How could this estaminet be spinning like a great wheel, the songs going round and round, in a great trail of stars and colours? It was beautiful, after a fashion. O‘Hara was dancing now with a girleen, it seemed so gay and good, and now Willie was being dragged to his feet, ’No, no, I do not wish, I do not, non, non,‘ but he was laughing, the truth must be told, he was kind of raging within, he was laughing and crying, Gretta was dancing in his daft head with Captain Pasley in a silver trail of stars, in the tail of a comet that promised heaven to the world, and good purpose to all things, and the loving chanting of God.
They were danced, O‘Hara and himself, into a deeper room. Willie went crashing down onto a mattress that had lived a long and ruinous life - there were fearsome gashes in it all over and the hair of a dozen horse tails was spewing out. The room stank of powder, something like oil, and other odd, fierce smells.
But the girl who had pulled him up to dance was a beauty right enough. Truth to tell she was. He lay on the ancient bed and looked up at her. She wore only a loose shift and a long petticoat like a queer metal, and he glanced hastily at her fat, trim breasts, in case she would take offence at his staring. From the crown of her head dropped hair as black as a dark corner. Thick, thick black hair like a smudge of night she had, and clear, clever eyes the colour of the dark blue feathers in a magpie. My God, he thought, she was like a goddess. She seemed to Willie more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen.
‘Money for fuck?’ she said.
‘Hah?’ he said. But he knew what she had said, because she had said it very clearly, through her small, sharp teeth.
‘Shillings,’ she said. ‘Fuck shillings?’
He looked over at O‘Hara and he had wasted no time at all and had climbed up on the other girl. His bare arse was pumping in and out, but his trews were pulled only down to his knees. Two little footballs of lard, it looked like. Two other soldiers were at the same work indistinctly in other corners. The girl leaned down and took the hem of her petticoat in her brown hands, and slowly raised herself again, her breasts tumbling about a little in a way that made Willie’s pecker so hard it was trying to strangle itself on his under-drawers. As she straightened, the hem was raised, and her thighs revealed, the skin as white as eggs, and then the pitch-black shiny hair between her legs.
‘Mercy,’ said Willie.
She smiled and dropped the petticoat and he smelled the heat from there blown out at him. She unfastened his belt and trousers, and pulled trousers and drawers down with a rough yank. Willie glanced down at himself, the flattened wig of his hairs there, and his pecker lolling to one side but blatantly uncovered. He was suddenly afraid that O‘Hara would see him naked but he had no need to worry about that. O’Hara was deep in his own pleasure, and was gasping and giving out little shouts. The girl as beautiful and rare as a black rose hoisted her petticoat again and climbed neatly onto him, and leaned her face to his, and laid her soft cheek on his. She manoeuvred his pecker into herself and suddenly he felt that graceful heat.
It was remarkable, he thought, how tender he felt towards her. He sort of loved her for that while. He tried to gaze into her eyes right enough, but she wasn’t a one for gazing it seemed. When he came it felt like what he thought being shot in the spine might feel like.
Then he seemed to sleep and awake. It wasn’t like proper time passing.
The girl was over in the corner, sluicing her crotch out at a chipped enamel basin. He felt as if his brain were loose in his skull. O‘Hara looked very glum and was sitting wearily on one of the awful beds. He stared over at Willie now.
‘Will we go, Willie?’ he said.
‘Why you call Willie?’ said the beautiful girl, giggling.
‘Let’s go back to fucking billets and forget this ould shite,’ said O‘Hara. ’It’s all shite.‘
The woman beside O‘Hara had a long purplish rash down the inside of her leg. Willie could glimpse it through her torn stocking. She grinned at him, as if wondering if he was the boy for a second lap.
‘All right, Pete,’ said Willie.
They careered out into the bleak night. Amiens was teeming. The clanking matériel of war inched along the road, the men of the army passed like a river. There were new faces in the backs of trucks, all white from the sea-voyage and raw with ignorance, their eyes burning brown and blue and green under the awnings.
When they went back to the billet the sergeant-major was awake. He didn’t say anything to them. He was lying on his army bed staring out of the window.
Royal Dublin Fusiliers,
Belgium.
January 1916.
Dear Gretta,
I hope this letter finds you and yours well. I hope over the Christmas you were happy and peaceful. Here is another year! I am sitting in these support trenches and the wind is coming howling over Flanders like a lot of old ghosts. There is a very quiet sector ahead of us with little or no bombardment and I think it is true that everyone begins to be dying off from the boredom. Not that we want to hear the bombs, but I tell you a tin of maconochie is not like a friend, not a welcome thing under your nose day after day. But at least we have proper latrines here which makes a change from other arrangements we have put up with. But you won’t want to be hearing about latrines. I wish I could write to you about roses and flowers and love, and that I am coming home for good. We all do wish the war was over now, though make no mistake we will stand up to the Hun no matter what. I do feel I have seen the inside and the outside of war and you do end up here as hard as a nut, which is all to the good. Say hello to your father for me. The wind is howling tonight. I wish you could see the frozen snow that lies over everything, it is quite something when you lift your head a moment above the parapet, which of course is a very foolish thing to do as there are still snipers everywhere, but we have the front line ahead of us for protection. Somehow we seem to be going through a time of peace more or less. The land is locked fast in winter and generals as a rule wait for the spring to be thinking of further things. We live day by day, my friend O‘Hara and me get through the night-times chatting away like lunatics and when we have to go out to do this and that up on no-man’s land in the darkness, we try and stick together. He is a nice sort from Sligo, you would like him, and I hope after the war you might meet him. He is what is left of our little group of mates now. He has a reasonable voice and he likes to sing with me in the daytimes. We are mostly sleeping when not on guard duty but you can’t sleep all the hours of the day and when we are awake we are repairing the trench walls which is work I alone in this army quite like, because it reminds me of the work I did with Dempsey’s, trenching for pipes and the like, and it keeps my spirits up. Then we are grubbing down and O‘Hara has read his soldier’s small-book and likes to boil everything in his tin till the colour has gone out of it. I fear to tell you that I haven’t had a proper wash now for a week and God alone knows when we will get one, because we are told we will be going up into the front line in another week or two and then we will be away from washing rightly. Even the line officers smell like old clothes. This is all farms hereabouts, with little stone farmhouses here and there, and we are billeted in the nooks and crannies of our own trench. I have carved out a happy niche for writing to my girl in. That girl is deep in my heart. I wish, Gretta, I had words for what I think of you. How high you seem to be, like an angel in the high sky. Luckily in dreams I see you, all bright and yourself. I am afraid you do kiss me then and often, and I am glad of it. Do you dream of me? I will sign off now and just to let you know I am always thinking of you.
Your Willie.
He didn’t think ‘Your Willie’ sounded very good and he crossed it out and put, ’Your loving Willie.’ Then he crossed that out and put, ’Yours lovingly, Willie.’ He always had trouble with the ending of letters, certainly.
It was a long letter though, and every inch of writing it he thought should he say something about the fallen girl of Amiens?
A couple of days later Willie and Pete
O‘Hara were at the latrines together. Poor O’Hara was yelping as he tried to piss.
‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ,’ muttered O‘Hara, with an oily sweat on his brow.
‘What’s wrong, Pete?’ said Willie.
‘It’s just like - oh, mother of fuck - someone’s lost a razor in my belly, and the bastard’s trying to pull the fucking thing out through my bollocking willic - Oh, mother of the good Jesus, save me. Oh, mother of the good Jesus.’
‘You need to get permission to see the good nurses, Pete.’
‘Oh, yeh, that’s great, Willie, I’ll go and bring this to the nurses. Nice Irish girls. They’ll be only thrilled. Of course. I just didn’t think of it.’
‘Well, Pete, what’ll you do, so?’
‘I’m after telling the sergeant and he’s going to fix it for me.’
‘Fix it for you?’
‘He’ll get me the necessary.’
The sergeant-major had laughed apparently and said that those women were dangerous girls, that had been driven out of Paris and Rouen and other points for one reason and another. ‘But aren’t they very fine girls?’ he had said, laughing.
All right,‘ said Willie. ‘Well, that’s good, Pete.’
‘Fucking bitches. I should go back and slit their throats for themselves. Of course, of course, lucky fucking Willie with his lucky willie, not a bother on you.’
‘Ah, here, don’t be giving out to me.’
‘And I’m after peeking into my fecking long-johns and haven’tIarash the shape of fucking England all down my leg?’
Ah, Jesus,‘ said Willie. ‘That’s bad luck all right.’
And so things went on and so they arranged themselves.
His company as promised went into the front line shortly but it was quiet in that cold sector of the world. About four or five men a day were lost to snipers.
One morning just after stand-to a lad from Aughrim put his nose above the parapet, not three feet from Willie. Willie Dunne was drinking a tin-mug of dreggy tea so he was not minding, trying to soak in every essence of surviving tea-leaf. To think it had come from China just to be boiled to death in Flanders. The lad from Aughrim had been only one day with them so far; he had been sent up among a group of replacements for what was called the natural wastage. Willie thought his name was Byrne and he meant to ask him shortly if he had any news of Captain Pasley’s family, because Aughrim was only a few miles from Tinahely where their house was situated.
As Willie drank his tea a shot rang out from over the way and for a moment Private Byrne stayed where he was, and then fell back onto the bottom of the trench. Willie stopped sipping a moment. Then he saw from the boy’s left eye, right from the centre of the eye it looked like, a bloom of red like the bud of a rose. Then it started to pump out fiercely, like a painter might try to paint vision itself, a conical jet of crimson.
The Royal Army Medical Corps could only come up slowly and after a couple of hours the boy still lay where he had fallen. He was alive and screaming non-stop. But Willie could not immediately give himself to the fact. He stayed put in his niche at first. After a while he couldn’t accommodate the screaming any longer and he crossed over to the lad and knelt beside him. But no one had any morphine and the ruined eye must have hurt like a coal. What could Willie do? He wished he had had the composure to stay in his niche and drink his tea. He was doing the lad no good and he was certainly doing himself no good.
The tea was long cold and forgotten in his stomach when the private disappeared on his stretcher around the corner of the traverse, the bearers cursing every inch of the way. This lad from Aughrim would be bumped down now to the Aid Post and then on to the Clearing Station if he lived that long. Then on to a hospital and if that bullet hadn’t done for him, he would be in Charing Cross Station before long, heading for an English hospital among all the thousands upon thousands of wounded and destroyed that passed through London. Men with half their faces gone and limbs lost and really and truly, ruined men, and then those more lightly wounded with their cherished Blighty, a wound that would take them out of the war for a little, maybe for good.
But Willie felt nothing but a cold despair as he watched the stretcher disappear. There were pains now and things now that no compassion could help. There needed now to be fellas brought up with guns, to shoot the most horribly wounded, like you might a horse. You’d never leave a fucking horse with an eye like that; you’d feel pity maybe, as much as you’d like, but you’d shoot it, to put it out of its misery. There needed to be a new sort of line officer like a veterinarian, he thought, because there was too much of this screaming and suffering. There was too much of it, too much of it, and it wasn’t love or anything close to it to leave a young fella screaming on the ground for three hours. It wasn’t love and it wasn’t even like being at a war and it wasn’t fucking right.
Christy Moran was strangely jubilant a few weeks later. They were back in the reserve lines, billeted on a right old so-and-so in a freezing and dilapidated farmhouse, not like their favourite old woman in Amiens.
‘I think they’re planning to give you a few days’ furlough, Willie. Proper leave, home leave,’ he said.
He said it with as much pleasure as he might about furlough of his own.
‘Jesus, when, sir?’
‘In a couple of weeks or so.’
‘Oh, that will be mighty.’
‘Try and stay alive till then, Willie.’
‘I will, I will, sir.’
Chapter Six
The sentry at the castle gate gave him a right look as he walked in, like the ghost of the war. The sentry, of course, was in the same uniform, but a hell of a lot cleaner.
Willie knocked at the familiar door of his father’s quarters. After a good wait the door was opened by Maud. She looked like she was in a dark mood; her face didn’t brighten to see him.
‘What is it, what do you want?’ she said, and he laughed at the fierceness of it.
Of course, she didn’t know him.
‘It’s me, Maud — Willie.’
‘Oh mercy me, poor little Willie, oh come in, come in.’
And it was with unusual joy that she pulled him into the rinsed room. It was all scrubbed floorboards, and there was a dresser of blue and white delph and really it was very shipshape, he thought, altogether shipshape.
After the long journey through the reserve lines, across England and over the Irish Sea, he would have been grubby even if he had started clean. But he had started in the state that ten days in trenches will leave you.
‘I think before you are kissing me and the like, Maud, you had better fill a tub for me, and maybe give these clothes an awful seeing to, and if you had something to disinfect them well and good, and me into the bargain.’
Maud drew back.
‘Annie, Annie!’ she called. ‘Annie will help us. Don’t you worry, Willie, we’ll get you clean all right.’
And she rolled up her black sleeves and went down the back stairs for the zinc tub that was stowed in its place under the lower landing. She nearly collided with Annie in the door.
‘Annie, dear, you will need to boil up some bathwater promptly and we will be washing Willie Dunne immediately.’
‘Willie, Willie,’ said Annie. She rushed forward and was about to put her arms around him.
‘Don’t touch me, Annie, I’m all lousy and God knows what.’
‘Well, we had better clean you off before Dolly gets back from school, because you won’t be able to hold her off!’
‘I’m sure that’s right,’ he said.
Annie had the polio as a little girl herself and was left with a bit of a hump, but it wasn’t anything too grievous and everyone hoped she would be able to get a husband.
‘To leave you standing there like that,’ said Annie, desperately. ‘Without a kiss. But I’ll warm the water in the scullery. Do you want a nice big lump of cheese in a bit of Maud’s bread?’
‘I do, I would heartily like that!’ he said, laugh
ing.
‘Well, heavens, it is a nice thing to have you back, and that laughter, and you will sing tonight, won’t you, some of those wicked songs of the war?’
‘I will not, Annie,’ he said, ‘they are much too bad, and you wouldn’t understand them anyway. I hope not!’
And who will we have to wash you? My heavens, I will have to send for Papa, I don’t know if I won’t. You can’t get rid of all those creatures yourself. And he was always a great man for the nits.‘
‘He was always the king of the nits.’
‘He was!’ cried Annie.
Soon the water was warmed, and the bath dragged over to the big window that looked out on the blind wall of the chief secretary’s department, but that let in a wonderful stream of sunlight, as good as a fire. Dark, deep, rich Dublin sunlight, he thought, that would roast the back off you if you lingered. For the window-glass didn’t let in the April breeze; it admitted only the sun itself. The blind planet sat above the city and you must not stare into it, his father taught him that years ago, when he used to wonder what the sun might be. But his father was ordinary and rigorous in his own mind, he considered the sun in a scientific manner, what its light might do to his son’s young eyes.
And Willie stood there and thoughts he didn’t welcome began to unsettle him.
He couldn’t stop his mind going back to that year, ‘13 , when his father faced the crowd in Sackville Street.
His father went into a shop in Sackville Street. He had his men massed at the O‘Connell Monument, and he telephoned headquarters to see what should be done, because there were hundreds of fellas out from the back streets, milling about, and there were scores of respectable people, and children, trying to make their way through the strange crowds. And headquarters told him to clear the streets.
A Long Long Way Page 7
