In three places in front of them far ahead the fields opened up. Huge brown mountains came up from that ground. They looked to Willie as big as Lugnaquilla itself. The brown shot up towards the stars and seemed to hover there. A hundred rainbows fanned out from the top and sour-looking yellow light flung itself at the dark enamel of the heavens. The puddle at Willie’s feet shrugged and a miniature storm at sea was created there. Then the whole warm night of Flanders was thrown in their faces, fierce zephyrs tore along the trenches like a brief tropical storm, and the earth they were now hugging and half-praying into shuddered. A mighty whap-whap- whap sound tore past, heading in violent haste they thought all the way to old Blighty. Then, behind them, a long, long line of machine-guns opened up, sending a lacework, a veritable solid cloak of bullets towards the ridge. And Biggs was urging them to go, and they were up the ladders and off, Willie scrambling like the rest, so astonished on that occasion he forgot to piss his pants.
Joe Kielty and Timmy Weekes were making fine progress with the gun on their shoulders. It looked to Willie like a good half-hour’s walking lay ahead and he knew from experience that if they were opened up on now they were entirely finished. The ridge looked down on them, and even in the wild dark, if the Hun could recover and get their guns going, by morning there would be fewer men to go back to Wicklow, Dublin and Mayo when the war was over. Just moments after the mines went up, the Boche had sent up coloured lights, to signal along their own front that an attack was in train, so there were some still up there. The heat was as bad as a mud, and as terror grew to be out in the open, a big, heavy sweat drenched them from inside, so they were like big feet sloshing about in big stockings. Pete O‘Hara and Smith and McNaughtan kept pace and all to the left of them stretched the other men of the battalion. But the whole division was engaged, and this was the leading wave. To their right they knew the men of the Ulster 36th would be pushing along just like them, no different. But it was a gigantic army moving over this ground, a horde of terrified men moving for all they knew into the nasty arms of Death. And any second they expected to feel bullets tear into them, or shrapnel do some evil damage to their too-soft bodies. The fumes of the explosions also met them, and Pete O’Hara finally gave up trying to hold down his ration of stew, and started to vomit forth into the brittle and violent darkness. Men could be seen falling not from wounds but from that terrible nausea.
It was like running through colours, that was all Willie could think. Stumbling more like. Filthy browns and then sudden flaring colours, yellows again and reds and even weird, wild greens, and heavy, hard acres of blackness, and swords and God-high spears of whiteness like lightning.
Biggs walked ahead of them, turning every moment to shout them on. It was intensely strange.
Before they expected it, they were nose up against the slopes of the ridge. There was a bomb crater just below as big as a lake, as round as an ornamental lake. So they hurried around the rim of that as best they could, finding themselves divided and separated from the main line. The great battery of machine-guns far behind was firing remorselessly into the high ground, like some manner of creeping barrage. Then, maybe fearing there would be British soldiers coming up amid that hail, it stopped. Immediately somewhere to the right a machine-gun opened up, firing queerly over their heads.
‘Fucking bastards,’ said Christy Moran. ‘Come on, you stupid cunts, we’re going to put a fucking sock in that.’
And gladly they would have followed him, but that he seemed to have shed all heaviness and weariness and was scrambling along like an animal well used to that slope. He had a Mills bomb miraculously in one hand and was hauling his rifle with the other.
‘I tell you, you fucking cunts, if you don’t keep up, I’ll fucking shoot yiz.’
But they were trying to keep up, they were trying. Now Willie saw the odd sight of two German soldiers standing by a concrete shelter. They looked in a very bad way, and were swaying and moaning like drunk men. The whole pillbox was cracked in two right along its middle, and there was smoke and stench everywhere, and that one machine-gun firing out through a ravaged slit, as if a child were directing it. Christy Moran did what he had to do to the Mills bomb to prime it and threw it through the damaged air so that it banged against the concrete and fell into the gaping crack. There was what sounded like a muffled gasp inside the building and then nothing. Flames suddenly tore out through the crack. Then Christy Moran started screaming at the enemy soldiers and ran at them with his bayonet fixed just in the learned manner, and before Willie’s amazed eyes he ran the bayonet into the stomach of the first man, drew it out with another wild scream, and rammed it again into the other, catching him somewhere in the upper ribs, because Christy cursed loudly as he tried to draw it back out. The soldier fell and Christy stood on the man’s chest and heaved out his weapon again.
‘Bastards, bastards,’ he muttered, clear as day, snarling like a giant dog.
Biggs was jubilant. There was nothing wrong with Biggs that blossoming morning. The light was marching up fast from the eastern woodlands. He was shouting now.
‘All right, lads, we’ve reached our line. We’re on the blue here. Well done, lads. The other boys will be coming through us. Don’t get in their way.’
And even as he spoke the second wave of the brigade was clambering up and going through. Jesus, Willie thought, if it had always been like this, he might have been a soldier in the first place.
‘Who are you lads?’
‘We’re the Dublins.’
‘Go on, the Faughs, go on, the Faughs.’
‘Good luck, lads, good luck.’
It was very sweet talk, very sweet and easy. Never mind the tugging cacophony all about, the bleak ripping of the shrapnel shells overhead, from God knew what direction, Willie couldn’t tell.
Jesus, they might go all the way this time, blast the poor Hun off this ridge entirely and drive them down into the plain behind. Let loose the horses and witness a thousand riders stream across open ground. That would be a sight, manes flying.
Then, quick as a curse, the sappers were up behind them with rolls of wire and all sorts and they were already making everything as it should be and had to be.
‘Where’s Moran, Private?’ said Second-Lieutenant Biggs. ‘Where’s your sergeant-major?’
‘He was just ahead with Joe Kielty and another few men,’ said Willie. ‘Just ahead there.’
‘I’ll follow them up. They’ve gone on too far. I’ll go up the rise there and see if I can see them. Hold on to this lot here, Private.’
‘Right, sir,’ said Willie Dunne, astounded. He had never been asked to do anything like that. Of course, he was the most experienced man there, though Private Smith was maybe older. He didn’t relish it for a minute.
An hour went by and Willie wondered if they should be pulling back. Or even going on. The place was filling with sections of other battalions. He didn’t know what to do. There were gangs and gangs of German prisoners being moved down to the starting trenches and beyond, gangs of them, trainloads. But anyhow, wonderful amounts of water came up to them and the fetchers seemed to think it was destined for them as well as the rest. They were like men in the dry desert, sucking at the necks of those bottles. It was a thirst like the thirst of babies, the first thirst, that you almost couldn’t satisfy.
Then Christy Moran came back down. He was very quiet. Joe Kielty, Timmy Weekes and the other four were with him as right as rain. It was hard to tell if they had used the machine-gun; it didn’t look like it. How they had carried the blasted thing up that slope and down like a stray sheep was beyond Willie. Those machine-gunners were grown a queer bunch all right.
Willie was suddenly exhausted.
‘How is everything up there, Sarge?’ he said.
‘Fucking great,’ said Christy Moran. ‘We walked right into that fucking village. Where were you cunts?’
‘We weren’t meant to go on. Biggs said so. He went up to fetch you back.’
‘I
s that what it was? We saw him. A great big fucking yoke came down and landed on him. I don’t even know what it was. There was just these fucking stars bursting out of him. It must have been a flare of a thing. Killed the poor bugger.’
‘Jesus,’ said Willie Dunne.
‘All the fucking lads up there. You should see the place. It’s just a flat fucking few acres with little spots of white dust on it where the fucking houses were. And those devious Ulster lads from the 36th milling about and calling us wonderful fucking Paddies, that’s what they said, and shaking our hands. And Australians and all kinds of mad bastards. And hundreds and hundreds of fucking Boche surrendering and shouting out that fucking Kamerad thing they do, and you couldn’t blame them. What a fucking to-do. You wouldn’t see it in Dublin on a Saturday night in the fucking summer, Willie. We’re after winning this one. Isn’t that a fucking how-are-you for the books?’
It was true they went about for the weeks after in a different state of mind. They were all quite buoyed up. The general was pleased, though they didn’t see him. It all seemed a right job of work well done. Of course, it was sad about Biggs, on his first job too. But they gave him some kind of posthumous medal. There were a good few medals flying about. Even Christy Moran got a medal and it was noted down in his soldier’s small-book. Major Stokes pinned it on him at a little ceremony. For valour in the field. For putting holes in Germans, Christy said. They liked that sort of thing, he said. If he got another, he said, he and Willie could play toss-the-medal, he said. Winner takes all.
Christy said much, much later it was a pity they didn’t leave it at that, them that knew about these things, as if.
Then Willie was away off for a day on a bayoneting course, and he came back to find Christy in a right good state.
‘You’ll never fucking believe it, Willie,’ he said.
‘What, sir?’ said Willie.
‘The King was here,’ said Christy.
‘What king?’
‘The fucking King of England.’
‘No, not here, sir.’
‘He was, the beggar. King George himself. Came up in a nice big car, got out, and was over chatting. Chatted about everything under the sun. The flaming King of buggering England.’
‘But, Sarge, you hate the King of buggering England, you often said so,’ said Willie, a bit disappointed himself he had been away. Just for the curiosity of it.
‘Ah, well,’ said Christy Moran.
‘What do you mean, “ah well”, Sarge?’
‘Ah, well,’ said Christy Moran. Then he said nothing for a few moments. He was thinking, Willie supposed. There was a happy, faraway look on the sergeant-major’s face. It was very odd. ‘He was very polite,’ said Christy Moran, as if that explained everything. ‘It kind of suits an Irishman to curse the King of England, all things considered. But he spoke to us, man to man. It wasn’t like an officer even. Like he was one of us. Like he was a fella like ourselves. Yeh. Said we were brave men to be bearing up so. Said he knew just how fucking hard it was for us out here.’
‘He didn’t go cursing?’
‘No, he didn’t, Willie, he didn’t. That’s just me. He wanted to know if we were tired of the fucking maconochie. Well! He said he knew we would carry the day in the end, because God was on our side and our cause was just. That’s what he said.‘
‘What did you say?’
‘I said to say thanks to the missus for the Christmas boxes she sent out to us last year.’
‘For the love of Jesus, Sarge. And what did he say?’
‘He said he would.’
Christy Moran hummed some tune then tunelessly.
‘A gentleman, a gentleman,’ said Christy Moran.
It was only the next month when they were on the move again and by the grace of the good Lord if they weren’t being shifted down near Ypres again.
‘I’ve spent longer in Ypres than I have in bloody Ireland,’ said Christy Moran. ‘They’ll have to make me an honorary citizen next. If I could speak bloody French.’
And then the ‘good’ general was gone and there was another general now that Christy Moran referred to as the ’Mutineer‘. Gough the Mutineer, he called him, because he had led the mutiny of the officers in the Curragh camp, years ago it seemed like now, when he said he would not march his men against the loyal Ulstermen, should it be asked of him in a time of crisis, that time they formed themselves into the Ulster Volunteers to resist Home Rule. That all seemed like three hundred years ago. Now he was going to pick up where the good general had left off. That was the plan, anyhow.
‘The best-laid plans of mice and men,’ said Christy Moran ominously, in a bad Scottish accent.
Chapter Eighteen
The whisper went round among the companies, and even if not everyone knew the name, soft words were said, and heads were dipped, in the proper funereal manner. But many knew the name, and many knew the story of the man in his fifties who had insisted on going up the line and into danger, a person with a thousand advantages, the brother, as Willie had put it, of ‘your man’, the leader of the Irish Party at Westminster, whom Willie’s own father had deemed a scoundrel. But it didn’t seem so to Willie. The whisper went round and when it was said to Father Buckley, the priest openly wept. In fact, he burst into tears right in front of the corporal who said it to him. Then it became like a common death, like a person close to them all had died. For Willie Redmond was dead. He died in an old style, twice wounded, roaring at the disappearing backs of his men to keep going and watch out in the attack. Stretcher bearers attached to the 36th Division took him to their regimental aid post. Ulster accents eased him into death, minds that maybe before the war would have looked on such a person with traditional horror.
Willie Dunne bumped into Father Buckley in the shit-house. Of course, a shit-house had no roof, so could you call it a house, but there it was. The priest had his usual penance of mild dysentery, so Willie Dunne had to wait while the man strained over the hole in the ground, and shot out streams of thin yellow shit. At last relief seemed to return to the anguished features.
‘I’m sorry for your trouble, Father,’ said Willie.
‘I’ll offer it up, Willie. Not much choice.’
‘Well, I meant, you know, that poor man dying, Father. The MP.’
Father Buckley looked at him. His face broke into a smile.
‘We were talking about him only the other day, weren’t we, Willie?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Everyone says he was a fine man. And he was. I had dinner with him one time, Willie. He was full of fun and stories. A most sincere and gentle man. You know I walked into Whytschaete myself to see what I could see. And there they were, back-slapping each other, North and South, and it was a grand moment. It was Willie Redmond’s moment, if only he could have seen it. But he was killed. He was killed. That is the pity of it.’
‘Of course, Father.’
‘We have to keep our chins up, as the English fellas say. It’s hard sometimes. But we’ve got to try. It’ll all turn out right in the end. It’s God’s will.’
‘I hope so, Father.’
‘I hope so too, Willie.’
But the talk didn’t seem to be over.
‘Are you all right, Father?’ said Willie.
‘I will be all right - when this bloody war is over.’
‘Of course,’ said Willie.
‘Yes,’ said the priest.
The world and his wife knew they had done well and there was a queer little time when the whole division seemed to have the reputation of lions. There was more fancy training then, and more drummers pretending to be bombardments, and there were fellas dressed up as wounded men wandering about, and all sorts of mysteries. All this on the firm ground of summer, the firm ground of hopefulness.
As the rains came that August of 1917 the very earth of Flanders suffered a ferocious change. The whole country under Ypres dissolved. Field barriers melted, fields sunk away to flat quagmires, roads became memori
es. Horses, guns, carts, cars and mere mortal men found it difficult to walk over memories! The drear rain fired down day after day; thousands of guns were firing without cease. The beautiful system of dykes and drainage ditches perfected over centuries by the peaceable hands of Flanders’ farmers vanished. Huge lakes appeared on flat ground as if every little dip and depression were being glazed by God. The whole world turned black and brown, the sky, even the dreams of men. Puttees fell away after a week or two because it was impossible to keep anything dry. In Willie’s platoon four men had hacking coughs all day and night. It was a highly mysterious change.
‘What did we do wrong?’ said Christy Moran, heavily superstitious.
When the whole country was turned utterly wretched and debased, their companies were marched up to the front. Everyone wore their long brown coats, and the big glistening hoods, and all the cloaks seemed to do was cook each man slowly underneath in a bath of uneasy sweat. They were almost glad to go, because while they squatted in those reserve areas, bits and bobs of the battalion had been sent up to do various tasks, and some said gloomily that the battalion was now only a few hundred lads. That was grievously frightening. Because they knew also that they were going to be asked to go for another little village, called Langemarck, before they were much older.
Under the hoods they thought their thoughts. Visions of home, streets of Dublin, faces, sounds and fleeting colours. All the long history of the war behind some of them, and the present chaos round them all. The roads sucked at them like hungry monsters, every step was a sort of wager. Shells landed liberally among them, so that often the struggling lines were broken by bloodshed and screaming. The poor lads of the Royal Army Medical Corps, stripped to the waist, hauled those morsels of humanity away if they were still breathing and gabbling and praying. The remnants were left to decorate the way. Hands, legs, heads, chests, all kicked over to the side of the road, half sunk in the destitute mud. And front ends of horses and horses’ heads sunk in with filthy foams of maggots and that violent smell; horses that looked even in death faithful and soft.