A Long Long Way (27 page)

Meanwhile, the explosions up ahead seemed to be tearing at the stars themselves, sorely extinguishing them, ripping those buttons of timid light.

The approach trench was a reeking culvert with a foul carpet of crushed dead. Willie could feel the pulverized flesh still in the destroyed uniforms sucking at his boots. These were the bodies of creatures gone beyond their own humanity into a severe state that had no place in human doings and the human world. They might be rotting animals thrown out at the back of a slaughterhouse, ready for the pits, urgently so. What lives and names and loves he was walking on he could not know any more; these flattened forms did not leak the whistle tunes and meanings of humanity any more.

There were bombs falling everywhere now in an industrial generosity. Sadly these were their own bombs, fired out some miles back by their own artillery, whose gauges and sights were so worn by use that the missiles went either too short or too far — in this case, as they stumbled along under the cargo of their packs, too short. Willie tried to half close his eyes as he passed now over fresh bodies, the exterminated forms of his own mates. He didn’t want to see men he knew mangled like this for nothing. He wished he were a horse on the road with his leather blinkers doing good service.

Now they rose up in the violent moonlight and entered bizarrely a huge field of high corn, the frail stems brushing gently against their faces, and because Willie was a small man, he had to grip the coat of Sergeant-Major Moran in front or he would be lost, set adrift to wander for ever in this unexpected crop. The absurd bombs followed them religiously into the field, smashing all about the darkness, the stench of cordite and other chemicals obliterating the old dry smell of the corn. Willie heard men cry out, he stumbled through little sites of disaster, he could not help but see through his squinting eyes here and there a ruined face, or underfoot stumble on the wet branch of an arm or a leg. How easily men were dismembered ; how quickly their parts were unstitched. What this war needed, Willie thought, was men made of steel, who could march on through chaos so that when they were blown into a thousand pieces there were no mourners for them at home and no extremity of pain. He passed poor Quigley, no longer miraculous but with his arm sheared off at the shoulder, so there was only a bloody boil of flesh there. His face had been lifted by the blast and torn half way off, so that his awful jaw-bone was bare with bare yellow teeth.

They came to a series of barbed-wire lines, and here there were older bodies heaped, in places three deep and more, men of Ireland also in a hundred terrible attitudes. Willie knew the gaps they had left in the division would be filled. More men from old Dublin and surrounds brought out on the crowded boats and along the rail-lines and bussed over puzzling country and inserted into trenches and then on into these local and myriad infernos. The thought somehow panicked him further, as if he were responsible for everything, for the dead men and the men soon to die. He wanted the dead to be alive again and the living men to go back home. There was one battle in this war but the armies were changing all the time, like a tube emptying at the top and filling at the bottom, so that no one man, he thought, knew what was afoot and no one man could feel he had done anything but piss his trousers in terror. For now Willie had the cold fingers of terror at his measly throat, he was starting to gabble, to pray not to God as it happened but to Gretta: Dear Gretta of the beautiful arse, preserve me, rescue me. He was chopping as best he could at the wire, as they all were, this cat’s cradle of death they must get through as quick as nifty rabbits.

‘What’s that you’re saying?’ said a voice behind; it was Joe Kielty.

‘Oh, forgive me, Joe,’ he said, hacking on at the wire with the clumsy cutters, ‘I don’t know what I’m gassing on about.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Joe Kielty, who after all was twenty-five years old and no spring chicken or chicken of any nature, ‘we’ll be all right, I am sure of it.’

‘I’m glad to hear that, Joe. I was urgently requiring to hear that.’

And when he said that in his best cheerful manner, O‘Hara looked over.

‘That’s it, Willie, you keep our spirits up.’

‘I will, Pete, I will, if I can.’

And there was no trace of the horror he had felt at Pete’s story.

‘What’s this fucking crop anyhow?’ said Christy Moran.

‘I don’t know, Sarge,’ said Joe Kielty, ‘you don’t see it in Mayo.’

‘Isn’t it rocks you grow there?’ said the sergeant-major gently.

‘It is, aye, it is,’ said Joe Kielty. ‘But they’re our rocks. We like them.’

‘It’s wheat,’ said a voice.

‘It’s not wheat anyhow,’ said Joe Kielty, ‘begging your pardon.’

‘Is it beet?’ said another.

‘Would you go and jump with your beet,’ said a Wicklow voice, pleasantly scoffing. And even Willie himself had seen piles of sugar beet on roadsides in September in that Wicklow. ‘That’s in the ground like a turnip.’

‘For the love of God, who cares what it is?’

‘Well, I don’t know, damn me, can you eat it?’ said another.

‘Little specks of yellow shite at the top of these rough stalks? I don’t think so, my lad.’

‘If you can’t eat it, fuck it.’

‘Fuck it yourself,’ said O‘Hara, and they all had the grace to laugh at the worst joke in Flanders. It was as good as a little sermon.

They came then to a place so loud, so bleak, so bare, that human eyes had difficulty in seeing it, in seeing what it was. Technically — that was, according to Captain Sheridan — they were moving up to the captured German lines, and were then to pass through Guillemont itself and get into trenches beyond for the kick-off. But to get across to the first line of trenches they had to cross a field of some twenty acres. This looked to Willie like it had been the very heart of the battle, either this battle or some other battle. The warriors were still there, all killed, every one. It was like a giant quilt of grey and khaki, like the acres had been ploughed vigorously but then sown with the giant seeds of corpses. There was a legion of British soldiers there, mingled astonishingly with the Boche. Grey jacket and khaki jacket, a thousand helmets scattered like mushrooms, a thousand packs mostly still attached to backs like horrible humps, and wounds, and wounds, such as ... Willie moved forward with O‘Hara and Joe Kielty, following after Christy Moran and Captain Sheridan. Captain Sheridan kept banging his stick on his leg and had not even drawn his revolver.

‘Come on, lads,’ he kept saying. ‘We’ll be all right. Come on, come on, lads.’

Death was a muddle of sorts, things thrown in their way to make them stumble and fall. It was hard and hard again to make any path through the humbled souls. The quick rats maybe had had their way with eyes and lips; the sightless sockets peered at the living soldiers, the lipless teeth all seemed to have just cracked some mighty jokes. They were seriously grinning. Hundreds more were face down, and turned on their sides, as if not interested in such awful mirth, showing the gashes where missing arms and legs had been, their breasts torn away, and hundreds and hundreds of floating hands, and legs, and big heavy puddles of guts and offal, all mixed through the loam and sharded vegetation. And as solid as the ruined flesh was the smell, a stench of a million rotted pheasants, that settled on their tongues like a liquid. O‘Hara was just retching as he went, spewing down the front of his tunic, and many others likewise. There was nothing they could do, only follow each other to the other side. In the corner of his eye Willie caught a glimpse of Father Buckley, taking up the rear of the battalion, far back at the edge of the slaughtered troops. He quickly looked away. He didn’t like the way Father Buckley stared about him. Too many souls without prayers to speed them, too many, too many.

They passed through Guillemont two by two and it was a queer thing to think that this was a site of victory. There was nothing there. The sappers were labouring to flatten sections of ground so that the machinery and supplies and trucks could be brought up. There was a long road being strengthened and repaired by about two thousand Chinese. Someone, either their own guns or the Boche, had the range of all these enterprises, and there were myriad bombs falling on everything, like a wild scene in a play without meaning or purpose, only mere spectacle. It had a filthy fascination, to see the coolies digging and hacking as if ignoring their peril. What could they do? The bombs fell among them and there were distant screams and then the ranks of the diggers closed, and on as before. Well, they were fucking heroes, all right, thought Willie Dunne. It was the very picture of strange courage, weird indifference.

When they reached the assigned jumping-off trenches, by some miracle there were vats of steaming stew. How they got up there no one could tell, but they were not complaining. Captain Sheridan shepherded his section into the new trenches, and very beautiful trenches they were, to Willie anyhow. They were the very peak of German workmanship, with revetments properly palisaded and the mud packed back with trimmed branches, and there was even drainage at their feet, the duck boards laid down over concrete and a culvert carrying off water beneath. Willie peeked into a dugout, fifteen steps down, and there was a light burning there, like a further miracle, and he saw the edge of a table and some papers neatly there. There was no sign of the Hun that had lived in these trenches for months and months past, no corpses at all, so someone had been in to clear them. They all shook their heads at the oddness of it all, and gladly tucked into the wonderful stew. The best of lamb it tasted like! Willie was drooling, he couldn’t help it. The juice of the stew was better than water, better than rum even, it slaked and perished the thirst. They felt like kings at the feast.

A dozen worn men in muddy uniforms cupping with sore fingers the rough tins of their food.

Captain Sheridan smiling to himself.

All Christy Moran could offer to this moment of general relief was one incongruous word: ‘Bastards!’

But whom he referred to no one could tell. All of wretched humanity, maybe.

And then they were allowed sleep if they could. Well, on this occasion they slept like hunting dogs. Christy Moran often referred to it later as ‘the Good Kip we had before Guinchy’ .

Captain Sheridan occupied a dugout and wrote sheet after sheet. Health of the men reports, supply-sheet reports, operational replies, assessments, a letter to his wife in Cavan Town, four letters to the families of dead men, a request for the home address of Private Quigley to divisional headquarters, a report on the state of the trench, a request to the quartermaster for provisions and supplies, more soap for the men’s feet in particular.

While he was finishing all this an order came up with a runner that they were to get into position at 0400 hours and follow the bombardment at 0445 hours, their objective being the east of Guinchy village to be reached by 1530 hours if possible on the dot for the purpose of liaison with, et cetera.

‘Of course,’ he muttered to himself. ‘We are not digging in here. What was I thinking? It was that blessed stew.’