Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  ‘What’s that got to do with it, old fruit?’ Mason asked, annoyed at having his diatribe interrupted.

  Hardacre shrugged. ‘Well, it’s all part of the scene,’ he said lamely. ‘It just shows they’re scared, that’s all.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, they’re hanging on to all the gold reserves, aren’t they?’

  ‘They’re not going to fight with coinage.’ Mason was a complete extrovert and never thought much beyond the next girl and the next new tie. ‘“Dear Frau Hoffenstinkel,”’ he went on with galling sarcasm, ‘“I regret to inform you that your son, Hans, has died gloriously in battle. He fell at the head of his troops today, with a half-sovereign smack between the eyes.”’

  Dicehart laughed and Hardacre began to lose his temper. He was busy with a bath bun which had come with the pot of tea and the sardines from Stahlers’, and you could see the perspiration along his upper lip as he cut at it in a furious sawing movement. ‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ he snapped. ‘It just shows it’s going to be an economic war. That’s all.’

  Locky slowly raised his head from the diary. ‘Anybody’d think you lot were eager for a war,’ he commented in that grave mocking manner of his.

  ‘Can’t say I’d mind.’ Arnold Holroyd spoke cheerfully over his shoulder, his pink face round and cheerful. ‘Somebody’s got to teach the swine a lesson, haven’t they?’

  ‘You’d soon change your tune if they called you up.’

  Mason grinned. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’d make a change from reporting.’

  Locky stared at him. He was just working up to one of those scathing retorts he was so good at when the Editor appeared. The door slammed back, and he walked straight through to Ashton without looking round. The Chief Sub was with him, dressed in evening clothes as though he’d been called away from a dinner party, and his face was pale and taut and there was a nerve twitching under his eye. Ashton rose at once and stood waiting for them, one hand on his blotter.

  ‘We’re only a few hours from war,’ I heard the Editor say. He seemed to draw in a deep breath, then he faced Ashton, his fingers fidgeting nervously with the edge of the desk. ‘The ultimatum’s due to expire at midnight. There isn’t a ghost of a chance now that it won’t be allowed to.’

  The office seemed to petrify. Ashton stared at the Editor without speaking. Hardacre, leaning forward across the desk, pretended to be absorbed with his bath bun. Mason was staring at the folded newspaper in front of him, his face suddenly grim, his eyes flickering towards the group by the desk. Locky still had one hand reaching across the diary for a slip of paper. Sainsbury, Dicehart and Arnold Holroyd were in a huddle, pretending to be discussing something again, but their ears were flapping like signal flags.

  Then Mason smiled slowly and gave me a thumbs-up sign across the desk, and I saw that all the faces around me had relaxed and were suddenly free from strain. After all the days of doubt and fading hope, the certainty of war had brought a kind of peace. Our problem was gone. It was no longer a question of ‘Will we?’ or ‘Won’t we?’ Now it was only: ‘Well, it’s here. Let’s get on with it.’

  The Editor turned and faced us, as though about to make a proclamation, and we all lifted our heads and stared at him with dutiful expectancy.

  ‘It’s war,’ he announced dramatically.

  ‘Thank God,’ Mason said at once. ‘This ought to teach the Kaiser to mind his own damned biz, if nothing else. If he wants a scrap, maybe a few belts of the best from us’ll make him change his mind.’

  Someone chuckled and before we knew where we were, we were all laughing and cheering Mason’s defiance, and even the Editor started to smile. The subs stopped work and joined in, and a few of the people from the offices along the corridor crowded through the door. They grouped themselves among the desks and started talking noisily, all excited and keen and uncertain about what would happen next.

  We were all like that, all bristling with eagerness and the sensation of being on the brink of glory, when young Murray burst in. He was in a tearing hurry as he always was, faintly indignant as usual, falling over his own feet and making as much din as ever, and his first words stopped the laughter and brought home abruptly to us that war wasn’t all flags and banners and cheering, but something else that included hatred and ugliness and fear.

  ‘The crowd’s throwing bricks through Schafers’ window,’ he shouted.

  And that’s how it started for us all. A few taut words from the Editor, a few cheers and a lot of laughter, and bricks through Schafers’ window. And now, here we all were, in the Army, a little startled and scared by our own boldness and wondering what the hell was in store for us.

  We’d signed on for three years or the duration of the war, and we weren’t Militia or Territorials, but Regular soldiers – in a brand-new unit, the 12th (University and City) Special Service Battalion of the two-counties regiment that had been garrisoned in the city since the Crimea.

  They’d given us our shilling and sworn us in and now here we were, all sitting around on our behinds waiting for a summons to report for duty that didn’t seem to come, all trying to behave normally and trying not to think of the future – because none of us could see any future beyond the Army.

  It wasn’t easy waiting, because everybody else seemed to be busy. Stories filtered north of heavy gunfire being heard off Southend and of a naval action off Kent; but while British ships were being sunk, and the Army began to fight back in France, my sole contribution to the war effort was a hashed-up story of the Angel of Mons.

  The city went on much as before. Although people were still hiding everything German they possessed, and disowning indignant German relatives as hard as they could go, the Messiah, which should have been put on at the City Hall when war broke out and had been cancelled because someone had suggested Handel was a Hun like Mendelssöhn and Wagner and the rest, was reannounced with the reassuring news that Handel was a jolly good type after all, because he’d given up his German friends and preferred to live in England.

  The management of Ross and McCall’s Empire billed a patriotic concert, and newsagents were offering on the streets The End of the Kaiser, Predicted in Brother Johannes’ 300-year-old prophecy of the war, price one penny. Every church and chapel from Cotterside to Greenedge began to announce sermons on thundering Old Testament texts, Whoso Diggeth a Pit Shall Fall Therein and Whoso Sheddeth a Man’s Blood, by Man shall His Blood be Shed. There were plenty for them to go at, once they started looking.

  Advertisements for foot-plasters for soldiers, and blast-proof earplugs for civilians in danger of bombardment, began to dot the papers, and notices appeared on the main news pages of the Post suggesting that anyone who might wish to enlist in the Yorkshire Dragoons or the Royal Engineers would be made very welcome if he cared to call at the Drill Hall. The Weekly News, the Sunday paper attached to the Post and the Clarion, announced a new serial, The English Girl, which was a hurried re-write of one which had appeared during the Boer War, only now the enemy were Uhlans instead of Boer vedettes, and to accompany it the Artists’ Department had turned out a very smart picture of a girl in a summer frock and picture hat, her arms held rigidly behind her by two German soldiers so that her bust stuck out. Her frock was torn discreetly at the shoulder, which was about as far as you could go in those days towards being suggestive.

  Photographs of people who’d joined the Army appeared on the picture pages, and Mason and I and Sainsbury and Arnold Holroyd were snapped on the front steps of the office and emerged among the main news as ‘Post’ Men in the City Battalion. I have it yet, yellow and dog-eared, four self-conscious young men in a theatrical pose which is heightened by the fact that the cameraman was on the bottom step and we were on the top, four young men in narrow trousers and light-coloured boots and tall stiff collars, me in a felt hat with a broad silk band, Holroyd in a natty sporting cap that almost drowned him, Mason in a furry Homburg that drew sardonic comments from everybody in the office. />
  All the same, we were pleased with the picture for there were plenty of witless idiots about with white feathers and insinuations of cowardice, and it let people know we’d taken the plunge.

  The girls round the office suddenly took a new interest in us, and Frank Mason vanished more often to the dark corners behind the files in the photo library. Suddenly we’d become privileged persons, and people found they wanted to stop and congratulate us and buy us drinks.

  Somehow, the simple act of enlisting had become a crusade. The new battalion had become a squadron of young Galahads in shining armour, itching to get at the Hun. The words they used to describe us! Steel-true! Blade-straight! True-blue! We weren’t very far from the turn of the century and the Victorians were still in full cry.

  We were all rather naïve in those days and thought that the British Empire was God’s gift to the world. We’d convinced ourselves that the whole structure of civilisation would fall to pieces if someone destroyed the Empire, and we felt the Germans were attempting to do just that.

  ‘After all,’ Frank Mason said, ‘nobody believes all that cock about atrocities they’re trying to give us. But the Huns are such a bloody dull lot with their Kaiser Bill and their “hochs” and their Nibelungs and Siegfrieds and so on. I once heard Wagner at the City Hall. It made me feel ill. Anybody can see they need a bit of sorting out.’

  So there we were, about to take up arms against Prussianism and militarism. Our King and Our Country needed us; and the ‘brav’ Belges’ and all those men of the Contemptible Little Army who were slowly sinking into the ground in Belgium were crying out to us to hurry. Jingoism and Kipling had suddenly become very popular again.

  But if the emotion increased, there was little sign of any anxiety on the part of the authorities to let us get on with the job.

  The Post was full of belated stories of fire and sword in Belgium, of the great German advance and the giant 42-centimetre Austrian siege guns that had smashed Belgian forts to bricks and rubble. Art treasures had been systematically destroyed, the agencies said, and the Germans were cutting off the ears and hands of children for sport and shooting old men and women out of hand. German officers were said to have raped women held down by helpful private soldiers on the cobblestones of the public squares in towns on the Meuse, and their troops, stupefied with brandy to enable them to face the crackling fire of the French 75s, were being slaughtered in thousands as they advanced – arm-in-arm to hold themselves upright. Their officers, in jack-boots and spiked helmets, were well to the rear, of course, driving their men before them, not leading them from in front as they did in the French and British armies.

  History was being made while we went on waiting.

  Much to our bitter annoyance, those men who’d got into the Army before us were already in camp and some of them were even in uniform. The Territorials, who’d been regarded with a certain amount of ribald merriment as Saturday-afternoon soldiers who could form fours, turn left and right and stand to attention and not much else, had overnight become the Thin Red Line, Up Guards and At ’Em and Gentlemen Rankers Out on the Spree.

  Then young Magnus, the copytaker, appeared in the office, cocky in all ill-fitting new uniform with a high collar that looked as though it was throttling him, and Murray and Sainsbury almost died of envy.

  ‘My God,’ Sainsbury said. ‘If they keep us hanging about any longer the blasted war’ll be over. The Russians are on their way to France already.’

  ‘Who says?’ Locky asked, imperturbable as ever and quite unmoved by the hysteria.

  ‘They’ve been seen on the stations,’ Sainsbury said.

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Well, that’s the story. They’ve even seen the snow on their boots.’

  ‘In this weather?’

  ‘Well’ – Sainsbury began to hedge a little – ‘whether they have or not, it’s time somebody got a move on. I thought they wanted us to set about the Germans. They made enough fuss about it. “Your King and Country Need You”. “Kitchener expects this day that every man will do his blasted duty”. That nonsense. Well, I’m waiting to be needed. I’m anxious to do my duty. And what happens? They tell me to sit back as meek as Moses and hang on till someone in Whitehall finishes his holiday or something. Well, blow ’em. I’m not going to.’

  And he went off and joined another unit that was willing to take him at once, and he vanished overnight without calling in to say goodbye. We never saw him again.

  ‘I wish I’d joined the Navy,’ young Murray said, staring glumly at a sheet of paper and pencil, no more capable of doing any intelligent work than flying to the moon.

  At the barracks, queues of men were still shuffling forward, and self-conscious little parties were marching away daily en route for some regimental depot, cheered by the kids all the way to the station. Smart young officers appeared in the pubs, a little excited and flushed, and horse-drawn service waggons took their place among the cabs and drays and tramcars and buses in the streets.

  There were always two or three sheepish Territorials nowadays to give weight to the recruiting sergeant’s words and sash and King’s Shilling, and a flood of martial music to ruffle the hair, stir the blood and disturb the conscience.

  Patriotic summonses came from the Town Hall steps and the plinths of the sooty statues in the parks. Even the women were at it, all those women who’d been concerned only with suffrage and the equality of the sexes up to a week or two before. And all the old thunderers from the City Council, reaching out gleefully for all the new and ringing phrases that had appeared in the papers.

  Words like Entente Cordiale, Our Noble Allies, and Prussian Militarists came to their lips as though they’d spent all their lives thinking about the situation, instead of having had it sprung on them overnight like the rest of us. Entente Cordiale? ‘Our lot’ to everybody else. Noble Allies? ‘Froggies’ was good enough for most of us. Prussian Militarists? ‘Kaiser Bill’ to the troops. What they didn’t realise, all those pretentious old windbags with their mutton-chop whiskers and frock coats and scarlet-lined top hats, what none of us realised, was that it was a young man’s world all of a sudden. The old world that they were used to, all the pompous Victoriana that never split an infinitive or ended with a preposition, was over and done with for ever.

  When the summons arrived at last, it was just a formal typewritten cyclostyled request to appear at the Edward Road Drill Hall at 8 a.m. the following morning. Nothing more. No instructions about what clothes to take. No words redolent of glory or ringing with martial ardour. Just a simple blunt little sentence that had the effect of leaving you filled with disappointment.

  Murray almost fell into the office that morning. ‘Thank God we can go now and wipe the swine off the face of Europe,’ he said sternly, every inch the ardent warrior.

  ‘Have you told your mother yet?’ I asked, and his face fell at once. Murray’s mother was a fussy little woman with pince-nez spectacles and a shrill voice who had a habit of registering complaints to the Editor whenever she thought her son was being overworked. Murray was a little sensitive about her.

  ‘Not likely,’ he said. ‘She’d have me out like a shot.’

  ‘When are you going to?’

  His face grew longer. ‘I don’t know,’ he said gloomily. ‘I’m not quite sure how to set about it. She’ll kick up such a fuss.’

  I said goodbye to Mrs Julius the next morning – not because I was fond of her, but simply because I didn’t expect to be back – and she surprised me with the emotional scene she worked up. She called in the neighbours and announced that ‘her second son’ was now going after ‘her first son’. Willie Julius had been a compositor on the Post until he’d got a job on a London daily and he was in one of the Territorial regiments down there. He was a corporal now and a devil for drill, though he’d once told me he only joined for the money and because the uniform fetched the girls in hordes. He was camped out on some racecourse in the south and was apparently thoroughly
enjoying himself.

  Saying goodbye to Mrs Julius took the best part of half an hour. For once, she’d got up ahead of me, and she’d cooked me a breakfast big enough for a navvy, clearly convinced that from that moment on I was unlikely to get a square meal until the Army discharged me at the end of the war.

  I’d packed a small case with my shaving things, debating for some time whether to include pyjamas. I wasn’t at all sure that soldiers wore pyjamas and the letter hadn’t been very helpful. Somehow, I felt that soldiers slept in their shirts and I had no desire to appear different, and in the end I came to an arrangement whereby I would write to Mrs Julius and she would send them along to me if it didn’t seem wrong to wear them.

  By the time I’d finished the meal she’d worked herself up to a frenzy of excitement, and was rushing round the house collecting everything she thought I might need – sandwiches, books to read, a piece of home-made fruit cake – and was occupied in wrapping and re-wrapping them for me to carry in my pocket. It was like going for a new job or on holiday.

  I finally got away ten minutes later than I expected and missed the tram, and found myself standing on the corner of Morrelly Street, thankful at last to be out of sight of the waving, weeping Mrs Julius, doubtful as to my future, and clutching a case and an enormous parcel of food. For a long time I tried to stuff the parcel into the pocket of my jacket, then into the case, and finally, in despair, I threw it over the wall into Henny Cuthbert’s front garden.

  The Drill Hall was already full when I arrived, and the first person I saw was Mason, smart in a Homburg and spats and surrounded by half a dozen other members of the Post staff.

  He grinned when he saw me. ‘We thought we might as well hang together, old fruit,’ he said. ‘They’ll probably put us all in the same company then. Ashton’s here, by the way. He wangled a transfer. Apparently he thought this mob would be more élite than the West Yorks.’