Supply of heroes, p.42
Supply of Heroes, page 42
Dan Curry took half a step toward Douglas, carried by an obvious, sudden impulse. He said, “Come with us!”
And Douglas knew that was the answer to his question: God’s kindness on the Western Front would only be—not being there. Because he didn’t dismiss it at once, Jane picked up on Curry’s notion. “Yes! Yes! Come with us! Leave now!” She looked around at the throng of tin-hatted Tommies. No one was forcing Douglas on board the train. He was not in custody now. “You don’t belong in France,” she said. “It isn’t our war any more than the war in Ireland is. These wars are wrong. They have no right to take you! Come with us!” Jane looked at Pamela. “Tell him.”
Pamela dropped her eyes. She would have given anything to keep Douglas from the trenches. She didn’t care whether the war was right or wrong, or where they had to go to avoid it. America? Borneo? This war was as absurd as the War of the Roses. She knew only one thing—she wanted him alive. But she was not going to add to his burden by suggesting such a thing, because she knew he could not do it. Salvation to her—desertion to him. She leaned against him, clinging to his arm in silence.
Douglas could not have explained why it was unthinkable that he should not board that train. He was responding to orders, yes. To a sense of being bound by a certain fate, no matter how unfair it felt, or how insane. Douglas simply felt a bond, still, with the men of his generation, and despite what he’d been through, he accepted the structures by which they measured the meaning of their lives. He was an officer and he had a duty to the men who would be entrusted to his authority. They were his nation now. Whether in fulfilling that duty he lived or died was secondary. Death was not the worst thing that could happen to him. To lose his fragile grasp on meaning would be. And that was certain to happen if he went now to America.
It had nothing to do—and this was what the Rising and its aftermath had taught him—with defending the Crown and defeating the Hun, as if it mattered which empire held sway in the world. Two armies fighting to possess Europe destroy Europe in the process, as two armies fighting over Dublin destroy Dublin. No ideal vision or patriotic urge was left him, in other words; but neither had ever been the source of his commitment. Like all the men who continued to respond in that era long after events had revealed the rhetoric for lies, Douglas felt an implicit brotherhood with his fellows on the line. Ironically, the more hopeless, the more absurd, the more obscene their situation became, the more their bond with each other intensified. He loved his family as much as any man could, but the owners of his heart were the anonymous, dull-eyed Tommies, Jocks, and Micks all around them.
Nothing more was said about his going to America.
The train whistle blew shrilly, and the pace of men heading for it picked up.
Jane kissed Douglas. Curry stood with his hand on his wife’s back, as if through her he could transmit his feeling. When Douglas looked at him, Curry nodded and said, “Good luck.”
Douglas turned to his father; they stared at each other for a moment, then embraced roughly. Sir Hugh, for the first time since his Anita died, fought back tears.
Then Douglas stooped to take his children in his arms. He said to Anne, “Take care of your mother and your brother until I come back.”
What Timmy saw in his father’s face made him burst into tears, and he clung to his mother. Sir Hugh coaxed him away, then scooped up both children once more. He led Jane and Curry off, leaving Pamela alone with Douglas.
They looked at each other dry-eyed. No tears now.
Pamela said, “The last time you left, I chased your train halfway to France.”
Douglas nodded. “None of the men believed it could be my wife.” He laughed. “No one could know how we love each other.”
She nodded.
The train whistle sounded again. The platform was empty.
Douglas had an impulse to say, I’ll be back, but either he would or he wouldn’t, and mere words couldn’t change that.
They kissed.
He walked to the train and boarded it.
Pamela waved once, but as the train began to move, she remained where she was, immobile, not wincing, though the fox inside her shirt was feasting.
When Douglas could no longer see Pamela, he walked through the cars of the train, looking at the men. A burly Irish sergeant made him think again of Lieutenant Keefe. It will be good to see Bernard once more, he thought, as if he weren’t dead.
22
In the way that July 4 takes its meaning for Americans from the year 1776, July 1 had always taken its meaning for Irishmen, both green and orange, from the year 1690. But that changed in 1916, when July 1 became something else.
Before 1916 that date was observed, either in celebration or grief, depending on religion, as the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. The Boyne was the meandering Ulster river at which James II, the last Catholic King of England, was vanquished by William of Orange. From then on, the Protestant stranglehold on the north of Ireland was secure, and it was beginning then that the infamous Penal Laws were enacted against Irish Catholics everywhere in the country. James II’s defeated army went into exile in France—“the flight of the wild geese”—never to help Ireland again.
Hence the irony that France should have been the scene of the transformation of the meaning of the first of July, and that it should have taken place at another meandering river, at another epic battle in which descendants of the “wild geese,” Irish soldiers at war in exile, were the first to fall. But they were so far from the last to fall as to make that stalemate battle the central emblem of the entire war. In sheer disproportion between gains and casualties, it was the worst battle in British history, and the worst day of it was the first.
The Somme wound in loops through a wide valley dotted by small villages surrounded by apple orchards and by squared fields. The river was lined with rushes and low willows and fed by slow-moving tributaries, each of which had cut its own shallow valley, and so the country was crisscrossed by plateaux and ridges that gave the advantage to defenders, whose positions rose in tiers up which attackers had to crawl. Unlike the drenched earth of Flanders, the chalky soil here lent itself to elaborate dugouts, and in the low hills there were caves and grottoes and ancient passageways between the medieval châteaux and abbeys. These underground labyrinths were linked by fresh tunnels on both sides of the trench line, but the Germans especially had spent their time digging. They were ready for it when the attack came, even though the numbers the British hurled at them along a twenty-five-mile front were staggering.
The British thought July 1 was going to be the date of the great breakthrough, and for that reason Tommies, Jocks, and Micks up and down the line wore flowers in their helmets. Behind the line masses of cavalry waited to pursue the advantage once the German front cracked open. The main reason for their optimism was that for a solid week, commencing on the day that Roger Casement’s trial began, British artillery had been pounding the German positions with the greatest concentration of shellfire in history. But the howitzer was, relative to what it would become, a primitive weapon in 1916; it could not be aimed with real precision, and the greater part of its destructive force was squandered above the ground with great showers of smoke, dust, and debris, the sight of which cheered British observers. But those dramatic explosions hardly dented the forty-foot dugouts in which the Germans waited. The bombardment failed even to smash the vicious belts of barbed wire that in some places were now thirty yards thick. When they were hit, the coils of wire simply bounced. So much, in other words and once again, for gunnery. Unfortunately for the soldiers who would have to assault it, the machine gun, unlike the heavy weapons of artillery, had already achieved the zenith of its destructive power, and where the British had tied their hopes to the one, the Germans had tied theirs to the other.
At dawn a cloud of mist hung over the region, but by 0730, when the platoon officers’ whistles began to blow all along the British line, the sun blazed in the sky. As the trenches emptied, the first waves of a force numbering over a hundred thousand advanced into No Man’s Land in broad view, shoulder to shoulder, each man staggering under the burden of enormous packs. And at once German machine guns opened fire and began to sweep the approaching Tommies, Jocks, and Micks away like leaves. British commanders understood the killing potential of the German weapon, even after two years’ running up against it, as little as they understood the limits of their own. Instead of ordering a halt to the advance, they redoubled it, thinking that what artillery had failed to do, the sheer hurling mass of an army’s bodies could do. The thought, if there was one, must have been to overwhelm the machine gunner, if not his gun, by sending an infinity of targets at him.
So throughout the day, line after line of British soldiers went over the top, and those who fell back were ordered out again. Crossing into the bomb-cratered zone of No Man’s Land, for those sent out in the afternoon, became the daylight nightmare of walking on ground made mushy by the corpses of the morning. And through all that horror the machine guns never faltered. They were something wholly new—the Industrial Revolution come to war, mechanized killing—and with their depersonalized, unthinking crews, who could as easily have been tending lathes in a monotonous factory, they could have gone on forever. By the end of the day the British had suffered the highest proportion of losses of any battle in their history. Sixty percent of the officers fell and forty-five percent of the men, more than sixty thousand in all. But what remains truly remarkable is the fact that the response of the British Command to the disaster of July 1 was frantically to prolong it.
Between the first assault and the last, five months later on November 18, nearly two million men would fall and the British line would have been advanced exactly six miles across the useless field of mud. While the battle lasted and the casualties mounted, many men snapped. If they were officers, they were sent home as victims of shell shock. If they were of the other ranks, they were shot at once for cowardice. One British soldier would be executed on the Somme every five days for attempting to desert, but many more, knowing that desertion in such circumstances was impossible—there was nowhere to flee but into No Man’s Land—and unable to bear the terror of their situation, would simply commit suicide. In official reports those men were always posted as killed in action, an implicit acknowledgment that at the Somme the usual definitions did not apply. Suicides were listed as dying nobly, while the heroes who mustered the will, out of patriotism or out of fear of their own superiors, to obey the order to mount the parapet and advance might as well have been throwing themselves in front of a runaway locomotive.
Douglas Tyrrell, like everyone on the line that first day, had no idea what was happening up and down the twenty-five-mile front. Division, brigade, and battalion commanders had their Morse shutters, carrier pigeons, semaphore flags, and, where the wires weren’t cut, telephone and telegraph, but communications ended at the edge of No Man’s Land, and that’s where the company commanders went. Douglas’s world was compressed into the chaos of what he could see, and all that his eyes told him as he led his boys out of the trenches was that they began falling around him damn soon. His memory of the action at Messines was bad, but this was different.
The first surprise after his return to Regiment from England was that the Connaught Rangers were now made up of men he’d never seen before. It came as a great shock to realize that all of the officers and many of the other ranks were now in fact Englishmen. The pristine Irish character of the regiment, which had been so valued by its members, had completely disappeared. That was the kind of year it had been on the Western Front. During the time since his capture, the original members had been lost, as had a full generation of their replacements. The Rangers had changed utterly, but it wasn’t only events in France that accounted for it. Events in Ireland had had their impact too, for once it was clear to authorities that a true nationalist rising was in the offing, Irish recruits had been dispersed in other regiments, and the Irish regiments had been replenished with Englishmen.
This watering-down of the national character of the Rangers explained why it was possible, in the great regrouping before the Somme offensive, to assign what had been a mainly Catholic Redmondite regiment to the Thirty-sixth Division, which was dominated by the fiercely Unionist, anti-Catholic Ulster Volunteers. On the dawn of that July 1, while other British units had prepared themselves at worship services—even the notoriously agnostic private soldiers took communion—or in somber, silent reflection, the Orangemen of the Ulster Division had prepared themselves by banging their ancient Lambeg drum, which for generations on that date had struck terror in the hearts of Catholic children in Derry and Belfast. Why shouldn’t it frighten Fritz as well? Never mind that the Orangeman’s fabled Billy was a Dutchman, more German than not, or that the Apprentice Boys’ victory over the Papist King was the result of the failure of the King’s artillery—that again—to breach the wall of Derry. Douglas had watched with bitter distaste as the Ulstermen, with their officers’ encouragement, snake-danced in nearby trenches under their banner, ulster will fight and ulster will be right! It didn’t help him think well of their tribal battle antics that their slogan had been coined not against their German enemy but, in resisting the Home Rule his father had fought for, against their Irish one.
But what the hell, once the whistles blew, the Ulster lads were as likely as any to wet themselves while scaling the parapets, and once in the desperate cratered moonscape of No Man’s Land, they fell under the withering fire of the German machine guns the same as Catholic boys from Galway did. If anything, one had to wonder if the British brass hadn’t lumped the Irish, orange and green, in the frontmost lines to have done once and for all with both of them.
Douglas had no idea how or why he survived that day. By the time the sun was setting, he had been out into No Man’s Land and back from it four times with the natural flux of a line that knows only falling or falling back. Each time he and the ever-diminishing number of Rangers collapsed back into the forwardmost trench, he had roused them, despite his disbelief, when the runners came up from the rear with the mad order to advance once more. Four times he led men out into the zone of disaster, and four times, like them, in terrified flight before the walls of bullets, he retreated. But with each futile effort his company, which had numbered three hundred at dawn, was reduced by half, until by dusk there were three dozen left. All of his platoon leaders had disappeared.
With darkness came silence. The assaults ceased and the German guns stopped for the first time in twelve hours. Douglas assembled his men at the bulge in their section of the trench, in front of the dugout that served as the orderly room. When they’d counted off and they realized how few had survived, including only two junior officers and three NCOs, one man began to shriek hysterically. Douglas cut him off with the order, forming them into six stretcher parties, to go back out through the night in shifts, searching the mile-wide stretch of No Man’s Land for the wounded. Normal procedure would have left such work to the medical corps, but not with these numbers. The effort of all the survivors would be required. It was a question of rescuing not only the men who’d been hit, but also those who’d been spared. Only the purposeful work now of pulling to safety those who were still alive out there would keep them all from the hysteria their situation quite justified. When they did not protest his order, though it meant leaving the womb of the trench again, Douglas felt an overwhelming admiration; what these men would do for each other!
For a moment, faced with such willingness, he felt he was looking down from a mountain into the goodness of the earth itself, a strange thought on such a day and an uncharacteristically religious one for him. As he dismissed them, preparing to lead the first party out himself, Douglas realized that each man had plumbed the well of his own selflessness because he’d asked him to. And then his thought was, What they do for their officers!
But nothing could prepare him for the experience of crisscrossing No Man’s Land that night. The feel of human flesh underfoot, the ungodly groaning of men who’d lost limbs, the gasping of the dying who clutched at his tunic when he knelt to them. Instinctively adopting an implicit policy of triage, he went from one to the other, determined to at least touch each one who was still living, to console him somehow, if moving him was pointless. When he lifted one Mick who was quite conscious, lucid even, the man’s shirt flopped open and his intestines, the color of worms from under rocks, fell into Douglas’s lap. The Mick grinned awkwardly to have his secret so exposed, then said, “Sorry, Captain” before expiring. Douglas put the man down gently—“That’s all right, old man”—then turned aside and vomited.
He had intended only to serve out his shift as a stretcher-bearer, like the others, but the sheer numbers of victims overwhelmed him. Going from one to the other, he lost all sense of time and, in the end, it was after midnight when one of the NCOs approached him.
“Captain, you’re wanted for order group.”
Douglas stared at the man uncomprehendingly.
“Battalion sent a runner up, sir. You’re the only company commander left alive and the C.O. wants you.”
Douglas’s mind refused to settle on what the man was saying. “The C.O.? Colonel Maclntyre?”
“No, sir.” The sergeant stepped closer to Tyrrell. In the darkness he couldn’t read his face. “Colonel Hall.”
“Colonel Hall?” An Englishman, the C.O. of Connaught?
