A Long Long Way (36 page)

The few clumps of their own British troops up ahead started firing at the Germans coming down. Then Willie saw a thing that amazed him. It was Father Buckley just ahead on the wrecked ground, with his stupid shovel, digging quietly beside a corpse.

‘Father, Father!’ he called, wild in the head from this addition of fright to fright.

‘Shut up, Willie Dunne, shut up,’ said Christy Moran. ‘What in the fucking name of Jesus are you doing?’

‘Father, Father!’ he called.

The mass of German soldiers seemed to veer away down the hill to the left. They were stopping to kill everything in their path. Their own soldiers in the distance could be seen rising up out of lurking places and vainly trying to defend themselves. Some of the Irishmen tried old trench cudgels. Willie saw German and Irish with hands at each other’s throats, both squeezing and yelling out strangled cries.

By some mercy of things the battered battalion started to come up behind. The new first lieutenant found them too, much to Christy’s exhausted surprise, with some stragglers in tow. No one knew exactly what to do then, but it was true that they were now officially, as it were, relieved. The men who had just crossed that mile of destruction were screamed at by the remaining officers to go on up, and go on up they did. Christy and his companions started their weary way back. They weren’t five minutes of the way done when a wild, strange sound made them turn. They looked back where they had been. There were hordes and hordes of Germans now, pouring down on the second wave.

There were dozens of the dead along the way at every step. The stretcher bearers had come out in groups of eight because of the mud. There were shouting, screaming men being ferried back roughly, and quiet faces with closed eyes.

Next day the dread truth was shared by the survivors in little groups. They knew one of the battalions had been reduced to one wounded officer. All the rest, those very men, Willie guessed, who had passed through them at the line and pressed on ahead at the behest of their officers, were dead or missing, believed dead. And yet orders kept coming to renew the attack. A mustard-gas bomb made a lucky hit right into the field headquarters of one battalion and turned three officers into green, smoking corpses, their skins eerily crackling and sparking in the ruined aftermath. And still along the lines of runners came the orders, to the dead and the dying and the wasted hearts, ‘Renew the attack, renew the attack.’

‘Where’s Father Buckley?’ said Willie Dunne.

‘Killed in that pigsty of an aid post,’ said one. ‘He was there the whole day, giving the last rites to lads brought in. It was only a bit of corrugated iron, that fucking place. Shrapnel came right through and killed him. They buried him somewhere.’

‘But I saw him up where we were,’ said Willie Dunne. ‘I swear.’

‘He never left the aid post till they took him out to bury him.’

‘That’s the saddest thing I ever heard,’ said Willie Dunne.

‘Aye.’

At least Major Stokes struggled down eventually to see them. Otherwise they were forgotten men, in an aftermath both insane and silent. By the time he reached them even he was covered in mud up to his armpits. He was bizarrely smiling when he came round the traverse. He looked about carefully at the strange arrangements.

‘This is a terrible fucking trench, Sergeant-Major,’ he said to Christy Moran.

‘Terrible, sir. But it’s home.’

The major laughed his odd, flinty laugh, like a sheep coughing in a mist.

‘You fucking Irish. You always see the joke, at any rate.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Christy Moran.

‘Which one of you mud-men is my friend little Willie, Private Dunne?’

‘I’m here, sir,’ said Willie.

Major Stokes came sloshing over to him. Willie was perched on a little makeshift raft of ammunition boxes.

It was odd. The major took off his tin hat and put it under his arm in an official kind of fashion. It was peculiar, the formality of it. Major Stokes’ hair was quite white. It had certainly not been white the last time Willie had seen it.

The major kept his voice down now. ‘No hard feelings, Private?’ he said.

Willie was surprised but he knew the answer straight off. He didn’t really know what the major was talking about, but he knew the answer. It could have been a number of things, a number of dire things. But he knew the answer. It was the only answer in that place.

‘No, sir. No hard feelings, sir.’

Major Stokes gazed at him; it was the only word for it. He gazed. Maybe he meant to say something else, different things, maybe he would have said different things in a different place.

‘That’s very kind of you, Private,’ said the major. You couldn’t just quite tell if there was still a hint of something in the words, a flavour of insincerity. But maybe that was his tone and always had been. Maybe at the age of two with his own mother he had puzzled her with that sardonic voice.

Anyhow, the major must have felt he had said his say and sloshed away again round the next bend to see the lads further along and how things were with them.

For fifteen days they stood in the water. The Royal Army, Medical Corps boys had cleared the wounded and the dying, with a thousand curses and taking the name of the Lord their God foully and continuously in vain, but now the dire wasteland before them bristled with poor dead men and the foul air drifted against them. Liberal shells of gas and shrapnel and high explosive were thrown their way. The airplanes were all German in the sky, and they puttered down along the Allied trenches, throwing out bombs.

‘This is a right fucking war,’ said Christy Moran. ‘A right fucking war all right.’

Only in the dark of the night, the rain firing down, was there any semblance of safety, but it was a tricky, slight, little safety at best. They often thought that headquarters had forgotten them. That even their own supply battalion had forgotten them. Rare were the victuals that made it up to them; they had often to risk the horrible water that lay about everywhere if they were to have a chance to slake a thirst.

‘We were heroes only a few weeks back. Now they don’t give a kicking mule what happens to us. Bastards,’ Christy Moran kept saying.

The new first lieutenant did his best for them. He was cranking the field phone all hours of the day, half-begging for orders to get them out of there. There were only scarecrows and ragged souls of men left along that part of the line. It was a wretched state of things.

Finally there seemed to be some hope of being pulled back. It was said that a battalion of the Gloucesters were going to relieve them.

All good things come to an end,‘ said Pete O’Hara, and his damp, cold and hungry companions laughed. Not a man among them but hadn’t thought once or twice of shooting himself in the foot, or eating a raw rat or the like, anything to be ferried away nicely. And what were they watching for now, only Death himself? If the Hun could rouse himself, there wouldn’t be much to offer him by way of warlike spirit.

The Gloucesters never did turn up. Maybe the great Leviathans of that mud world swallowed them up. There was talk of new creatures fashioning themselves from this chaos, horrible, fanged whale-like monsters that could eat a soldier in two ticks.

They read the po-faced information in their soldier’s small-books for the laugh, especially the stuff about keeping the feet dry and clean. And ‘clean dry socks’.

‘I like that bit best,’ said Willie Dunne.

There wasn’t a clean dry anything for ten miles around, he thought.

Then Christy Moran pulled a rabbit out of the hat, for Willie Dunne, anyhow.

All right, Willie,‘ said Christy Moran. ’You’re not in debt and you’re not on a charge, so I think I can spare you. Poor Father Buckley said I had to see pronto if I could get you a little home leave.‘

‘What’s that, sir?’ said Willie.

‘Furlough, Willie, I’m letting you go home on a bit of furlough, you lucky fucker.’

Willie knew he wasn’t due leave. Or had it been eighteen months again already? Had it been a thousand years? Despite the mud in his very arteries, despite the cold stone that had replaced his head, a tiny bubble of remnant joy surged up. He was going home, just for a bit. Father Buckley was still looking out for them from the grave, wherever his grave might be.

‘Thank you, Sarge,’ he said. ‘I could kiss you, Sarge.’

‘Go way, you fucker, you,’ said Christy Moran. ‘I’m not your mother.’

‘You bugger,’ said Pete O‘Hara. ’Don’t leave us here on our own.‘

‘Sorry, Pete,’ said Willie Dunne.

‘Bring us back a parrot then,’ said Joe Kielty.

‘Rightyo.’

When Willie was all packed up and his kit aloft his back and his gun in hand, and his greatcoat over everything else, and he wasn’t in a position to stop him, Christy Moran reached in under the coat and put something in his top left-hand tunic pocket.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘You keep that. Just in case I don’t see you again.’

‘What is it, Sarge?’

‘It’s that fucking medal they gave me. I didn’t know where to put it till this moment.’

‘But, Sarge, it’s your medal, for gallantry, Sarge, killing those Germans and all.’

‘I don’t fucking want it. You earned it just as much, you stupid cunt. Anyhow, Willie, it has a little harp on it and a little crown, and I reckon between the two it might get you home safe.’

‘Jesus, Sarge, I don’t know what to say.’

‘Then shut up, Willie, and get going.’

‘Rightyo.’

Chapter Nineteen

What a thing it was to be released out of there and ferried along by truck and train to places on the earth that were still firm underfoot. He stared out at that world, thinking all the time of his companions behind in that desolation. He found himself wondering what they would be gassing on about, and was surprised that though they were planted in a spot so evil, he missed them.

He was shocked to discover that England, as he passed through, looked and smelled the same. An Irishman passes through England and cannot think English thoughts. What lies between his home and Belgium? That England.