The shit he had shat in his pants was hardening, making Willie Dunne’s backside devilishly itchy.
It was Easter Thursday in that realm of myriad deaths.
Company headquarters was in what remained of an old barn. You wouldn’t know something strange and dark had happened not much more than a mile away. The transport officers were shouting at the drivers just as they might anywhere at any time. The big munitions waggons were dragged forward by resplendent shires, as strong as engines, with huge, intelligent heads. They lifted their forelegs like dancers in a dance that had become stylized by repetition. They were almost ridiculously beautiful, like wonders in a story, and all about them ground on the columns of uniformed men.
Willie Dunne found the ruined barn nearly by instinct, thinking to himself, It must be this way, and eventually, mysteriously, so it proved. The missing wall of the barn had been shored up roughly and there was a torn canvas awning for a roof. The three officers at their table, which looked like it must have been dragged out of an estaminet bar, were nevertheless neat enough. Their cheeks were shaven, although one of them had old-fashioned dundrearies, despite his years, which blossomed out at his ears. He had seen the major before, a Major Stokes, but the two other men were new to Willie. He came in and held out the scribbled note to them, covered in mud and blood as he was and certainly not shaven.
‘What’s this?’ said Major Stokes.
‘Message from D Company, sir.’
‘Who’s the man down there?’ asked one of the other officers.
‘Captain Pasley — no, Sheridan, sir,’ said Willie.
‘Oh, yes, Sheridan. Right, Sheridan.’
‘Bent as a cart-spring, Sheridan,’ said Major Stokes.
‘What, sir?’ said Willie.
‘I wasn’t talking to you, Private,’ he said.
Major Stokes read the note and Willie knew the information hurt him. He could see that clearly. The man’s narrow face with a hundred pockmarks closed in on itself slightly. He put a hand to his forehead and tapped a finger there.
‘That’s another bunch of casualties,’ he said. ‘Christ Almighty.’ Then his face changed again. ‘What’s wrong with you fucking Irish? Can’t you take a bit of gas?’
‘Excuse me, sir?’ said Willie.
‘Would you take it easy, Stokes, for the love of Mike. Can’t you see he’s been down there with them?’
‘Now how would I know that?’
‘He’s covered in blood,’ said the officer. He looked like the sort of man you might see behind a bank counter, half his hair gone west, a soft grey pallor on his cheeks, which seemed to be squeezing his mouth like two puffballs.
‘I tell you, you smell like hell, Private,’ said the major.
‘Leave the poor bugger alone,’ said the bank-clerky captain.
Now the telephone was ringing and the third officer got his ear to it and listened, only grunting back replies.
‘Would you stop interfering, Boston,’ said Major Stokes vaguely. ‘Can I not talk to this soldier without you heckling me?’
Willie Dunne felt only a numbness, a wateriness in his limbs. He was trying to read the man’s face still, and not listen so much to the words. This was happening in front of him, but the death of the German man was happening still also. Now Willie started to tremble, not from any emotion he knew of, but his hands were rattling and he held on to his jacket to steady them.
‘What’s wrong with you fucking Irish?’ said the Major again.
‘I shat in my trousers, sir, that’s the smell you’re smelling.’
‘What?’ said the major, enfiladed as it were by this honest remark.
‘Shat in my trousers, sir.’
‘Why on earth did you do that, Private?’ said Captain Boston.
‘Terror, sir.’
‘Terror?’ said the captain. ‘You say terror?’
‘Why not, sir?’
‘Well, you’re an honest man, I suppose,’ said Captain Boston. ‘Yes indeed.’
Major Stokes was just staring ahead now. There was a little table in the corner of the destroyed barn with a cut-glass bottle on it that Willie just happened to notice at that moment. Whiskey in it or the like, and three small red glasses beside it. It was like a fragment from another world adrift in these confusions. He wondered what went on here between the three, what they would talk about when he went off again. Major Stokes rustled the message in his hand, waved it about a bit.
‘Fucking stinking war,’ he muttered.
The third soldier put the phone back on its box.
‘What’s the news from up there?’ said Major Stokes.
‘You can ring back to headquarters, if you like,’ said the man.
‘To say what?’
About two hundred dead Boche back there. Mostly in the trenches themselves. And they would appear to have finished up for today No sign of any more of the buggers rushing over.’
‘That’s excellent, that’s very good, tip-top,’ said Captain Boston, and glancing at Willie.
‘In the trenches?’
‘Yes. Hand-to-hand stuff.’
‘Good at that sort of thing, the Irish,’ said Major Stokes, but it was difficult for Willie to know if it was meant as a compliment to the nation or what. ‘Sheridan has a pretty miserable estimate of his casualties. Half his company, he says here. Wants his men relieved.’
‘I just got the total there of the battalion casualties,’ said the third officer.
‘Well?’ said the major mildly enough. ‘Whatever it is, I cannot relieve them.’
‘Eight hundred,’ said the third man succinctly.
‘Out of twelve hundred men?’ said Major Stokes.
‘Yes.’
‘My good Lord,’ said Major Stokes.
The long pockmarked face stared into Willie’s now. Hard to say if the man was really looking at him, though. He was definitely weeping, but not the weeping of a weeping person exactly — it was incongruous and peculiar weeping.
‘How will the clearing stations deal with that?’ said the major, and now he was trembling too, like Willie. Neither was trembling because he was afraid, or not just because he was, but because the world and the dealings of the world had set the pendulums of their hearts swinging, had set whatever they were swaying back and forth.
‘They’ll have to manage, David,’ said the third officer, who Willie now noticed was also a major.
‘Poor fuckers, they will,’ said Major Stokes. ‘Poor lines of blind fucking men and worse traipsing about all over the football pitch.’
‘The what, sir?’ said Willie Dunne.
‘Go back to Sheridan, go back to Captain Sheridan, Private. Tell him I’ll ring headquarters now and ask the general to do something about replacements. But he’ll have to hold the fucking line till something is sorted. I’ll send him a bunch of fucking coolies to bury his dead. And I’ll send him a few fucking buckets of hot fucking stew or something. Isn’t that what you Irish eat? And if the quartermaster can spare a tun or two of rum, he shall have that too.’
‘All right, sir,’ said Willie.
And wash that fucking arse of yours, Private. This is the fucking army, you know. Not the fucking Dublin slums.‘
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What’s your name, Private — for the report?’ said Captain Boston.
‘Dunne, sir. William Dunne.’
‘Little Willie, yes?’ said Major Stokes, in his misery.
‘No, sir,’ said Willie.
‘The fucking Kaiser’s son, yes? Little Willie.’
‘I’m not, no, sir. Not the Kaiser’s son at all, sir.’
‘Ah, fucking hell, come on. No one calls you Little Willie? A little lad like you, with the name of William. No?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Ah, don’t sound so fucking insulted. What’s the matter with you? Little Irish midget with a shitty arse. Don’t look at me like you’re going to make a fucking complaint. Don’t fucking look at me.’
�
��Lay off him, Major, for Christ’s sake,‘ said the other major.
‘Yes, yes. Very well, Private. Sorry about that.’
‘That’s all right, sir.’
And somehow he felt that it was all right. Given the new world that held sway over all things. And given that he himself, Willie Dunne, had had to kill a man. Anyway, you couldn’t give an officer a box in the gob.
‘Yes,’ said the major. ‘Of course it’s all right.’
Then Willie turned about and headed to go.
‘Small William,’ said the major behind him. ‘Will that do it? That doesn’t insult you? You don’t mind that, surely?’
Willie risked going on without turning round or replying.
‘Those fucking Irish,’ he heard muttered again behind him.
‘They’ve had a hell of a day up there,’ he heard Captain Boston say.
He headed back through suffering and growing darkness to rejoin what was left of his company. With a scalded heart to guide him, and an affrighted soul, which, in these parts of the insulted earth, proved not bad lamps.
The dead were tidied away. Due to the cover of the gas and the failure of the machine-gunners to hold the hour, there were few enough mounds of grey-jacketed corpses up on no-man’s land, and what there were their brothers in the far trenches showed no enthusiasm to come and bury.
Major Stokes was nearly as good as his word. Some dubious stuff did come up to them in a covered vat, and it may well have been stew of some sort, except it had been religiously boiled till every last thing gone into it had merged into a sticky brown.
A man brought up tenderly a little barrel of rum, which though evil in its general character was welcomed with the warmth of children by the men.
The promised Chinese labourers didn’t appear and a detail from among the last four hundred men was drawn and all corpses, German and Irish, were carried back a ways and yet another little graveyard was instituted. There were no white picket fences, headstones, or the like. Just row after row of irregular beds, like a poor man’s vegetable plot, and into these loamy beds were lain the vanished soldiers. If they were stiff, the living men broke a limb here and a limb there, with muttered apologies to the slain. They were clothed in dark army sacks, all stray things, wallets, pictures, letters carefully extracted from dusty pockets and bloodied places, and the commanding officers of all the units kept these scraps and flotsams with identifying discs and soldier’s small-books and the like, eventually to be sent back to the mourning mothers and fathers in their counties. Many for the city of Dublin, parts of which were said to be still burning. Many to Kildare and Wicklow, Westmeath, little farms and labourers’ cottages would find the dark postman at the door with a well-constructed package, brown paper over a box of thin floppy boards and good twine and a wax seal over all, like an inheritance. These would be opened, examined, reverently repackaged, and placed reverently in the safer niches of sad houses.
Willie Dunne sought out his German among the rows and heaps, and dug a hole for him first. He found in the man’s pockets a little battered Bible, in German of course, funny, thick black lettering, and a little brown figure of a horse, which must be merely a keepsake. It was made of porcelain and did not seem the toy of a child, but nevertheless Willie thought it might have been handed to him quickly by his son or daughter at the door going away. He had a little leather fold, and when Willie opened it there were two little squares of gold leaf. He knew it was gold leaf because he had seen such things on the tables of the men who did the work on the castle chapel, gilding the shields and crests of the Lord-Lieutenants of Ireland that were erected above the congregation. Maybe his German thought it was a good sort of currency, or maybe he carried them as an emblem of his trade in peacetime. Who could know?
The sky glowered overhead. There was a new wind coming in from the west, and the freshening smells of rain were signalling in it. Nevertheless, the fields and woods about were washed by sunlight. Of course, his German had the expected photographs, a frowning woman with a heap of hair above her head, in a rough-looking dress. Her head looked too big for her body, and she- could hardly compare to Gretta. The other photograph showed a line of children, seven of them in an obedient row, and Willie suddenly put the two pictures back and gathered all the small things together and put them aside for to give to Captain Sheridan. For Captain Sheridan had ordered even the possessions of the dead Germans to be retrieved and not pilfered. However, Willie on instinct pocketed the little horse.
Seven children like steps of stairs.
O‘Hara was working about twenty yards off, whistling ’The Mountains of Mourne‘.
It was a relief for Willie simply to dig, to keep whatever hole he was digging square to the angles. It was like digging a foundation for a house. He even found himself, as he would by instruction working for Dempsey, throwing up stones in their allotted heaps, the bigger for filler stone for a wall, the rounded stones for cobbles, the pebbly ones for a mix of muck. But he knew it was ridiculous. And these stones would go back into each finished grave-hole as a sort of sore bed to lay the bodies on, but he did not think his German would mind, skinny though he was. Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea. He thrust his spade in again, lifted a half load and tossed it out neatly onto the pile in the professional manner. Like a dancer. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. Where did that drift from? He thought it must be Sunday school in the castle chapel, where his father used to send him and the girls, though the minister’s wife was a Protestant. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls. She was a nice woman called Daphne. He wondered what the state of his Dublin was now. He had heard of course that the artillery had been brought up the river and had shelled fucking Sackville Street with a will. Men who came over in the last days had brought news of shattered houses, standing naked to the sky with all their innards gone, showing their fireplaces to the world on the gable walls. It would almost make an apprentice builder weep to think of the deep work gone into the making of those houses. But men would come, he supposed, to build them up again. It was no more than the towns and cities of Belgium. Dublin and Ypres were all the one. And I saw heaven opened and behold a white horse and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True. That was his favourite line in the whole Bible. And he didn’t suppose it meant anything at all.
Funny how a person thought of one thing and then thought of another thing. And then another thing. And was the third thing brother at all to the first? He stopped a moment and leaned on his spade like a bad worker. That was Dempsey’s voice in his ear. Little Mr Dempsey with his round face. The Duck Dempsey, he was called, because of his flat-footed walk and his funny arse. But Dempsey was the prophet of finishing on time and the poet of the mortar mix and the stone taken rightly out of twist. He knew the hardnesses of bricks and could easily tell without error where in the kiln an individual brick would have lain. A soft brick from the edge, a hard brick from the core of the stack. Hard bricks for outside work, soft for the weatherless interior of a house, to give a straight reveal, to give an arch to a niche for the range. Old Dempsey in his youth was a roofer and put the roofs onto barracks buildings which was why the soldiers of Ireland were not rained on. He was given the work of building the monuments for the Boer War in whatever places it was required to be commemorated, and for this fine brickies were brought in from other firms, and no architect was happy till his roof had a dozen twists and turns, and it was Dempsey himself who laid the work out on the ground and nailed up those frames, dismantled them, and did the work then again from the walls. And he seventy years of age in the windy rain and the rainy wind. Dempsey and his fellows would build Dublin up again, Willie was sure.
‘Would you get along with that, Dunne,’ yelled Christy Moran. And don’t be daydreaming like a lounger.‘
‘Yes, Mr Dempsey, sir!’ said Willie.
‘Me who?’ said Christy Moran.
After the digging was done he hauled his German i
nto the hole, crossed the arms as best he could across the chest, breaking the arms at the shoulder and the elbow with a mallet. He knew Father Buckley would reach this grave and every grave in the course of his work and say a few words for him, the better to encourage his soul to rise up to heaven, but even so he said a Hail Mary himself in that sunlight smelling of rich rain.
And so in that manner they filled the holes with men and on the Sunday were taken out of the line and dragged themselves back to billets far behind the ugly terrain of death.
Chapter Ten
The pigeons were walking on the glass roof, making a small tapping noise, and coo-coo-cooing. Of course, it was a miracle that a glass building had survived thus far. But it was an old building with an old job to do, to clean the crust and filth off the workers that used to create the slagheaps, and cut along the earth to harvest the anthracite lying innocently there.
There were twenty big white enamel baths in two rows. They stood on the floor of green flagstones with their regal curlicues and big, fat brass taps. All the water knew how to do was gush out at a tremendous rate, thick, ropy water with its twirling cloths of steam. The taps were left hot enough to put a red mark on your palm. Willie Dunne could not tell from where they piped this miraculous water.
He had stripped down as nature put him on the earth and his fellows likewise, Christy Moran in the bath next to his, O‘Hara then, and Dermot Smith from Cavan, and the others. There were, of course, a good few men quite new, and Smith, a farm-labourer in former days in Kilnaleck, was one of them, and McNaughtan, a lofty, spare fella with a strange face like a bag of dumplings, another.
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