“ ‘Here lies my finger,’ he said, ‘which lost its little life somewhere near the beach, beneath the fort whose name I can’t pronounce. May it rest in peace.’ Then he blessed himself with his bad hand and the dried bloodied stump seemed not to bother him at all. He looked up at me with those eyes and
it
was hard to tell whether he was laughing or crying. ‘Have you anything to say, Gregory?’
“ ‘Yes,’ I said, and bowed my head. ‘I want to pay homage to George’s little finger, whose service to King and Country has been mighty and immeasurable, which finger died in the heat of battle in defence of Poor Little Belgium on a beach in Turkey. This finger paid the ultimate price and joins the ranks of glorious dead on these shores from Achilles to those thousands of poor souls around us as yet unburied. Amen.’”
~
I changed in my bedroom and walked down the stairs, carrying my wet clothes in a bundle, down the avenue with the crunching gravel, through the gates and along by the silver river. I threw my bundle in the water, and I walked with no object, just to walk, just to feel my useless body moving of its own accord along the pitiless road. I knew the road had no pity, just as the house would have no pity, as my mother and Mary Dagge would have no pity, and the only one who would have pity I could never tell, and that would be my father.
So I walked away from him, putting so much distance between him and me that I would never have to hear the sound of his breaking heart. I walked until the house had long disappeared behind the hedges and the hayricks and the broadleafed trees, and kept the river to my left with the graveyard by Mornington across it. And when the spires of Drogheda came into view, and the masts of the boats like spires themselves, I saw the round yellow light of a porthole come into view with a gangplank above it. I stood by that porthole and looked down at how the yellow light seemed to make the lapping crests of water below even blacker. I could have taken one step in and found myself looking at the hull of the boat from the crush of water below. But I heard a sound then, the lowing of cattle from the ship above, and I decided to go wherever those cattle went. I walked up the manure-caked gangplank, and on the deck I could hear nothing but the creak of the ship and the moan of cattle below. There were bales of straw stacked below the funnel, and I crawled up them like I had crawled in Mabel Hatch’s barn and I wrapped the loose straw around me and fell asleep.
~
“The trench was full of sleeping bodies so we burrowed into the sand above it like crabs. Or more like worms perhaps,” says Gregory, “the kinds of worms that leave their sandcasts on Baltray strand, ragworms, lugworms . . . We scraped the ground with our knives and wormed our way in, leaving the displaced sand like casts above us, facing the Turkish line, ready to catch whatever bullets they fired our way when the sun came up. It felt as if the earth was our only comforter and there was a sweet protection in being so close to it, not even an oilcloth beneath us. We belonged to it and only it, it would protect us and if needs be bury us, embrace us, turn us once more into itself through the agency of what we seemed to be, worms. I was asleep within minutes and when I woke the hot sun was climbing above us and there was a burning in my left arm.”
~
When I awoke the funnel was spewing smoke above me and the sun was streaming through it. There was a girl standing by the mass of rivets with her arms crossed, looking down on me. I couldn’t see her face for the smoke but I heard her voice.
“What do we have here,” she said, “a stowaway? Oh no, it’s the girl from the Laytown races.”
And I recognised the voice of the Colleen Bawn. “Are we moving?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, “we’re waiting for the engines to warm up. I never got your name.”
“Rosalind,” I lied.
“What are you running from, Rosalind?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You like sleeping on cattle feed, then?”
“No,” I said, “but I’ve got no alternative.”
“You better come down,” she said, “and have some breakfast or they’ll send you back to nothing.”
~
“By eight o’clock the guns were going again from the sea behind us, and we crawled out of our burrows into the trench where we re-acquainted ourselves with our kit. George opened a tin and we ate the meat together, it was in a warm stew of suet and water and tasted like nothing I could remember. We were told to kit up and walk forwards which we did, though if we had ignored the order I don’t know what they could have done since it came from no officer we knew, and besides, we hardly knew each other. But we walked forwards because that was why we came here, we had a dim memory of our purpose, and what were we there for, if not to walk blindly on to an unknown beach, across ridges of shale and scrub, through unannounced and unexpected red poppies, towards an opponent who only revealed himself in distant puffs of smoke. Maybe they had been cleared out by the bombardment, maybe they had fled, because we walked unopposed now, up small stony slopes that seemed hardly worth the effort.
We gained height gradually and made it to the ridge where I could see the whole peninsula—lines of men stretching away to the left arid right, thousands of them, an endless plain in front of us, four or five broken stone columns jutting into the sky and beyond them what someone told me was a village. I could see the bright colours far to my right, red and blue—or was it gold?—of the French troops, miles away like small toys, images of what I had always imagined were soldiers, small emblazoned ants walking forwards and every now and then one of them would tumble backwards and vanish from view.
So there was firing down there, we could gather, but from where we were the only thing to stop us was our own tiredness and thirst. Thirst more than tiredness. We could have sleepwalked on, eyes half-closed, feet moving forwards in the half-remembered imitation of the act of walking, but the thirst blinded us to anything but the need for a drop of the water we were leaving behind us. They had runners carrying cans of it from the beaches, but the further we moved the less of it reached us, until around noon we just stopped, like mindless donkeys who could move neither forwards nor back but could only stand, struggling for breath in the punishing heat.
They came at us then, from somewhere in the leafless bushes beyond, one of them waving a sword of all things. And we probably would have let them cut right through us, when a shell whistled over and exploded above them leaving pulverised pieces of the flesh of fifty or more, a pall of white smoke, an echo that rattled from the gulley to our left and the distant groans of the men still alive, in a language that was unintelligible. But we understood well enough, they were dying, and that sounds the same in anyone’s language.”
~
She brought me down below, past the merchant seamen waking up, to where the cattle were shifting in their pens and her companions were sleeping on their rolled-up tent canvas against the portholes. She poured a pitcher of cold water for me to wash myself in and as they woke, one by one, the questions came.
“Are you in trouble, Rosalind, the kind of trouble she’s in?”
“What kind of trouble is she in?” I asked, and the older one with the straw-blonde hair rubbed her belly and laughed.
“The kind of trouble that shows,” she said, “the kind of trouble that’ll have her off the boards in a month’s time.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not in that kind of trouble, I’m not in any trouble at all, but I want to do what she does.”
“What do you want to do that I do?” she asked, looking at me with her clear blue eyes.
“Act,” I said.
“W
E CRAWLED FORWARDS
then through the groaning to an empty trench which they must have left. We settled ourselves in there and the more adventurous among us took up sniping positions and fired at anything that moved. George’s hand was now a mass of pus as if he had dipped it in custard, and my shoulder was no better, the wound bubbling away in its own juices in the heat. Neither of us could hold a rifle but we had two good arms between us, his left, my right, and we were put to moving sandbags from the back of the trenches to the front.
The stretcher-bearers came as the sun was going down and two of them got hit by a blast; one died immediately and the other crawled above us groaning, a great hole in his chest. We were told to take their place, one-handed stretcher-bearers, and we lifted him on it and scurried with it back the way we had advanced all day, sideways, bent like crabs. At the beach now there were rafts with piles of wounded on them, pulled by other boats with piles of the same. We lifted him on the raft we could reach, said nothing to his curses in that fine Birmingham accent, and as the raft pulled off I had an idea.
“ ‘You’re wounded, George,’ I said.
“’If I’m wounded, Gregory,’ he said, ‘then you’re wounded too.’
“ ‘We’re both wounded,’ I said, and pulled away my coat to display the bandaged arm, and we made it through the water to the raft and crawled on up, and saw the one we had carried had stopped cursing in his Brummie accent and was quite still now, already dead. The boat pulled us out to sea, to where the battleships still breathed their smoke, and then the moon came up and they stopped. We edged past them slowly, we drew alongside an old cattle-ship, and the business of winching them up began, one by one on the bloodied stretcher, until the ones who walked were left to clamber up the ladder by the side.
“Up on the deck there was a blanket of what looked like yellow straw on the ground, until I lay on it in the only space I could find and realised it was dried horse and mule manure. We were on an animal transport that had been improvised into a hospital ship. But the improvisation was minimal, the men lay like worms on the dried turds, the only relief being a procession of orderlies going from one to the other with panniers of water. And when my turn came I opened my lips and drank what I could, then lay down and slept.”
~
They gave me tea and beans and a fried
egg
cooked on a small paraffin stove.
“We might have use for you,” said the blonde one, Ethel, lighting a cigarette. And what use it was I would soon find out, as the other girl grew bigger in the bed beside me. I graduated from washing and stitching costumes to taking her place on the boards, since I stayed small as there was nothing to grow big inside me. So I drank the tea and ate the
egg
and beans as every rivet in the hold began to shudder and the cattle bellowed and the gangplank was cranked away on its chains.
“Where are we going?” I asked Ethel, as the dockhands outside began to diminish in the porthole.
“Liverpool,” said Ethel, “where else did you think?”
“Will you excuse me then,” I said, “since I want to see the country that I’m leaving.”
~
“What still amazes me,” says Gregory, “was the lack of any logic. I could see the hospital tents on the island from the ship’s deck, I could even see the nurses in their white uniforms and their bonnets like miniature tents, but we sailed right past them with our accompanying cloud of flies and bluebottles, all buzzing round the festering wounds on the open deck of that ship in the heat of the sun.
“ ‘Why don’t we land?’ I asked the orderly who cleaned the pus from my shoulder and injected it with quinine.
“ ‘Orders,’ he said, ‘to take you all to Egypt.’
“So we watched the empty hospital tents and the idle nurses retreat behind us.”
~
I climbed up to the morning air to see the town shifting slowly past the smoking funnel at the back, the small pilot tug in front of us with Janie’s father at the helm. I could see the smoke from his pipe curling like a question mark over his cap, and the question the smoke seemed to ask was would I ever see them both again? The tall warehouses by the docks drew past me and the RIC station above the sloping lawns and the dotted shapes of cottages, then the small tributaries from the river we were on, one of them that curled round the grey limestone shape that I was leaving for good. The sun glinted off the glasshouse and the chestnut tree was tiny against the water, a small doll’s umbrella, so small I couldn’t see the swing below it.
Were they looking for me, I wondered, searching every room of the grounds around? Of course they would be, maybe even calling the peelers to help them in their search. I would write, I had decided, when I reached Liverpool, explaining nothing but that I was safe. Then there was Mozambique and Mabel Hatch’s barn and the red roof of Janie’s cottage. The Lady’s Finger drifted by, the granite curve at the top so close I could nearly touch it, and the Maiden’s Tower was to my right with the Bettystown strand curving away, and I wondered was she still there, a ghost of her, watching the ships of another era come and go. Then the line of the Irish sea, as quiet as tea in a teacup, and the only odd thing was the sound of the cattle lowing from below.
~
“They took us back to Alexandria, where we’d started from, an improvised hospital in what used to be a brothel. I lay on the floor in a tall room with one window high up in the almost conical walls and listened to the low moans of pain around me, not too different I supposed from the moans of pleasure that must have filled the place. My arm was better within the week and George’s hand was saved the indignity of amputation. It was soon entirely functional with just three fingers and a thumb.
“We were given a week’s leave then, and wandered round the souks and market-places, round the working brothels where the hordes of squaddies drank warm beer while they waited for their turn. We were shy ourselves and didn’t indulge, an odd innocence when you consider what we had been through. Then we were sent back on another cattle-ship, full of volunteers from the Tenth Division, Irish, eager to stick fresh bayonets in Johnny Turk; we listened and said nothing. Another landing on another bay. We kept our heads down this time, knew the wormlike procedure in the sand, saw them mown down around us like new-cut grass again, felt the crushing heat again, the flies, but kept our water cans full.