A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry

Author:Sebastian Barry [Barry, Sebastian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: World War I, General, Historical, War & Military, Military, Fiction, History
ISBN: 9780143035091
Google: B73wDUgCSk0C
Amazon: 0143035096
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2005-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

At last army clashed against army but it was not for them this time to be involved.

It was the Ulstermen of the 36th Division who went over ist July.

Terrible brave news came down to them, the men of the 16th in cosy billets. There’d been two thousand fellas killed and dying of wounds, and another two or even three that were wounded. Some mad battalions reached the enemy trenches, but had no further men coming up to back them. The guns and counter-attacks ate them.

But O‘Hara looked at Willie Dunne and he looked at Dermot Smith and Smith looked at Kielty. It was a strange time. They knew what two thousand corpses looked like, that was a fact.

There were villages in Ulster would have no men in them now. They would never come back to guide the plough and curse the Pope on a Sunday, more was the pity.

It had been a dark ruckus and the news of it confounded their hearts. There was odd love there for the brave Ulstermen; what could a man do against that love? Nothing at all, only add to it by thinking and weeping privately. Maybe there were some there, many, that didn’t give a tuppenny damn about the fucking Ulstermen, or anything else in these changed and muddied days of the war. Maybe so.

That very day 3rd July of the savage news, Willie went with Father Buckley to the rear of the rear lines where Jesse Kirwan was held captive, a kind of underworld of an underworld.

Yet the fields there were bright enough, and the French farmers were hoping to take a harvest anyhow at the end of the summer, if the war would only progress the other way, Germany-wards. The poplars along the white roads rattled their merry leaves; there were geese standing in the wet margins like swollen ducks.

Jesse Kirwan was being held in the privy of a working abattoir. Willie and the priest passed through the big concrete hall where there were dozens of bullocks standing in pens. Willie saw a bullock led through some iron railings, goaded with a metal stick to make it stumble forward properly. A fine, handsome fellow felled it with a stun hammer, driving a good blow to the temple. The bullock knelt like a praying animal and fell dead like an actor, without a speech, only a truncated yowl, horribly like a dog.

Willie never heard such a sound from a bullock in his born days. Then the cleavermen moved in, the beast had a hook attached to its leg muscles, it was hoisted up, and the cleavers sliced it in two. There was a Niagara Falls of curtainy blood, it drenched the yellow coats of the men, it poured out over their heads. You would think they might hang the animal first and bleed it for the good of the blood, but there was a sense of ugly haste. Battalions, divisions indeed, to be fed.

The head was sliced off expertly, the heavy front legs,

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