A Long Long Way (43 page)

‘I sent all of Timmy Weekes’ things back, like you do, and I hoped his father and mother wouldn’t mind it, but I kept this back. I was going to send it on to you in a while. But you’re here now, Willie, and can take charge of it.’

It was the Dostoevsky that had made that winter near Ypres well-nigh bearable. Willie didn’t cry then. He felt proud, somehow, and loving towards Timmy Weekes. The King of England was a gentleman and his soldier Timmy Weekes was, too. The war was a fucking folly and it had ruined the lot of them and even the living were ruined, and it would never be any different, but Timmy Weekes was a gentleman.

‘Thanks a lot, Sarge,’ said Willie Dunne.

‘I just thought you might like to have it,’ said Christy Moran, in elegant tones not entirely characteristic of him.

‘How in the world did you get out of that, Joe?’ said Willie next day, crouched down together in the daylight in a manner that now seemed immemorial.

‘ Ah, well,‘ said Joe, ’it just came round in a handy way.‘

‘How so, Joe?’

‘I was trying my best to kill those poor fellas, rushing towards me. I was going along not so well, when somewhere behind them they began firing these huge shells, big mortar jobs that fell straight down from the blessed heavens, and they came short of me anyhow, and killed a rake of their own fellas. You lads were gone a good half-hour and there was a big gap in the lines coming at me, and I thought to myself, Is that enough time now to give you? And I saw this great horde of grey jackets come streaming in the distance, yelling like madmen, so I said to myself, It is! and went galloping off after ye, but it was days and days till I found the sergeant.’

‘You deserve a big medal for that, Joe.’

‘Ah, well,’ said Joe.

The summer of 1918 passed and Major Stokes was found hanged in a little haybarn three miles from a recent battlefield. His fine black motorbike was found neatly propped outside. His note to his wife mentioned the stresses of the war and apologized for his apparent cowardice. He put on record his love for his three sons. He hoped they would be spared such a war in the future. He didn’t mention Jesse Kirwan.

Now the regiments of the Yanks had done their long training and were putting their polished toes into the blood and wastelands of the war. It was their coming in — and the very resplendent look of them, fellas that seemed inches taller, and wider, and stronger, and generally larger, like giants in a storybook fed on beef and turkeys — it was their coming in that eased the anxieties of the government, and so feared conscription was let go by in Ireland. There’d be no new hordes of Irish lads following in behind, against their will or willingly. Whoever was out there already was all there was, and all there would be, of Ireland now in the fields of Flanders.

And yet those were soon the days when the army surged forward, lost many more thousands to Hades and heaven, offered here and there the long-desired sight of the cavalries cantering over spreading farms — in their dull khaki certainly, but the horses putting out the flags of their manes, and all those men surging at last on those epic creatures, and the grey and darkening men of the Kaiser driven fiercely towards Germany.

And here and there along the roads Willie’s lot shared the way now and then with American units, astonishing tall lads, they seemed to him, any one of which his father would have been proud to have as a son, if height were the measure of a true son. King Death maybe eyed them differently. Why, in the space of a few weeks they lost three hundred thousand men, it was said, and that was a dire slaughter to equal any of the suffering nations.

They passed on and on through Flanders. And that was almost the first time in the long years that Willie got a tincture again in his heart of the impulse that had brought him out, to put his hand to freeing old Belgium. And he was astonished to feel it again.

All that wild day they pressed on after the fleeing Hun. But it was a strange business, that fleeing. They never did see the vanishing army, hastening back to their homeland. What country would they find there? What greeting would they have? Maybe they will be stoned, maybe they will be greeted like heroes. Maybe their country too had changed behind them and was no more, was another country altogether. Starving in their shoes, the officer had said. It was rumoured the old Kaiser would be killed, or he would pack up and go and be Kaiser no more. The men generally would have liked him to be captured. Maybe to be hung up alive in a public place and his guts put out for himself! After all the sear death and dark griefs he had brought to the nations!

As they followed in the wake of the German divisions, moving it must be like deer and rabbits back through the unopened woodlands, the neglected fallow fields, it was dismaying to Willie to see everything had been levelled and destroyed. How had they found time to crush down the buildings of Flanders, to burn the aching fields? They feared to drink from the rivers and wells for dread of poison. It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood.

Past every building Willie in his mind built them up again, he forced himself to see the scaffolding poles lashed up, and the masons and the carpenters come again, and everything being made anew. They would be busy hereabouts, the armies of the sacred building trades.

He could feel the ending in his bones. He followed Christy Moran like he had done now for three years. He was light in his bones, the sergeant-major, he hadn’t changed much. He still whistled brief Dublin songs and still muttered to himself, cursing and coining dark phrases. He could have been put, Willie thought, to be King of Ireland. He could not be discouraged. If the Boche had had him for Kaiser ... The wrong men were up and the wrong were down. That thought had turned Russia on her head, and made the brave French fellas down guns and tools in ‘17. A thought that had brought out the men in Dublin, and that had killed Jesse Kirwan into the bargain.

He knew he had no country now. He knew it well. Finally the words of Jesse Kirwan had penetrated deep into the sap of his brain and he understood them. All sorts of Irelands were no more, and he didn’t know what Ireland there was behind him now. But he feared he was not a citizen, they would not let him be a citizen. He would have no pride to be walking through Stephen’s Green, he would not have the mercy of youth or the hastening thoughts of age. They may stone him too when he returned, or burn the house of himself to the ground, or shoot him, or make him lie down under the bridges of Dublin and be a lowly dosser for all the rest of his days. He went on through the widening farms. He had fought for all this in his own manner. He had crouched in the murderous trenches, he had miraculously — so said Christy Moran — come through the given battles, and almost alone of his comrades he was alive. No, he did not understand Jesse Kirwan entirely, but he would seek to in the coming years, he told himself. At least in the upshot he would try to know that philosophy. But how would he live and breathe? How would he love and live? How would any of them? Those that went out for a dozen reasons, both foolish and wise and all between, from a world they loved or feared, but that equally vanished behind them. How could a fella go out and fight for his country when his country would dissolve behind him like sugar in the rain? How could a fella love his uniform when that same uniform killed the new heroes, as Jesse Kirwan said? How could a fella like Willie hold England and Ireland equally in his heart, like his father before him, like his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father, when both now would call him a traitor, though his heart was clear and pure, as pure as a heart can be after three years of slaughter? What would his sisters do for succour and admiration in their own country, when their own country had gone? They were like these Belgian citizens toiling along the roads with their chattels and tables and pots, except they were entirely unlike them, because, destitute though these people were, and homeless, at least they were wandering and lost in their own land.

About midday they came to a hilly place where it seemed a contingent of some Bavarian soldiery had decided to make a stand. At least they were trying to hold a rickety bridge, or so it would appear in the distance. Someone read the map and said it was called St-Court. They must have had a few pieces of artillery with them too, because there were big shells being lobbed suddenly into the woods behind. Strangely, the force and nature of the old war returned. Perhaps they would all dig in again, and be at this for another thousand years. This would be their country for ever more, these few hills, this bridge, these autumn-tormented trees. He would ever look out on here from a neat trench that he would make with his entrenching tool, and they would fashion, him and Christy Moran and the other lads, some nice revetments from the hazels in the wood, and keep everything as trim as they could, and pray for good weather. And those Germans in the distance would become a rumour, the ghosts of a rumour, another world, but a close world, the dark moon to their bright sun. And so it would be for ever and ever more.