I had to look up the number and I'm not entirely sure how accurate it is, but more than 5.5 million men were killed in the First World War. And that's only on the Allied side. It's too large a number to try and wrap my head around to consider how many men total were killed, wounded or went missing in action. In a book I was reading not so long ago a character was thinking about a young policeman who was meant to be protecting her and she felt slightly apprehensive about his age, he being not so much older than she. Then she thought about wars and how it is always the young men who must go and fight in them to protect entire nations. Of course this is always in the back of my mind when I'm reading a book with a war setting, but I hadn't really thought of it in practical, real terms. It's a story so it's all pretty abstract until you start really thinking about it. I work at a university and and one afternoon I was looking around the library at all the young people just out of high school or in their early 20s and was a little shocked to think it would be these young men who, had we been living at the beginning of the last century, would be going off to France and Belgium to fight. They look so very young, it's hard to imagine what it must really have been like during the war.
In Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way a young Irishman who's only eighteen goes off to fight for King and country, his own country--Ireland. Probably like so many other young men, he also thought of it in the abstract and hadn't really understood the implications of what he was doing. Why was he going off to fight, other than it was expected. Barry writes this WWI novel from an interesting perspective--that of an Irish soldier, who is part of the British Empire yet still very much apart from British culture, still somewhat 'foreign', and certainly made to feel so throughout the war.
I found Willie Dunne to be an immensely sympathetic character. The son of a Dublin policeman, whose father had high expectations that he would grow into a strong man and follow in his footsteps, but Willie only grew to 5'6", falling well short of the height requirement. With each year and each measuring pencil mark the disappointment grows, but Willie doesn't. Willie had been named in honor of King William of Orange and grew up in a respectable law-abiding family, but the country was becoming unruly. Before the war it was almost a given that Ireland would soon enjoy Home Rule and going off to war was a way of ensuring it, or so many thought. Willie goes to war because it's the honorable thing to do and to please his father. Accused by his girlfriend's father of not knowing his mind, Willie feels he has finally made a decision which shows he does. But the tragedy of the story, and this is a tragic story, is that he comes to know his own mind through hardship and suffering and separation.
The bulk of this story takes place on the battlefield, or more specifically in the trenches. This is a world that is horrific and Barry writes of it with a verisimilitude that was almost too hard to take at times. He offers little respite from the constant bombardment and electrically charged atmosphere. Even when not in the trenches he conveys the feelings of fear and apprehension, exhaustion and cold. It's not just bullets that the men have to fear, going over the top and being mowed down or having the Germans overrun the trenches but as well it's an enemy that invades so silently and unknowingly by the men.
"The yellow cloud was noticed first by Christy Moran because he was standing on the fire-step with his less than handy mirror arrangement, looking out across the quiet battlefield. That little breeze had freshened and it blew now against the ratty hair that drooped out of Christy Moran's hat here and there. So the breeze was more of a wind and was blowing full on against Christy's hat and mirror, but it was nothing remarkable."
"What was remarkable was the strange yellow-tinged cloud that had just appeared from nowhere like a sea fog. But not like a fog really; he knew what a flaming fog looked like, for God's sake, being born and bred near the sea in fucking Kingstown. He watched for a few seconds in his mirror, straining to see and straining to understand. It was about four o'clock, and all as peaceful as anything. Not even the guns were firing now. The caterpillars foamed on the yellow flowers."
"And the grass died in the path of the cloud."
And the men don't even realize or understand what's happening at first. To run is to be cowardly, and what are they running from exactly.
When Willie returns home on leave early in 1916, his visit coincides with the Easter Rising and he gets pulled into defending the city and is ordered to shoot the rebels, his own countrymen. For young Willie Dunn, who has been apolitical, not even understanding the situation and what each side wants, this is the beginning of a moral quandary. Raised by a father who has always been pro-British, he now sees young men dying all around him and wonders at the senselessness of it all. He is defending an Empire that ridicules and looks down on him for being Irish yet his own countrymen see him as a Tommie and spit upon him. He's caught in the middle of a war he doesn't understand trying to do the best he can when all he wants is for the war to end and to be able to marry the woman he loves back home in Dublin. And his uncertainties about the rebels and what they are trying to achieve causes a rift between he and his father.
A Long Long Way is an intense, unremitting read. I liked it for many reasons; Barry is a good writer who knows how to tell a very good story. Everything wraps around from beginning to end so compactly and you can't help but feel for Willie Dunn. As well, the friendships and camaraderie of the men, and the betrayals are so sensitively portrayed. I've not read a WWI story quite like this, or rather he had such an interesting and unusual twist on the subject that it felt quite fresh to me. Yet it's that same intense and unremitting quality that made this such a painful read for me as well. I happened to flip to the end to see how many pages I had left in order to pace myself, and I couldn't help myself. I read the ending. I knew this was not going to be a happy story and my fears were well founded. I only read the last bit, so it didn't come as a surprise, but the way the story gets to that point is fairly bleak and so heart wrenching I felt a little like I'd been sucker punched by the time I arrived. So I'm glad I read it, and I'll read more of Barry's books, but I do hope his other work is a little more hopeful.
You can read Caroline's thoughts on the book here and Anna's of An Eccentric Reader here. Next up is Jean Giono's To the Slaughterhouse, though I think I need to take a little breather first and lose myself in a nice cheerful story this week.