A Long Long Way (7 page)

He thought how beautiful Gretta was, like the statue of the Grecian lady in the Painting Museum in Merrion Square. But she was no great hand at the letter writing, that was sure. The fella would come by with the letters and if he was lucky there’d be one from his father. Weeks and weeks and weeks he had waited for a letter from Gretta. It could be said that just now and then he was angry about it, humiliated. Even Christy Moran’s wife, never mentioned by Christy, wrote to Christy, because Willie had seen him hunkering down hungrily to read such letters. Joe Clancy had a girl that wrote to him right enough and regularly into the bargain.

He knew the captain had to read all the letters that they themselves wrote, so that an eye would be cast over everything, for information that might give help to the enemy, in case the letters were lost in an attack. He was always a bit nervous so writing to Gretta, to declare those few words that had been said he knew those countless times in all the languages of mankind. But it had to be risked. He loved her. And he knew, he hoped, she loved him because she had said so at their parting. And though the occasion may have driven the words into her mouth, he knew and hoped and prayed that they had started their journey in her heart, as they had in his.

Sometimes he could manage quite a long letter and sometimes for some reason when he tried to fetch out the proper words, there were only a few of them.

He thought how young she was in truth and how young he was and all their possible long days ahead, if they could only get their hands on them, and nothing standing between.

Of course, he remembered that she had not been able to give her word that she would marry him. He had felt awkward asking her in the dark of the stairwell of her father’s tenement, but she had not felt awkward saying no.

‘No, Willie, I won’t undertake such a thing,’ she had said, like a lawyer or the like.

And well he understood why not, what with her so-called beau going against her wishes and off to war with him seemingly without a care. That was the story then.

But it was every day now he cared, for her and for all the things he had left behind.

How beautiful she was, he thought, how beautiful.

Royal Dublin Fusiliers,
Flanders.
April 1915.

Dear Gretta,

I am thinking and thinking of you, Gretta. There are Chinese diggers everywhere and black lads and the Gurkhas looking fierce, the whole Empire, Gretta. And I don’t know what nation is not here, unless it is only the Hottentots and the pygmies stayed at home. But maybe they are here with us too, only we can’t see them so low in the trenches. I should talk! I am longing for furlough so I can go home and tell you all that I have seen here at the war. I love you, Gretta. That’s a fact.

Your loving friend,

Willie.

He wrote that. And then he tried to erase the ‘friend’ and put in something better. But it became a smudge, so he wrote in ‘friend’ again and hoped it would do the trick. He was very nervous writing the letter all right. The captain might think it was stupid; and worse than that, she might think it was stupid.

Some toiling days later they were on the move again, pushing on further up country to near St Julian. He was getting the hang of the new words, and anyway St Julian wasn’t much of a mouthful, it was almost English.

At first they considered things to be much improved. There was a river near the reserve lines where they were billeted, waiting to go up into the line, with weeping willows along the banks, and the same river was known to meander out between the lines eventually, and to carry into the German lines themselves, so it amused them to set little paper boats on the water, with violent messages written on them in bits of German, in the hope that somewhere a German hand would fish them out.

They supposed they would have to say it would soon be summer, as summer was said to come early, in those parts.

Clancy, Williams, O‘Hara and Willie Dunne asked permission one fine day to swim in the river, and Captain Pasley didn’t say nay, in fact declared he would join them.

It was a pleasing stretch of country there when they reached the elected spot. The glistening blue bullet of a kingfisher fired along and away under the lowering trees. The water was dark black silk.

Once the uniforms were stripped off, no one was so obviously a private or an officer. It was curious to Willie and his pals how slight and young Captain Pasley looked.

They ran about in their long-johns kicking a sick-looking football, and there was a fresh and excited laughter in their voices under the trees.

It was a laughter almost painful in their throats, and the willows seemed to float now in the breeze, like green clouds, and the river water was a piercing blue, the blue of old memory, and although being young they did not know exactly the privilege of being young, yet even after long hardships their bodies felt fine, and the blood was flowing round them well, and after all in the horrible mathematics of the war, they were alive.

Then Clancy did a running dive into the river, and Williams arrowed in after him, and then Willie, and then Captain Pasley went in with a belly flop.

Then they were out again smartish as the water was still quite chill and they lay back on their uniforms, arms behind their heads. They were naked as babies. A little breeze played about in the willows. The five penises lay like worms in their nests of pubic hair. It was like, thought Willie, an old painting in the window of a pricey shop in Grafton Street that a person might gawp at in surprise.

It was not that the war receded; they could hear it clearly enough, coming over to them in the still air, the shocking repetition of the high-explosive shells, and shrapnel bombs that even at that distance made a mean little insect noise.

An airplane careered overhead, going about its business of photographing and intelligence-gathering. The head of the pilot was quite plain, jutting up from the canvas of the craft. The colours and the big letters of the Royal Flying Corps gave the airplane an air of the circus.

But it was quiet otherwise along those fields.

‘How long will the war last, do you think, sir?’ said Clancy, scratching his ankle with his other foot. His nails were as long as Methuselah‘s, yellow and bony looking, and they had begun to curl back under the toes. They had been long days in their snug boots.

‘I hope not too long, anyhow,’ said Captain Pasley.

Then nothing for a while.

‘It’s the farm I miss mostly,’ said Captain Pasley, as if the words arose from a private thought of his own. ‘It makes me jittery to think of all the work that needs doing at home.’

He pulled at the grass under his hands.

‘And my brother John’s in now, South Irish Horse,’ he said.

‘Is that so, sir?’ said Clancy idly.

‘And the father’s not getting any younger, I suppose,’ said the captain. ‘You know, he needs us there really, to be seeing to the liming of the fields, that’s a big job just now. We only have one or two labouring men left, everyone else gone into the army, like the men of Humewood and Coollattin and the other estates. By Christ, boys, I am jittery to think of it.’

O‘Hara nodded sagely enough. They liked him talking about his home place somehow.

Captain Pasley stayed peaceful enough, despite what he said about being jittery.

The kingfisher went firing back up the other way.

‘That liming is a big job,’ he said, pensively.

But soon enough they were wearily in the line again - wearily, because they took over twenty yards of a trench that had been in the possession of some sad-looking Frenchmen, and by heavens their idea of a nice trench was a strange one. At least they had decent spades up here, and regulation army wire-brushes to get the clay that stuck like toffee off their boots.

It was foolish to make too many banging noises in a trench. In this position the enemy was a comfortable three hundred yards distant, and there was no sense in waking them up to their duty. Willie Dunne’s spade bit quietly into the ragged trench. The spoil was thrown up conveniently behind to make a better parados, a line of heaped earth to prevent fire unexpectedly coming in from the back. Other loads were heaped into sacks and stacked up in front for a decent parapet. A fire-step was put in place below so a fellow could stand on that and make some fist of firing out into no-man’s land, or, in the worst case, stand there by the ladders before going over the top.

The Algerians were just over to his right. The Algerians sang fine, strange songs most of the day, and at night now he could hear them laughing and talking in a sort of endless excitement.

The trench was soon looking fairly smart.

‘That’s fucking better now,’ said the sergeant-major religiously.

They did all that and then lurked in the perfected trench, getting muggy like old boxers. The poor human mind played queer tricks, and you could forget even your name betimes, and even the point of being there, aside enduring the unstoppable blather of the guns. What day oftentimes it was, Willie would forget.

Then a different day arrived. Everyone had had a lash of tea, and there was a lot of farting going on after the big yellow beans that had come up around twelve. As usual after they had eaten, they were beginning to look at each other and think this St Julian wasn’t the worst place they’d been in. It was the essential illusion bestowed on them by full stomachs.

A breeze had pushed through the tall grasses all day. There was a yellow flower everywhere with a hundred tiny blooms on it. The caterpillars loved them. There were millions of caterpillars, the same yellow as the flowers. It was a yellow world.