A Long Long Way (35 page)

The world and his wife knew they had done well and there was a queer little time when the whole division seemed to have the reputation of lions. There was more fancy training then, and more drummers pretending to be bombardments, and there were fellas dressed up as wounded men wandering about, and all sorts of mysteries. All this on the firm ground of summer, the firm ground of hopefulness.

As the rains came that August of 1917 the very earth of Flanders suffered a ferocious change. The whole country under Ypres dissolved. Field barriers melted, fields sunk away to flat quagmires, roads became memories. Horses, guns, carts, cars and mere mortal men found it difficult to walk over memories! The drear rain fired down day after day; thousands of guns were firing without cease. The beautiful system of dykes and drainage ditches perfected over centuries by the peaceable hands of Flanders’ farmers vanished. Huge lakes appeared on flat ground as if every little dip and depression were being glazed by God. The whole world turned black and brown, the sky, even the dreams of men. Puttees fell away after a week or two because it was impossible to keep anything dry. In Willie’s platoon four men had hacking coughs all day and night. It was a highly mysterious change.

‘What did we do wrong?’ said Christy Moran, heavily superstitious.

When the whole country was turned utterly wretched and debased, their companies were marched up to the front. Everyone wore their long brown coats, and the big glistening hoods, and all the cloaks seemed to do was cook each man slowly underneath in a bath of uneasy sweat. They were almost glad to go, because while they squatted in those reserve areas, bits and bobs of the battalion had been sent up to do various tasks, and some said gloomily that the battalion was now only a few hundred lads. That was grievously frightening. Because they knew also that they were going to be asked to go for another little village, called Langemarck, before they were much older.

Under the hoods they thought their thoughts. Visions of home, streets of Dublin, faces, sounds and fleeting colours. All the long history of the war behind some of them, and the present chaos round them all. The roads sucked at them like hungry monsters, every step was a sort of wager. Shells landed liberally among them, so that often the struggling lines were broken by bloodshed and screaming. The poor lads of the Royal Army Medical Corps, stripped to the waist, hauled those morsels of humanity away if they were still breathing and gabbling and praying. The remnants were left to decorate the way. Hands, legs, heads, chests, all kicked over to the side of the road, half sunk in the destitute mud. And front ends of horses and horses’ heads sunk in with filthy foams of maggots and that violent smell; horses that looked even in death faithful and soft.

Willie Dunne saw these sights, blinkered though he was by the hood. But you had to try to see ahead. How would he ever describe this to Dolly? He could not. She would wake screaming from her childish dreams all the rest of her life. It would topple a gentle mind over into craziness. How could a verdant land come to such an August? Even old Dostoevsky couldn’t have imagined such a thing; no mind of any dreaming or waking person could have.

Timmy Weekes was trudging along beside him. He had Joe Kielty on the other side and a new man he didn’t know, a frail little chap of nineteen. Nevertheless, he was keeping up well enough, that was the main thing. It had been intended as a march of two hours but already they were four hours going, in the bleakest dark that God had ever conferred on his strange earth.

‘I was just thinking, Timmy’ said Willie Dunne, ’ould Dostoevsky would’ve taken fright at all this.‘

‘Dante is the chap for this,’ said Timmy Weekes.

‘Who’s that, Timmy?’ said Joe Kielty.

‘Italian bloke,’ said Timmy Weekes, ‘called Dante.’

‘That’s a nice, interesting name,’ said Joe Kielty.

‘Or Tolstoy,’ said Timmy Weekes. The rain suddenly lashed into his face like it could make an angle for itself, so there was a pause. The wind was like bulls. ‘Now, Tolstoy wrote about wars. But not like this war. In his war you could still go home and fall in love with a lady.’

‘Can you not go home and fall in love with a lady?’ said Joe Kielty, and the four of them laughed, a line of laughing men in the midst of a human nowhere.

‘I wouldn’t say no,’ said Timmy Weekes.

‘A warm bed, a few bottles of beer, and a lass,’ said the new man.

‘Now you said it,’ said Timmy Weekes.

Then they didn’t say anything for a while, slogging on as they were.

‘And how is it different now?’ said Willie Dunne nevertheless. ‘That other fella’s war and this ould war?’

‘Well, maybe it i’n’t so very different. Maybe not. Anyway, they don’t write books about the likes of us. It’s officers and high-up people mostly.‘

‘So the battles maybe were the same?’ said Joe Kielty.

‘The same. Maybe so, Joe,’ said Timmy Weekes. ‘You put out a crowd of lads on the field, and the other side put out a crowd of lads, and you had musket shot and cavalry, and then the low lads like ourselves were shunted down the valley or whatnot, and fought like fucking lions, I suppose. And when everyone was dead on the other side, you had a victory. A victory, you know?’

‘Well, and that’s not the same with us, then, is it?’ said Willie. ‘Because we only had a victory the one time, at ’Whitesheet‘, unless you count Guinchy. And even then we were fucked to hell. Other times you had a rake of our lads killed, and a rake of the old grey-suited devils, and you wouldn’t know who had won the fucking thing, sure how could you tell, boys?’

‘Well, that’s a difference, i’n’t it, right there?‘ said Timmy Weekes. ’But they might be adding us up after, and if more of us is left standing, then they might be calling that a sort of victory, i‘n’t that it?’

‘Some fucking victory,’ said Willie Dunne.

‘Some fucking war,’ said Timmy Weekes.

‘And so say all of us,’ said Willie Dunne.

And that was strong talk. And that was all right for a while. But as that strange silence that could descend on you, even among your companions, descended on Willie Dunne, all ease and that tincture of happiness like the sweet juice in an orange left his brain. It began to throb with that all too familiar throbbing. A dash of grog might take that away. An ill thought, a curse, or a good sleep might also.

Christy Moran seemed to know where they were supposed to be, and after five hours of that ‘merry march’, as he called it, he pitched them into some curious ditches. They may have been trenches once. The new officer was only a first lieutenant and he didn’t know how to read the maps, so Christy was helping him along. It behoved them to tackle the trenches straight away because it would be daylight in a few hours, so even after their march they all started stabbing at the black soft clay with their entrenching tools, trying to fling the stuff back onto the parapet and parados. But it was like porter on their spades. They didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and did both generously. Still the rain cascaded with an intense passion that bespoke something that could think and breathe. It wanted to know every nóok and cranny of every man, till every man was drenched and shivering.

The dawn came and stand-to was a sort of humourless jest. There were no firing steps, no duck boards, and, what was more imminent and sad, no breakfast to speak of. They nibbled at their iron rations, like rats themselves. Their trench was in full view of someone that bore a grave antagonism towards them, because the parapet was continuously strafed by buzzing bullets. Some crowd of geniuses somewhere had a mortar and were sending mortar bombs liberally over. Even when the shells exploded yards off, great chill sheets of filthy water came pouring victoriously down on their crowns. It was stupefying, withering. Willie Dunne could feel his very soul shrinking away in despair. Two days they suffered there, with the water to their knees, and not a bite came up behind them, not a scanty suggestion of fresh water, nothing. And always the ruckus of the shells, the machine-guns, the evil stenches. Even in the walls of the trenches hung the sad bones and fleshy remnants of other souls, as if some crazy farmer had sown them there, expecting in the spring a harvest of babies. At this point Willie would have believed anything. For those two days they pissed and shat where they stood, because the word ‘latrine’ belonged now to another era. It was said that even the first-aid post in a trench behind, where Father Buckley held his station over the wounded, was a sort of pigsty of blood and entrails. And there was nothing anyone could do. Father Buckley had been reported to be roving about in the darkness, with a spade, and, even under that morass of shells above and in the vile muck beneath, had been carefully finding the dead, and, with a few flashes of his spade, burying them into the entirely unstable ground, and praying over them with full and passionate prayers.

Willie Dunne never knew the first lieutenant’s name but he led them into battle on the third day.

There was another tremendous expense of shells from their own artillery far behind which served to transmute three feet of mud into five feet of mud. Nevertheless, at the appointed hour Willie and his fellows rose up and started to grapple with the ground, for the ground itself was an enemy. The mud took a hold like very hands of their boots and pulled and held them. A nasty sucking noise, and they could hazard another step. There was in that place a veritable mile to cross to reach the objective that the Mutineer had in mind. To the right again in the miserable version of daylight the men of the 36th dragged their destitute forms through the same mud. Was this what poor Willie Redmond had in mind, thought Willie Dunne? It was only a brief thought. All his other thoughts were of wetness, violent noises, hurting joints. It was as if the whole battalion had been changed into hundred-year-old men.

Great numbers were falling. Others were finding where the quagmire was even more mired than other places and the mud was just swallowing them whole. The heads of men were being taken away by the low shells, and a million bullets searched out that struggling flesh, chests, groins and faces. They were fighting for nothing now, only breath and safety, a dream of safety, and after half a mile many would have settled for death, and did. The vilest fates were reserved for the wounded, half subsided in the mud, and receiving bullet and bullet again, as if all manner of human hope were now forbidden on the earth. This was a crazy walk of death, the terminus of all lives and wishes.

All about the German area they could see no trenches. Nothing familiar at all. At set intervals in the wild mud had been built neat little concrete houses, and the machine-guns were blazing out of them. No one could storm them, because the black morass forbade it. In all truth, Christy Moran didn’t have a clue how to deal with them. He just pushed his platoon through, what was left of them, and in a low voice howled to himself in the howling air.

Willie Dunne, Christy Moran, Joe Kielty, Timmy Weekes, by some weird chance that they would never be able to explicate, came up to what Christy believed was the first allotted line.

‘Where’s the others?’ said Joe Kielty, not expecting an answer.

‘Did you see where that first lieutenant got to?’ said Christy Moran with utter weariness.

Now the battalion in reserve was supposed to appear behind them in a bit and surge on wonderfully to Langemarck. Not a soul living seemed to be near them, nor a soul behind. All was a blank, black sheet of murderous nothing. It was daylight and the war had fogged the world.

Maybe it was minutes or hours but the air thinned a little about them and they saw that they were not in fact entirely alone. There were clumps of khaki uniforms all about. There seemed to be some hundreds coming behind, even thousands, as so greatly desired, and they could watch the shells dropping among them, and see in the distance the ruined soldiers falling. Every now and then Joe or Willie fired up the slope, when they thought they saw some leaping grey, like strange deer. Then a truly nasty thing - if such were possible of nasty matters further that day - happened. Willie’s stomach felt as if it had fallen out of its place and dropped down somewhere into his feet. Because over the hill in front came line after line of grey uniforms, a sight of the normally invisible enemy in horrible formation.