Free A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry Page A

food to open his mouth and heart and sing ‘Tipperary’, the long line of men bawling it out.
    Every man Jack of them knew ‘Tipperary’ and sang it as if most of them weren’t city-boys but hailed from the verdant fields of that county. Probably every man in the army knew it, whether he was from Aberdeen or Lahore. Even the coolies sang ’Tipperary’ while they dug; Willie had heard them.
    The men near to him liked to hear Willie sing because his voice reminded them of the music hall. It was as good as any of those tuppenny tenors they had there. Pete O‘Hara too, it was noted, had a decent voice.
    Then they sang ‘Your Old Kit Bag’. And they sang ‘Charlotte the Harlot’, which was a good song, and they sang ‘Take Me back to Dear Old Blighty’, even though none of them were from dear old Blighty, but how and ever.
    ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ was a favourite but not on a march; that was for some quiet evening in the reserve trenches.
    Then, by request of the captain, they sang ‘Do Your Balls Hang Low’. It had been a revelation and an especial delight that Captain Sheridan, unlike Captain Pasley, who had been a little restrained in such matters, favoured this song above all other marching songs:
Can you sling them on your shoulder
Like a lousy fucking soldier
Do your balls hang low?
    Like Dan Leno dancing the fucking clog dance, Willie sang it - with infinite passion. It was a wonderful odd thing to see Captain Sheridan up on his horse, his head thrown back, bawling out those happy words to the lowering winter sky. Under his hat he looked like a boy, did Sheridan. And that passed a mile or two just nicely.
    The only thing different now was that when Willie sang too mightily he felt a dire need to cough. It was the little bit of gas remaining, he thought, in his chest, some little whirling marble of wretched gas that was upsetting his means of singing. But the men didn’t mind a bit of spluttering and for the most part he got through without too much impediment.

    He was gay enough, in such singing times. But he couldn’t shake off the feeling of being knackered, knackered somewhere deep in himself - something going wrong, in the very centre. In the corner of his eye there was always a black shadow now, something, someone, some afflicted figure looming there, like an angel or a meagre spectre. He couldn’t quite make out the features of the spectre but he thought it might be Captain Pasley. It chilled him. And in general terms now he found it impossible to get truly warm, which was, he knew, an affliction of old men.
    The sorrow he had felt at the death of his captain, and Williams and Clancy, something had happened to that sorrow. It had gone rancid in him, he thought; it had boiled down to something he didn’t understand. The pith of sorrow was in the upshot a little seed of death.
    Sometimes he wanted to cry out against his officers, his fellows, even his own heart, and he didn’t know what stopped him, he didn’t.

Chapter Five
    They were adjudged to have been through a bit of bother and then a long time left in trenches and were being rested conscientiously in Amiens. It would not last more than a few days, and they had to make the most of it.
    Willie Dunne and O‘Hara went forth one evening from their billet to see what they could see. The sun was falling off the edge of the world like a burning man. The sergeant-major had given them good directions and they had a scrap of paper with the name of a street on it, which brought them to the best estaminet in Amiens, for a private soldier, anyhow. And it was bursting with private soldiers, of many different regiments, strangers to Willie and Pete O’Hara, but also, being marked by the shadows of the same war, not strangers. The drink of the place was a shit-coloured beer.
    Willie Dunne had not been a man for drinking in his short life and yet he had taken his ration of bleak rum now every day this last few months, and he found the beer was