Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

Author:Sebastian Barry [Sebastian Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780571277032
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2016-03-12T16:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER THIRTEEN

NOTHING TOO TRICKY about dying for your country. It’s the easiest item on the menu. God knows the truth of it. Young Seth McCarthy he come up from Missouri to be a drummer boy in the Federal army and what does he get only his head took off by a Federal shell. We seen that on the morning after when we strode the field looking for papers and the like we could send home. Seth there with his drum still roped to his young body. But he didn’t have his head. It wasn’t the only or the worst sight of the aftermath. Let’s put the charred corpses first on the list. How come God wants us to fight like goddamn heroes and then be some bit of burned flesh that even the wolves don’t want. Burial detail told to bury grey and blue alike and say the prayers. Fr Giovanni tells his beads and we hear him muttering in his Latin. The boys that never seen battle afore some of them were not cheerful. I don’t know what those bad sights do to a person. A few soldiers just shaking in their tents and no amount of beef jerky or even whisky can pull them straight. They got to get sent back to some place but the battlefield ain’t right for them now. Couldn’t hold a spoon let alone a musket. John Cole is very concerned in his nice-hearted way and two of his privates is dead as poked-out winkles. Took the fire from their own hind firers. That’s how it goes oftentimes. Just comes home to me how curious dark is battle. Does anyone know what in tarnation’s going on? Well, not this Christian. Me and John Cole thank God and old Lige Magan and Starling come through and also Dan FitzGerald. Else how we going to play cards God damn it.

When my sentinels is set up that night I pull away alone to a little copsewood. Alone there a while. Moonlight pouring down through the scrubby oaks as if a thousand dresses. I am thinking man is something of a wolf but also ain’t he something stranger too. I am thinking of Winona and about all her travails. I couldn’t say who in that while I was myself. Sligo seem a long long time ago and only another brush of darkness. The light is John Cole and all the copiousness of his kindness. Can’t get that drummer boy out of my inner eye. He’s stuck in there like a floating thing. I guess he should a got more from living than he did. Brave lad out of Missouri and cheery and not expecting nothing. His head rolling about a lonesome meadow in Virginia. Bright eyes and now they put him in a hole. By God it wouldn’t even be good enough to weep for him. How we going to count all the souls to be lost in this war? I am shaking like a last dry leaf on a branch in winter.



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