Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  ‘Stupefaction’s setting in,’ I said. ‘That’s the trouble.’

  ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘Same to you, with knobs on.’

  We got the driver to stop before we reached the camp and we walked the rest of the way in silence. As we reached the wire fence, we paused, wondering how to get in without being caught.

  People who got themselves put on charges weren’t very popular. Murray, for one, thought it was letting the side down. And there was always the knowledge that anyone who was a troublemaker could be booted out of the battalion with very little difficulty at all.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Locky said as we stood staring over the darkened huts, and the tall square shape of the water tower against the the sky. ‘What’s next?’

  ‘Let’s get through the wire,’ I suggested.

  ‘Suppose they catch us?’

  ‘They won’t. The grass is long. We can almost reach the hut from this corner without standing up.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve tried it before. Let’s have a go.’

  We wriggled on our stomachs through the damp grass under the wire and headed at a crouch towards the dark block of shadows that was the huts. We had crossed half of the patch of grass when we saw something move in front of us, and we froze to the ground, panting.

  ‘’Alt! Who goes there?’ The voice came sharply across the thin night air, and made us jump.

  ‘Where is he?’ Locky said.

  ‘He’s near the gate,’ I said. ‘We’re all right. He’s got the wind up, that’s all.’

  ‘Wind up or not, he’s coming this way.’

  ‘’Alt or I fire!’

  ‘What do we do now, for God’s sake?’ Locky was hugging the ground and his voice sounded muffled as though he were laughing.

  ‘It’s not so bloody funny,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I thought it was. Come on, Fen, you’re the man of action. What do we do?’

  ‘Run like hell,’ I said.

  ‘Suppose he really does shoot?’

  ‘Don’t talk barmy,’ I said. ‘He’s bluffing, there’s nothing on this camp that’s straight enough to hit us.’

  Locky raised his head cautiously. ‘I think it’s Bold,’ he said.

  ‘Oh God! Now what?’

  ‘Let’s throw ourselves on his mercy.’

  ‘He doesn’t know the meaning of the word.’

  ‘Let’s stay where we are,’ Locky suggested. ‘He might never see us.’

  ‘Not on your life,’ I said. ‘He’s got eyes in his behind. You go that way. I’ll go this. He can’t catch us both and there’s no point in both of us being on a charge. And if only one gets away, he doesn’t give himself up. Agreed?’

  ‘Fair enough. Ready?’

  ‘Yes. Off you go.’

  It was when Locky had gone that I realised he was heading for the shadows and I’d picked the wrong direction. I knew I was caught. Bold was too much of an old soldier to be baffled by two enemies at different points. He went for the one he could see and appeared smack in front of me. Thin as a lath and as high as a house he seemed, from where I was crouching in the grass. I was tempted to run for it, but there wasn’t much point, so I stopped.

  ‘Aha!’ he said cheerfully. ‘What the hell do you think you’re up to there? Rabbitin’?’

  I stood up and he shone his torch on me, blinding me.

  I heard him drew his breath in quickly, then he gave a gusty sigh. ‘Cor stone the bloody crows,’ he said wearily. ‘Not you again, Fenner?’

  6

  I was still finishing my period of detention when we were informed we were to move from Blackmires to Romstone on the East Coast.

  Murray, as usual, was the Perseus who brought us the news. I never did find out how it was that Murray always got to know the news first, but he always did. It was almost as though he hung around outside the orderly room waiting for something to happen. He spent most of his days in a tizzy of excitement and fear and indignation, and inevitably he came up more than once with what was nothing more than a camp buzz. But this time he was right and he waltzed me round, full pack, rifle and all, as I returned from the guardroom.

  ‘We’re going,’ he chirruped. ‘We’re going! One step nearer the war!’

  ‘Can’t say I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’ll be a change to see the inside of a different guardroom.’

  He began to help me off with my equipment, still hopping about and frantic with excitement.

  ‘Just think,’ he said. ‘No digging. No building. No road-making.’

  ‘And a fresh batch of girls!’ Mason said.

  Murray’s mood changed abruptly, as though he regarded the comment as a flippancy not in keeping with the correct attitude for war.

  ‘They say they don’t like troops to grow attached to any one place,’ he said sternly.

  ‘Who says they don’t?’ Spring demanded.

  ‘Well, they don’t.’

  ‘Well, go on, General, tell us why.’

  Murray scowled. ‘They just don’t,’ he said. ‘They’ve moved the Manchester battalions long since. Now it’s our turn. I expect the idea’s that they think we should learn to do without wives and girlfriends. Sort of in preparation for the real separation when it comes.’

  All Murray’s thoughts and opinions were directed by his dedication to the battle he was going to fight before long. All harshness, all discipline, all disappointments were subordinated to and explained by this greater thing that hovered over us, this privilege we’d been fortunate enough to have bestowed on us.

  We left Blackmires at six o’clock in the morning led by a Royal Engineers band playing the regimental march. On the city outskirts a colliery band in scarlet and gold was waiting for us, and tagged on behind. It was made up now, I noticed, largely of older men and younger boys, but they’re great ones for brass bands in the north and the noise was still enough to wake the dead, and people appeared on the pavements in spite of the early hour. Flags hung from windows all along the route and banners with goodwill messages were strung across the streets. ON TO BERLIN they said, and UP, THE CITY BATTALION, and things like that.

  Outside the Town Hall, we were formed up in a hollow square and addressed by the Lord Mayor.

  ‘Never forget,’ he said ponderously, ‘that you’re taking the good name of this city with you. We shall await reports of your gallantry and heroism, in full certainty that when the war ends – perhaps next year – you will all have played your part.’

  He seemed to go on half the morning, dwelling far longer, it seemed to me, on the city we came from than on us. Somewhere along the line he lost sight of the battalion and, as he developed his paean of praise for the Corporation transport system, I could see restless twitchings going on all around me.

  It was warm and we were tired, because most of us had been on our feet since long before daylight, and our packs were heavy and dragging at our shoulders. I could see Bold in front of me, rigid as a ramrod, not a muscle moving, intense disgust expressed clearly even by the back of his neck, and Appleby, fidgeting a little restlessly, his expression wild.

  Finally, long after I’d lost interest, someone called for three cheers for us, and they were given by the crowd that was filling the road behind us, holding up the trams and the traffic, the shrill cries of the women and the children coming through the deep-throated roar of the men. We returned the compliment enthusiastically, thankful the ordeal was ending, then we formed ranks once more and set off for the station, women and children in dozens alongside the marching column, arm-in-arm with husbands and brothers and sons. Every window seemed to have sprouted flags, Union Jacks, tricolours, pictures of the King and Queen and the Prince of Wales, and miscellaneous bunting.

  The sun was just beginning to warm the drab little houses among the cutlery works, and the soot-rotten bricks glowed in its yellow light.

  There was another crowd outside the station and as we approach
ed hats, sticks and handkerchiefs started waving agitatedly, and a low self-conscious murmur began as they worked up to a cheer. We were marching at ease now, joking and shouting, women stumbling along beside us, getting in the way, some weeping, some laughing, all excited and a little hysterical.

  As we reached the bottom of the hill, we were called to attention, and swung up the station approach in fine style, past horses and waggons and field kitchens and piles of kit which had been dumped in the roadway outside the goods entrance, all ready for loading. We marched through the sooty columns that were still plastered with Skegness is so Bracing and notices for cheap fares, led by our own band and accompanied by two others. The reserve company, which was staying behind, was drawn up alongside the booking office and saluted us with the colours that the Mothers’ Unions had stitched for us as we stamped on to the platform, the shouted orders echoing in the sooty glass-and-iron dome of the station.

  We piled arms on the platform and were allowed to fall out to say goodbye to friends, while they loaded up the last of the equipment in the goods yard. Molly Miles from the Post picture library was there and seemed to be seeing Locky off; and Arnold Holroyd’s wife, Ethel; and Murray’s mother. I thought and hoped Helen would have come to see Locky off too, but there was only his father.

  ‘She’s coming later,’ Mason announced confidently.

  ‘How do you know?’ I demanded.

  He grinned. ‘Saw her last night, old fruit,’ he said.

  I stared. I’d been trying to telephone her from the orderly room half the evening. I’d bribed one of the clerks because I wasn’t allowed to leave camp, but the maid had answered and said she was out. Now I knew where.

  ‘No wonder I couldn’t get in touch with her,’ I said bitterly.

  Mason grinned again. ‘The skivvy said someone had been telephoning while we were out,’ he said. ‘Was it you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, well.’ He chuckled. ‘The things you do get up to, to be sure. Of course, if you will go and get yourself in Bold’s bad books. It was hard luck, that, at a time like this.’

  I pushed through the crowds, cursing Bold and dogging Mason’s footsteps, determined that he shouldn’t catch Helen on her own without me having a chance to speak to her too. But she hadn’t come by the time the train arrived and we were both beginning to lose our tempers with each other.

  ‘My God,’ Mason said bitterly. ‘Can’t a chap look for a girl without other people hanging around all the time?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not if the chap’s you, and the girl’s Helen, and the other people’s me.’

  Eventually the order to entrain was given and they shoved us in, eight to a compartment, and in a few moments the platform was empty and the windows of every carriage were full of laughing faces. Pine, the adjutant, who was staying behind to clear things up, went along shaking hands, and we reached out to grab his fist.

  ‘So long, sir,’ Murray shouted. ‘See you later.’

  ‘Mind you don’t miss your putty medal!’

  ‘We’ll keep a few Fritzes back for you if you’re delayed.’

  Then the Lord Mayor and the Lady Mayoress came along, and old FitzJimmy, waving and shouting, and, I thought, a little too full of whisky, considering the early hour.

  He shook every hand he could reach and Eph sat back, awed, staring at the palm of his hand and his thick red fingers.

  ‘Gawd,’ he said. ‘If that don’t take the bloody biscuit! Me, Eph Lott, shaking ’ands with a ruddy earl! It’s amazing what a war does for a chap.’

  Mason and I were still fighting each other for a place in the window, staring down the platform for Helen and pumping Locky with questions.

  ‘She’s late,’ I pointed out.

  ‘She promised,’ Mason said agitatedly. ‘Last night.’

  A whistle blew and Mason groaned as the crowd began their final yell, their final waving of arms, handkerchiefs and Union Jacks. We all waved back like mad, cheering and shouting, and the train jerked.

  ‘She’s there!’ Mason shouted, heaving violently in the window so that I banged my chin on the glass, and I saw Helen appear on the platform just behind Molly Miles and Locky’s father. She ran forward, looking a little lost, then stopped, her hand to her mouth, then she started to wave frantically.

  ‘My God,’ I said. ‘What bloody awful luck!’ I gave Mason a shove and got an arm out. ‘For God’s sake, get over, man!’

  Mason pushed me back. ‘Helen,’ he bawled. ‘Helen!’

  His big body was filling the window and I couldn’t get my head out and I had to edge one shoulder below him and try to wave like that.

  I caught a brief glimpse of her, a slender figure in blue, then we were passing the sooty windows of the workshops along the Queen’s Road embankment, which were full of cheering men and girls and agitated flags. The furnace-workers outside Liddell, Moore and Hart’s were waving their caps among the purple-grey bars of cooling iron and the smoking new bogey wheels stacked in the yard, and all the way along the Enfield Road the crowds were standing, with the kids they’d turned out of the schools and lined up to cheer us as we went by.

  Mason sat down in the seat next to the window, among the piled equipment that we’d dumped hurriedly in an effort to get nearest to the platform.

  ‘That’s that,’ he said flatly. ‘What a damned shame! Didn’t give a chap chance to say goodbye.’

  Romstone was a dreary little place where we dug trenches all over the sand dunes, then waited for the sea to fill them in again so we could dig some more the following day, while all the time along the beach the tireless batteries of horse artillery wheeled in and out of white posts set in the ground, limbers bumping and swaying and instructors bawling their contempt from the sidelines.

  ‘You blokes want bicycle ’andles,’ they shouted. ‘We’ll never train you lot till someone invents a horse you can ride inside, like a bus.’

  We were now part of the new 4th Army and were brigaded with another Yorkshire battalion and two battalions from Lancashire. The whole area echoed to the tramp of men in khaki, and tents and huts were springing up outside every town and village. Work was being carried out in theatres, cinemas and halls wherever there was room. There were men in companies and squads, occupied in battalion and brigade and division drill; men of the machine gun section, engineers constructing bridges over every spare stream and pond and canal they could find; cavalrymen, motorcycle and bicycle corps, scouts, signallers; men at bayonet practice, men at musketry training, men learning transport; whole divisions marching or at manœuvres, skirmishing, charging up steep slopes and across the dunes, erecting barbed-wire defences, or just lying on the ground recovering.

  Here we learned to work with artillery and aircraft, little string-and-wire affairs that circled over us as we moved about, the sun shining on the varnished surfaces of their wings as they banked and caught the sun, with just the grinning face of the pilot, swathed in leather, leaning over the edge of the cockpit and an arm waving down to us.

  We were billeted in the basement rooms of Victorian boarding houses along the front, all of them darkened every night in case of Zeppelins or the hit-and-run raiders who’d shelled Whitby, Scarborough and Lowestoft from the sea. The esplanade and the beach where the kids had built their sandcastles not so long before were deserted most of the time, and the shelters were dilapidated, most of the glass smashed. The gaslamps were blue-painted and there was barbed wire everywhere in great looping black tangles, as sorrowful as the cries of the seabirds that spotted the promenade with white.

  ‘It looks like the last place God made,’ Locky commented, staring over the top of the railinged steps that led to our gas-lit basement quarters.

  ‘Perhaps it is,’ I said.

  We did our drilling on the front and our trench-assaulting among the dunes. After a while the silver ornaments began to reappear in our billets, and eventually we were surreptitiously moved into bedrooms which had been standing empty since all summer v
isitors had stopped. Brass bedsteads were given a rub up for us and the picture of ‘Hope’ was polished and the patchwork quilts were hung out of the windows to air in the sunshine.

  ‘We had to be careful,’ they told us shamefacedly. ‘They’re not all gentlemen like you lot.’

  We became part of the family, and, to save work, eventually moved in with them and helped with the chores, taking the place of sons who’d disappeared into other regiments and were probably now stationed in the place we’d just left. We sneaked out at night in their civilian clothes and sneaked in again when no one was looking. Love affairs developed inevitably. Barraclough was taken tea in bed every morning; and Murray found himself with a motherly old dear who so took to his rosy cheeks she provided transport in the form of a dog-cart from his billet to the little seafront school which had became company headquarters.

  We lived with them, ate with them, and in one or two notable cases like Eph Lott and Spring, the great lover, slept with them. Two men got married, rather abruptly.

  ‘It’s the sea air,’ Locky said.

  At Romstone we were taken over at last by the War Office, at one of those fantastic parades the Army loved so dearly, with the whole division standing for hours in a drizzling rain, while we were inspected by some elderly general who arrived late and, because of the weather, hurried through the affair and departed for the officers’-mess fire as fast as he could. Afterwards, they formed us up outside our huts, and the colonel came along and announced unexpectedly that, because the battalion was so much over strength, anyone who wanted his discharge could have it at once. All we had to do to get our freedom was inform the orderly room.

  The suggestion was received with the stunned silence of indignation. Even after a training that consisted in no small measure of building huts and making roads and rifle ranges, no one wanted to go home. That unreasonable optimistic faith that had brought us in wouldn’t let us back out now.

  As a result, the following week, the whole battalion was medically examined to pick out the best, and we queued up outside the little school that was sick quarters for hours to know our fate, trying not to smoke and to learn by heart the letters on the eye-chart in case of some dreadful mistake.