A Long Long Way (4 page)

Your loving son,

Willie.

The time came when the new recruits were changed into something they had despaired of, trim, polished soldiers, though they had never seen battle.

It was past Christmas now and the new year had come and still the war was there. They had got used to the novelty of the number 1915 on their forms and chits and thrown the old number into the back of their minds with all the other years, in the manner of a young man’s easy way of thinking. They had all heard the stories of the lads on both sides at Christmas coming out of the trenches and singing together, and playing a bit of football, and exchanging black sausages and plum puddings, and singing, and now they all knew that ‘Silent Night’ was called ’Stille Nacht’ in German. So it didn’t sound all bad, though of their own regiment hundreds had died and many taken as prisoners by the vile Hun.

The most difficult thing in barracks was to find some quiet spot to masturbate, because if he didn’t masturbate, Willie thought, he would explode worse than any bomb. That was the principal difficulty anyhow.

Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht ... It didn’t sound so bad at all, really.

Much to Willie’s delight, they were to head off from the North Wall in Dublin, so it was a chance to be waved off by his own people. They were carried up from Cork on the train and were to be marched from the station to the ship. And indeed faces lined the road to the North Wall like a thousand blowing flowers. Little scuts came out of the back streets and shouted God knew what at them.

He looked everywhere in the crowds for his own Gretta. Gretta the secret he kept from his father, he loved her so much.

He couldn’t see her anywhere. But girls in their dresses and nice coats waved at him, and the soldiers large, thin and small looked all puffed up with the excitement, and they were cheered from the station all along the Liffey and all the way through the docks. All those Dublin people loved to see them go, it seemed, they looked proud.

Annie, Maud and Dolly had told him they would be standing at the O‘Connell Monument, up on the first plinth below the angels, and he was to look over that way when he crossed the bridge and not to forget.

They marched like great experts of marching and indeed they had been well drilled and perfected in Fermoy after all. The boredom had become ability. They kept good time with their boots and kept themselves stiff, though they couldn’t help a little tincture of swagger. Soldiers after all, who had freely signed up for the duration.

Not long now, of course. And they would be lucky if the war was still there when they got to France.

Everyone hoped to see a bit before they were turned back victorious.

The men marched with the knowledge that they had the bit of money now and the bellies of brothers and sisters wouldn’t go empty. You could write it down in a special book, or have an officer write it down in a special book, who the pay was to be sent to, if you didn’t want it yourself. And any young wives now would have the allowance to fend off the evil days and keep that wolf from the door.

But he didn’t see sight nor hear sound of his sisters. Maud wrote to him later to say that Dolly refused to go. In fact, she refused to be found, and hid herself in the labyrinths of their castle quarters. It was half-four before they found her in the great coal-cellar, weeping, weeping. And it was too late to set out then. Oh, they asked her what the matter was, and why she had been so bold as to run off. She couldn’t help it, she said. If she had to see her own lovely Willie go off to war, she would die.

It was a strange England they moved through. Not the England of stories and legend, but the real, plain land herself. Willie had never seen those places in true fashion. Now he was required to see them as they were, through the bright glass of the troop train.

In little villages and towns the people there also came out to cheer his train, his very train. They lifted their hats and smiled. Even at daybreak the sleepy inhabitants came out. The young soldiers were all weary so it was very cheering. Private Williams rather bitterly decreed that they were just people going on their own journeys, and would probably just feel embarrassed if they didn’t cheer when they saw soldiers. Williams was a tall, soft-looking man with hair as yellow as wall-flowers, all spiking up.

‘They certainly don’t know we’re Irish,’ he said.

‘Would they not cheer as loud if they knew?’ said Willie Dunne.

‘I don’t know,’ said Private Williams. ‘They more than likely think we’re little lads from the collieries of Wales. Yeh, because they see you sitting there, Willie. They think we’re all midgets.’

‘They think we’re from the circus. A battalion of pals from the circus, I bet,’ said Clancy. He was as plump as the day he had come in, despite the training, and as confident as a robin in winter.

‘You can’t tell a man’s length sitting down,’ said Willie agreeably.

‘That’s not what Maisie says!’ said Private Clancy. Clancy was from south Dublin somewhere.

‘I don’t think there’s anyone called Maisie where you live,’ said Williams. ‘They’re all Winnies and Annies there!’

Now, Willie Dunne’s middle sister was Annie, so he didn’t quite follow the friendly insult here. But he thought it might be a rural reference.

‘Ah well,’ said Clancy. ‘It’s a saying. I pay no heed to anyone but Maisie - she bakes the currenty cake. Did you never hear that, Johnnie?’

‘What in the fucking world does it mean?’ said Williams.

‘I couldn’t tell you. A saying isn’t supposed to mean anything. It’s supposed to - what in the name of fuck is a saying supposed to do, Willie?’

‘Jesus, don’t ask me,’ said Willie Dunne.

‘Too many cooks spoil the broth,’ said Clancy inconse- quentially.

‘There’s no hearth like your own hearth,’ said Williams.

Willie in his mind’s eye saw for the thousandth time his three sisters milling in the pantry, Annie getting under Maud’s elbows and Dolly getting under any elbows going. And his father shouting from the front room not to be roaring at each other. And the fire of Welsh coals roaring in the big black iron grate, speaking of the collieries. And the chimney howling in the wind, and the skies blowing about outside in the deep winter.

And it was not a world he had thought he would ever leave; you didn’t think that at the time - you didn’t know.

He thought he knew what a saying was supposed to do, despite his denial. A saying, since a saying arises always from the mouths of adults when a person was just a listening child, was supposed to carry you back there, like a magic trick, or a scrap of a story, or something with something else still sticking to it. But he had no inclination to bother his pals with such a winding thought.

The seats of the train were made of wood; it was really a fourth-class carriage in its civilian days. There must have been a hundred trains rushing across all the old shires of England, coming down out of the highlands, from the dirty north, from the sedate south, bringing all the boys to the war. And some were more than boys, men in their thirties and forties, even a few aged ones in their fifties. It wasn’t all a young fella’s game.

When he went to the jacks to piss he thought he was pissing with a new dexterity. He could think of only one word to describe everything, bloody manhood at last.

In that strange six o‘clock when the sun just began to mark the dark horizon.

‘See,’ said Clancy, ‘they don’t mean a blessed thing, bloody sayings. They’re not supposed to.’

They went through from the French port in real transports, big, groaning lorries the like of which he had not seen before.

As they approached the war, it was as if they went through a series of doors, each one opened briefly and then locked fast behind them.

At first it was the miraculous and shining sea, like some great magician was trying to make a huge mirror out of dull metal, and half succeeding, half failing.

Then the salty farms and then the flat chill fields, with little modest woods and high straight trees along the grey roads. Well, the roads were almost white, because the weather had been unusually dry. So one of the lads said it looked like home except with the mountains flattened out and the people were in queer clothes.

It was thrilling to travel through that foreign place. Willie Dunne was ravished by the simple joy of seeing new places of the earth. He sat up in his seat so he could peer out through the planking of the truck and thrummed with pleasure. He found himself comparing this serene landscape to the country place he knew best, the fields and estates around the home place of his old grandfather in Kiltegan. There was nothing here to compare to the mysterious heights of Lugnaquilla, the folds and folds of its great hills, like a gigantic pudding not ever to be entirely folded in, that would bring a traveller at last into the city of Dublin.

But sober as it was, the landscape overwhelmed him.

He sat with his new companions Williams and Clancy. Across the gap sat his company sergeant-major Christy Moran, a wraith of a fellow from Kingstown with the face of an eagle. If there was fat on that body, Willie was not a Christian. The man was all sinew, like a carpet at the mills in Avoca before they start to work the loom at it. He was all long threads going one way only.

Willie had been pleased to discover also as they had boarded the Dublin train at Limerick Junction that their platoon leader was a young captain from Wicklow, one of the Pasleys of the Mount, and Willie’s father when he wrote to tell him was pleased also, because everyone knew the Pasleys and they were highly respected people and had a lovely garden there around their house. Willie’s father indeed was sure the captain would be a chip off of the old block, just as he himself was a chip off the old block of his father, who had been steward of Humewood in his heyday, and just as Willie was a chip off him.

The big transport lurched on towards the war. He felt so proud of himself he thought his toes might burst out of his boots. In fact he imagined for a moment that he had grown those wanting inches, and might go now after all and be a policeman if he chose, astonishing his father. The men of the decent world had been asked by Lord Kitchener to go and drive back the filthy Hun, back where they belonged, in their own evil country beyond the verdant borders of Belgium. Willie felt his body folding and folding over and over with pride like the very Wicklow mountains must feel the roll of heather and the roll of rain.

It was this country he had come to heal, he himself, Willie Dunne. He hoped his father’s fervent worship of the King would guide him, as the lynchpin that held down the dangerous tent of the world. And he was sure that all that Ireland was, and all that she had, should be brought to bear against this entirely foul and disgusting enemy.

The blood in his arms seemed to flush along his veins with a strange force. Yes, yes, he felt, though merely five foot six, that he had grown, it was surely an absolute fact, something in him had leaped forth towards this other unknown something. He could put it no clearer than that in his mind. All confusion he had felt, all intimations that troubled him and unsettled him, melted away in this euphoria. He was full of health after the nine-month slog in Fermoy. His muscles were like wraps of prime meat to make a butcher happy. The lecturers at Fermoy had described the cavalry engagements that would soon be possible, and there would be no more of that miserable retreat that had made the beginning of the war a horror, killing indeed so many of the old Dublin Fusiliers and making prisoners of heroes. The enemy lines would be burst asunder now by this million of new men that had come out at Lord Kitchener’s behest. It was obvious, Willie thought. A million was a terrible lot of men. They would smash the line in a thousand places, and the horses and their gallant riders would be brought up and they would go off ballyhooing across open ground, slashing at the ruined Germans with their sabres. And good enough for them. Their headgear would stream in the foreign sun and the good nations would be relieved and grateful!