The Story of Lucy Gault

1

Prayer continued to be the solace of the man who had become a soldier. But his expectation that the rigours and severity and the communal nature of military life would discipline his confusion had been denied. When his mother lay dying he had thought to share his trouble with her, for as things were she would have passed it on to no one. But each time he tried to he was seized by panic, fearful of eavesdroppers he knew could not be there.

He was an old hand at the Camp now, his hollow countenance and the intensity of his averted gaze familiar to all who came and went around him. Some had carried to other Camps a description of his lanky, quiet presence, had spoken of his strangeness, his regular, lone attendance before the chapel statue. He had made no friends, but in his duties was conscientious and persevering and reliable, known for such qualities to the officers who commanded him. He had dug latrines, metalled roads, adequately performed cookhouse duties, followed instructions as to the upkeep of equipment, was the first to volunteer when volunteers were called for. That he bore his torment with fortitude was known to no one.

In such a manner further years of Horahan’s life went by. When rumours of war in Europe began he was aware of anxiety and uncertainty at the Camp, but that mood did not concern him. There was talk of invasion. In preparation for what might occur in the years ahead, sandbags and other equipment of defence made their appearance. On occasion, the hours of training were longer.

Horahan fell in with this hastily arranged regimen. Hardly knowing the reason for it, he was obedient to all that was required of him, and questioned nothing. By day, instead, a funeral that was repeated in his sleep possessed him. The hearse passed through the streets of the town he knew and, when he had himself dug the grave, the clay closed in on top of him. He lay beside the coffin, but when the child called out from within it he could not reach her.

In the town he asked about the house that in his dreaming blazed and was destroyed. He was told, yet again, that it had never been set on fire, that the child who was dead in his dreams had been left solitary by her parents, the victim of an error. But still there was the funeral, the hearse drawn through familiar streets, the horse hooves echoing; still he awoke, his body wet with sweat. He rose often in the night from his narrow cot to creep through the darkness, his feet still bare. In the chapel, where he dared not light a candle, he knelt before the Virgin he could not see, begging for the gift of a sign, a whisper of assurance that he was not abandoned.