A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  ‘How are you?’ asked Duggie. Everyone called him that, but behind his back, of course.

  ‘Not so bad, Sir, considering.’

  ‘Yes, considering.’

  They fell silent. The dog’s tail flapped on the dirt, its breathing uncommonly loud.

  ‘I can’t help you if you won’t help me,’ said Duggie, lighting his pipe.

  Flanagan’s father used to say the same thing, sitting in the exhausted light by the fire. But his father had been talking of the farm and the fishing, the breaking of rocks to make the walls, the burning of the kelp to make iodine. And Flanagan had wanted to escape the harness of life on the island, to taste air without salt, to walk for miles without sight of the sea.

  ‘I said I need your help,’ repeated Duggie, striking another match.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, Sir,’ he lied.

  ‘Let me help you. How did you get to Étaples and back again without a pass?’

  ‘Hah, I’m sorry, Sir, I am.’ He shook his head, as did the dog. ‘I told you before, it wasn’t me. The police must have stopped some other fella. There’s—’

  ‘—Flanagans aplenty in the army,’ recited Duggie.

  ‘Aye, there is, Sir.’

  ‘A tot of rum?’ Duggie asked, playfully, reaching for a pocket flask.

  ‘I won’t, thank you, Sir.’

  ‘Thought not. Drink isn’t your thing, is it?’ The CO sighed and scratched his cheek. ‘You’ll be kept under close arrest. However – he picked a shred off his tongue and flicked it away – ‘between the hours of four and six, you’ll polish the weapons of the regimental band. I’m told there are twenty-six instruments in all. Do them carefully, please. And do bear in mind … there’s no rush.’

  Flanagan had expected to be locked up day and night until the Commander-in-Chief had decided what to do with him. But the CO had a way of startling you in moments of crisis by a quiet word or, as now, a kind decision. Something to show that the individual soldier was as important to him as the battalion itself. There was another reason, though, for why Flanagan liked his CO: he served the army like his father had served the land. Both of them saw further than their own horizons, both of them would never say so. Yet both of them understood someone who did, for they looked on to the world from their own regret, from a field they would not leave.

  2

  Later that day, when the rest of the battalion was being screamed at while they marched, Corporal Mackie escorted Flanagan from the cellar to an abandoned house on the roadside between the abbey and the school. Thin orange bricks framed sections of beige cement stamped with imprints like a cat’s paws. Mackie unlocked the door and pushed Flanagan inside.

  ‘If I was in charge,’ he whispered, ‘I’d have shot you by now, you worthless bastard.’

  The door banged shut and Flanagan entered the sitting room. Most of the instruments were stored upon shelves along one wall. On the floor were two big drums and a tuba on its bell. He sat on a stool and opened a bottle of Goddard’s Silver Polish. Mindful of Mackie’s bitterness, and the many others who felt the same, he began to think of Owen Doyle. He, too, had been worthless … from one angle.

  After Flanagan had taken Major Dunne to the stretcher-bearers, he began the return trip to Joyce and the boys. Out there, among the craters and rain, he literally crawled upon Doyle. The heap moaned and hit out, an arm rising from the dirt that smacked Flanagan straight in the teeth.

  ‘Calm down, ye brute,’ he snapped. ‘I’m on your side.’

  The soldier remained crouched, each hand over the back of his head, face down in the muck, whimpering.

  ‘Are you injured, so?’

  The heap wouldn’t speak. It rocked from side to side as if it were a mole trying to get its nose under the earth. Sitting upright, Flanagan patted its back. He did that for a long time, as his father had done on the farm, helping a beast push out a calf. Pat, pat, pat. And all around the rain thumped into the soft land. Finally, the soldier raised his head, his hands kneading the mud. He sat upright, like Flanagan. They looked at each other, each unseeing, each etched against the darkness, rain thundering down upon them. This other man had no gun, no bandolier and no helmet.

  ‘Where’s your people?’ Flanagan asked. The figure just rocked from side to side, humming on a monotone. He wasn’t one of Flanagan’s pack, that was for sure. He was from another battalion. He’d crossed a boundary. He was on the run.

  ‘What’s your name, so?’

  ‘I want to go home,’ he wailed, answering neither question.

  ‘And where might that be?’

  The voice answered, this time aggressive and through bared teeth. ‘I don’t have one, but it’s Blighty. Not this hole. This cemetery.’

  Hah, the fear. It could split the lining of the lungs if you let it loose. The impulse to avoid death rose from a pit, from somewhere deeper than any thought or idea.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘But you’ll likely as not get caught.’

  The hunched figure rocked and hummed under the beating rain. Flanagan could imagine the running nose, the tears, the juddering lip, and that terrible relaxation in the limbs, so like exhaustion and helplessness. He’d heard about an execution, once, when on leave. The poor wretch couldn’t hold his limbs. He’d flopped in the guardhouse and kept apologising. They’d had to drag him out and strap him to a chair, and all the while he was saying, ‘I’m sorry, lads.’

  ‘I can’t go back,’ whispered the shape. ‘They’ll shoot me.’

  ‘Tell me your name.’

  ‘Owen Doyle.’

  There in the rain, soaking up the mud, they talked. In the dreadful, low, unquiet between explosions. Or rather Doyle did, of home and the cobbled streets of Bolton in Lancashire. He’d come to London and taken the King’s shilling, and now he wanted to give it back, without interest. Flanagan’s eyes misted. There were no cobbled streets on Inisdúr … just tracks across grassland that had been worn through to the strong rock beneath, a rock that wouldn’t yield. As Doyle spoke of the cotton mills with their tall, thin chimneys, the tight terraced houses, and the gas light halos at night time, Flanagan remembered the fields of seaweed and sand, and the white gable ends of low houses huddled in the lee. This gathering of flesh and stone he’d left behind. He’d sailed away, leaving a crowd at the slip.

  Hardly listening to Doyle’s moaning, Flanagan made the greatest decision of his life, though it appeared more as an instinctive reaction than a rational choice. In truth, the thinking had been completed long ago.

  It had begun with that spate of burials last spring. For three days Flanagan manhandled his own future. He smelled it on his fingers. It made his trousers tacky. Afterwards, he was told to count the identity tags that had been collected in a pannier taken from a mule. There were two thousand, three hundred and fourteen discs of different shapes and sizes, like coins … all sorts of strange currency, crudely stamped with number, name and religion. The essentials. He’d remembered a winter’s morning on Inisdúr when, as a boy, he’d heard an explosion of wings and seen thousands of birds in flight at once. The discs became heavy in his hands. On the fourth day, and shivering, he told the new MO that his mind was sick. ‘The faces of the dead hang around me like a crowd,’ he said. So the doctor checked his tongue and shone a torch in his ears and snapped, ‘You’re normal.’ Flanagan had been relieved. He’d thought maybe it’d been too much sun and not enough water. But then, in June, the mines were blown at Messines. A million tons of TNT, they’d said. The German positions just disappeared in a great belch of hot wind. Bás. Flanagan had never seen anything like it, awake or in his dreams. After he saw the crater, he couldn’t speak. The MO shone a torch in his throat and muttered, as if it were a threat, ‘You’re normal, just like me.’ But Flanagan knew he wasn’t. That he’d changed. That he wanted a death with meaning.

  Not death from a whizz-bang. Not death from a coal-box. Not death from bullets scything out of nowhere. Not death from suicide, or accident, or a hideou
s, screaming brawl with another man-beast. The capricious butchering had almost driven him mad. Only one sanity remained: if he must, he would choose the manner of his dying. He’d reached the point of serenity where ‘thinking’ was no longer necessary.

  And then, like a bitter gift, he crawled upon Owen Doyle. At a very deep level, without being able to fully appreciate the workings of his own decision, or track the velocity of the insight, Flanagan knew that in finding this unhappy boy he’d received the opportunity he was looking for: to die in a meaningful way.

  His mind blank, his emotions numbed, Flanagan dipped a field dressing into a pool of bloody water and thrust it against Doyle’s face. The brat fought back, howling with terror, but Flanagan had the strength of a God. He’d made a decision that set him above this arbitrary universe. He dragged Doyle, weeping and deranged, all the way back to the RAP, where he told Father Maguire what had happened out there in the rain. For a few, flashing seconds they argued about the right word to describe it. They quickly settled on nochtadh – a disclosure. Either way, Flanagan had made up his mind. He was going to Lisette Papinau’s. ‘Just do as I ask,’ he begged. The chaplain splashed off into the shadows to get Doyle’s number. When he came back, ill with worry, he listed the lad as injured. ‘But not me,’ hissed Flanagan. ‘Just him. That’s important.’ It was then, on hearing the sketch of Flanagan’s plan, that the mainlander muttered, ‘Listen, man, your only chance is drink.’ Hastily and shivering, Flanagan wrapped his arm with the second field dressing. As the familiar words came out of the darkness, he bowed his head.

  ‘Nár lagaí Dia do lámh.’ May God not weaken your hand.

  It lacked the whack of the original.

  Within half an hour Flanagan and Doyle joined the utter chaos of injured troops moving away from the front towards an Advanced Dressing Station.

  Protected by the crowds and madness, they smuggled themselves into a Red Cross ambulance which took them through the rain to a Casualty Clearing Station at Abeele – an awful, eight-hour rattling journey among cries and the silence of dying. There, at Flanagan’s request, a nurse procured two clean uniforms. In the late morning, washed and presentable, they slipped away to find a train. As usual it pulled in bursting with troops for the Salient, the coach windows glazed with body heat. More chaos, as the shining faces disembarked. And while the NCOs shouted and stamped their ground, Flanagan and Doyle clambered on to a goods carriage and hid among some crates.

  As they trundled towards the coast, Flanagan made a greater escape into memory. He talked of Inisdúr and the sharp smell of the tide, the steaming rocks, and the labour of Muiris, his father. In a mist of longing he saw Róisín, his mother. She was proud, holding Brendan’s little hand. Flanagan gasped his explanations. It was like he was going home, at last.

  Flanagan pressed a valve on the tuba, reflecting that it was only on the train that he’d got a chance to study the face of his accomplice. The talk of the island had sent Doyle to sleep. Flanagan looked on the slumped head, slightly fearful, wondering if he’d picked the wrong man.

  Side on, Doyle was boyish with an upturned nose and a top lip that curved gently outwards, as if he was one of those Christmas angels or the bronze lad of so many fountains – the tyke with the arched back, passing water into a marble basin filled with pennies.

  But Doyle had stirred. His head had turned and his eyelids had opened for a moment. And Flanagan had seen someone else. The brow was heavy, the eyes mature and disconcerting: one was narrowed and vigilant, the other dull and unfeeling, as if it could watch terrible things without rolling over. That impish nose showed itself squat above uneven lips … all in all, a face that had been hit once too often. Perhaps by hands like his own, with tattooed dots on each knuckle.

  He was, as Flanagan’s mother would have said, contrary. ‘Be careful, Seosamh, that one can go either way.’

  Taking a soft cloth he set to work on the bell, bringing up the shine till he saw his own face across the trademark of Boosey and Company, makers, 295 Regent Street, London. His features were so distorted that he saw the man within: not a shape but an assembly of attitudes: fear, determination, abandonment and hope: all gathered into the grimace of someone who’d found a way out of senseless dying.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Mutiny

  1

  ‘There’s unrest in the regiment,’ said Duggie, carelessly.

  ‘What kind?’ Herbert felt queasy.

  They were in battalion HQ – the back room of a blacksmith’s forge, the enterprise rendered useless upon the demise of the owner and his four sons at Verdun. The widow and her only daughter now crept about in black, tending to the cares of the British Army by the careful management of vegetables grown where the horses used to wait. Chamberlayne had insisted on peacetime comforts, and to that end had filched a desk from the post office, securing for Duggie a more imposing specimen from a blown-out bank.

  ‘Among whom?’ pursued Herbert.

  Chamberlayne typed laboriously with one finger, not looking up. ‘Those who remain.’ He span the roller three times, pulled out the document, and signed it through a quite awful hush.

  Herbert had already suffered the stony salutes of the RSM and Private Elliot. There was a ruthless obedience among the NCOs and men: no muttering or undertones of complaint, just brute compliance with his orders. Flanagan’s conviction was common knowledge among ‘those who remained’ and it had struck a nerve.

  Chamberlayne fed another sheet of paper into his typewriter. ‘A court martial subsequent to the decimation of an entire regiment in twelve hours has not been received with universal understanding by the rank and file,’ he observed, turning the roller slowly to align the page. ‘But that is not the problem to which our Commanding Officer refers. Do I address this one to Division, Sir?’

  Duggie nodded and Chamberlayne set about the usual preliminaries, hitting each key with a jab of calculated uncertainty.

  Herbert’s stomach rolled as if he were at sea. The animosity had become personal, focusing on himself. It was not unknown for men to finish off a hated officer in no-man’s-land, among the litter of bodies. It could never be proved. He’d once heard a tale of some rough nuts sticking a Mills bomb down the trousers of a Second Lieutenant who thought he was Hannibal.

  ‘Joyce came to see me this morning,’ said Duggie, sitting on the edge of Chamberlayne’s desk. One leg began to swing. ‘He’s overheard some strong talk.’

  ‘Yes?’ Herbert squared himself.

  ‘Apparently, the men will be buggered before they’ll hand a win to the Lancashire Fusiliers.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They want to pull a team together for the Lambton Cup. They want to win it for the old team.’

  Herbert flashed his rage at Chamberlayne for leading him on. The adjutant gave a servant’s nod of gratitude and hit a full stop with a stiff index finger.

  ‘The final will take place on the sixteenth,’ said Duggie. ‘That gives us two weeks to field a team that can’t be beaten. I’d like you to sort out the players. There’s some new boys from Blighty, but four of them come from Flanagan’s old section. Gibbons, Pickering, Nugent, and Hudson. These are the ones he left near Black Eye Corner. In fact, I’m transferring them to your Company. Along with Elliot. Joyce will be there, too. He says he’s a robust defender.’

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ said Herbert, understanding at once the breadth of Duggie’s intentions.

  ‘I think it would do you good to mingle with the men.’

  Any hostility thrown up by the trial had to be dealt with, but not on the level of ideas and explanations. As ever, with the army, it was a matter of solidarity and mutual respect. And Duggie was sure that Joyce understood Herbert’s position, just as Elliot understood that of Joyce, just as the rank and file understood that of Elliot. The place to re-establish the bond between officer and soldier was not the parade ground but the field of play.

  The CO gave Herbert the document that Chamberlayne had prepared. It wa
s a memo setting out the members of the squad and the practice times. Fourteen names were listed, the last of whom was Joseph Flanagan.

  ‘Flanagan?’

  ‘Edward’s idea.’

  Chamberlayne nodded, accepting the praise. But the CO’s decision was nonetheless remarkable. It meant that Flanagan, for a certain time, would be released from imprisonment … a condition that had already been relaxed through his polishing of the regiment’s instruments. At that instant, Herbert realised that Duggie had subtly changed. Something had broken inside him after the annihilation of the battalion in August. The CO wanted to save his men … even from a court material and its consequences.

  Duggie slid off the desk and led Herbert outside on to the road. In the distance the guns rumbled, forever erratic and monotonous. To the right another battalion was marching to the front; to the left, in the distance, charabancs lined the verge. They’d brought fresh batches of men from Poperinghe and Abeele for the rehearsals that would begin in earnest later that morning. It was as though Herbert and Duggie were at a still point between this coming and going.

  ‘Division is pushing this one through,’ said Duggie, referring to Flanagan’s case. ‘He was tried within three days of being caught. They’ll decide his fate in the same breath. We’ll know before we go up the line. That gives you time to find out what really happened with Doyle in Étaples.’

  ‘But why me?’

  ‘Because I think you might thank me for it in the years to come.’