by Tom Phelan
“What’s honour?” Lard asked. “Having your guts floating on the breeze?”
“Honour is the right to brag about the great things you did. This war we’re in will be over sometime; the Germans will be gone home with their tails between their legs. And in years to come we’ll be able to say, ‘We were there. We did our bit.’ And the pride we will feel and the way people will look at us when we are old men parade-marching in uniforms too small for us will be our small cloud of honour or glory. We will be given special distinction and people will clap their hands as we stumble by and they’ll say, ‘You helped to keep the Germans out of our homes, and we thank you.’”
“I’ll tell you one thing, Professor,” Owl said. “If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never feel there was anything honourable about sitting in this shite-hole, waiting to crawl out like a garden slug in the dark. We’re not even defending this miserable muck hole, we’re just sitting in it. We don’t even have guns, for Christ’s sake. There’s nothing about this that’s worth remembering. As a matter of fact, the sooner I forget about this hole the better. I’d be ashamed to let anyone know that I spent even five minutes of the War like this; sitting in a shite-hole. People would laugh at us if they knew about it.”
“You’ll remember this hole, Owl, and we’ll all remember it and we’ll tell our grandchildren about it. And if you don’t believe me, then think of this—here we are, sitting in a shite-hole in the middle of Fucking Belgium, and we are remembering the men who fought in a battle five hundred years ago. We don’t know the name of one common soldier who fought in that battle. Their fight only lasted three hours, but all the pain and suffering they endured for months in order to attain their victory was part of the battle. We don’t know what any individual man did at Agincourt, but we do know what all the men did together. No one will know in a few years that we sat here in this stinking hole, but they will know we were part of the War. We are as important to the War as the men on the big guns or the ones bringing all the stuff over from England on ships, or the ones charging out of the trenches, or the doctors and the nurses back at the stations. When they put up monuments to the men who died in this war, those will be our monuments too.”
Professor’s little speech made me feel not as bad as I’d been. I remember there was a pause for a few seconds, as if we were storing Professor’s words in a safe place from which we could bring them out again and listen to them for the comfort they would give.
“Is there a monument for the men at Agincourt?”
“Shakespeare wrote a play about Henry and the battle,” Professor said.
“That bastard,” Owl spluttered. “I got more beatings at school over that bastard than I did from all the bullies who beat the shite out of me in the schoolyard. I could never learn his bloody poetry, it was all so awkward and full of words nobody ever heard of. I couldn’t ever spell the fucker’s name right and got punished for that too. And don’t tell me, Professor, you’re going to sit here in this horses’ grave and say some of the fucker’s poems.”
“Just a few lines, Owl,” Professor smiled. “In Shakespeare’s play, one of Henry’s men wishes out loud that they had ten thousand more soldiers on their side. But Henry says, ‘The fewer men we have, the greater will be our share of the honour when we win. As a matter of fact, if any man here has no stomach for the fight, he can go home and we will give him some money for the journey. I will not die in the company of a man who is afraid to die.’”
“That’s a bit mad,” Lard said, “facing a big fight with not enough men, and telling your lads they can go home if they want.”
“If Haig said that, he wouldn’t have one man left in this Fucking Belgium in five minutes sharp.”
“Henry wasn’t really offering to pay a man’s way home,” Con said. “He was saying, ‘You can go home if you like, but if you do, you’re a real shite to leave the rest of us here to die; you’re a coward and I hope a wild pig rips the balls out of you on the way home.’ ”
“But Shakespeare said it nicer, Vanderbilt, don’t you think? And Henry was obsessed with winning glory and honour. He said, ‘If it’s a sin to want all the honour in the world, then I am the biggest sinner in the world.’”
“I can’t understand that,” Owl said, “wanting glory. All I want is a good wash and then a plate of eggs and rashers and sausages and lashings of bread and butter and a mug of sweet tea strong enough to trot a mouse.”
“You must remember that in the play Henry is trying to encourage a ragtag group of hungry and exhausted men who have just laid eyes on an army six times as large as theirs. He’s trying to keep his men from running away, from fainting with the fright.”
“He’s trying to stop the scutter from running down the backs of their legs,” Con said.
“Poetic, Vanderbilt, poetic,” Professor said. “So, to keep the shite from running down the backs of their legs, Henry says, ‘Today is the feast of Saint Crispian. Every one of us who survives this battle and lives to old age will stand proud every year from now on on Saint Crispian’s day. We will roll up our sleeves and show our scars and say, I got these wounds on Crispian’s day. Old men get forgetful, but every one of us in our old age will remember what we did on Saint Crispian’s day, and we’ll exaggerate too, and tell of doing things we never did. No matter how useless any of us feels about ourselves right now, we will all be changed forever by what happens today; we will never again think of ourselves as useless. In years to come, the good man will teach our story to his son, and every Saint Crispian’s day from now to the ending of the world, we will be remembered, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.’”
“Happy, my arse!” Lard said. “How could anyone be happy about maybe getting a blunt spear through the guts?”
“Band of brothers,” Owl said. “That sounds nice and cuddly, but since I’ve been in the army I’ve never felt like I belonged to a band of brothers.”
“Right now I feel, a little tiny bit, like I belong to a band of first cousins, maybe,” Professor said, “but only because we are all up to our necks in this shite-hole together, and we’re all stretcher-men. And this is something I will tell my grandchildren when I’m old and doddery, if I ever get back to Blighty, that is. And the grandchildren will say, ‘Gads! Here he goes again, gassing on about that stinking old ’ole in Fucking Belgium.’” I saw smiles flickering on a couple of faces. Professor had moved us all away from Trossachs’s guts in the wind, had even taken us out of the hole for a few seconds.
“Henry got exactly what he set out to get—remembrance and honour. Here we are today in a hole on Saint Crispian’s day remembering him.”
Con said, “If Shakespeare wrote a play about five men trapped in a black hole full of rotten men and horses, would he have written a speech as high-sounding as the one he wrote for Henry?”
“Oh, Vanderbilt! You sceptical Celt! Before Agincourt, Henry’s army was as helpless as we are now. When the time is right, when it gets dark, we’ll climb out of here and make our way back to the lines. And when we are back on our feet, washed and dry, we will come back to the front again and we will rescue the wounded, and some of the wounded will go home and recover, and they will get married and have children, and those children will have children, and we will be giving life to generations of people we will never know and can’t even imagine. Some of those children will be doctors and nurses and soldiers and leaders and farmers and engineers and mill workers and architects and Irish storytellers…”
“… and professors,” Owl said.
“… and roof-thatchers, Owl, and poets. And some of the poets and writers and historians will look back at this War and they will tell the stories of the soldiers. Books and plays will be written about the War, and monuments will be built to the men who died, and every year there will be a special day to remember all the men who fought and died or survived. And for a few years, for as long as we live, we’ll be able to pull up our sleeves
and show our wounds and we’ll exaggerate a bit and maybe even tell a few lies, but we will know that we were here, that we spent an afternoon in a rank grave so we could crawl out in the dark and come back to save generations of men and women.”
“You think so, Professor?” Lard asked.
“I know so, Lard. Our misery today will be our honour and our glory when stories of the War are written down. Remember the condition of Henry’s men when he was giving his speech and look at what they did. They fought and won. One of our brothers got killed, but we have survived an afternoon in a hole of liquid, dead, stinking flesh. We will crawl out, but we will come back. We’re doing a good job. We’re fighting our part of the War. For every man we save, we have won his war for him. And yes, Vanderbilt. Yes, yes and yes again. Shakespeare could easily have written a speech about us, and it would have been every bit as heroic and every bit as moving as the one he wrote and put into the mouth of Henry the king.”
There was nothing but the sounds of the big guns for a long time. As I sat there up to my chin in the liquid grave, I heard a faint echo of joy in the chambers of my heart for the first time since our ship had turned around in the Mediterranean two years earlier.
The light faded. When it got dark we crawled out of the hole, looking like creatures from a swamp. We got back to our own lines and we washed our clothes and ourselves. Lard spoke his letter to Tossachs’s mother and Professor did not change a word.
We came back to the front with our stretchers. We saved men we thought would make it. We put out of their misery globs of guts with nothing human about them but their screaming mouths.
Lard got a new partner, but on that first day, before we even had time to nickname him, before they had even unfurled their stretcher, the new man was killed and Lard lost a hand—an expensive blighty. Professor and Owl carried 143 men out of no man’s before they were killed by the same shell. Before Con died two years later, we carried 1,683 men to safety. I kept count with scratches on the handles of the stretcher, the way my father had shown me how to keep count of the fish caught on the hazel rod when I was small; the side of a tiny box for one point, the bottom for two, the other side for three, the top for four, and from one corner to the other for five, and then onto a new box. On our stretcher handles there were 336 boxes, two sides and one bottom.
I sent Kitty a picture of five heads sitting on black water in a round hole with the word Agincourt under it. I knew I’d have to explain it when I came home.
COMING HOME
Billy Simkins
dear mrs Hatchel,
if you had a son by the name of Cornelius Hatchel killed in the war write back to me. I would write to you about him if he was your son, he was called Con and his middle name was Francis, my name is Billy Simkins 62 Fairmount bldv Mansfield Beds England.
Signed,
Billy Simkins
Jer Meaney
I was the one who seen him first the day he come home. I mean, I was the first one seen him and knew it was Matthias. People over at Marbra Station must have saw him, and at the Dublin station too, but they only seen him the way you’d see someone you don’t know; just another person, unless of course the person had something wrong with him, like a glass eye or only one arm or a burnt face, like the Hodgkins one behind her mask.
But there wasn’t anything wrong with Matthias’s body when I caught up with him on the Bog Road, no wooden leg like Mick Nolan, no shakes like Ownie Egan roaring in his house in the middle of the day or night, his burned lungs making him sound like a calving cow in trouble—frighten the shite out of you—and eyes bulging forever against the green gas snaking across no man’s land, screaming at it to “Stay away, stay away, ya hure,” shouting, “Piss on me hanky, piss on me hanky, will someone for the love of Jazus piss on me hanky? I’ve not a drop left in me.”
That was the first time, on the Bog Road, I ever saw Matthias by himself. It was always Matthias and Con and the girl Kitty since they were small childer down at the Canal. The Hatchel triplets. Poor Con didn’t come back at all—buried a million miles away, in France somewhere, too far for anyone to go and cry at his grave, may the Lord have mercy on him.
By the walk of him from behind, it never crossed my mind it was Matthias—he’d always walked with a bit of a stoop to the left, and this fella was as straight as a telegraph pole. And when I did pass him and looked back, it still took me a second to recognize him. Compared to the well-fed Matthias that left Enderly to join the army, he was a skeleton: sunk eyes, grey hair made all the greyer with the fierce black eyebrows, cheeks sucked in like when you bite into a sloe after your mother telling you not to, so purple you couldn’t stop yourself. Matthias was twenty-two years younger than myself, but he looked twenty-two years older.
Of course, he wasn’t wearing the uniform. I wouldn’t have been wearing it myself neither, if ’twere me, never knowing when you’d run into a Fenian or some other bugger who’d give you hell for joining the army—“Took the king’s shilling, didn’t ya?”—accusing you, not asking you a question at all. Ireland had changed since Matthias went off to join up. Them lads in Dublin in 1916 had seen to that; suddenly you weren’t a real Irishman if you’d fought in the English army. It was a terrible mix-up—most of the lads out in the trenches fighting for a daily wage on the English side, and suddenly at Easter, the English soldiers in Dublin shooting the yobs in Kilmainham. If you ask me, they got what they deserved. Of course, I’d never say that out loud, or I’d get hit by someone sooner or later, most likely in the back in the dark.
“Good God! It’s you, Matthias,” I shouted, when I looked back at him, and I was all excited to see him, because he was the last one from the town to come back. There was great excitement in Ballyrannel when the two of them went off to see the world. Most of the lads in the town were jealous, sorry they hadn’t whatever it is that gets a young fellow up and moving away from the homeplace. Of course, when the War started a year later and Mister Redmond began speechifying, about thirty lads from Ballyrannel joined up. There was a great severance pay for the missus and the childers.
A whole lot of stories came back from France and Belgium about Matthias escaping getting killed a hundred times, or half blown to bits, or legless at least, or armless. He was in the papers a whole lot of times: “The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Stretcher-Bearers.” This French reporter picked out six soldiers at the beginning of the War and every month wrote about what was happening to one of them, all the while the War was on. After two years of seeing how Matthias was still carrying out the wounded, he called him the Scarlet Pimpernel because there was a man by that name who was always having narrow escapes from the English in the Boer War, and Matthias was like that. Of course, in Ballyrannel we all knew about the first miraculous escape he had when he was a chap and the rest of the family got burnt to death down by the Canal; only Matt was wearing the Franciscan scapular that day he’d have been burned with the rest of them.
The Dublin paper translated the Frenchman’s stories about Matthias. The other five soldiers were killed, and then the reporter himself was killed the week before the War ended, just after stepping away from the spot where he and Matt had their picture took together, Matthias tall, the Frenchman a bit of a runt. They say a lot of quare things like that happened all the time, mostly to the Germans—two lads talking and a shell would blow one to bits and not touch the other; even stories of chaps getting their heads took clean off their shoulders and they still taking that last step forward when they fell. There were stories about bodies blasted into nothing and the heads left there on the ground with the strap of the tin helmet still under the chin, and the butt of a fag in the mouth still lighting.
It made us all feel important that Matthias and Ballyrannel were in the papers.
I was so excited to see him that I blurted out, “Janey, Matthias, I thought you were dead a hundred times, and here y’are home from the War safe and sound.” I pulled on the reins and the pony stopped, and the half-blind mare behind hit h
er chest against the tailboard.
To tell the truth, the next minute the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. Not only did Matthias not answer me, he didn’t even see me. He didn’t even veer to one side to walk around the mare and the cart and the pony. He walked through the whole lot of us like he was a ghost; never even changed his step, just kept going like we wasn’t there at all.
The eyes of him!
“Matthias,” I called weakly, “it’s me, Jer. Jer Meaney.”
He didn’t look around, and the hairs on my arms were up like the hairs on the back of a frightened dog trying to make himself look bigger to a bigger dog. To tell you the God’s truth, I was certain sure I’d seen a ghost—all those stories in the papers from the War, about angels with bows and arrows in the sky on wild horses beating back the Germans so the English could escape, and the Blessed Virgin Mary herself hanging off the spire of a church and not falling, no matter how many times they fired at her and the baby in her arms, and the War supposed to stop when she fell, and miraculous medals stopping bullets in front of men’s hearts; God rolling the sun around in the sky trying to stop the men from killing each other; and two aeroplanes fighting in the sky and everyone on the ground seeing the shape of a heart around them—God telling them that he loved one as much as the other; people all over England getting in touch with their slaughtered husbands and sons and brothers through people who can talk to the dead. So, it wouldn’t be strange at all if Matthias had been killed and I was seeing his ghost walking toward home, or at least toward the place where he had lived once, just a few walls now like black tooth stumps in a terrible mouth, nettles and dandelions and docks growing in the kitchen floor, tom-tits building in the walls, yellow and black.
