A Long Long Way (33 page)

They were given two water bottles that night and the second they found was full of tea. That was an Irish touch all right. Their boys at the kettles and the big pots far behind at the field kitchens hadn’t let them down. A big stew came up after them and a double ration of rum. It wasn’t the war they knew.

The guns had stopped a good few hours and the land about had returned to itself. It was like a new country, a fresh place. The summer rain had loosed the smells of everything, the new grass that was boldly coming up everywhere like a crazy green beard, the briefly drenched woods all about. There were even nightingales in the woods that any man could hear for himself and wonder at.

‘What’s that bird going on?’ said Willie Dunne.

‘Fucking nightingale,’ said Christy Moran.

They were warmly bidden to show no lights, so no one could have a smoke. They sat there or lounged there in the silent, murky conduits. They talked in low voices. All the equipment was up and Joe Kielty and Timmy Weekes were now the machine-gun operators, so they had four men to carry the huge ammunition boxes. They had to shoulder the Lewis gun themselves, but, compared to the bullet belts, that was a doddle really. It stood to reason that carrying the boxes would be like fetching lead along the way.

They were only waiting there like that when all of a sudden the guns opened up behind them. There had been a whole week spent digging them in and putting the camouflage tarpaulins over them. There were said to be about two thousand guns all told and what was more all fit to fire. The artillery liked to fire two-thirds of them at a time and let the other third cool off. So in the darkness there was a roof of shells above them. For once in their lives, Willie thought, they seemed to have the range, and he could see the shells exploding in the distance along the lower part of the ridge. It was like bright red blood and yellow sweets, the colours. The noise gathered all together and made into one noise was like a terrific wailing of all the damned that had ever been stuffed down into hell. If you stopped a sound like that, you would still hear it for about three minutes after.

The ladders were already in place. Everything was bizarrely in place. They had enough iron rations about them to meet emergencies. Even their uniforms were clean because they had been told to brush them down religiously as if they were new recruits, as some of them were. They had used the special smelly stuff to rub off stains. All this had been done. It was as if the world had been made anew. The fact was, said Christy Moran, there was a real fucking general in charge. A fella that had fought battles before. They should make him a field marshal, he said.

Even Biggs started to look like a good thing. He had all his maps and order papers in order. He did look even more like a pull of pastry, but his voice stayed calm and the men were grateful for small mercies. Christy Moran in particular didn’t have to tell him what to do.

‘You know why I came into the army?’ said Christy Moran.

‘Why, Sarge?’ said Joe Kielty genuinely interested, considering his own entry had been quite accidental.

‘Well, why would you think? King and country? Bad debts? To escape a murder charge? Did it for a wager? Lost my fucking way and found myself in barracks? No, none of those things. None of the fucking reasons that brought you bastards in,’ he added affectionately.

‘Why then, Sarge?’ said Joe Kielty.

‘Because the missus burned her hand off.’

There was a silence then.

‘She what?’ said Pete O‘Hara, feeling a little uneasy.

‘We were the both of us drinking one night. Both of us half-seas-over when we went to bed. The missus likes to smoke this little pipe for herself. So we wake up in the small hours and the bed is blazing away on her side. And she’s too drunk to stir. So I pull her away. Hasn’t the fucking pipe set the bed alight, and she out to the dickens and didn’t even feel it. It was her right hand. So there went her work right there. Seamstress at the Kingstown Asylum. Gone. So I had to do something. So I joined up, seeing as they were looking for men. And she’s glad of the separation allowance, let me tell you. There you are now.’

‘That’s a fucking desperate story, Sarge,’ said O‘Hara, who felt quite green now.

‘There you are now,’ said Christy Moran, very satisfied with the response. There had been no laughter anyhow. Laughter would have killed him. Christy Moran, R.I.P., died of laughter. ‘That’s what got me in.’

‘Your poor missus and her hand?’ said Joe Kielty. ‘Jesus, the poor woman.’

‘Poor woman is right,’ said Pete O‘Hara.

What a strange flood of relief washed over Christy Moran’s thinking head. He didn’t know why hardly. It was ridiculous to feel relief with such a ruckus around them.

‘You think so?’ he said.

‘Well, certainly, Sarge,’ said Joe.

A person might have thought that Christy Moran would then have proceeded to tell the men how he felt about them, since that maybe had been the point of the story. But such was his sense of victory, it overwhelmed him, he said no more, he forgot to say what had long hidden in his mind. But it hardly mattered, in essence, they knew well his mind. They knew it well, without him having to say a word.

The guns went on wailing and caterwauling. There were ferocious blows and bangs and thumps. The sergeant-major, for reasons of his own, was whistling ‘The Minstrel Boy’ now low under his breath, which was a curious fact, since he never whistled. Willie could see in his mind’s eye the gunners work their guns, the way they were so used to it, and knew all the movements, like in a Saturday dance. Like they were waltzing or something with those metal guns. Then, after three hot, fierce hours, they fell away again, and their noise rang in everyone’s ears, and then a wilder, rarer thing happened.

‘Wild and rare’, Christy Moran called it later.

But for the moment Biggs looked at his watch and told them all to kneel or lie on the ground. They had been told that the sappers were going to try to blow some mines underneath the ridge. But they had been digging since 1915 and it was 1917 now and no one really knew what would happen when an attempt was made to blow them. It was funny, they had been told all that but no one could imagine what that would look like, so they had presumed in the main that there would be some little fiddly explosions in the distance, which might or might not help them in their enterprise.

In three places in front of them far ahead the fields opened up. Huge brown mountains came up from that ground. They looked to Willie as big as Lugnaquilla itself. The brown shot up towards the stars and seemed to hover there. A hundred rainbows fanned out from the top and sour-looking yellow light flung itself at the dark enamel of the heavens. The puddle at Willie’s feet shrugged and a miniature storm at sea was created there. Then the whole warm night of Flanders was thrown in their faces, fierce zephyrs tore along the trenches like a brief tropical storm, and the earth they were now hugging and half-praying into shuddered. A mighty whap-whap- whap sound tore past, heading in violent haste they thought all the way to old Blighty. Then, behind them, a long, long line of machine-guns opened up, sending a lacework, a veritable solid cloak of bullets towards the ridge. And Biggs was urging them to go, and they were up the ladders and off, Willie scrambling like the rest, so astonished on that occasion he forgot to piss his pants.

Joe Kielty and Timmy Weekes were making fine progress with the gun on their shoulders. It looked to Willie like a good half-hour’s walking lay ahead and he knew from experience that if they were opened up on now they were entirely finished. The ridge looked down on them, and even in the wild dark, if the Hun could recover and get their guns going, by morning there would be fewer men to go back to Wicklow, Dublin and Mayo when the war was over. Just moments after the mines went up, the Boche had sent up coloured lights, to signal along their own front that an attack was in train, so there were some still up there. The heat was as bad as a mud, and as terror grew to be out in the open, a big, heavy sweat drenched them from inside, so they were like big feet sloshing about in big stockings. Pete O‘Hara and Smith and McNaughtan kept pace and all to the left of them stretched the other men of the battalion. But the whole division was engaged, and this was the leading wave. To their right they knew the men of the Ulster 36th would be pushing along just like them, no different. But it was a gigantic army moving over this ground, a horde of terrified men moving for all they knew into the nasty arms of Death. And any second they expected to feel bullets tear into them, or shrapnel do some evil damage to their too-soft bodies. The fumes of the explosions also met them, and Pete O’Hara finally gave up trying to hold down his ration of stew, and started to vomit forth into the brittle and violent darkness. Men could be seen falling not from wounds but from that terrible nausea.

It was like running through colours, that was all Willie could think. Stumbling more like. Filthy browns and then sudden flaring colours, yellows again and reds and even weird, wild greens, and heavy, hard acres of blackness, and swords and God-high spears of whiteness like lightning.

Biggs walked ahead of them, turning every moment to shout them on. It was intensely strange.

Before they expected it, they were nose up against the slopes of the ridge. There was a bomb crater just below as big as a lake, as round as an ornamental lake. So they hurried around the rim of that as best they could, finding themselves divided and separated from the main line. The great battery of machine-guns far behind was firing remorselessly into the high ground, like some manner of creeping barrage. Then, maybe fearing there would be British soldiers coming up amid that hail, it stopped. Immediately somewhere to the right a machine-gun opened up, firing queerly over their heads.

‘Fucking bastards,’ said Christy Moran. ‘Come on, you stupid cunts, we’re going to put a fucking sock in that.’

And gladly they would have followed him, but that he seemed to have shed all heaviness and weariness and was scrambling along like an animal well used to that slope. He had a Mills bomb miraculously in one hand and was hauling his rifle with the other.

‘I tell you, you fucking cunts, if you don’t keep up, I’ll fucking shoot yiz.’

But they were trying to keep up, they were trying. Now Willie saw the odd sight of two German soldiers standing by a concrete shelter. They looked in a very bad way, and were swaying and moaning like drunk men. The whole pillbox was cracked in two right along its middle, and there was smoke and stench everywhere, and that one machine-gun firing out through a ravaged slit, as if a child were directing it. Christy Moran did what he had to do to the Mills bomb to prime it and threw it through the damaged air so that it banged against the concrete and fell into the gaping crack. There was what sounded like a muffled gasp inside the building and then nothing. Flames suddenly tore out through the crack. Then Christy Moran started screaming at the enemy soldiers and ran at them with his bayonet fixed just in the learned manner, and before Willie’s amazed eyes he ran the bayonet into the stomach of the first man, drew it out with another wild scream, and rammed it again into the other, catching him somewhere in the upper ribs, because Christy cursed loudly as he tried to draw it back out. The soldier fell and Christy stood on the man’s chest and heaved out his weapon again.

‘Bastards, bastards,’ he muttered, clear as day, snarling like a giant dog.

Biggs was jubilant. There was nothing wrong with Biggs that blossoming morning. The light was marching up fast from the eastern woodlands. He was shouting now.

‘All right, lads, we’ve reached our line. We’re on the blue here. Well done, lads. The other boys will be coming through us. Don’t get in their way.’

And even as he spoke the second wave of the brigade was clambering up and going through. Jesus, Willie thought, if it had always been like this, he might have been a soldier in the first place.

‘Who are you lads?’

‘We’re the Dublins.’

‘Go on, the Faughs, go on, the Faughs.’

‘Good luck, lads, good luck.’

It was very sweet talk, very sweet and easy. Never mind the tugging cacophony all about, the bleak ripping of the shrapnel shells overhead, from God knew what direction, Willie couldn’t tell.