A Long Long Way

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Ah, well.’

  ‘Because I never reached six feet.’

  ‘What’s that, Willie?’

  ‘The reason.’

  ‘You’re a strange one, Willie.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Keep all this under your hat and if they let you into the court martial, well and good.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘All right?’ said Jesse Kirwan

  ‘ All right,‘ said Willie Dunne, and even started to go. But something kept him; he didn’t know what it was. A dread of moving forward into the next moment, a dread of history and a dread of the future. And the coin of — what? — strange friendship maybe, spinning in between, in this bleak room.

  ‘Look it, Willie,’ said Jesse Kirwan. ‘Millions of lads have died out here. Maybe millions more will yet. Heaps and heaps of us. I will acknowledge my mistake, Willie Dunne. I thought it would be a good thing to follow John Redmond’s words. I thought for my mother’s sake, her gentle soul, for the sake of my own children, I might go out and fight for to save Europe so that we might have the Home Rule in Ireland in the upshot. I came out to fight for a country that doesn’t exist, and now, Willie, mark my words, it never will. Don’t think I am not gob-smacked by that news. I know you don’t think like me. I don’t know what has brought you out here. Maybe you think that Ireland is just fine as she is and you are fighting for that. Well, Willie boy, that’s an Ireland that maybe did exist two years ago as you set out, but I doubt if it will much longer.’

  ‘Can’t you just eat your maconochie like the rest of us, Jesse, and to hell with Ireland and this Ireland and that Ireland? You’d give a saint a headache with that talk, man dear. Didn’t you have the winner of the Grand National? That’s what we should be talking about.’

  ‘Did I, did I? I never even thought to look. Lord Jesus, I hope I still have the docket.’

  ‘That’s the right sort of talk. That other talk of yours is lousy talk.’

  ‘I know, I know. You’re a gentleman to put up with it. And I got the habit from my father. Such a self-torturing, complicated, mad-thinking man you never met. Better he had been an accordion player and handed me down an accordion. Don’t you know? But it had to be this song, this rigmarole, this torment of talk of freedom. I knew it would do for me in the end!’

  ‘Come on, Jesse, say the good word and when we meet again you can talk as much nonsense about Ireland as you please. Come on now.’

  But Jesse Kirwan only turned a weary smile on him, and raised up a shaky hand. And took Willie’s right hand in his, and shook it very nicely.

  ‘ All right,‘ said Willie, ’then, I brought you this.‘

  And he fetched into one of his pockets and brought out the little Bible that Maud had got for him.

  ‘I’ve taken out the letters I had in it and a photograph.’

  ‘I have a Bible, Willie,’ said Jesse, but he took it right enough.

  ‘Yeh, well, there’s one without my piss stains on it.’

  Then Willie Dunne came out again to the curious priest and the curious sentry. But he didn’t say anything to them. He felt like there were lice in his blood; his arms were uncomfortable. He had wanted for a moment to embrace Jesse Kirwan like you might a child, but he hadn‘t, and so his arms were aching.

  Father Buckley walked him back to billets. The ordinary business of war proceeded around them; they were bringing up lorry-loads of munitions in a great and endless snake. Some cavalry regiment was billeted back here and there were a thousand horses or so all saddled up and ready, in two seemingly infinite lines in a broad field. They were beautiful, like beasts out of fables. There were peaceful enough woods far over to the right with tall black trunks and an air of simplicity and the force of a storybook.

  ‘He knows that Jesus loves him, he said to me,’ said Father Buckley. ‘His mother is a great believer, he told me. A convert, as a matter of fact. What did he say to you, Willie? Do we have any chance of saving him?’

  Willie stopped on the gravelly road. Some fellas only recently had cast the gravel over it, to counteract the unsea sonal rain. The Engineers it might be, or the Chinese coolies. But the July sun was piercing and heroic now. It was like a music in itself. A prayer.

  Anyway, Willie looked at Father Buckley. Of course, now he was under a sort of promise to say nothing. To be a queer sort of witness that witnessed and said nothing. For what?

  Willie had a sudden desire to be drinking, to be happily whoring, to be doing anything but this, walking along with this morose padre, with his serious and rather ugly face. He didn’t understand Jesse Kirwan. He had met him only the once, more or less. Why should he pay him any heed in the upshot? There had been thousands of deaths just in the last days over by the ruinous river. Two thousand Irishmen of the 36th alone. He thought Jesse Kirwan was all twisted up in a rope of his own making; he knew he was. He had made a trap for himself in the wood of his own heart. He was the snare, the rabbit, and the hunter all in one.

  ‘Why doesn’t he just buckle down to the job and see it through and go home then and think his thoughts as he likes?’ said Willie.

  ‘I wish he would. It’s not the time for that, maybe. People of all sorts are having notions. Maybe it’s a time for notions, Willie. When death is all around. Well, we can pray for him. God is good.’

  Willie shook his head and they moved on together.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In August, just as the weather worsened, Jesse Kirwan was executed. It wasn’t that Major Stokes showed special vindictiveness. In fact, as chairman of the field general court martial, he spoke with a measure of grace and mercy. But they were all bound in the bounds of army law. Father Buckley did his best to speak of his character. Willie Dunne, as it happened, was not allowed to speak, nor was even called to attend, because he was not an officer and therefore had no force for such an occasion. Father Buckley in the presence of the judges felt awkward and clumsy, out of his element. He had grown used to the company of the private soldiers. Nevertheless, he said what he knew candidly. He couldn’t help wondering in his private mind whether it wouldn’t have been better to get the Anglican padre to speak, though Major Stokes treated him with utmost courtesy. But the prisoner himself seemed entirely unrepentant, and though he was able to sit in his chair in the room appointed, he was obviously very sick and weak. There was nothing Major Stokes could do. The whole of the world was at war and both the conscripted and voluntary soldiers were bound to do their duty before the horrendous challenge that faced them. It was liberty herself that was imperilled. Major Stokes said all these things with a grave and florid face. He reminded the court that in the first year of the war six hundred French soldiers were shot for cowardice. His Majesty by comparison had been lenient. But the war was coming into a new phase of emergency, and discipline was now as precious as life itself.

  By tradition a man was killed at dawn in that moment between darkness and growing light. Twelve of his fellows were chosen from his own battalion as an example to them. But Jesse had had only a chance to touch but lightly on his fellow soldiers. They did not know him, because he had changed his mind so swiftly, and had had no time to be an ordinary soldier among them, pissing and shitting and joking with the rest.

  When he was brought out to stand against the pole, they had to tie him, because he had no strength at all after his long fast. He was as thin as a greyhound.

  It was rather cold that morning and the men could smell the rain burgeoning in the west.

  Someone pinned a piece of white cloth on his breast over the heart, like a military decoration. Or as if his heart were partaking in some weird act of surrender. Certainly he was a man of uncomplicated faith and straight reasoning, but his heart was pierced by a bullet from one of the gathered party.

  They lifted their cold rifles and when Major Stokes dropped his officer’s stick, they killed Jesse Kirwan.

  The birds began to sing in the stand of trees behind the fa
llen body. It was as if he never had been. It was as if there never had been a proper reason for a life, as if all stories and pictures were a lie and a nonsense. It was as if blood were ashes and the song of a life was only the painful extension of a baby’s cry. How his mother had loved him and rejoiced in his coming and fed him were hardly known. He seemed in that moment to leave no echo in the world.

  Willie Dunne was given permission to join the detail to dig a hole for him in the earth. The truth was, that earth would be disturbed four or five times in the coming years. Jesse Kirwan would be blown out of his resting-place and scattered across the bombed earth, blown and scattered again, till every morsel of him was entirely atomized and defunct.

  As Willie dug, he could not help thinking of the uniform removed from the body, and sent back to the father and the mother, and how they might puzzle over the bloodied hole. How the father and the mother might hold the uniform without their son in it, and wonder about a thousand things.

  Father Buckley of course attended. He was voluble in his grief. When the slight body was lain down to rest and the earth thrown back in and over with the glistening spades, he expatiated to Willie. He could not help it, Willie thought. He told him things that were no good for Willie to know. It hurt him to know them, as if Jesse Kirwan were being brought closer and closer to him, like a brother. He wanted to stop his blessed ears against the information.

  But Father Buckley wanted to slow down this awful speeded-up death. Maybe he wanted to sing the praises of a soul as it started to fly up towards heaven, and all so unexpectedly. Jesse must have said a few things right enough to the priest in the dark of the lock-up; small, useless things.

  That Jesse’s mother, Fanny Kirwan, was a little woman from Sherkin Island on the coast of Cork. Her own people being millenarians from Manchester, who had come to Sherkin to await the New Jerusalem. But in the end the sect had dwindled and there was no one left among them for Fanny Kirwan to marry. She had gone away to Cork City with Patrick Kirwan, a lithographer, and a Catholic, Jesse’s dada himself, never to return again, causing hurt to herself and to her own father. It was the rule of her sect that no one could marry outside the chosen families, and if they did, loved as they might be, they must go and never return. And she chose that, because she had been so intent to have her children. Losing her place in the New Jerusalem and by the hearth of her family, to have her children. And she had had a child, said Father Buckley, and they had just lain him in the ground.

  Well, it sounded like a fable to Willie Dunne, a fable, not a truthful account. It made him want to shoot the bloody priest, listening to it, and the doleful voice it was spoken with. Willie didn’t want the story hanging from his heart for the rest of his days, for the love of God.

  The story hung from his heart for the rest of his days.

  That night in the blowing darkness Willie Dunne sneaked away to the grave and sang ‘Ave Maria’ to Jesse Kirwan’s vanished shade. It was the edge of a storm. As it was a song he sang often to his father, he couldn’t help but think of his father now.

  Poor Jesse. He hardly knew him, but he felt brotherly about the matter. He sang both verses of the hymn. The moon was quite playful among the August clouds. As Willie Dunne was no fool, he knew that he couldn’t be the same Willie Dunne he had been before this happened.

  ‘That’s very fucking sad,’ said O‘Hara, lying on his bed.

  Willie was thinking, Yes, it was.

  ‘It’s fucking terrible what they can shoot you for out here,’ said O‘Hara. He was keeping his voice very low. He was lying on one side so his lampy face was opposite Willie’s own, in the August dark. Far off in the distance they could hear a continuous ruckus of big guns, which had woken them both up. It must be still five o’clock. Maybe the bombardment was further up the line where the French were, who were fond of a four-thirty bombardment. But it could be anywhere.

  ‘How do you mean?’ said Willie.

  ‘I mean disobedience, shooting a man for that. I mean. There’s much worse.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, you came in in ’15, didn’t you, Willie? But there were RDF men in earlier, the old hands. Well, we were stationed out in India when the war broke out, and had to be shipped back here. You may have heard of what we went through in the first weeks. A lot of us were killed. It was terrible days.‘

  ‘I heard that. A lot of the old hands were killed.’

  ‘Yeh, that’s right, Willie. Fellas that were in the army because, well, fuck it, Willie, there wasn’t much else for them to be doing. But a lad like your man there, your pal, shot yesterday, now he was a volunteer, right and proper, you might say. Now a fella volunteers and you’d think they’d treat a man like that different. You know? Would you go shooting a man that volunteered to help you, if he suddenly decided he didn’t want to help any more? Hah? No. You would not. Anyway, I was saying, it was in the early days of the war and -’

  Then he stopped. Willie was listening but O‘Hara stopped.

  ‘What?’ said Willie.

  ‘ Ah well, maybe I shouldn’t be telling you. Maybe it doesn’t reflect very good on me, either. Come to think of it. You see, your man there being shot makes me think what I could have been shot for, and proper order maybe, and better deserved.‘

  ‘Why, Pete?’

  ‘Well, in those days the war was a little more open, just a little more, you know, moving about. You could lie down at the edge of a field and see the fucking Hun across the wheat or whatever, and engage like that. It was the fucking guns and the armies swinging round about that fucking made these fucking trenches from north to south of the fucking world. But in those times it was different. And you might be in a place that the Germans were in a few days before and vice versa. And the soldiers were old hands and that, rough lads and had seen grim old times out in India; we were always dying out there of dysentery and malaria and the like. We were like fucking stuck pigs out there from the heat and the fevers. It was nicer in fucking Belgium! Anyway, my little crowd was sent in to be checking out this little village, little place like a little Irish fucking village, and in we went, scared as rabbits, but, you know, willing enough, for the sake of the grub and the rum ration, you know? Well, Willie, of course there wasn’t a soul left in there. That was the time when Jerry went fucking through, he killed everything, he drove everything in front of him, and what he didn’t kill he ate, and worse. And worse is what I’m getting to. Now you heard of the nuns being, you know, done over, you know, and you heard of babies being, yeh? — and now I never saw such things, but we came into this little place like I say, and there was nothing there, a few people lying around dead, a few dogs even I remember, but in the middle of the village was a small building, it might even have been a chapel, but it was just rough and ready, I don’t know. Me and the lads went in and there was a woman, a girl, tied up there. Well, she was tied belly down onto a kind of a yoke that might usually hold a saddle or something, and she was lashed to that, and her skirts were all up at the back, big dark blue skirts she had, and her poor bum all exposed, and I swear as red as a beetroot the whole fucking vista of it. Now the first thing we did was we hurried over to her, you know, thinking to untie her. And I was the first to get round the front of her, where her face was, and Jesus Christ, it was a horrible thing to see, although we had come through a battle by then and had seen men slaughtered rightly. Someone had cut out her tongue and you could see the blessed thing lying in the straw, like a what’s-it, a baby mouse, you know, all hairless and bloody, and into her forehead someone had cut the word “d-e-u-t-s-c-h”, which means, Willie, German, and one of the lads said, “Hold on, Pete,” he said to me, “is that written on her head because she’s after going off with the Boche, or is that written there because she betrayed her own people, or what’s it written there for?” And I said, “It’s there because they’re after raping, after violating the poor woman, and now we should cut her down loose and help her.” But this lad said, “Well, now, Pete, we don’t know th
at,” but the young lieutenant that was with us comes in then, and he said, “Help that woman and we’ll report back.” So right, Willie, we cut her down and of course she‘s, you know, wonky in the head, she can’t speak, she’s in terrible pain, she’s weeping and making a horrible moaning sound you make when you don’t have a tongue. It was just fucking horrible. And this lad said, “What’ll we do, sir? Sure we can’t bring her back with us,” and the lieutenant said, “Of course we can.” Now the lieutenant in question was about nineteen years old, I do not lie, and if he ever saw a woman naked, let alone without a tongue, I am willing to hand over the million pounds you bet me. Well, bugger me, we head back through the village, helping the girl along, well, and she’s kicking and sort of groaning like that, and won’t be easily helped, and the blood starts to pour again from her broken mouth, and we make our way across a stubbly field the way we came, and just as we get out into the middle of the field, some fucking joker in the woods over to the right of us opens up with a machine-gun, and down goes the lieutenant because in those days the officers still wore their officers’ uniforms, like eejits, but what did we know about that, and down goes a few of the other lads, and I don’t know, but we haul ourselves over with that mad girl and heave ourselves and her into the ditch along the field-path, like burning dogs. And this lad I was talking about gets such a scare, he hits the woman in the face with his fist and calls her an ugly German bitch, but she couldn’t have been, out there in the middle of Belgium, but he was frightened, you know, and had that little mad thing in the head you get out here. Then we wait. Not a sound from the woods, not a squeak. We wait about ten minutes. A — what do you call it? — an airplane goes over, and that was a rare sight in those days, and it gave us another fright, and it had those funny markings on the wings, so we knew it wasn’t one of our lads, RFC. But you’d never hear a shot from an airplane then, or a bomb dropped, they were just for looking, but looking seemed bad enough, and we were thinking there’d be all sorts of bits of the Boche army coming after us then, and we were half a mile at the least from where we wanted to be. So this little bastard gets a hold of the woman and he lifts her skirts and doesn’t he start to hump her himself, right there in the ditch, I mean, the daftest thing you would ever see.’