The Canal Bridge: A Novel of Ireland, Love, and the First World War

by Tom Phelan

  “You can’t sleep with your eyes open,” I said.

  “Fish can,” Kitty said.

  The first time we saw a dead man in the muck with his eyes open, I said to Con, “He’s sleeping like a fish.”

  After that we always called dead men Fishes, except the ones floating in the shell holes after days dead. Those ones, with bellies so big you’d wonder how they kept from bursting, look like the bloated, floating bodies of the dogs people drowned in the Canal.

  A pointed hazel stick is what I used to make the dogs sink. I’d wade out in the shallow water near the bank and poke the stick through the skin to let the stinking air out. The dog would shrivel up like a pig’s bladder with a puncture and drift slowly to the bottom, the hair floating upright off the body and then waving like ripe barley in a breeze before lying down flat against the dead skin. Everything would be gone in a few weeks, because the tench would eat the body and scatter the bones around in the weeds. Whenever I caught a tench, I’d chop it in pieces on the Canal bank with Daddy’s spade.

  Daddy saw me sinking a dog one day and he got very cross. He told me people could get diseases from the stuff that comes out of dead animals. He told me I couldn’t fish anymore unless I promised never to do it again.

  The night of the fire, I was in the Canal in the dark, sinking a dog, after pretending I was going over the Bridge to Con’s for his atlas. I ran up the bank to the drowned dog and got the hazel stick I had ready. When I stuck the dog there was this loud swoosh sound, but it was from our house that the sound came, not from the dog.

  When I looked back, our house was lit up on the inside with a bright red light. And that’s what it was, the constable said. He said Daddy had been filling the lamp and that the flame must have got into the can of paraffin oil. The constable said people should not fill their lamps while keeping them lit to see what they’re doing.

  I seldom hear the star shells exploding, just see their light spreading silently across the heavens, lighting up the clouds and the earth. Every time a star shell lights up the sky, I see the flames roaring in our thatch.

  By the time I ran back, the smoke was coming out through the roof. When I put my thumb on the latch there was a huge gust of wind, and the door was whipped out of my hand and the wind went past me screeching.

  Mister Hatchel came running from the far side of the Canal, Con and Kitty behind him panting, and then Missus Hatchel. I was sitting with my back against the elm, looking at the dying fire. The roof had fallen in, and the two blackened gables were standing there like two bad teeth screeching with pain. I knew the cooking smell mixed in with the stink of the burning thatch was Mammy and Daddy and the girls roasting in the fire. But when Mister Hatchel asked me where Daddy and Mammy and the girls were, I didn’t answer him. I didn’t want to make it real.

  Con Hatchel

  There was this soldier sitting in the trench. The trench was a scar across the muddy countryside made by a giant with his giant plough. It was eight feet deep in the middle.

  As far as I could see, the landscape was as torn up as the ground around a summer watering hole where the thirsty, fly-stung, too-hot cattle have ploughed up the earth with their sharp hooves, sinking deep into the black soil softened with streams of piss and heaps of loose shite.

  But at the Somme, the earth had been torn up by ferocious shells and it was made liquid by the blood and guts of boy soldiers. Deep, water-filled holes bigger than front gardens had been made by repeated explosions that blew the blood and guts and bone and piss and shite and terror high into the sky in sudden plumes. The water in the holes had bits and pieces of men and horses floating on the surface, along with bits and pieces of shattered timber that had once been wagons and gun carriages. Bits and pieces of horses and men were half-buried in the muck of the ruined farmland. Whole bodies lay on the surface too, their arms still in sleeves, fingers curled purplish in death; bits of heads covered with matted hair stirring in the moving air; lower jaws of men and horses, all teeth; bits of horses’ legs with iron shoes still nailed onto the hooves; big balls of guts and strings of guts; bits of rifles; sitting on a tiny muck-hill, a pipe with a curled shank, its bowl full of unlit tobacco; Tommy helmets battered and crushed and twisted, and others in perfect shape with their chin straps clean; a soldier’s decomposing face staring at the blue of the summer sky with empty eye sockets, a rat feasting on his lips; broken horse collars with the once-cushioning golden straw spilling out through rips in the fabric; chains that had once been draughts of wagons; pieces of shafts with grease glistening on the iron fittings; ropes and ruined tacklings hopelessly entangled with pieces of men and horses; purple, bare buttocks with no legs, ribbons of grey tattered guts stuck flatly to the rotting flesh like a bunch of forgotten and dead flowers collapsed over the rim of a vase. There were a million hoof-holes, and the million hoof-holes were brimful of rainwater, and a million small lakes winked in the sloping sun.

  The stink. The stink, especially when I stepped into a hidden carcass and punctured it; the horror of my foot sinking through the rotting muck-camouflaged ribcage of man or animal; my terrible sleep haunted by graves through which I suddenly sank into the rotting corpses below. I knew that if I lived to go home to Ballyrannel, if I lived to be a hundred, my body and mind would never be free again. My memory was being scarred forever and I knew it.

  We saw this one live soldier in the trench, Matt and myself. His arse was on a narrow ledge of earth about one foot above the slushy muck in the bottom. All around him filthy corpses lay across each other, on top of each other or by themselves, some with their faces buried so deep in the muck they might have been headless. Arms and legs were bent at such unnatural angles that, had these young lads been alive, the pain would have pushed them into insanity. It was only by their boots we could tell German corpses from English ones, bundles of them so entangled they could have been dolls thrown into an old box by an uncaring nursery maid.

  For twenty yards each way from where we were standing on the edge of the trench, the bodies lay motionless, no breeze in the bottom of the trench to stir hair that had once been carefully combed to impress imagined girls. And all along the trenches, the noses of fat rats were twitching in gluttonous anticipation.

  In the middle of all the corpses we saw this one soldier alive. He was bareheaded. The liquid muck of the trench came up to his knees, or else his legs had been shot off. He was so thickly covered in muck he could have been English or German or one of the black African soldiers. The whites of his eyes were very white and his lips were like two thin, dead worms. It was only the wet of his staring eyes that gave the soldier life, and it was only his sitting up that had drawn our attention to him in the first place. Not even the layer of drying muck could hide the horror-knotted flesh of his face.

  Our boots were ankle deep in the wet earth on the edge of the trench. We were wet and mucky and cold in the crotch, and the skin was chafed at the tops of our thighs. Our uniforms and faces were blotched with patches and swipes of mud in varying stages of drying out. Matthias had the rolled-up stretcher on his right shoulder, his muck-caked right hand holding it in place. All across the landscape, pairs of stretcher-bearers like us were looking for live ones who had some chance of being put back together. They were all seeing what we were seeing, a countryside without trees or markers or grass, strewn thickly with the rotting bits of men and horses, like so much scattered animal dung coating the surface of a spring field in readiness for ploughing.

  Standing in solitary clarity across the trench from us was a big-spoked and red-painted wheel, the iron rim and wooden felloes gone, leaving the spokes arrayed like the rays of a rising sun drawn by a small child. Beyond the wheel was the silhouette of an enormous gun still on its carriage, but with the barrel tilted down, the mouth buried in the muck, the whole thing looking like an enormous snipe with its beak sunk into the ground, sucking nourishment out of the fecund, black, shite-strewn, and hoof-churned earth surrounding a watering hole for large animals.
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  The sitting soldier in the trench was holding his hands out in front as if keeping a threatening dog at bay. We had been looking at him for several minutes when Matthias said, “How can he keep his hands held out that way without them shaking? It’s like he’s carved, except for the eyes.”

  The soldier did not look up when Matthias spoke, nor did his eyes move from whatever they were staring at.

  After trudging and wading our way across this half-mile of deathland, of making the effort to hold on to our sanity in the face of the mishmash of guts and hardware and barbed wire and timbers and remains of animals and men, this one living soldier in the bottom of the trench gave us purpose. If we could save this one poor bastard, we would achieve something, pull something live out of all the rottenness.

  Then Matthias said, “He’s mad. He doesn’t even know he’s alive.”

  I lowered myself backwards down into the trench with each of us holding an end of the stretcher and Matt acting as anchor. Some rats scampered, but they were too inured to the presence of men to go very far, too fat to keep going.

  I let go of the stretcher and leaped across the soup in the bottom of the trench. My feet landed on the mucky ledge beside the arse of the sitting soldier and I grasped his shoulder for balance. He was so still, he might as well have been a piece of wood.

  Matthias said, “Feel to see if his legs are gone.”

  I knelt down, put one hand on the soldier’s thigh, and felt with the other in the liquid at the bottom of the trench. “He has them,” I said, and I shook the stuff off my hand, went through the motions of cleaning it by rubbing it on the back of the man’s mucky coat.

  “What do you think?” Matthias asked.

  I moved my hand in front of the soldier’s face. He didn’t blink.

  “He’s gone in the head,” I said. With the edge of my knife, I scraped the muck off his front and looked for stains of blood. He may have had many more, but when I stopped counting, I had found thirteen bloody slits where bayonets had stuck him.

  “Will he live?” Matt asked.

  “He’s lived this long,” I said. “They must have missed the important stuff.”

  For a long time Matthias stood on the edge of the trench looking down at the soldier trapped insanely in a horrific present from which he was unlikely ever to escape, for all eternity staving off thrusting bayonets aimed at his guts. “I’d use Knifey, but it looks like he’s all we’ve got,” Matt said. “Maybe it’s better to bring in one mad one than nothing at all.”

  It took us a long time to get the frozen soldier out. In the end, we tied a rope around his chest and pulled him on his back across the trench bottom. When he landed dripping on the bank, he lay there for a moment before he toppled over, his arms still outstretched, his knees still bent. When we were tying him onto the stretcher we saw the deep cuts in his palms and fingers, so deep the bones were visible.

  For a flying second, I remembered an incident on the Canal bank when we were small, the three of us hysterically excited as we got in each other’s way trying to pull out a big pike that had taken the bait on one of our night lines. The bait had been a large frog we’d found beheaded by the mowing bar in one of the Lamberts’ summer meadows.

  When we went to our ends of the stretcher, Matt said, “I’m only bringing him to make myself feel good. What do you think, Con?”

  I looked at the poor bugger for a long time, tried to imagine what the rest of his life would be like. “I’ll do it, Matt,” I said, and I held out my hand for Knifey.

  Matthias Wrenn

  After slogging across the fields of Fucking Belgium for hours, the tiredness reminded me of the tiredness of walking with the big people when we were small, their steps three times longer than ours.

  The first hour of those Sunday morning jaunts were full of activity—Con and Kitty and myself trotting on ahead like ten-week-old pups, sticking our noses into everything that was new; smelling flowers and weeds and brushing up against stinging nettles; climbing gates to imitate the sounds of goats or a thickheaded bull with a brass ring in his nose; following old tracks in the long grass, afraid we might come upon a sleeping rabbit; climbing down the steep sides of ditches and disappearing into the culverts under the road—shouting to make echoes; hunting for dock leaves among the tall field daisies and cow parsnips to rub on the scalding white nettle blisters.

  Always running, always on the move, we tired ourselves out long before the men had reached their halfway point. And then like whining, tired pups we badgered the men to carry us, and cried when they wouldn’t. We hung out of the corners of their coats and knew that home was moving farther away with every hopeless step taken.

  Unless it was pouring, Daddy and Mister Hatchel never missed a Sunday walk. That was in the years before the fire in our house when I was sinking a dog.

  Two by two, twenty of us had been slogging across Belgian fields since four o’clock. It had been dark when the sergeant wakened us. He was a small man off a farm near Scunthorpe. “Call me Wilkie, lads. I’m no better at milking a cow than the rest of you,” he told us one time. Half an hour later we were on the move, the sun below the horizon shining pink on the undersides of the high clouds that could have been skeins of wool rolled up by a crowd of old women during the night and laid out snugly against each other across the sky.

  “A red sky in the morn …,” someone muttered, and let the rest of us finish it in our own heads.

  Our path through the fields ran more or less parallel to a road. The land was better than the fields around Ballyrannel, with none of the symptoms of the bad soil we had at home—daisies, nettles, thistles, rushes, docks, buttercups, ragwort. But an hour after sunrise there was some talk, complaining mainly, about the conditions underfoot. Because of all the war traffic and the recent rain it was as hard to walk across these Belgian fields as it was to walk across freshly ploughed Irish fields after a night’s rain. With every step forward we slipped back. With every step taken we lifted our mud-caked, waterlogged boots out of three inches of muck, and the muck—the sticky Belgian muck—had worked its way up along the inside of our boots and leggings. It had crept along the cloth of our uniforms until we could hear and feel the wetness between our legs. Once, for a few minutes, the underfooting lost its looseness, its wetness, and when we looked up, we found ourselves on a village street. But the village was only scattered stones now, pieces of roofs and windows the only things to show that houses had once been here. No people at all, no chickens, not even a sniffing dog.

  Three or four or five or six times before we stopped to eat, it had rained, as the red sky had warned us. Mindlessly we slogged on, the early morning talk long gone into silence, only the sergeant speaking every half hour, telling those of us with the rolled-up stretchers it was time to pass them over to our partners. It would have been less painful if we hadn’t moved the stretchers at all, left the wooden handles sitting in the fleshy groove on our shoulders.

  We were bareheaded, our tin hats strapped on to our packs. It was July 1917.

  Out of step, slightly bent forward to ease our loaded backs, we slogged on with eyes bent to the lifting heels of the man in front. The rest of the world had gone away.

  In that peculiar hypnotized state that exists between wakefulness and sleep, we moved ever closer to Wipers. For a while, I had kept bits and pieces of Ballyrannel and the Canal in my mind, but they too flickered out. The red fire that burned Daddy and Mammy and the babies had flared for a moment before I got rid of it. I had never gone beyond the redness of the fire to what was happening to the four of them inside the heat of the fire. Hours ago I had brought Kitty into my mind, but even she could not keep me company. I lay down beside her in Ali Baba’s Cave on the Canal bank, put my hand on her chest, then lay on top of her, her legs around me, our mouths joined, but I could not hold on to her.

  The tiredness wasn’t just in our bodies, it had seeped into our heads, and my brain was satisfied with the boots of the walking man ahead of me. If I raise
d my head and looked to the left or right, I knew I would have seen a moving landscape of brown uniforms split in the middle by a dark line of wagons and guns and horses; tens of thousands of men walking to Wipers, thousands of horses pulling thousands of wheeled wagons and guns and kitchens and hospitals along the road to Wipers; in the carts were boxes of bullets, cases of shells, bags of bandages, gallons of morphine, stacks of surgical saws, bundles of grave-digging shovels.

  When we’d stopped to eat and rest hours ago, Con had looked at the moving landscape and said, “The migration of the animals across the Serengeti plain must look like this.” More than anyone else in our platoon of stretcher-bearers, Con was the one who’d read enough to be able to compare one thing with another. The one and only consolation we had since our ship to India turned around at the far end of the Mediterranean was that Con and I had managed to stay together. The Irish Twins, we were called in this particular group of stretcher-bearers. Wilkie, our sergeant, was called Milky when he wasn’t being our officer.

  When Con, in his offhand way, mentioned something exotic, one of the lads would say, “Come on, Twinny, tell us about it!” And that’s how it happened that on the way to Wipers, Con told us about Tanganyika and Kilimanjaro, and the lakes nearly as big as Ireland. And he told us about the herds of animals moving to “fresh fields and pastures new”; the great migration of elephants, buffaloes, giraffes, antelopes, wildebeests; the tigers and lions and jackals and hyenas and leopards that kept pace with the herds; the vultures that soared so high a person mightn’t see them; the blazing sun every day of the year except when rains as heavy as the ones at Noah’s deluge came—and we all sitting on our wet, cold arses in a circle in a field of last year’s unharvested turnips in Fucking Belgium.

  “And here we are,” Con ended up, “all moving north to Wipers like the animals migrating from the Serengeti, all looking for new food.”