the last few words, which put him in a panic, but he squeezed them in and hoped they were clear.

That night in his narrow bed he fell into a sleep with dreams that had the blessed clarity of childhood dreams.

They were billeted in the remnant of a small factory that was used to make the industrial suits that now-vanished men had worn to their dark work, three layers of linen stitched together against the flares and eruptions of a former steelworks close by. Their beds were ranged in a long, narrow anteroom of some kind, and in the next room the men had peered in at a strange sight, a hundred and more thin paper patterns, hanging up in rows, the shapes of the very workers themselves, jackets and trousers, through which unknown company a mild breeze moved from the broken window, lifting and nudging the shapes, like the very shadows of living persons.

The army had not cleared them out. Perhaps in their silence they were too voluble of past lives and other days.

In this makeshift place Willie Dunne discovered a peace of sorts. Yes, the wild guns struck their great notes in the distance like the bells of a horrific city. Hearts asleep in the shires of England close upon the sea must have heard them too. But he fell down between the boards of memory and sleep like a penny in an old floor. He lay there in the dust of nowhere, sunken and alone.

The dream in which he found himself was nearly too clear to be a proper dream. He was back in trenches somewhere, looking out across the shell-ploughed between-land without a mirror, with his naked eyes. His soft head peered out, he could see it himself, poking up like a turnip, as plain as day for a sniper. But he could not extract it, it was stuck there. Very near, absurdly so, was a German soldier in his own trench, fiddling about with a little box. Into the box the soldier was putting grain, seeds perhaps of the hapless grasses. He left the box on the parapet and ducked down. A wide, hot, yellow sunlight flooded the world; a heavy, dark grey lid of rain sat on the far horizon. The breeze rustled through the small woodlands, and in the trees hung the paper bodies of lost men, the patterns of their expended souls. Wood pigeons made their familiar call, sixteen wooden notes that Willie had often counted in the woods of Kiltegan and Kelsha as a boy. Co-co-co, coco, co-co-co-coco, co-co-co-coco, co. And always, Willie, and always Willie, and always, Willie, all. That’s what he used to think they were saying, when he was seven in the realms of his grandfather, White Meg himself, the onetime steward of those woods. Now the wood pigeons called in these Belgian woods, imagined though they might be, and dreamed. A sweat appeared on his sleeping form, seeped into his long-johns. The lice moiled in his armpits, despite the boon of the baths. But he didn’t feel them. He was watching now in the dream. A pigeon landed fussily near the box of the German soldier, walked along the parapet plumply, and poked its head into the box. When it could not reach all the grain, it darted right in, and just as it did, up popped the German, blocking the exit of the pigeon with a hand, and grabbing the box. Willie Dunne nearly cheered. He certainly made a noise of some kind, because the soldier stopped instantly. The long face turned and looked intently across no-man’s land, right into Willie’s stuck face.

Willie knew it was his German, the lad he had killed. He wanted to call out to him, to tell him he had kept the little horse for him. The soldier drew the pigeon out from the trap and held it in both hands. Isn’t he going to kill and eat it? thought Willie. Pigeon was not to be sneezed at, and if he let it boil for a couple of hours in his mess tin or whatever he might use, he would not regret the effort. One shake of the head would break the weak neck, quicker than a chicken even.

Willie longed for the man to do it. He could taste the dark meat of the pigeon, hints in it of woodland and secret weather. Kill and eat, kill and eat.

But his German just lifted his arms to the threatening sky and opened his hands, and the bird rose up like a silly angel, like a grey rag.

Always, Willie, and always, Willie, and always, Willie, all.

The pigeon and all his fellow pigeons called in the wood. It was a cacophony. And the arms of his German remained aloft, as if he had forgotten them, and the face of his German remained fixed on his, and the rainy light sat in the face, replacing the long wash of sun.

Chapter Twelve

That strange week the roads leading in and out of the reserve districts became burdened in their ditches and banks by flowers. Willie and his company suffered the inexplicable indignities of fatigues. Trenches were dug that never would be used, they were marched from spot to spot like madmen, they were given long lectures about their feet, how to avoid trench foot, how to boil vegetables in their mess tins, though none of them had seen a true vegetable for a long while, the deep lore of saluting and the nervous rituals of sentry duty. A hundred things they knew already, and if they did not know them by now, they thought they did not need to know them.

Meanwhile, the roadsides burgeoned up and grew almost noisy with memory-laden colours. The arrogant sun had touched them and the casual rain had done the rest, leaving these million marks of respect on the neglected edges of fields and paths and roads. Even in fields, where most likely some calamity had stolen away the tillers, great weaves and plethoras of field flowers appeared, army after army of yellow heads, golden heads and blue, red and burning green. It was like a sudden paradise. Birds fiercely sought those sites on which they would bestow their efforts all the summer, the heroic house-martins and swallows come back from whatever Portugals and Africas they knew, to rest their faith again in Flanders, and the safety of Flanders. Willie wondered what houses knew them all the winter, what families and children had regarded them as their own. Or did they live out in wild marshes and desolate woodlands away from troubled men and women and their young? Now they had returned and of course they did not ask for news of war; they patched their muddy nests under the eaves with spittle mixed with clay, and fired round in the evening air like old arrowheads without their sticks. And he thought of the many unseen beasts seeking each other out in the underwood, and the tadpoles making a crowd of rusty commas in every narrowing pool.

And in from Ireland trickled the names, every day two or three, of the executed, sending some Dublin men into sore dances of worry in their minds, thinking Armageddon would descend on their unprotected homes. Men got dizzy, the faces of their six-year-olds, and seven, and all that chance and precious cargo of their children, tormenting them, calling to them to return home. And they could not.

The executed men were cursed, and praised, and doubted, and despised, and held to account, and blackened, and wondered at, and mourned, all in a confusion complicated infinitely by the site of war.

But perhaps Armageddon lay not so far away as Ireland.

The beds of the young men of England were empty, they had come out to the war. And the goosedown covers, the plain starched sheets, the feather pillows of a thousand Ulster farmhouses had no young men now to dream in them. The cities and the towns of the Irish North sent their vivid sons. The old, lousy warrens of Dublin. Of course, the two sets of sons liked to trade insults with each other when they passed by chance on the road, or fetched up in billets near each other. The Ulstermen thought the southern boys were all suspect, Home Rulers and worse, and suggested as much in forceful phrases. At any rate, geat armies were massing everywhere, great divisions, so that a single man was only one flickering light in a wide sky of millions. There must be movement on the front, all were agreed. The French boys were drowning in the caverns of Verdun, drowning in their own blood. Millions must push back millions. The Kaiser sent his myriad boys, the King of England his. Great troops of women followed, to bandage, bolster and bury. And all of England, and all old empires, British, Austro-Hungarian, Prussian, the empires of halfpenny lives and the hungry, sad kings and commoners all party to the same haze, strained for news, and the mountains stood away, and a thousand widows wore their black ribbons in Ireland on their arms, and were treated kindly in the main, with whispered sympathy and whatever was left of wise words. Because the box of wise words was emptying.