Read Online A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry - Free Book Online
Authors: Sebastian Barry
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St John and wondered if by chance and lack he had reached the unknown date of the end of the living world.
Smeared across the faces was a yellowish grease, the men’s uniforms had turned a peculiar and undesirable yellow, and all the acres of the world had been seared and ruined afresh. Even the leaves of the trees, so fresh the day before, seemed to have gone limp on their natural hinges and twisted about sadly, not making the usual reassuring music of the poplars along the roadside, but a dank, dead, metallic rustling, as if every drop of sap had been replaced with a dreadful poison.
It was two days before this shocked stretch of Flanders could be restored to ordinary war. All the first day for seven miles it was said there was not a soldier in the trenches. The reserve battalions were marched up as quickly as it could be done, and the survivors went back to see if they could group up again with their platoons. Willie Dunne, frightened as he was, felt doubly distraught that he was alone in all this crowd of dour-faced men. It was then that he felt slight enough in the world, a creature of low stature. He wanted his sergeant and his captain and his mates the way a baby wants its home, no matter how provisional. And he felt a fool for feeling like that, but there it was.
He wandered back along the way of fear and no one said a word to him. Soon there were bodies everywhere strewn about, and burial details were busy composing them into sudden little graveyards. He passed through the wretched bottleneck and the drowned men in the craters floating face-down, and though he was fearful of what he would find he pushed his legs on to the lip of his trench. He half expected despite everything to see his pals crouched down and easy, drinking their tea, scuttling along to take a crap in the latrines, someone on sentry duty, someone singing, but all he saw was a place that had turned into a mere pit of death.
The hole was filled with bodies, and to him they looked like dozens and dozens of garden statues of the sort you might see in Humewood, where his grandfather had worked, fallen down like figures from some vanished empire, thinkers and senators and poets unknown, with their hands raised in impressive attitudes, their stone bodies for some reason half clothed in the uniforms of this modern war. The faces were contorted like devils’ in a book of admonition, like the faces of the truly fallen, the damned, and the condemned. Horrible dreams hung in their faces as if the foulest nightmares had gripped them and remained visible now frozen in direst death. Their mouths were ringed and caked with a greeny slime, as if they were the poor Irish cottagers of old, who people said in the last extremity of hunger had eaten of the very nettles in the fields. And still the echo, foul in itself, of that ferocious stench hanging everywhere.
And down on the fire-step across the chasm of the trench, quite naked, his uniform cast all about him like the torn petals of a flower, with a face to match the other faces tortured eternally in a last agony, that decent man who did not wish to leave his post, heaped about everywhere with Algerians and Irishmen equally, a man that knew well the hard task that was in the liming: Captain Pasley.
‘God rest his soul,’ murmured Willie Dunne.
Then Willie found John Williams, Joe Clancy, Joe McNulty. A dozen men and more who had been bound to him by some bond he didn’t know the explanation of. Willie’s very stomach was torn by sorrow, his very eyes were burned by sorrow, as if sorrow itself were a kind of gas. He was so disgusted somehow he thought he might puke like a dog. In the disgust was a horrible push of anger that dismayed him entirely. Like an old man, he walked back over to stand stupidly by the captain’s body.
Father Buckley was down among the dead also, going from stiff head to head, choking himself from the residues of the smoke. Now they knew it was a filthy gas sent over by the filthy
Smeared across the faces was a yellowish grease, the men’s uniforms had turned a peculiar and undesirable yellow, and all the acres of the world had been seared and ruined afresh. Even the leaves of the trees, so fresh the day before, seemed to have gone limp on their natural hinges and twisted about sadly, not making the usual reassuring music of the poplars along the roadside, but a dank, dead, metallic rustling, as if every drop of sap had been replaced with a dreadful poison.
It was two days before this shocked stretch of Flanders could be restored to ordinary war. All the first day for seven miles it was said there was not a soldier in the trenches. The reserve battalions were marched up as quickly as it could be done, and the survivors went back to see if they could group up again with their platoons. Willie Dunne, frightened as he was, felt doubly distraught that he was alone in all this crowd of dour-faced men. It was then that he felt slight enough in the world, a creature of low stature. He wanted his sergeant and his captain and his mates the way a baby wants its home, no matter how provisional. And he felt a fool for feeling like that, but there it was.
He wandered back along the way of fear and no one said a word to him. Soon there were bodies everywhere strewn about, and burial details were busy composing them into sudden little graveyards. He passed through the wretched bottleneck and the drowned men in the craters floating face-down, and though he was fearful of what he would find he pushed his legs on to the lip of his trench. He half expected despite everything to see his pals crouched down and easy, drinking their tea, scuttling along to take a crap in the latrines, someone on sentry duty, someone singing, but all he saw was a place that had turned into a mere pit of death.
The hole was filled with bodies, and to him they looked like dozens and dozens of garden statues of the sort you might see in Humewood, where his grandfather had worked, fallen down like figures from some vanished empire, thinkers and senators and poets unknown, with their hands raised in impressive attitudes, their stone bodies for some reason half clothed in the uniforms of this modern war. The faces were contorted like devils’ in a book of admonition, like the faces of the truly fallen, the damned, and the condemned. Horrible dreams hung in their faces as if the foulest nightmares had gripped them and remained visible now frozen in direst death. Their mouths were ringed and caked with a greeny slime, as if they were the poor Irish cottagers of old, who people said in the last extremity of hunger had eaten of the very nettles in the fields. And still the echo, foul in itself, of that ferocious stench hanging everywhere.
And down on the fire-step across the chasm of the trench, quite naked, his uniform cast all about him like the torn petals of a flower, with a face to match the other faces tortured eternally in a last agony, that decent man who did not wish to leave his post, heaped about everywhere with Algerians and Irishmen equally, a man that knew well the hard task that was in the liming: Captain Pasley.
‘God rest his soul,’ murmured Willie Dunne.
Then Willie found John Williams, Joe Clancy, Joe McNulty. A dozen men and more who had been bound to him by some bond he didn’t know the explanation of. Willie’s very stomach was torn by sorrow, his very eyes were burned by sorrow, as if sorrow itself were a kind of gas. He was so disgusted somehow he thought he might puke like a dog. In the disgust was a horrible push of anger that dismayed him entirely. Like an old man, he walked back over to stand stupidly by the captain’s body.
Father Buckley was down among the dead also, going from stiff head to head, choking himself from the residues of the smoke. Now they knew it was a filthy gas sent over by the filthy
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