A Long Long Way

by Sebastian Barry

  He looked about him frantically. He was terrified. In the seats were a dozen women, beautiful young women in lovely dry and well-cleaned dresses. Dry dresses on a dozen lovely, lovely girls. But they were girls, they were girls, they were girls with no tongues.

  Then it was all blackness and dark again.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A little sweet-smelling nurse — that was what he noticed about her, the smell, not that he was much competition for sweet smells, as his skin healed — bathed him every day in some kind of stinking oil. That was, she rubbed at him with a sponge. Of course, the effects of the shell exploding so near him had done something to his engine, and he couldn’t stop his head jerking about, and his left arm had a mind of its own, the mind of an arm that wanted to dance a jig all the blessed day.

  Her father had a butcher’s shop in Clonmel, she told him, which had aroused an interest in medicine. They were afraid to wash him in water, he supposed, in case his skin fell off like a dress. She rubbed him all over, but especially on the chest, where he had carried the main wash of the blast. By a miracle it had left his face alone. His helmet must have fallen down in front, he didn’t know. But he was very glad of it, as it happened. There were scores of burns in that hospital that had turned nice-looking fellas into the fearful faces in a child’s blackest dream.

  Christy Moran wrote him a nice letter to say he was fucked if he would carry him so far the next time, and hoped he was getting on well anyhow, and that it has been very sad about that business, and that that bomb may have fucked up Willie Dunne but it had killed poor Timmy Weekes.

  ‘They say the old 16th has “ceased to exist”,’ he wrote. ‘But Christy Moran is still here! The Mutineer was given his marching papers.’

  An officer did come round to see him. When Willie asked him about the battle he was told that a huge swath of the 16th was gone. The officer was from Leitrim himself, he said, so he felt it very keenly. But the Irish soldiers had not shown their backs. The French army had mutinied the year before, but you’d never see an Irish regiment refuse the fight.

  There was a huge row at home, he said, about conscription that the government was trying to establish in Ireland. The officer said very bitterly that no one cared about the war now in Ireland, they didn’t care if the men that were in already lived or died, and they certainly wanted no more going in. There were riots threatened and all sorts of wild disobedience. It was like Russia now, the officer said. It was like Germany itself, except the German people had some excuse to resent the endless war, since they were starving in their shoes.

  Mothers in Ireland said they would stand in front of their sons and be shot before they’d let them go, and that was a change, the officer said. They could raise one hundred and fifty thousand men immediately, he said, and that was a great number and would win the war. But the Nationalists wouldn’t stand for it. Said King George could find lambs for the slaughter in his own green fields from now on.

  Whoever said that, it was well enough said, Willie thought, but didn’t say it out loud. What was the point?

  The officer expressed immense satisfaction that the Irish Convention — Willie didn’t know what he meant — had failed. Home Rule, he avowed, was a dead duck.

  ‘Poor Father Buckley wouldn’t like to hear that, sir,’ said Willie, his words thrown about like a baby’s food.

  ‘Who, who?’ said the officer, for all the world like an owl. ‘I tell you, Private, your contribution has not been unavailing. The Sinn Fein is on the rise, but when the war is over, we’ll go and show them what’s what. When the war is over we’ll show them what we think of their treachery.’

  But now Willie’s head and arm were shaking so badly the officer couldn’t see the point of comforting him further, and off he went, his duty accomplished.

  The newspaper that the little nurse read to him said it was thought the 16th hadn’t fought well. It was feared they had thrown down their arms and run at the first sign of attack. Even Lloyd George had said something the same. So it wasn’t just the parlour maids; it was the master of the house as well. You couldn’t trust the Irish now. Hadn’t fought well! The sorrow of such a phrase! Willie would have shaken his head at that except it was already shaking.

  Only King George himself seemed to have a good word for his Irish troops. That fella had a heart anyhow, Willie thought.

  There was no point saying anything about it. Something had come to an end before even the war was over. Poor Father Buckley. The aspirations of poor men were annulled for ever. Any fella that had come out in the expectation of Home Rule could rest assured his efforts and his sacrifice were useless. For all that his father would think of it, Willie thought that was very sad. Very fucking sad. And very mysterious.

  The doctor, who was in his own opinion a great wit, had greeted Willie Dunne with: ‘Well, here’s the Sinn Feiner.’ There wasn’t wool enough in the basket to knit socks for those feet.

  In a month or two the top layer of skin was healing pretty good. He knew in his bones he was lucky. He had stood there, a human person, right in the middle of a bomb, and though it had lacerated his arms and legs, and burned his breast, all the scores and marks were slowly disappearing. In his delirium under morphine the streaks and fierce red blotches looked to him as if hell were painted on his body, the city of hell and all the roads leading to it. Slowly, slowly, under the ministrations of the little nurse, the map of hell faded.

  Then the day came when the little nurse put her hand against his heart.

  ‘You have a tattoo here, Private?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was never a sailor, Sister.’

  Sister seemed a very pleasing thing to call another person.

  ‘Well, you do, Private. It is very small but I am sure you do. A little harp and a little crown.’

  Willie couldn’t think what to make of it. He was days and days thinking about it, as he hadn’t much else to contemplate, and he tried to peer down his chest and see the little yokes, but he couldn’t keep his bloody head still enough.

  A few days later, the little nurse brought in a mirror for him to see them with. Willie looked in the mirror with his jumping eyes and saw his bearded face. It was a thick, black beard the like of which even a Wicklow hill-farmer might fear to sport. He laughed at himself. He laughed. His head lashed about and he roared.

  Then the little nurse turned the mirror inward and he glanced at the little marks. It was a harp and a crown, right enough.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, I know what that is. It’s Christy Moran’s medal. By Jesus, Sister, the heat’s after branding it into my skin. The heat of the explosion. I had it in my pocket there.’

  ‘Did you ever see the like?’ she said, shaking her head, but in her case with perfect control. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You’ll carry that to your grave. I have no oil will wipe it off. It is just like you’d brand a young calf.’

  ‘I don’t mind them at all, Sister, not at all.’

  ‘Well, who would ever have thought?’ she said.

  ‘They’ll never believe us, Sister.’

  ‘ And they will not,‘ she said. ’They will not.‘

  She had only come in for something small, the nurse, his sweet-smelling nurse with the hair the colour of conkers.

  ‘Will you — will you,’ he began with difficulty, like his head was being pitched about like a football kicked away out to sea.

  ‘What, Private?’ said the nurse.

  ‘Will — you — will you — hold me?’ he said with a gasp, and many a stupid-sounding splutter. He was no better than an idiot like that, well he knew it. He would have no world at all like that, for ever more.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ she said. ‘It isn’t allowed at all.’

  ‘Please — please — please,’ he said, oh, his chin jutting, and turning, and turning, eyes darting, and darting.

  ‘All right,’ she said coldly enough.

  And she gathered him into her arms. She was wearing a blue overall over her white dres
s, against the spits and all the rest. It occurred to him then that she was spat on by him, just as he had been spat on and stoned by those boys of Dublin Town. She gathered him in.

  He closed his eyes and Gretta’s face slowly filtered in. All the ache and murder of the last years just for a moment ceased — ceased to write itself in the history of his addled blood. He hung suspended, beautifully aloft, somewhere, he knew not where, with Gretta’s face, her breast, her arms about him. He was surprised by the soft silence, as if his brain had been a noisy place lately. Curiously, to him, the face was not her face now, but the face he supposed as it might be in times to come — the trim contours of the jaw were no more, the eyes were hooded, she was altered by time and how he wished he was to be the man to comfort her in that and avow to her that no lessening of youth would bring a lessening of love. How he wished he was to be the man who would be old beside her, and herself old. Going about the town like two old lizards.

  ‘I’ll just hold you now a few moments,’ she said. ‘In a motherly way, mind.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. Motherly.

  Then the tender miracle happened. He would have to call himself the Miraculous Dunne after that, like old Quigley himself, God rest him. Oh, God rest him, and God rest them all. His own body was suddenly strangely at rest, and deliciously.

  Her breasts were pressed against his arm, he couldn’t help noticing. They were small and hard and cold, not at all like Gretta’s. She seemed to him suddenly a sad person, a saddened person, a sad nurse. Maybe her sadness had cured him. Could it have been? he wondered.

  St George’s Military Hospital,

  Shropshire.

  June 1918.

  Dear Papa,

  ‘ I have been in hospital a while in England but you are not to worry, I am better now and am being sent back to the war. We were left in trenches a long while near Ypres and everyone was tired and then there was a bomb. I was not injured but I began to tremble and could not stop, so they took me to England. I was here a good few weeks. Now I can hold a pencil again and write to you, Papa. In these last days I have been thinking a lot in my bed and I have been thinking about you and Mam and the old days. I was thinking how strange it was when Mam died that things were still pleasing to a child and that was because you bestirred yourself and were a good father. I was lying there thinking how it might have been, two young girls and a boy and a baby girl into the bargain. So how did you manage all that? It was a wonderful thing to do, to hold us to you, and make all those teas, Papa, and find time to play with us, and when you did give out it was for good reason. Do you remember, Papa, the time you took us on the Liffey ferry over to the Great South Wall? And how you knew the old captain in the old house and we all went up to his lookout room at the top of the house and looked out over the river? And you showed us the red lighthouse and the green lighthouse? And how sunny it was that day, and we walked along past the sentries on the wall, and you showed us the long buttery stones the seawall was made out of, and when we got to the Pigeon House we all had to sing that old song you had taught us, ’Weile Weile Waile‘, you put the four of us up on the steps there, and you said, ’Sing for your mam now.‘ And the gulls were very surprised. I was lying in bed and wondering why you did that. As a child nothing seems strange. Now that seems very strange and wonderful. I am going back to the war and will not be home I think till next year. I wanted to say in this letter that I have been thinking about all that has happened to me, and many another thing. And how some of those things made me start thinking in a different light about things, and how that offended you so grievously. And I understand why. But it cannot change the fact that I believe in my heart that you are the finest man I know. When I think of you there is nothing bad that arises at all. You stand before me often in my dreams and in my dreams you seem to comfort me. So I am sending this letter with my love, and thinking of you.

  Your son,

  Willie.

  Start thinking in a different light ... Some of his new thoughts offended even him. It had nothing to do with kings and countries, rebels or soldiers. Generals or their dark ambitions, their plus and their minus. It was that Death himself had made those things ridiculous. Death was the King of England, Scotland and Ireland. The King of France. Of India, Germany, Italy, Russia. Emperor of all the empires. He had taken Willie’s companions, lifted away entire nations, looked down on their struggles with contempt and glee. The whole world had come out to decide some muddled question, and Death in delight rubbed his bloody hands.

  You couldn’t blame King George, God knew. You couldn’t even hardly blame the fucking Kaiser. Not any more. Death now had a hold on the whole matter.

  And his loyalty, his old faith in the cause, as a man might say, a dozen times so sorely tested, was dying in Willie Dunne. An ember maybe only remaining, for his father’s sake.

  She shaved him so gently it was like being shaved by a human smile. She lathered up his whiskers and with a blade as sharp as marram-grass she took off the black beard. She pushed the strands together in a little sheaf and put them in what she called the ‘Hair Box’. What she did with them then he didn’t know. His friend from Clonmel.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It was almost a jaunty, happy thing to go back to his regiment, what remained of it. All in his youth and prime, like the song said. To the extent that a man with a broken heart could be happy. To the extent that a man with the soul filleted out of him could be happy. Since the things he had wished for were no more, he wished for nothing. He breathed in and out. That was all. That was where the war had brought him, he thought.

  There was a terrible lack of new Irishmen now in the army. You could hardly meet another fella in transit. It had all dried up, those thoughts and deeds of’ 14. It was all a thing long done and past. No one now thought it was a good notion to kit up against the Kaiser and go to Flanders. The 16th was gone the way of all old, finished things. He read again and again in the paper that the Irish that remained couldn’t really be trusted. So they had stuffed the gaps in the 16th with what English and Scottish and Welsh they could muster. An Irish soldier these days might as soon run as fight. The Mutineer himself in fact said it, and he should have known better, their own general. Ceased to exist! And then to be blamed for that themselves. That was a test of loyalty anyhow, to hear a thing like that, never mind a rake of Germans rushing at you. But Willie heard it said on the trains; he could smell that opinion almost in the sea air of Southampton. Better forget about the Irish. They always had been a strange crowd, anyhow. Well, that was just an old song of those days. It wasn’t ‘Tipperary’ any more and ’Goodbye Leicester Square‘.

  Between your own countrymen deriding you for being in the army, and the army deriding you for your own slaughter, a man didn’t know what to be thinking. A man’s mind could be roaring out in pain of a sort. The fact that the war didn’t make a jot of sense any more hardly came into it.

  He was twenty-one now. That was a grown man, right enough. He couldn’t cross back quick enough. It was very strange to him. All the ‘valleys of death’ he had been through, all the fields of dead men, all the insane noise, and wastage of living hearts, you would think would have deterred him mightily. He didn’t understand the war in the upshot, and he had thought to himself a dozen times and more that no one on earth understood it rightly. And he certainly didn’t desire it and he feared it like the hunted animal fears the hunter and the hounds — but all the same he grew happier the closer he drew to his friends. A sort of happiness he feared he could have nowhere else. If he thought of Dolly, indeed, he felt tearful. If he thought of Gretta he felt as if he must stop breathing and die. Indeed, he could cry at the shortest notice, queer little things set him off, a fag butt thrown on the ground, the whistling of a lonely bird, he had to stop and collect himself, let the crying stop, and the shaking stop. He didn’t really care if anyone saw him. That wasn’t important. If it looked like cowardice, it looked like cowardice, and that was that. He knew that it was just tha
t he was a man with bits of himself broken. That’s all it fucking was. In those moments he was as weak as a newborn lamb; the weakest soldier in Germany could have killed him with his breath. But still he hurried back along the ways of the war, and with a curious pride he came into the place where his new platoon was set, and gave Christy Moran a glad hello, and received one back, and an embrace.

  ‘I thought I would not see you again, Willie,’ said the company sergeant-major.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ said Willie Dunne. ‘Are there any of the other lads I know here now?’

  ‘These are new lads now,’ said Christy Moran. ‘Geordies, they call themselves, each and every one. They talk so dark they might as well be fellas from the Galway islands.’

  But then Willie saw a familiar face.

  ‘Sarge, Sarge, you didn’t tell me Joe Kielty came through.’

  ‘ Ah, yes. You can’t kill Joe, Willie.‘

  Willie went over to the Joe Kielty who had been smiling across all the while. He took Joe’s right hand in both his hands and shook the hand.

  ‘Joe, you must be the best gunner in all of Flanders.’

  ‘Ah, not so bad.’

  ‘The best gunner, my God.’

  ‘The best runner, anyhow,’ said Joe Kielty, laughing.

  ‘Come here a minute,’ said the sergeant-major, and Willie followed him to a dugout. Christy Moran ducked in there and came out again carrying a thick book that Willie thought he recognized.

  ‘I sent all of Timmy Weekes’ things back, like you do, and I hoped his father and mother wouldn’t mind it, but I kept this back. I was going to send it on to you in a while. But you’re here now, Willie, and can take charge of it.’