A Long Long Way Read Online Free PDF

direction,’ said another lad.
    ‘Someone open a window for the poor bollocks!’
    ‘There’s no fucking window!’
    ‘Well, you’ll have a lapful of warm puke if you don’t!’
    ‘No, no,’ said Willie, ‘it’s all right, lads. I feel better now.’
    ‘Poor fucker,’ said Clancy and gave him a bang on the back. ‘Poor bloody fucker.’
    And Willie brought up the sausages, though they didn’t look like sausages, and they spread like a little plate of guts on the wooden flooring.
    He’d have been fine if he hadn’t been banged on the back like that.
    ‘Oh, you little bollocks,’ said the sergeant-major.

    When they came into their trench he felt small enough. The biggest thing there was the roaring of Death and the smallest thing was a man. Bombs not so far off distressed the earth of Belgium, disgorged great heaps of it, and did everything except kill him immediately, as he half expected them to do.
    He was shivering like a Wicklow sheepdog in a snowy yard, though the weather was officially ‘clement’.
    The first layer of clothing was his jacket, the second his shirt, the third his long-johns, the fourth his share of lice, the fifth his share of fear.

    ‘This fucking British army, I hate it,’ said Christy Moran, in the doubtful glamour of his own mucky British uniform.
    They were all gathered, the platoon, around a small brazier with weakling coals. But the murky twilight was fairly warm and the bombardment had stopped.
    The last three murderous, racketing hours Christy Moran had been on watchful duty with a fiddly mirror. It had been enough to drive a sane man to madness. The angle and catch on it had been driving him spare, some patented piece of genius to serve the brave man in the trenches. He had been trying to scope out across the tormented acres for any sign of grey figures rising from the reasonably distant trenches. Those mysterious strangers, but in the same breath neighbours, the fucking enemy. And now on top of that there was no sign of the hot grub that would make the long night bearable, not to mention the rum ration, the most essential bit of kit outside tobacco, chewing or smoking.
    Christy Moran was talking now to himself, or the mirror, or the men of the platoon. It was to put something against the dirty silence. A sort of whining silence it was. He was white in the face from lack of sleep.
    Willie Dunne couldn’t even hear him right; it was a muddle and a trickle of words. But it did a good thing, it dispelled that fog of panic that he had begun to know, at all turns of the days.
    It was Christy Moran’s heartfelt creed, his inner understanding, his root of joy. It was not talk for captains or second or first lieutenants and not meant to be, either. It was for the ordinary Irish philosopher that the generality of enlisted men in this stretch of forlorn torment were, men of the Dublin back streets, or the landsmen of some Leinster or Wicklow farmer, the latter being fellas that might not even understand the thrust of Christy Moran’s argument, being often loyal, unthinking and accepting sort of men.
    ‘The same fucking army that always done for us. Held me head down in all of history and drownded me and me family, and all before, like fucking dogs, and made a heap of us and burned us for black rebels. English bastards, bastards the lot, and poor people like me and the father and his oul da and his again and all going back, all under the boot, and them just minding their own business, fishing out of Kingstown Harbour till they were blue in the teeth.’
    But Christy Moran had no truck with diatribe just for the sake of it. He paused, dug a hand into the seam of his jacket, pulled out a pinch of lice, crushed them in a hopeless manner, and said: ‘And I’m out here, I’m out here fighting for the same fucking King.’
    And indeed it was a known fact that Christy Moran’s da had been in the army before him, and in a different mood the sergeant-major might tell them about that