Here is the long tall stretch of Abraham. He’s in a trench, cold rat-run muck-puddle, suck and splash, cigarette smoke and then stillness. He believes he is there for a purpose, that he was called for this and he waits in the line for the word to come. The waiting is the worst for someone like him. He’s got all that mind, all that inner country he keeps going around in, mines and craters, caverns and dead ends. Mind has Mountains, that’s in Gerard Manley Hopkins (Book 1,555, Poems & Prose, Penguin, London). Or, put another way, there’s a man, Gerry Quinn, lives under the shadow of Croagh Patrick in Mayo and says he goes up the mountain most days and when they asked him on the radio why he does it he said at this stage that mountain’s part of me. In Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen it comes out as ‘I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me.’
There in the trenches our Abraham goes up and down those inner mountains bigtime.
What am I supposed to do with this life? is a common Swainism. It’s just about embedded under the skin and the way the hook is you can’t pull it out, it just makes things worse. So Grandfather Abraham wriggles on the question and waits for the word. When the command comes, when Captain John Weynsley Burke appears in the trench looking all dry-cleaned and Dad’s Armyish and says, ‘Cigarettes out, chaps. Today I’m going to get you medals,’ Abraham does not hesitate. He doesn’t think there’s German guns waiting to fire on him or that the next moment might be his last. He trusts that This Is It, O boy, he trusts that there is a purpose, however blind and mysterious, and it’s pulling him in now. He can hardly breathe with the swift tow, the sense of the Great Fisher getting him on the line, and the free feeling of just going, of release. He’s filled with a sudden bright-red bloom of elation. He tosses his ciggy, shouts out, and into the air already streaming with German gunfire he leaps.
Zip zip zip the bullets fly into him.
He sees the tears in his uniform and thinks: that’s interesting.
But he keeps going.
Then he sees the blood coming. Why is that?
Because there’s no pain yet. There’s too much adrenalin and rhetoric in his bloodstream. There’s whole chunky paragraphs of What it Means to King and Country. Never mind God. There’s fine speeches still pumping up along his arteries, principal and subordinate clauses, the adjectival, the adverbial, in gorgeous Latinate construction and hot breath. It’s the Age of Speeches. There’s exclamation marks doing needle dancing in his brain, and so he gets twenty yards into the war.
Zip zip zip. Splash muck-puddle splash.
He looks sideways and sees Haynes, Harrison, Benchley, spinning backwards like they’ve been hooked, invisible lines whipping them off their feet and into the Next Life. It’s very Spielberg. Only without the John Williams soundtrack.
Grandfather’s running on. God bless him, Auntie D says when she tells it, as if she’s still not sure he’ll make it through her narrative and any of us will ever be born. The way she tells it, sitting bolt upright in Windermere Nursing Home, Blackrock, room at maybe thirty degrees which is the way the Filipino nurses like it, I’m not sure I will be.
Abraham’s leaking now, a sticky slather of blood gathered at his belt, but he’s still running and getting ready to fire his First Shot of the War. His rifle is wavering, they haven’t really explained this bit, that running & shooting is quite different to standing & shooting and that running & shooting while being shot at is for obvious reasons, chaps, not taught at all. It’ll come to you; don’t worry, men.
Grandfather doesn’t see any Germans. Germans being Germans, they’ve taken a practical approach and decided to keep their heads down and their guns up. It’s more technik than the valiant British method of running at bullets.
So, as Abraham is about to fire in the general direction of where there might be Germans, zip! another rip comes in his uniform just below the heart and instantly whop down he goes.
And that’s it for Grandfather.
There’s a Gap.
A white space in which he’s gone from the world.
I know what that’s like too, when the last thing you feel is the pinch in your arm and this might hurt just a little and you’re off into the wherever depending on the length and breadth of your imagination. My father has a whole section of his library just for this. Here’s Thomas Traherne (1637–74), poet, mystic, entering Paradise (Book 1,569, The Faber Book of Utopias, John Carey, Faber & Faber, London): ‘The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. . the dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The Gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees, when I saw them first through the gates, transported and ravished me. . The men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And the young men glittering and sparkling angels; and maids, strange and seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street and playing were moving jewels.’
Paradise has actual gates?
Thank you, Thomas. We’re back: Grandfather’s dead in a hole in the ground.
It’s a bomb crater. The artillery boys have had fun blowing holes in France and some of the holes like this one are deep. He’s down there on his side, his mind doing last-minute preparations for the Afterlife, when the whole attack above retreats and the Germans take their turn to advance.
It’s like Dancing in Jane Austen, Advance and Retreat, only with guns and mud. The German attack passes Grandfather’s Hole.
But one German sees Grandfather move below and he jumps down. He does. He jumps down into the hole. And he whips out his bayonet.
It’s in this thin little protective scabbard that keeps the blade clean. What Grandfather sees is a flash of light. He pulls out his pistol.
Only his arm isn’t working so that doesn’t actually happen.
He tries again, thinking pull out your pistol, but there’s only this torso-wriggle in the mud, and now the German is closing in on him. Grandfather’s looking at his arms telling them to wake up but he sees his whole chest is this tacky darkness and he realises the bayonet is the least of his worries.
The German is standing over him, full sky behind his head, and knife in his hand.
And then, flat German face perspiring, eyes intelligent and calm, he leans down to Grandfather and does the most remarkable thing; he taps Grandfather twice on the shoulder.
‘Tommy okay,’ he says. ‘Tommy okay.’
Then he takes the bayonet and cuts a strip of cloth and with swift efficiency ties a tourniquet round Grandfather’s arm. He opens his pack of Whatever-To-Use-if-Shot that the Germans have given their soldiers and he splashes some on Grandfather’s chest wound.
He looks at his handiwork a moment. Being German there are no loose bits. He nods. Grandfather sees the eyes he is to remember all his life.
‘Tommy okay,’ he says.
Then the German soldier goes back to War.