William “Willie” Dunne Character Analysis

“You should have an opinion. I don’t care what a man thinks as long as he knows his own mind.”

They would smash the line in a thousand places, and the horses and their gallant riders would be brought up and they would go off ballyhooing across open ground, slashing at the ruined Germans with their sabres. And good enough for them. Their headgear would stream in the foreign sun and the good nations would be relieved and grateful!

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.

Then Willie found John Williams, Joe Clancy, Joe McNulty. A dozen men and more who had been bound to him by some bond he didn’t know the explanation of. Willie’s very stomach was torn by sorrow, his very eyes were burned by sorrow, as if sorrow itself were a kind of gas.

Soon the places were filled with new men from home. Flocks and flocks and flocks of them, thought Willie. King George’s lambs. It was just a little inkling of a thought.

And it did Willie Dunne more good than food to open his mouth and heart and sing “Tipperary,” the long line of men bawling it out.

The ruined face of Captain Pasley hung over all like a moon. […] Maybe there was a poison in this tepid water. Maybe there was worse than poison, maybe there were dead men’s destroyed dreams milled down into powder and scattered in these bitter glasses.

So James Patrick, a man of six foot six, stood his son William, a man of five foot six, into the steaming zinc bath […] and he started to lave his son from head to foot, cascading the water neatly over everything. And the lice must have been flying from Willie Dunne just like those poor men in Sackville Street from the batons, and soon the water speckled with them, little writhing white creatures.

“I’m not going to shoot you,” [Willie] said. “Are you a German?”

“German?” said the man. “German? What are you talking about? I’m an Irishman. We’re all Irishmen in here, fighting for Ireland.”

Suddenly the enemy guns opened their filthy cursing mouths and belched forth a ruinous misery of shells. […] But the men didn’t drop a stitch of the Hail Mary they were halfway through knitting, one soothing word to the next.

So Willie started to sing the “Ave Maria.” Well, it was the very selfsame song he had sung for the singing competition, when his father witnessed his undoing. But he had heard that twiddly bit between the verses now, and he knew he was ready for it.

Willie’s mind now leaped to think, to remember, the tone of a child in a room in Dalkey singing to his mother, after the birth of his sister Dolly that killed her, […] “Ave Maria, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” and his mother’s face not listening and listening, and similarly now he sang for these ruined men.

We got the news now about the three leaders shot. Some of the men think it is a good thing. Myself, I cannot say what I think hardly. How I wish I were at home now and was able to talk these matters over with you. I wish they had not seen fit to shoot them. It doesn’t feel right somehow. I don’t know why. What does John Redmond say about it? When I came through Dublin I saw a young lad killed in a doorway, a rebel he was, and I felt pity for him. He was no older than myself. I wish they had not seen fit to shoot the three leaders.

“But I won’t serve in the uniform that lads wore when they shot those others lads. I can’t. I’m not eating so I can shrink, and not be touching the cloth of this uniform, you know? I am trying to disappear, I suppose.”

Was O’Hara a child thrown among blood and broken souls? Was O’Hara his brother too, if Jesse Kirwan was? Was the family of mankind in all of itself the enemy?

He wondered suddenly and definitely for the first time in his life what words might be. Sounds and sense certainly, but something else also, a kind of natural music that explained a man’s heart or heartlessness, words as tempered as steel, as soft as air. He felt his sore head clear and his back lighten and his legs strengthen. It was as strange to him as the sight of death. He hoped the words would work on the dead and be a balm to them also.

Nevertheless, the distance between the site of war and the site of home was a long one and widening. Not the ordinary pragmatic miles between, but some other, more mysterious measure of distance.

“You can know your own mind and your father can know his.”

“But my father and me always had the one mind on things. That’s the trouble, I think—I don’t even know. I’m confused, Father.”

“I don’t fucking want [the medal]. You earned it just as much, you stupid cunt. Anyhow, Willie, it has a little harp on it and a little crown, and I reckon between the two it might get you home safe.”

“It’s a funny, dark world out at the war, Papa,” said Willie slowly. “It brings your mind to think a thousand thoughts, a thousand new thoughts.”

“I won’t stand here and listen to your villainy!” shouted his father.

He missed them all. He missed them when they were killed. He sorrowed to see them killed, he sorrowed to go on without them, he sorrowed to see the new men coming in, and to be killed themselves, and himself going on, and not a mark on him, and Christy Moran, not a mark, and all their friends and mates removed.

He closed his eyes and Gretta’s face slowly filtered in. All the ache and murder of the last years just for a moment ceased—ceased to write itself in the history of his addled blood. He hung suspended, beautifully aloft, somewhere, he knew not where, with Gretta’s face, her breast, her arms about him. He was surprised by the soft silence, as if his brain had been a noisy place lately.

It had nothing to do with kings and countries, rebels or soldiers. Generals or their dark ambitions, their plus and their minus. It was that Death himself had made those things ridiculous. Death was the King of England, Scotland and Ireland. The King of France. Of India, Germany, Italy, Russia. Emperor of all the empires. He had taken Willie’s companions, lifted away entire nations, looked down on their struggles with contempt and glee. The whole world had come out to decide some muddled question, and Death in delight rubbed his bloody hands.

Between your own countrymen deriding you for being in the army, and the army deriding you for your own slaughter, a man didn’t know what to be thinking. A man’s mind could be roaring out in pain of a sort.

Silent night, holy night. And indeed the shepherds were in their hut and their flocks were scattered round about in these lovely woods. The sheep lay down in the darkness fearful of the wolves. But were there any wolves in the upshot? Or just sheep against sheep?

So far, so far they had come that they had walked right out to the edge of the known world and had fallen off into other realms entirely in the thunder and ruckus of the falls. There was no road back along the way they had taken. He had no country, he was an orphan, he was alone.