Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  All the original crowd seemed to be still together. I’ve got them all to this day, set down for ever on one of those group photographs that men always fly to whenever they’re thrown together in groups or communities, all our little platoon in a curiously mixed bag in one corner of the picture. Henny Cuthbert. Eph and his corner boys, curiously saintly in the blankness of their expressions. MacKinley. All the newspapermen. Henry Oakley, looking just as he always did in the columns of the Post when he’d sent the wickets tumbling at Hendrick Lane. Catchpole, big and blond and somehow evil-looking. Tim Williams, who, to Eph’s amazement, wrote poetry in his spare time. Spring, who was a Devonshire man and had joined the battalion for no other reason than that he happened to be in the city with a group of barnstorming actors, and had marched off to war in a fury because someone had dropped a cigarette among his props and destroyed the lot so that, in the excitement after Mons, he’d seen the hidden hand of the Germans in it. All of them, stiff and uncomfortable in ill-fitting uniforms and glengarries, with Tom Creak and his little group of ex-miners to one side, stunted, hardbitten, dour men for the most part, with the grinning faces of the Mandys shining out from the middle of them like a couple of Irish moons; and Tom, still a deputy to them in spite of his uniform, looking like an unofficial major-general with his stiff dignified face.

  Tom and the Mandys were our most important men those days. We had to make our own roads and not many of us were used to the work. We quarried our own stones for the road surfaces and put down drainpipes, claying the joints up quite wrongly, so that we had to take them up again and send for Tom and the Mandys to show us how to do it properly. Suddenly life took on different values. The men who were heading for promotion at this point in our lives were the ones who knew how to build walls and lay drains.

  The camp remained a vast expanse of mud where the wooden duckwalks disappeared from sight when it wasn’t raining and floated on the surface of the puddles when it was. The parade ground was a mud-flat that never once changed its texture except when the damp browns of autumn faded into winter mists and the bitter black frosts came down on us, with stars of ice in the congealed footprints in the mud, and the grass looking white like a winter fur. Then the snow came to soften the harsh outlines of the camp and isolated us for days, so that we had to live off oranges, which were the only thing the cooks had plenty of just then. During that period we crouched miserably round the red-hot stoves of our huts and prayed for fine weather. A few cases were taken away with pneumonia but surprisingly not many.

  I learned to live under the conditions that would have depressed a poacher’s lurcher, but we’d joined of our own free will and accord so no one complained. Those of us who’d practised guard duty at Edward Road in preparation for the time when we should have something to guard, began to wonder – when we learned what it was like to stand on sentry duty throughout a bitter night, armed with staves instead of rifles – where we could have found such enthusiasm. When we were cold we stamped about the comfortless huts for warmth, our boots hollowly thumping the floorboards, and when we were bored – and we were often bored because for a long time we had no lights to read or write letters by – we managed to be sustained by the faith that our hardships were suffered in a good cause. We sang ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Hello, Hello, Who’s Your Lady Friend?’, and ‘Who Were You With Last Night?’ to Tommy Mandy’s mouth-organ, or listened to Catchpole or Spring who had the biggest fund of dirty ballads I’d ever heard.

  We worked off our excess spirits by acting the fool and playing stupid jokes on each other. One night we shaved off the moustache of one of our elderly corporals when he was drunk on swiped rum, and another we nailed Sergeant Bernard’s boots through the laceholes to the ceiling, and put fireworks among the coal by Corker’s stove. But, with their stripes, they always had the whip hand and worked it out of us by giving us left and right wheel in extended order so that they had us running miles.

  When they let us out of camp and the weather was reasonable we crammed the open-topped, hard-tyred buses, or borrowed bicycles or motorbikes or even runabouts from those who were lucky enough to possess them, and roared, shouting and singing, each of us as cocky as ten men because we were who we were, into the city or the Four Merry Lads, some of us still in incomplete uniforms.

  Then, as the bitter weather ceased, the rats discovered the waste behind the cookhouse and came from all the farms around and bred in their thousands under the huts, and it became a matter of life and death to us that we should clear them out. One night when the colonel was in town, Tom Creak and the Mandys and I helped ourselves to a stray terrier which had attached itself to him and slept in his office. Unfortunately, the blasted dog got stuck and we had to go under the hut after it with shovels, crawling among the the rubbish and old food that had been thrown there out of the way, scratching around in the slime and barking our knees on bricks the workmen had left behind, accompanied by sarcastic shouts of encouragement from the rest of the hut crouching outside.

  When we got it out we had to give it a bath in a washbasin and dry it in front of the stove, and finally toss up for who should sneak it back before the CO returned. Inevitably, I lost, and was caught by Bold as I crept back, keeping to the shadows away from the camp patrol.

  He swooped on me like an avenging angel, as though it literally warmed his heart to find someone he could put on a charge. He had long since accepted the challenge thrown out by a couple of hundred high-spirited young men determined not to be downhearted under the conditions, and waged a perpetual breezy war with the lawbreakers.

  ‘Whatcha doing out of your hut?’ he demanded immediately.

  ‘Going back, Sergeant-Major,’ I said. I was wet and muddy and sick of the colonel’s dog by this time.

  Bold put his hands on his hips and thrust his bony face forward. ‘What sort of answer’s that?’ he demanded.

  ‘Well, you asked, Sergeant-Major.’

  He flashed his torch over me, dazzling me, a disembodied voice behind a bright light.

  ‘An’ what’s all that mud on your uniform?’ he demanded. ‘You been under the wire? You been out of camp?’

  ‘No, I haven’t, Sergeant-Major.’

  ‘We’ll soon see. You’re in the mush, my lad. Better come along to the guardroom.’

  For a while, as he turned away, I debated bolting for it, but I rejected the idea in the end, giving Bold credit for having too much cunning to let me get away with that.

  As we walked between the darkened huts, he looked down at me.

  ‘Quite the boy for fun, ain’t you, Private Fenner?’ he said.

  ‘I get by, Sergeant-Major.’

  ‘I’ve thought more than once I might make a soldier outta you, if nobody else. But you can’t go chucking promotion at a bloke what’s always in trouble. Now can you? ’Pon me word, you’re enough to demoralise a whole army corps.’

  ‘Sorry if I’ve disappointed, Sergeant-Major.’

  ‘You got the ideas,’ he went on in a low baffled voice. ‘You got the strength. You got the right sort of nasty temper. You get rattled when dirty great NCOs like me come down on you. Just the type to wipe out a regiment of Prussian Guards single-handed because their artillery’s knocked some dirt in his morning cup o’ char. You don’t half make life difficult for ambitious sergeant-majors.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Sergeant-Major.’

  ‘You want to git left behind, or something?’

  ‘No, Sergeant-Major,’ I said.

  ‘Well, the way you’re shaping, you will,’ he said. ‘In case you don’t know it, we’re over-strength and the colonel’s determined to put on a good show when we get out there. They’re going to weed out the shirkers and the troublemakers, so you’d better look out or you’ll be one. I’ll tell you that for nothing.’

  Taking Bold’s advice, I stopped dodging church parades and found to my surprise it was simpler than dodging the fatigues which were the only alternative. So I sang ‘Fight the Good Fight’ with gusto
but more than a little sarcasm, considering the total absence on the camp of anything more lethal than a pick-handle, leaving the back row to Locky and Tim Williams and Eph Lott who always made for the dark corners; Locky and Tim because it was one of the few places where they could read in peace, and Eph because he ran a card school there, conducted in whispers among the guarded fag-ends.

  ‘I’ll go nap,’ you could hear in a muttered undertone all the time through the padre’s sermon. Or ‘I shoulda led trumps’ or ‘Keep your bloody voice down or the old bastard’ll hear you.’

  Fortunately, the padres never did hear or, if they did, they pretended not to. Most of them were too engrossed in exhorting us to ‘fight for right’ and ‘scrag the Hun’, anyway.

  By the spring we were soldiers with a sturdy independence, modelled neither on the Territorials nor the Regulars. Bold did his best to make us Regulars and discipline was as strict as any Guards regiment, but neither he nor anyone else ever quite overcame the fact that our officers had been our friends and that we’d cheered the same football teams and courted the same girls. Not all the edicts that were ever issued, not even the War Office, Lord Kitchener and all the Bolds in creation, could alter that.

  Before the end of March another company was recruited to supply reinforcements and joined us at Blackmires, while the case-hardened original members of the battalion cheered them in with horrifying tales of the conditions.

  To Corker’s bewildered amazement there was a fanatical abstention from all the ordinary military crimes.

  ‘Never in all me puff,’ he said, ‘’ave I seen so many brutal and licentious soldiery who were so lacking in brutality and licentiousness. There’s a perfectly good guardroom there waitin’ for occupants and all goin’ to waste. It’s a bleeden shame. That’s what it is.’

  ‘We’ve always Fenner,’ Bold liked to tell him with the heavy humour of the parade ground when he was feeling particularly cheerful. ‘The Crippen of D Company. The Charlie Peace of the City Battalion. If you watch him carefully, you’re bound to nick him one o’ these days making off with the colonel’s trousers.’

  They loved to indulge in this sort of talk in front of us when we couldn’t reply, but they knew as well as we did that the abstention from criminality sprang entirely from the very real dread we had of being left behind if the battalion were sent overseas. Once even, Eph Lott gave one of his boys the mother and father of all hidings for trying to steal from a comrade.

  ‘This is our mob,’ he said. ‘Nick it from another mob if you like, but not from this one. We don’t do that ’ere.’

  ‘We’d learned as much in six months as the average soldier learned in six years. Bold himself said so and that was praise indeed. We could endure hail, rain and snow; could march our twenty miles a day – fifty minutes on the trot and ten resting – and dig trenches with the best.

  We were slowly being shaken into our appointed places. The authoritative were given rank. The clerks found their way – amid ironic cheers – among the signallers and telephonists, or to the blanket-covered tables and piles of pay books in the over-heated orderly room. The youngest with good lungs like Murray were employed as runners. Henry Oakley used his skill as a bowler to such an extent that he could drop a dummy bomb on any given spot within thirty-five yards of where he was standing and got himself a stripe for his trouble. The mechanically minded were absorbed into transport and swarmed in dozens over the solitary lorry we’d acquired. The tradesmen became cobblers, farriers, butchers, harness-men, bakers and cooks. A few of us – I was one – were given instruction on machine guns and squatted for hours behind wooden models complete with tripod stands and corrugated barrels, solemnly swinging rattles to simulate firing.

  ‘The Maxim is practically a rifle with a automatic breech action,’ we were informed by a lordly corporal instructor who spoke like an emasculated curate. ‘To prevent it becoming over-’eated it is enclosed in a brass water-jacket and ammunition is fed to the breach by means of canvas belts carrying supplies of cartridges. It can jam. Learn what causes these ’ere jams, or you’re a dead man and, what’s much worse, the enemy might capture the gun.’

  We got our khaki at last – a magnificent new suit, paid for by the City Council out of the rates – and, thankfully handing in the conspicuous blue for the unfortunates coming along behind, swarmed into Sidepool to have our photographs taken, singly and in groups to send home to families, wives and friends, all looking broken-necked in the stand-up collars buttoned to the throat and the bus conductors hats from which we pulled the wire when Bold wasn’t around, to make them look older and battle-worn.

  Dear Mum and all – the letters went out in dozens – this is me and the boys.

  Life had become immensely simple. I no longer had to worry or think for other people, or even for myself. There was always Bold, hard-faced and unforgiving, but, I discovered, never foul-mouthed and always willing to help, to do it for me; and everything was fixed in advance, from the time I got up to the way I had to have my hair cut. It meant nothing to me that the elderly NCOs in the stores still fiddled the rations and flogged the blankets from time to time, and that if Sheridan, Ashton’s second-in-command, had run his business in Hill Street as he sometimes tried to run the company, he’d have been ruined.

  Then one day rifles appeared, the first real rifles we’d had, to take the place of the home-made wooden ones they’d issued us with for drill. There were only forty-odd of them and even those were on loan from the Vickers works in the city, but we paraded with them in small batches, complaining all the time about the way Bold’s dull military mind kept us throwing them around when what we really wanted to do was shoot Germans with them.

  We took our turn on the range which, of course, we’d had to build ourselves, firing five rounds apiece – when we could get five rounds. The rifles weren’t much good as weapons, but we got so that the movements became instinctive and we automatically ceased to breathe when we took sight. We fired at bobbing jinnies, and were initiated into the mysteries of ‘grouping’. We learned what a sector was and how to judge distances, and began to boast about our skill, which, God knows, was nothing to write home about.

  ‘You start to see a man’s eyes at a hundred yards,’ Corker told us. ‘You start to see his buttons at two hundred yards, ’is face at three hundred. When ’e’s four hundred yards away you start to see the movements of his legs, and the colour of his uniform can be seen at five hundred. If you want to count men moving when they’re so far away they’re only a blur, remember that cavalry riding in twos pass a given point at sixty a minute. Guns and waggons pass five to the minute and infantry in fours at two hundred to the minute.’

  ‘What happens if Cavalry attacks us?’ Murray asked breathlessly, and Corker gave him a glance which was full of contempt.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘They won’t. They know better. Cavalry only attack prepared infantry positions once in their sweet lives. They never come back for more.’

  One of the most heart-lifting things that occurred was the arrival of the 10th Battalion. They were brigaded with us and brought to Blackmires, and when we found we could outmarch them by miles we suddenly began to take an inverted pride in the bleakness of the conditions we’d had to endure.

  ‘You know,’ I said as we watched their squads wheeling on the muddy parade ground, ‘perhaps we’re not so awful as we thought we were. I mean, that lot’s a bit of a mob, isn’t it? Look at their discipline. Just look at it!’

  ‘Fen, my son,’ Locky said placidly. ‘It’s remarkable the number of people round here who’ve suddenly started to discover the meaning of esprit de corps.’

  Rumours flew about like pigeons in a high wind. Germany was finished, we heard, and we were only waiting for the spring to smash him, so if you wanted to see any fighting you had to move smartly, but if you could transfer to one of the Regular battalions your chances of getting to France were greater. However, the Big Push was due at any time and when it came w
e were all in it, Regulars, Territorials and Kitchener men, so perhaps it was pointless to worry. The war wasn’t going to be over by Christmas, after all, it seemed – not even the second Christmas.

  Gradually, and in penny numbers, we were equipped with water-bottles, haversacks, mess tins, waterproof sheets and then – in the midst of tremendous excitement – the first real consignments of rifles arrived. They were long Lee-Metfords, weapons which were already obsolete and had been replaced months before in France. Two hundred of them appeared and were used for drilling. Then another two hundred and yet another two hundred, until everyone had a weapon. Many of them were in bad condition because they’d been picked up on the battlefields of France, but they were just fit to fire and we stayed up till the small hours making them presentable for parade the next morning, scratching at the rust, and dabbing boot-polish on the butts to make them shine.

  ‘The night has suddenly become hideous with the click of rifle-bolts,’ Locky said dryly.

  Only now were we satisfied. We were not only properly dressed but at long last we were armed. Nothing could stop us. If the enthusiasm had been strong before, it was red hot now. Nothing could mar our faith in being in at the final victory when it came. Nothing managed to dim the sight of distant glory, not even the cold or the discomfort. It even survived our first disturbing meeting with men from France.

  In the spring the isolation hospital farther along the road, standing like a fortress on a small hill where the Blackmires winds could tear through its wards and blow away the germs, was emptied of fever cases and turned over to the military who promptly filled it with wounded from Ypres.