by Tom Phelan
“My daddy thinks they won’t bite when they’re too hot,” Con said when we were eight, me with my hazel fishing rod that Daddy made, the fishing line brown so the fish wouldn’t see it, small staples for eyelets, a short bit of stick like a knife’s hilt to wind the line around.
He was on the far bank—Con—sitting there with his bare feet in the water on the hot August day, Kitty beside him like she was sewed to him. Everything happened in August, no matter what year it was. We even signed up in August, the year before the real August happened in 1914.
I made the bait Daddy’s way at the kitchen table: in a saucer, one small handful of flour, a few strands of the wool from the sheepskin Mammy won in the Christmas draw for the nuns, a couple of drops of water, and then mix. It was always sticky and cloying until the water and the flour evened out.
The wool kept the bait from falling off the hook. But that day in August, when I silently slipped the dough down in front of the fat fish in the weeds, the roach just hung there in the sanctifying grace looking like panting dogs in the sun, mouths wide open making a different whistling sound when the air was going in and coming out.
Heen, hout. Heen, hout.
Heen, hout. The soldier had no face at all above the mouth. There was no nose or eyes, no forehead. It looked like someone had swung down on him with a beet knife, caught about an inch of his forehead and gone down behind his eyes and nose till it stopped above his top lip; then the beet knife was pulled out and slammed, blade first, into his face just below the nose. It was all so neat. No jaggedy edges at all, no flowing blood, as if everything had been cauterized by the heat of whatever had hit him.
His grey brain was in what was left of his eyeholes. Sometimes shells did the quarest things.
Face wounds were the worst. I never got used to them, and the air making a whistling sound through those lips—the lips the only things left of his face. There was something obscene about it, the way any part of the body isolated looks strange. I hated seeing heads in the muck, or legs or arms.
Heen, hout. And the noise was the sound of the terrible effort to get that air in and out.
Knifey slipped into my hand by herself. Out of the scabbard she was as sharp as a January wind for cutting away dangling legs and arms; so sharp, she’d bite if you touched her without thinking, but at the same time, she’d kiss all the pain away if that’s what was wanted.
Heen, hout. When I ran her up between the flaps of his topcoat, all the tense buttons popped away from their buttonholes. The same with the tunic and then the braces, the tension going out of the elastic the second Knifey touched them. Along with his gansey, I pulled his shirt out of his trousers. No matter who it was—English, Irish, French, German, Indian, Senegalese—I’d sing all the time like I’d sing to a dog when I’d be taking a thorn out of his paw, telling him not to twist around and bite. I sang quietly when I was using Knifey, not much above the hum of a bee, an inch from the ear, if there was one. I wanted him to think he was on his mother’s lap before bedtime, the two of them in the red-warm glow of the kitchen fire.
Knifey slipped in over his fourth rib while I hummed. Knifey stole straight into the heart, like a mother’s kiss to the top of her baby’s head, and me leaning down nicely on him like I was a body he was used to snuggling with. Then I waited so he wouldn’t feel Knifey going away, and I’d sing my mother’s lap song again while I waited for him to slip off into death.
An English doctor showed me how to do it between the ribs. “Don’t bring them back, Pat, if what’s left wouldn’t want to be kept alive if he was you.”
“But how’ll I know?” I asked him.
“You’ll know,” he said, and he was right.
Con was kneeling with me in the muck the first time I used Knifey to save a man. While I cleaned Knifey on the dead soldier’s coat, Con said, “Would you save me like that, Matt, if I was bad enough?”
“I would, Con,” I said, “and you’ll do it for me too, won’t you?”
Beneath his toughness, Con had great regard for people and animals, and it was the tender side that got him in the end. As tough as nails he could be, like when he was at home killing pigs or castrating calves with a straight-edged razor; or playing hurling and taking on the toughest lads on the other team, stopping them dead in their running; “as unforgiving as an elm fence post” is what someone said about him. But in France, sometimes it got to where he couldn’t hide his tears, jumping with fright all the time, like a boy soldier on his first day at the front. Near the end, whether it was over a horse with its arse and back legs missing or the head of a German lying there in the muck still wearing his helmet with the spike on top, Con cried a lot.
And it was near the end too, while the lines of young lads got ready to jump up into a hail of machine gun bullets, that he begged the ones nearest him to stop. He shouted at them, then screamed and called them names. He was threatened by sergeants who were trying to keep the lads’ spirits up.
“What’s wrong with you?” Con would shout. “Why are you killing yourselves?”
Why?
Ah, Con. I don’t know either.
The sun was shining at seven o’clock that first day of July in 1916 when the whistles started blowing. The lads from Ulster got farther than anyone else. They all did it because it was expected of them, climbed out of holes and faced into a slanting storm of terrible bullets—twenty-seven thousand of them dead or wounded between seven and eleven in one morning, and a mother and father to cry for each one of them. Twenty-seven thousand young lads! If you squeezed all that sadness into a bomb, you could destroy half the world with one explosion.
Do you remember, Con? We were waiting with our stretchers for permission from the Germans to carry back the wounded. Twenty-seven thousand down in four hours, and we saying that the people in Dublin thought they had something to cry about with the twelve lads shot in Kilmainham that same Easter. Twenty-seven thousand lying in the muck in front of us, many of them from Ireland, but all that Ireland could think of was twelve bastards who stabbed in the back every Irishman fighting against the Germans. Couldn’t they have waited? Did they need to be heroes that badly?
Con Hatchel
A lad from Carlow carried with us for two months in France. His name was Martin. One morning he became part of a cloud of dirt sent spewing by a Jack Johnson. Puff, and he was gone as if he had never been; nothing at all left of him, not even his hat, not even a sigh. The remembrance he left of himself was very dim. Martin, in life, had been a body more than a person. It was only after he died that I learned Martin was his last name, Mick his first.
Mick Martin hadn’t the faculty to imagine any more than a blind man has the faculty to see. He revealed himself one day when Matthias and myself and a lad named Bart from Brixton were lying on our backs looking at a meandering line of crows heading to a rookery after a day of pecking. The big guns had been silent for a month, and the birds were back as if nothing had happened, although their pickings must have been richer with all the meat in the muck.
We were imagining what it was like to be free like a crow.
“They own nothing.”
“No socks.”
“Nor a cap.”
“Never have to hold it. Squart it out the second they get the urge.”
“No kettle to boil in the morning.”
“No coat to put on when it’s cold.”
“Not even a scarf.”
“No hot-water bottle when the winter’s cutting the feet off them.”
“Just imagine owning nothing.”
“No boots.”
“When they fly off in the morning they haven’t a thing to leave behind and nothing to bring. Doesn’t matter a damn if they ever see that roost again.”
Then Martin said, “You’re all daft. How could a crow wear a cap?”
“With the strap tied under its chin,” Matt said.
In the few sentences that followed, it became clear that in Martin’s brain crows did not, could not wea
r boots and scarves; the idea of a crow carrying a suitcase full of socks dangling in its claws was ridiculous. He couldn’t see that a cloud in the sky was a snorting horse. A cloud in the sky was a cloud in the sky and nothing else. A horse was a horse. How could a cloud snort? It was amazing, unbelievable at first, this lack of imagination. I had thought everyone had the same imagination. I could imagine Sarah as easily as I could open my eyes, see her that day floating toward me in the garden in Enderly, her sky-blue dress snug above the waist, the bottom half flared and all movement. In her pale blue eyes was diamond dust, a touch of brown in her pure skin and auburn in her hair. She had come to show herself to me, as she had promised, before she went to her cousin’s wedding. If she had only known that inside my head I was drowning in my drool she would have understood why I stammered like a blathering fool. Sarah the Beautiful. Only Matthias knew about Sarah the Beautiful living in a hidden corner of my mind.
Whenever someone I knew got killed, I felt myself hammered down another notch into the bottomless hopelessness of the ruination around us. But when Mick Martin became part of that sky-bound spurt, I didn’t miss him at all—he’d had less personality than a hated mule, or maybe, finally, inurement was creeping in without me noticing.
One night, in the stable where we were billeted, I tried to imagine having no imagination. What I imagined was so unsettling that I stopped and never ventured into that area again; too much dazzling darkness and murky brightness and high circular windowless brick walls enclosing me. Martin must have spent his life plodding his way from happening to happening in a stark world in which what he could see with his eyes was all there was. He had been a yoked ox walking in a tight circle turning a wheel that turned a wheel that turned a wheel, never knowing what the last wheel turned, never knowing what it was doing besides walking.
But there were times when I thought Mick Martin was blessed and I was cursed.
In my first few days of the War, it was my imagination that kept the terrible things away. Through my hooded eyes, bloated horse-bodies floating in dark shell holes were hippopotamuses in pictures in Mister Hodgkins’s books; the muck was ploughed fields in Ireland on a tired Sunday evening after hunting rabbits on a miserable wet day; bodies and pieces of bodies emerging from the muck were the white trunks and boughs of bog deal uncovered at turf time; heads of horses, screaming, wild-eyed and wild-maned when death fixated them, were the heads of the charioted horses in the line drawings in Mister Hodgkins’s Ben-Hur; bits of heads and faces of men were sculptures that hadn’t yet fully emerged from the block of marble; complete heads were what was left of a noble city’s statuary after the Vandals had passed through; the screaming men we rolled onto our stretchers were the pigs in Enderly dragged out to be slaughtered; the men going over the top by the thousands were little boys playing King of the Hill; the acres of dead bodies under a low-slung black sky, with lightning flashes on the horizon, were sheaves of barley before stooking.
But like a cottage-sized boulder thundering down a mountainside, reality smashed my defences as if they were eggs in a plover’s nest. And not only did reality force itself on me, it took my imagination and worked it against me. Suddenly, there was nothing more nightmarish than the dead heads of screaming horses. Not hindered by expectations of any kind, the horses had made no effort to hide their anger and pain and total terror. As death ripped their bodies apart with the tearing teeth of red-hot shells, everything they were feeling was registered on the heads and faces of the dead animals: fierce eyes on the verge of popping out of sockets; grimacing lips as taut as the rope of the Canal Windlass lifting a ton; long yellow teeth bared savagely, seeking to chop through the very bones of their tormentors; flaring manes held in horrific outlines by the ubiquitous muck; and hides of twisted necks pushed into ripples by the underlying muscles as the dying horses sought out their mortal enemy.
I never saw terror on a man’s dead face to match the terror on the face of a dead horse. Poor dumb beasts. And because they were poor dumb beasts my imagination gave them personalities as tender and as vulnerable as those of children. And then in my imagination, the men in shell holes, the men in the muck beside the duckboards, the men we stepped on in the trenches, became poor dumb beasts too. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Dumber than the squealing pigs of Enderly. At least when the level of violence and cruelty against them had risen to unbearable, the pigs had fought to escape. The soldiers didn’t fight to escape, to live. They lived to fight, lived to jump out of a hole into a barrage of bullets as destructive as the whirring steel teeth of a pulper against the soft flesh of a turnip. The soldiers knew what was up there, knew what they were climbing into. And they dumbly climbed up, believing it would be the lad beside them who got the blast of blunt bullets that would shred him in a bit of a second. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb lads at the mercy of the men who led them from behind.
What my imagination had protected me against for a few days was ratcheting me downward. Instead of hearing delighted children playing King of the Hill, I heard hard-charging soldiers calling to their mothers as they ran against moulded chunks of metal shrieking toward them to whip out their guts, rip off their legs and arms, smash their hard skulls into smithereens, explode their brains into grey puffs, rip out their balls and send them flying in so many tiny fragments, in so many directions in so many pieces that not even God himself could find the pieces, never mind put them back together again.
Humpty-Dumpty God.
But of course there is no God in a battlefield or anywhere else, unless he is a lousy, sadistic fucker of a hure’s melt. Whatever God I had imagined once upon a time died very suddenly in France. God became nothing but a package of mental shite handed down from one generation to another, like bad health or bad teeth. The package got bigger and more destructive as it travelled down from ancestor to grandfather to father to son. There are no atheists in shell holes, some self-righteous preacher said. But in shell holes and trenches I have heard God cursed back across the ages into the nonexistence from which he emerged in answer to the question, “What happens to us when we die?”
On the first day of July in 1916 I knew my mind had taken a beating under the deadening drumbeat of horror and terror and stupidity and wanton death. And Wipers was still a year away; Wipers, where, most days, it took eight men to carry out one wounded soldier; where ninety thousand men became so minced up with the mud that no trace was ever found of them.
Say that one slowly, my friends. Say it very slowly—ninety thousand men became muck in the fields around Wipers. Ninety thousand—the population of one hundred and eighty Ballyrannels.
They got ploughed under like dung in a spring field in Enderly to make the potatoes grow.
Whose God oversaw Wipers?
Will there be bountiful crops of spuds in Wipers for a thousand years?
Will the crows of Passchendaele and Messines and Wipers ever be thin again?
Matthias Wrenn
For five weeks we lived in a straw shed in a place called Collins Camp not far from Ocean Villas. We got the straw shed because we were among the first to arrive. It was one of the few times we were lucky. Within a few weeks there were so many men in the place that we stopped asking if there was going to be a big push. If the rumours were to be believed, it was now only a matter of when.
There were so few of us at Collins Camp on that first day that we washed for hours, scrubbed until our skin was as wrinkled as an old potato that has escaped the pot for two winters. We soaked our clothes and tried to murder the lice in the seams with hazel sticks. Then with our uniforms drying on the bushes we lay naked in the hazy sun; hundreds of white bodies with their white exclamation marks hanging down off the bottoms of the black crotches on the cool grass of France.
“Don’t get burned or you won’t be worth a damn!” “If I get killed in a trench would that be better?” “We could use your corpse to stand on in the trench, but back here you’re not worth a shite dead.”
The luxury of it—of being out of our lice-filled clot
hes; of rubbing our bodies on the grass like horses fresh out of sweaty tacklings after a day’s ploughing. To be free of lice was every man’s most wished-for wish. And it was probably because of the heavenly enjoyment of those few lice-free minutes that a new rumour took hold and brought the men to the edge of mass hysteria.
By some wonderful and miraculous misplanning by the army, a Foden Disinfector had arrived at Collins Camp. As the rumour sped across the pasture, the men leapt to their feet and ran to the hedges to collect their clothes. Like an ants’ nest disturbed by a child with a stick, Collins Camp was suddenly overrun by hundreds of men clutching their bundled-up clothes to their bellies. Hither and thither they ran like huge white insects carrying their eggs to safety. Then suddenly, as if someone had shouted out a silent signal, all the men veered in the same direction and a river of white arses flowed through a gate into a barbed-wired area where heaps of supplies as big as small houses were hidden under canvases. Some of the men were already peeling off one of the covers. The rest of us stood around cheering the naked unveilers, waiting to get at the machine that would fumigate our clothes and rid us of the purgatorial lice for the first time in two years. Even Con was grinning at the rude comments about the arse sizes and other exposed body parts of the men on top of the canvas piles. Con had not smiled for a long time. It seemed that every new horror he saw fed his anger at the generals who gave the orders and at the men who followed the orders.
But of course what was uncovered by the naked men was not a Foden Disinfector at all. It was nothing but a huge water tank. And the next canvas-covered heap was a tank and every one after that too.
A crowd of military police appeared out of nowhere. Shots were fired in the air to get our attention and we were so urgently ordered to rewrap the tanks that they might as well have been secret weapons. More shots were fired and we were warned to stay away from the barbed-wire enclosure. Disappointed and grumbling at the ill humour of the police, we went back to the bushes and spread out our damp clothes. When we put our uniforms on at the end of the day the scratching began again.
