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

by Tom Phelan

  “I wish we could find some new food besides this shite,” one of the lads said, and he spooned another spoonful of the shite into his mouth.

  “There’s turnips buried in these fields from all the lads walking them down into the muck,” the sergeant said.

  “Turnips are for cows.”

  “Turnips are sweet and juicy,” the sergeant said, “especially if they’ve had a touch of frost like these from being out all winter.” He pulled a bayonet out of one of the lads’ gear and poked around until he felt a sunken turnip. He used the toe of his boot to pry out the prize. It was black, covered in muck. Milky stuck the bayonet into the ground beside the turnip, opened the buttons in the front of his trousers, and fished out his watering pipe. He sprayed the turnip, moved it around with the tip of his boot until the maroon and pale yellow skin was washed clean. There was steam. After stuffing his pipe back into his trousers, the sergeant-farmer dried the turnip by swiping at it with the flap of his coat. Then he hacked at the outer skin with the bayonet until he was left with a cube of yellow turnip with a few smears of mud on it.

  “Peggy’s Leg, lads,” he said, in his peculiar accent, as he cut the turnip into slices and then into thick strips. When he walked around distributing the pieces he reminded me of the old, demented nun in the convent playground who distributed tiny squares of jammed bread off a white enamel tray to young children with watering mouths. The crunchy, juicy turnip was so good that, before we moved off, each of us had a turnip in his pack. Some of us had two. All the turnips had been washed.

  “We’ll be mooing before we get to Wipers,” one of the lads said, as we set off again, and we lowed like cows.

  Very soon, we were back into our mindless trudging, depending on Wilkie to keep us in our place in the great migration. For hours, the only voice was the one telling us to hand over the stretchers.

  And then we heard a bell ringing.

  After all the slurping and sucking sounds of the day, the peal of the bell was the song of a blackbird in an apple tree in October. We all stopped walking at once, all looked up, and there, not a quarter of a mile away, was a village still standing, the spire of a church pointing up into the sky, a desire in stone to be united with a divinity.

  The bell sang out a loud and joyous bong-bong, bong-bong, the kind of bell you’d imagine ringing for a wedding.

  “Maybe they’re glad to see us.”

  “Maybe they’re glad we’re all moving through, not stopping to eat them out of house and home and shite in their ditches.”

  “Maybe they think we’re on our way to kick the shite out of Gerry.”

  “Maybe we’d better get a move on,” Wilkie said, “before the lads in front get away and the ones behind run over us.”

  But the bell had raised our spirits.

  We pounded the muck off our feet when we stepped onto the hard village road. We fell in step without being told, straightened up, and ran our fingers through our hair. Half-smoked Woodbines were nicked between thumb and forefinger and slipped into breast pockets. We were about to go on parade. We would march through that village with our heads in the air, have the local people cheer us on—we who had come from the ends of the earth to save them.

  We passed through the gable ends of two houses and were suddenly in a small square. The group of soldiers ahead of us had stopped on the street that led out of the square on the far side. They were looking back, their faces as grim as if they were looking into the coffin of a dead brother.

  A tall man was pushing a wheelbarrow around the square followed by a scraggly line of noisy children. People on the footpaths pointed at the wheelbarrow and laughed, but it was mirthless laughter, forced laughter, like the squawking of chickens after a feed of dry barley.

  A German soldier was sitting in the wheelbarrow. He was fat under his great coat; a spiked helmet was on his head and both arms were up in the air as if he were leading a crowd in a roar of victory. His jaw was hanging open.

  Little children ran up and poked the soldier in the belly, shrieked, and fled. It was only when a little girl with a long pigtail ran up and slashed the soldier across the face with a stick that we realized the German was dead. The nose was beginning to disintegrate and lose its place on the face.

  We stood still and stared. The tall man jerked the handles of his wheelbarrow until the head of the dead body nodded and the propped arms moved up and down. The adults on the footpaths cackled their soulless laugh, pointed and shouted sounds that were the sounds of hate in any language. Like hungry chickens dashing in to steal flecks of food from starving dogs, the children scurried up to the barrow and desecrated the corpse with their sticks. The church bell had lost its joyful tones.

  Suddenly there was a scream in my ear like the scream of a horse in flames, and Sergeant Wilkie grabbed my stretcher and ran across the square. Before he reached the wheelbarrow, the folded stretcher was already swinging through a wide arc like a heavy and ancient battle sword, and at precisely the right moment, the other end of the oak handles crashed into the chest of the man pushing the wheelbarrow. The pusher fell on his back, and as the legs of the barrow touched the ground, the sergeant grabbed the handles and saved its occupant from tumbling out.

  As he stepped away from the barrow, Milky stumbled over the fallen barrow-pusher. When he recovered, we were not looking at a Yorkshire farm boy anymore. He whirled around in a circle, taking in all the people in the square and, when he spoke to them, he was screaming.

  “You fucking savages! You demented fucking savages! You stupid, stupid people. Look at your children, for Christ’s sake.” And tears sprung out of Milky’s face like drops of hard rain. He blew his nose into his hand and wiped it on the back of his trousers.

  When Wilkie had run across the square, the rest of us had followed. We now stood close beside him as he shouted, “Someone here speaks English?” When there was no answer he roared, “Who speaks English? Who’s the schoolmaster?”

  A woman wearing a white kerchief pointed to the tall man lying at the sergeant’s feet. “The master,” she said.

  Milky, who had been wrestling farm animals to the ground since he was a child, pulled the master to his feet, reached up, and slapped him viciously. “You stupid fucker!” he screamed into the man’s face. He shook the tall teacher back and forth—Milky the terrier, schoolmaster the rat. “You tell these fucking ghouls they’re to bring this soldier to your parish graveyard and dig a grave for him.”

  The master was too stunned to do or say anything. Milky pulled the man’s face down to the level of his own face and screamed the spitty words at him, “Tell them to do it now!” Milky pushed the master away and pulled out his revolver. He shot a bullet into the stone wall above the heads of the people. A twitch ran through the crowd.

  The schoolmaster spoke to the villagers. When he was finished, the sergeant spoke to him again. “Tell them our platoon will oversee the burial, and tell them whoever doesn’t attend the funeral will be shot.”

  While the man spoke, the sergeant undid Con’s great coat from his pack and covered the corpse in the wheelbarrow. With the schoolmaster and the wheelbarrow leading the way, our platoon of stretcher-bearers funnelled the people into a procession. As we made our way over to the graveyard surrounding the church, the only sound was the scraping of feet on the cobbled square. The bell started ringing again, and now it had the plaintive tones of the dead bell in Ballyrannel telling the countryside that someone has died.

  Before the wheelbarrow passed through the rusting wrought-iron churchyard gate, the people of the village had begun to clutch at their forgotten humanity, had cast quick glances around as if they were all suddenly naked and ashamed. By the time Sergeant Wilkie had picked out a spot for the grave, sobbing could be heard, sounds like the after-bursts that shake a child’s body at the end of a long, sad cry.

  Sergeant Wilkie’s temper had changed too. He pulled his entrencher out of his pack and marked out the edge of the grave in the grass. Then he began to dig
, but he had only dug a few sods when one of the village men touched him on the shoulder. Then more men came over to us and borrowed our short-handled, narrow-headed shovels. The fresh earth began to pile up quickly near the wheelbarrow. When the hole was five feet deep, the villagers moved forward and surrounded the deepening grave. Some of the women near the front knelt and men nearby leaned on each other and went down on one knee, just like the ones at the back of the church on Sunday mornings in Ballyrannell.

  When the last digger was pulled out of the grave, the schoolmaster uncovered the dead German. More men stepped forward, two overcoats were produced, and the corpse was laid on them. With two men on each side holding a sleeve, the body was manoeuvred over the grave. As they lowered the dead man, the pallbearers sank down with their burden, sank down until their bellies were on the grass, their holding hands stretched down into the grave as far as they could go. The corpse came to a gentle rest on the bottom of the grave. Two more overcoats were passed forward and spread over the body to protect it from the first shovels of cold earth.

  The grave was filled in and when the mound had been patted into shape, two of the entrenching tools were placed across each other on top of the mound, just like they were in Ballyrannel at the end of a funeral. But in Ballyrannel the crossed shovel-handles were a sign for the priest to begin the prayers for the dead. Maybe there was no priest in the cemetery that day, or maybe he was too ashamed to step forward.

  After a few minutes, Sergeant Wílkie realized that the villagers were looking at him, waiting for him to say something. He stood there blushing and rubbing his hand across his mouth. Our sergeant’s outrage had run its course, and the Wilkie we knew was back. But he took a small step closer to the grave.

  “May God have mercy on the soul of this man,” he said. With hands folded and head bent, Milky stood there in the silence that had replaced the tolls of the dead bell. Finally, he stirred himself, looked at the village people, and gently said, “There’s times in life when we all need someone to tell us we have gone mad. Everything’s all right now,” he said. He looked at the schoolmaster, and the schoolmaster looked at Milky, as if waiting for him to say more.

  “That’s all,” Milky said. The schoolmaster spoke the sentence to the people in their language, and then, to the sergeant’s surprise and embarrassment, the teacher leaned over and kissed him on both cheeks.

  We were on our way trudging across wet fields again, maybe a mile or two beyond the village, when Con asked, “Sergeant, who’s going to tell us when we’ve gone mad?”

  “I know I’m insane already,” Milky said. He brought us to a halt when he himself stopped. “Who in his right mind would do what we’re doing, walking to Wipers in Fucking Belgium where fifty thousand men have already disappeared into the muck. Fifty thousand men gone without a trace, part of the muck, and here we are making our way there to take their places in another big push. I don’t know about you, lads, but I know I’m so far removed from the Wilkie who lived in Scunthorpe that I’m not normal anymore.”

  Four weeks later, between Wipers and Passchendaele, Milky was pointing Con and myself to a shell hole where he’d seen a wounded man. I heard a shell coming, but terror turned me into a stick. Like many shells, this one didn’t explode, but it struck Sergeant Wilkie, and before he fell, I saw the ground behind him through the hole in his chest.

  Missus Hodgkins

  From the day Lionel and Sarah landed in France, I listened for Paulie Bolger in the pebbles when he stepped through the wicket gate with the letters in his hand.

  The longer Sarah and Lionel survived in the War, the more nervous I became. I worried that the longer they survived the more likely they were to get killed. Kitty saw things the other way around—the longer Con and Matthias stayed alive, the better was their chance of coming home. Neither line of reasoning made much sense, except that mine made me fearful and Kitty’s made her hopeful. My beloved husband, David, went around like a man holding his breath but pretending not to. The tension of having two children in a war was visibly wearing him down, was wearing me down too.

  We didn’t speak about our fear, but each of us read it in the behaviour of the other: David would disappear for hours across the fields on his horse; he knew I no longer waited for Paulie Bolger’s steps in the stones, that instead I had taken to waiting outside the wicket gate or even walking in the rain bareheaded and without a coat, along the avenue to meet him.

  On the morning of the third Monday in September in 1916, I opened the door and I didn’t even see Paulie Bolger in the pebbles—I only saw the letter in his hand. And then, as if the lights had gone out for a moment, Paulie was on the top step holding the letter out to me. I swatted at it the way I’d swat at an attacking wasp. A feeling of weakness gushed over me: sweat itched its way out all over my body and I thought I would vomit. I swayed over against the door jamb and heard Paulie calling Kitty’s name, and I wondered why he was doing that, calling Kitty. Then my eyes and my mind took in the letter again, and I leaned over to vomit, but nothing came, just a jagged pain in my diaphragm and a cavernous-sounding belch. Paulie touched my arm and at the same moment I felt Kitty’s hands on me.

  My brain was overloaded with the knowledge that one of my children was dead and I was in the position of having to choose which one it was. Who did I hope was not in the envelope? I wanted to bang my head against the stone wall, wanted to bang myself into unconsciousness before I could begin to make a choice. And that’s what I started to do, bang my head against the door jamb until Kitty wrestled me out onto the steps outside the door. She pushed me against the wrought-iron railing at the side of the steps and snatched the letter out of Paulie’s hand. As she ripped open the envelope, I vomited down into the flower bed.

  “Sarah’s in a hospital,” Kitty said quickly. “She’s expected to survive.”

  With a firm grip on the top rail, I lowered myself down because I knew my knees were about to give out. I ended up kneeling and even though prayer was very far from my mind, my mouth said, “Thank God. Thank God she’s alive. Thank God.” Water was running down my face but I wasn’t crying; my body was simply releasing built-up terror, was letting it escape any way it could. I wet myself.

  Kitty was kneeling in front of me on the top step, holding my shoulders. My water was spreading across the slates toward her knees. She told Paulie to go to the farmyard to look for David, and the moment the postman was gone, she said, “Quick, Missus Hodgkins, before the men get back, get into the kitchen and sit on a chair so they won’t see your dress.”

  The small things that concern us when we’re in the middle of a crisis.

  Paulie and David came rushing through the back door. Kitty and I were at the kitchen table, Kitty with her arm around my shoulders. She gave the letter to David, and the way he read it he was like a turkey gobbling down food, totally self-absorbed. David collapsed onto a chair and Kitty led the postman out through the back door. “I didn’t want him to see the wet step and talk about it,” she told me later.

  “Oh, David,” I said, “I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. I wanted to be dead before I knew who it was. Before Kitty opened the letter I was still trying to choose between them, who I wanted it to be, who I didn’t want it to be. Wasn’t that terrible? Oh, David. Oh, God. I hate myself for having thought that way. How I hate God sometimes, the trials he throws at us!”

  “There is no God,” David said. He moved the hand that was still holding the letter. “How could there be a God this stupid?” He put his forehead on his arms on the table and wept for Sarah or for himself or for me or for Lionel or whoever it is we weep for when we are knocked off our feet by a wave of the world’s sadness. Eventually he came around the table and knelt on the floor beside me, put his arms around me.

  “I wet myself,” I said, but he didn’t hear me.

  “At least she’s alive,” he said. “We’ll have to find out where she is as quick as we can.”

  Trying to get information from an army i
n the middle of a war is difficult, and only for Uncle David’s connections from the Boer War we would have waited a long time to find out that Sarah was in a hospital called Pine Haven near Edinburgh. Pine Haven had only recently become a hospital when the army requisitioned the large building for the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers. In plain English, Pine Haven was an asylum for people who’d gone mad in the War.

  If Enderly ever had a stiff upper lip, it collapsed with the madness of Sarah.

  Every day I wrote to Sarah, begging her to respond to my letters. Every day I waited for an answer; every day I trembled in fear that another letter would come to tell us Lionel had been killed.

  Sometimes it takes an outsider to take you by the hand and point you in the right direction. It was Kitty who told us what to do. She would move into Enderly, take care of the place and the men, while David and I went to Scotland to see Sarah.

  “But what will happen if a letter comes about Lionel while we’re away?” I asked.

  “At this very minute,” Kitty said, “Lionel is all right. Sarah isn’t. You can’t sit around not taking care of Sarah because you’re afraid something might happen to Lionel. As well as that, the two of you will be taking care of yourselves by taking care of Sarah.”

  Kitty the wise! It was only three years since she landed on our top step, cow dung on her shins, her head like a burr that’s scraped against the fur of a mangy dog.

  Kitty brought us to Ballyrannel’s station in the pony and trap. Then it was Marbra, Dublin, Belfast, Clydebank and Edinburgh. I held on to David’s arm all the way, hugged it to myself. Yet it was a lonely journey for the two of us, the first time in our marriage that David and I were unable to support each other with words. There was no talk between us at all, no pointing out of curiosities, no comments about fellow passengers. There was only the blind staring at the speeding countryside and the listening to the unending clacking of the wheels that unconsciously sneaked into the brain and became unwanted words: Sarah mad Sarah mad Sarah mad. Lionel lost Lionel lost Lionel lost. There was nothing I could think of to say to David, not one thing. It was as if language had become nothing but noise.