Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  We heard they’d arrived but we rarely saw them, until one night we found that the little back room at the Four Merry Lads, which we had come to accept as our own private headquarters, had been taken over by men in bright blue suits and red ties who were dodging the rules that insisted they were not to be served with intoxicating liquor.

  We stopped dead in the doorway as we saw them. They held crutches against stiff legs or drank left-handed because they had no right hands, and the face of more than one of them was marked by livid new tissue where torn flesh was just beginning to heal. They were the first wounded we’d ever seen and we regarded them with awe and a certain amount of guilt.

  ‘Where’d you get it?’ we asked them, and for the price of a pint and the inevitable question, ‘What’s it like out there?’ they proceeded to chill our blood.

  There was silence as they finished, the silence of disbelief and shame. In our enthusiasm to get into the war this had never been quite how we’d imagined it would be, and it ran contrary to our expectations.

  ‘Oh, well,’ Murray announced, as casually as he could, trying hard to appear indifferent, ‘it’ll be our turn soon. We’ve just about finished our training.’ He was eager to be accepted by those dour, hard-bitten men, anxious that no one should think he was dodging his share of the work, keen to let the rest of the Army know that they’d only to hang on until he could take over from their faltering hands and face the storm for them. ‘Any day now,’ he said. ‘And we’ll be there.’

  They were unimpressed by his zeal.

  ‘Don’t be in too big a hurry, mate,’ they told him flatly. ‘You’re a bloody sight better off here than hanging on the wire.’

  ‘Hanging on the wire?’ Murray’s rosy face was bewildered.

  ‘Dead, mate.’ A big man with bristling black moustaches spoke up from the corner. He had a pair of crutches beside him and the good-conduct stripe of an old sweat on his arm. ‘It’s no place for a regimental soldier, out there, mate. You can reckon on living about three months, if yer lucky. Officers and NCOs two. If you want to go out there kid, you want to get your dad to pull a few strings for you and get ’em to make you a general first. They’re the boys what enjoy the war. Twenty miles behind the lines in chatoos. Bloody great houses like Buckingham Palace set in their own parks. Dinner and wine at night. And girls in their beds as well, for all I know – so bloody beautiful they make you weep real tears just to look at ’em.’

  Gradually, it all came out in tight, brusque sentences that put a dread in your heart. They told us of their hatred for the Belgians, who profiteered from the troops trying to save them, and of the French jeers at half-trained Britishers; of confused orders that hung whole companies on uncut German wire like scarecrows, to rot in the sun and the rain; of men who did succeed through sheer courage and were left unsupported, to be shelled to perdition because their own artillery had nothing to fire in retaliation.

  We didn’t believe half of it and put it down to the usual old soldier’s desire to impress.

  ‘I think you’re stretching it,’ young Murray said at last, his round pink face shocked and horrified. He’d been listening with increasing anger, his face growing more and more suffused with indignation until he clearly couldn’t contain himself any longer. ‘That’s what I think. I think you’re bloody well drawing it out a bit.’

  ‘Drawing it out or not,’ the man with the moustaches said, ‘I didn’t get one in this here leg of mine because I didn’t know my job. I been in the Army long enough to know what’s what.’ He held up his arm with the good-conduct stripe on it. ‘I got a stripe to prove it. I got my packet because I got caught on the wire when they said there wasn’t any and I couldn’t get away. Every time I shifted I got caught on another bit and, in the end, there I was hanging half upside down with it twanging all round me like a banjo band and the bullets whistling in me ears like bees. I’d have been there yet if my pal hadn’t come and got me off. I left him there. He stopped the one that didn’t get me.’

  There was silence again, then Murray stood up.

  ‘I still think you’re stretching it,’ he said.

  ‘You calling me a liar?’ There was an ominous movement from the corner, and I bundled Murray outside before trouble could start and left Locky behind me to explain it all away.

  ‘He’s a bit mental,’ I heard him saying gravely. ‘They only let him in because his father’s the Lord Mayor.’

  We were all a little subdued as we went home that night. A little of the dread they felt had found its way into us. These men weren’t bayonet and bombing instructors trying to put the face of war on us. They’d tried war and found it different from what they’d expected.

  But we were too young to brood long and, as soon as spring made it possible, we were thrown into a training programme that seemed at first ridiculous and childish in the extreme.

  Reveille was at dawn and we rolled out of bed, gummy-eyed with sleep, with Corker bawling at us from the door. ‘Up you get! Turn out! Turn out!’ A two-mile run in heady air that was sweet and strong in your lungs. ‘Faster! Faster! What you think you’re doing? Crawling?’ Back, famished, for breakfast, and then a whole day of marching and digging and eating bully beef and bread from haversacks at the roadside among the first of the daisies, like a lot of roadmenders, and listening open-mouthed to instructors with their tall tales of derring-do.

  ‘Let’s see a bit more murder in them eyes,’ the bayonet-fighting sergeant liked to say. ‘A short jab to the froat and out again. Nobody needs more than six inches o’ cold Sheffield to let the life out of him. I seen ten men killed in twenty seconds by a man what knew his job with the bay’nit.’

  We had brigade and divisional manœuvres and, because some bright individual with red gorgets conceived the idea of raiding the camps of other battalions for practice, we spent half our nights sitting under bushes in the dark waiting for someone to stumble upon us.

  ‘A fatuous form of play-acting,’ Mason announced portentously as we crouched in the rain in a grass-fringed ditch on the edge of the moors, trying to behave like outposts.

  We had rattles with us to represent machine guns and were waiting for a nervous patrol of the 10th to come our way so we could ambush them. We’d picked the spot carefully because we were anxious to do the job properly. We’d been taught that grass was camouflage and head cover came from behind and we’d argued for ten minutes on the subject before we finally sat down.

  It was raining steadily and the wind moaned dismally through the chinks of the dry-stone wall behind us. We’d lain dutifully silent for a long time but in the end we’d all become stiff and numb with cold, and, disregarding the chances of being heard or seen, we’d stood up one after the other and stamped our feet and rubbed life back into our hands before finally settling into a state of numb indifference. Nobody had been near us for what seemed hours, and Mason was anxious to pull back into shelter.

  ‘They’ve forgotten us,’ he kept saying bitterly. ‘They’ve forgotten we’re here.’

  ‘Ashton won’t forget us,’ I said. ‘He never has done yet.’

  ‘All right, then.’ Mason started slapping his cold hands against his ribs and stamping. ‘All right. They haven’t forgotten us. But they’ve left us stuck out here where we’ll be spotted sure as eggs are eggs. We’ll spend the night in somebody else’s guardroom.’

  ‘At least it’ll be warmer and drier than this,’ Locky said.

  ‘They’ll not spot us,’ I pointed out. ‘They can only come on us from the west, and they’ll have what light there is behind them. We’ve got this wall and the bushes behind us. They’ll never see us before we see them.’

  Mason stopped flapping and stared at the leaden horizon more cheerfully. ‘I hadn’t thought of that, old fruit,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘Yes, when I consider it, troops, perhaps I’ve chosen a good position after all.’

  ‘Only you didn’t choose it,’ Murray said sourly. ‘Fen did.’

  The rain came down h
arder as it grew later, solidly, effortlessly, with no sign of stopping, and the water, running off the field behind us and down the bank where we were crouching, began to form in a little rivulet in the limp grass at the bottom of the ditch. Mason began to grow impatient again.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said. ‘What a perfectly blood-stained way of spending an evening. Anybody in favour of a retreat?’

  ‘You’re the corporal,’ I said. ‘You decide.’

  Murray interrupted irritably. ‘How do you expect to learn anything,’ he said in his eager exalted way, ‘if you just pull back every time it rains? We’ll have plenty of rain when we get out there.’

  Mason was looking uncertainly about him, hating the weather but stirred by Murray’s challenge.

  ‘Well, Appleby said we should stay here,’ he agreed.

  Second Lieutenant Appleby was a tall young man with dark-ringed yellow eyes and a ginger toothbrush moustache who’d been attached to the company. He’d been a sergeant in the Gloucesters and he’d arrived with a group of quiet-mannered, tired-looking men from France to teach us that the real fighting was vastly different from the theoretical stuff we’d been learning.

  ‘Bombs are important,’ he’d told us. ‘And the pick and shovel.’

  He’d proved to us it wasn’t a good idea after all to dig trenches on the slope of a hill overlooking enemy positions, because there they’d be spotted at once and promptly blown out of existence by artillery fire. The place, it seemed, for constructing trenches was over the brow of the hill, or in hollows, and the method was to follow the line of the country so that aircraft couldn’t spot them.

  He’d pooh-poohed the theories on rifle-fire that we’d been taught and claimed it was more important to learn to shoot fast than to shoot accurately at great distance If we were rushed, it seemed, a field of fire of two hundred yards was sufficient to wipe an enemy off the face of the earth.

  ‘At two hundred yards’ range,’ he’d said, ‘rapid fire is the most dreadful medium of destruction yet devised in warfare. At Mons they thought we were armed with machine guns.’

  It had all sounded like good sense, and as Appleby’s nerves weren’t all they might have been after Mons and Le Cateau, and he sometimes appeared on parade in the afternoons glassy-eyed, bad-tempered and swaying, we’d got into the habit of taking no notice of him.

  So we stayed where we were, with Mason fretting miserably, certain we’d been forgotten, and Eph Lott and MacKinley and a few more huddled under the wall trying to keep out of the rain.

  There was a scrape of a match as someone lit a cigarette and a splash as a stone was knocked from the wall and fell into the rivulet of water by our feet. Then Eph shuffled restlessly.

  ‘Let’s find a barn,’ he suggested. ‘Make a fire. ’Ave some grub. I’m so hungry I could eat a mangy pup.’

  Mason gave a harsh laugh. ‘A fire?’ he said. ‘Up here at Blackmires? What’ll we burn? Nothing grows up here but heather.’

  ‘Well, we can try for nothing.’

  ‘Appleby said to avoid barns,’ Murray said, his voice rising.

  All that we’d learned about taking cover in farm buildings or plantations or woods had also had to be rapidly unlearned on the arrival of Appleby. Much to my amazement, it seemed that the safest place in battle was a small hole in the middle of a large field that wasn’t marked on a map, because there the enemy’s range-takers would find it hard to gauge the exact distance.

  We sat a little longer, huddled in sodden greatcoats, miserably contemplating the wet countryside and the fading light, then someone suggested a move again and the argument cracked to life once more.

  ‘I say toss up for it,’ Tom Creak said. ‘’Eads we go. Tails we stay. Or draw lots.’

  ‘Let’s vote for it,’ Spring offered.

  Mason took off his cap and shook the water from it. His face was only a blur now in the increasing dusk. ‘This isn’t the Houses of bloody Parliament,’ he said. ‘This is the Army. We don’t have debates and take votes.’

  ‘Well, we ought to.’

  ‘Up the Reds!’ Henny Cuthbert said gloomily, his long face longer than ever.

  We began to laugh and Mason started to get a little irritable. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You’re all so blasted full of ideas, what do you suggest?’

  ‘I suggest a game of ’alfpenny nap,’ Eph grunted.

  ‘Come on, Mason,’ Spring encouraged. ‘You’re the man with all the power and authority. You’re the lance-corporal. Let’s hear those stentorian commands ring out. What are we to do?’

  Mason shook his head uncertainly. He clearly wanted to go home as much as anyone else, but he was scared stiff of Appleby and the possibility of losing his stripe.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s bloody wet, isn’t it? What do you suggest, Fen?’

  ‘Stay here,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  Locky grinned. ‘He’s got the best spot. He’s under a bush. That’s why.’

  Mason looked perplexed. ‘You think we should?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Murray replied firmly, far less daunted by the weather than by what he considered a lamentable lack of martial ardour on Mason’s part. ‘Give ’em the old rapid fire. Remember what Appleby said: “The most dreadful medium of destruction yet devised in warfare.”’

  Locky raised his head. ‘It struck me at the time,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘that if we can wipe them off the face of the earth as easily as all that, what’s to stop ’em returning the compliment when we play away.’

  ‘If you’d read your little history books as a boy,’ Tim Williams, the history lecturer, commented, ‘you’d have noticed that the power of the rifle in defence has been growing ever since the American Civil War.’

  Murray fidgeted restlessly. This sort of talk always made him uneasy. He had absolute faith in his destiny as a saviour of mankind, and in the skill of the people set above us. He liked life to be orderly and simple, and felt that everyone else should have the same faith that he did.

  ‘They’ll not stop us when we get out there,’ he claimed stoutly.

  Mason shivered and started to slap his arms against his sides again.

  ‘It’s just a game,’ he snorted. ‘Designed to find the officers something to write down in their little notebooks.’

  ‘It’s a curious fallacy among the young,’ Locky commented gently, ‘that it’s possible to do any job without bothering first to learn it. You were always inclined to that view as a reporter, I seem to remember, Lance-Corporal Mason.’

  He was speaking in his normal quiet voice, devoid of anger or irritability or weariness or even boredom. He sounded as though he were laughing, in fact, and Mason swung round on him angrily.

  ‘I suppose you’re enjoying all this Mr Bloody Deputy Chief Reporter Private Haddo,’ he said sourly.

  Locky chuckled. ‘I fortify myself,’ he said, ‘with the thought that if I can do it properly it might help me to survive the war. Six months ago, I foolishly presented myself burning with patriotic fire at the Drill Hall and was promply bereft of my name and forced to answer three-score questions and ten about myself ranging from stupidity to sheer impertinence. I had my head viciously shorn of its hair by an uncontrolled farmer with sheep-clippers. I’ve sworn a great oath and had my number stamped indelibly all over my person. I’ve long since realised that I’ve made the greatest mistake of my life, but, loving my home and having a few quid in the bank and hoping one day to marry and raise more little Haddos like myself, I’m determined to emerge at the end of it alive enough to enjoy it all. I’m therefore learning to make use of cover and trying not very successfully to fire round it instead of over it – in the manner of Appleby and the good Bold. When I finally get a rifle that shoots straight, I should be quite an expert.’

  There seemed to be no answer.

  In the end we stayed where we were and caught the patrol we were waiting for, and Mason got a pat on the back from Appleby for his determination.

 
; 5

  By the time the Germans sank the Lusitania in May 1915 the war had begun to change.

  Gas had been used against the Canadians at Ypres and was likely to be used again, and its appearance opened up a whole new series of horrors. Gallipoli had started in a welter of blood and failure, and the need for that Big Push for which they were supposed to be saving the Kitchener armies seemed to be growing daily more pressing. Things were going none too well out there and the casualties in France were mounting rapidly. In spite of the strangely static front, the papers were filled monotonously with lists of dead and wounded and the Post’s roll-of-honour column ran on to other pages now.

  Men I’d known appeared briefly under the single heading FOR KING AND COUNTRY and then were forgotten for ever. Magnus who’d been one of the first to leave the newspaper with Ashton and Sainsbury and old Corker, was back in the city, minus an arm and looking ten years older, and suddenly, in spite of his youth, beyond our reach, strangely withdrawn and unanxious to meet us. He told us Sainsbury had died of fever on some Greek island no one had ever heard of on his way to the Dardanelles and before he’d even heard a shot fired in anger. The Lusitania was only one more stone that marked the passage of the war.

  The night the news came through, Locky, Frank Mason and I had sneaked out of camp for the evening. Officially, we were supposed to be confined to company quarters, but the 10th Battalion was furnishing the guard that night and for the promise of a drink we found someone who agreed not to press too hard for our passes at the gate when we returned.

  Locky set off on his own because he hadn’t so far to go, and Mason and I got a lift into town from a second lieutenant in the 10th, who had a yellow bull-nosed Morris runabout. He crammed us into the dickey seat, both of us furtively eyeing the guardroom, and we roared and jiggled down the hill, through Parkland and Sidepool, our feet on the mudguards, holding on to our hats with one hand and to the car with the other. The second lieutenant hadn’t had the car long and hadn’t much idea how to drive. His contribution seemed to be to take the brake off and open the throttle as wide as he could. We weren’t sorry when we arrived.