Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  ‘They can’t throw me out,’ Murray said loudly. ‘Not now. Not after all this time.’

  Locky looked up from where he was reading a book, sitting on the pavement, his feet in the gutter, absorbed, indifferent to the discomfort, the boredom and the uproar as he always was. ‘If I were you,’ he said dryly, ‘I’d be inclined to lay low and say nothing. You know what happens to little boys who tell lies about their age.’

  Murray grinned. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They end up as soldiers in France.’

  We all pretended it was only because we’d gone so far that it would be a waste not to go the rest of the way. But the truth was that there was a tremendous pride in the battalion which had never been put into us by the artificial means of propaganda. We knew we were the pick of our northern city and we’d acquired a reputation for outmarching and outshooting everybody else.

  But it wasn’t just prowess that made us what we were, not just comradeship. It was something more, an awareness, perhaps, that we all came from the same place and that any letting down of the side would be heard of at once at home. Our friends knew each other, some of us were related even – there were several sets of brothers like the Mandys – we’d gone to the same schools, attended the same churches, followed the same football teams and chased the same girls. And we had an immense confidence in ourselves and nothing in the world could induce us to feel we weren’t needed – every single one of us.

  We felt we were soldiers now. Only ordeal by battle could tell us how good we were, but there was a feeling which ran through the whole battalion like a bright thread of courage, that we shouldn’t at this stage be cheated of the chance to prove ourselves.

  In my despairing moments, when things didn’t seem to be going right, I sometimes wondered how we’d behave if we were ever faced with some situation that hadn’t occurred to our instructors, some desperate chance that might arise when we’d been separated from the directions of the staff. What we’d learned was mostly theoretical and only the colonel and Appleby and Bold and Corker and one or two others could say with any certainty how they’d react to danger.

  If the colonel were to fall, I thought, was Ashton capable of taking his place? If Ashton fell, could young Welch step into his shoes? If Welch died, could some sergeant take command? And if our sergeants were hit, could we? I often doubted it.

  But when those thoughts frightened me, I pushed them away hurriedly; and pride, both in myself and in the battalion, didn’t let them come often. Surely, I reassured myself, that native intelligence that had enabled so many of us to do well in our civilian jobs would help us on any battlefield.

  In the end, only about fifteen were sent home, and they were mostly the troublemakers and the shirkers, who the colonel was glad to be rid of and who on the whole were glad to be rid of us. Since they’d picked us so carefully in the first days of the battalion’s existence, and told us more than once that our physique equalled that of the Guards, they couldn’t honestly throw out anyone on medical grounds.

  But we were still greatly over strength, and someone had the much brighter idea of sending for the Ministry of Munitions people, who descended on us unexpectedly and began at once to weed out the tradesmen, the turners, the fitters and the machinists. There’d been a tremendous outcry about the shortage of ammunition after Loos, and Sir John French was in danger of being superseded as Commander-in-Chief and Lloyd George had taken over the Ministry of Munitions. Even Kitchener was being edged out of office for the faults that had become obvious in the system.

  There were three of the investigators, conscientious little men with glasses and well-pressed suits, sitting at a table on which they’d spread a blanket and a Union Jack. They had all our files there and looked very important. They were the sort of men who always find themselves on tribunals and city councils or in Parliament; the sort of men who spend a lifetime doing public work, poking their noses into everyone else’s affairs, dressing up their remarks in high-flown parliamentary language, all very important and efficient and unimaginative, reducing patriotism to the loveless proportions of a disputed footpath.

  They tried hard to pin down Barraclough, who’d been a foreman mechanic at the Post, but he hedged cautiously, blinking his pale eyelashes indignantly. ‘My job was to see that the paper didn’t tear and the printing inkwells were full,’ was all that he’d admit to. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘That’s not what it says here,’ they pointed out, and they put him aside with fifty-odd other men. But, when they weren’t looking, he sneaked away to see Ashton, his pale hair spiky with rage, and Ashton, wearing his hurt-father look, was unable to say ‘no’ to him and demanded that he be allowed to remain, on the grounds that he was essential to battalion transport – at that time one lorry and a lot of horse-drawn carts.

  It was about this time that we lost the colonel, who was sent to command an Indian battalion in the Middle East and departed thankfully for the warmer climate. In his place, the adjutant, arranged that his brother, a little terrier of a man with service in the Durhams, should take over. The new colonel was a city man like the rest of us, but he’d been in France and, after being blown up, had lost an eye and acquired a stammer which in no way, however, detracted from his efficiency, and he was given a spontaneous cheer when he first appeared on parade.

  ‘He’s got the Military Cross,’ Murray whispered. ‘I can see the ribbon. That’s a leg up for us, if you like.’

  In spite of his wounds, Pine was a hard-boiled soldier, and he told us firmly what he expected of us. He stood with his feet apart, his hands behind his back, the black patch over his sightless eye sinister against his pale face, his small frame tensed and eager, holding our attention as he talked. At his feet sat the little white terrier he’d inherited with the battalion and which had finally become part of the official presence of the commanding officer.

  ‘You ch-chaps – have done damn’ well,’ he said, his jaw working as he struggled to get the words out. ‘It’s taken you only a year to reach a – state that a new regiment in p-p-peacetime would have taken three years to reach. So we’re – not going to let you go stale by overdoing it.’

  There were cheers from the rear which were immediately squashed by Corker.

  ‘Because of this,’ Pine went on, ‘I’ve come to the b-battalion with something that ought to make me very dear to your hearts. I’ve b-brought something you haven’t had before – leave.’

  The burst of cheering that followed the announcement drowned all the protests from the sergeants, and Pine stood in front of us with a broad grin on his face, fingering one of the buttons of his jacket.

  ‘Thought y-you’d appreciate that,’ he said.

  We played cards most of the way home, crammed into a special train with all our kit, very conscious of ourselves with our best khaki and the hard-bitten look we all thought we wore by now. In the next compartment, in a fug of cigarette smoke, they were singing one of Spring’s ribald songs and outside in the corridor the Mandy brothers were arguing about some girl they’d picked up at Romstone.

  ‘She will,’ Billy Mandy said.

  ‘She won’t,’ Tommy Mandy said.

  ‘She will, you know.’

  ‘She bloody won’t, you know.’

  Young Murray had climbed on to the luggage-rack for comfort, his face a little lost and homesick. He’d shown no interest in anything but the business of becoming a soldier from the day he’d joined up, but now you could see the desire to get home burning out of his face.

  Locky sat silently in a corner, reading a book, curiously untouched by all the excitement, though I’d thought that going home would be the one thing that might have roused him from the curiously detached state he always managed to preserve.

  ‘Suppose we go and get killed,’ Murray said suddenly out of the blue, the words coming unexpectedly through the excited conversation round the card game.

  ‘Well, suppose we do?’ Mason said. ‘What’s bothering your baby mind, son?’

  He
didn’t look up and didn’t show much interest. We never thought much of death, obsessed as we were with life and winning the war.

  ‘It’s just a thought, that’s all,’ Murray said. ‘What happens if we do get killed? Will it make any difference? I mean, what’ll they think of us? I suppose somebody’d write and tell my mother, wouldn’t they?’

  Mason laughed, but Murray was not to be put off.

  ‘It’s not a joke,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It’s a big problem.’

  Locky looked up. ‘I think it is, Murray,’ he said. ‘People do occasionally get done to death in wartime.’

  ‘There were a lot killed at Ypres,’ Murray said thoughtfully. ‘Something went wrong, by the look of things.’

  ‘Are you afraid, Murray?’ Locky said gently.

  Murray looked down at him from his perch, his eyes wide. ‘Me?’ he said, surprised. ‘No, ’course not! Only, well, just suppose I got a bullet in the heart…’

  All Murray’s conceptions of death seemed to be neat clean ones, and usually included a bullet in the heart. It often seemed to me that death in battle could easily be a much more untidy affair than that.

  ‘Suppose I got a bullet in the heart,’ he said. ‘Suppose I just fell and nobody noticed. Who’d be aware that I’d tried to do my duty?’

  ‘I think it’d leak out somehow,’ Locky said gently.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, we’ve had to listen to you – often when we didn’t want to – for the best part of a year now. In fact, many a time, when training was slow suicide, the flat and toneless day became sheer music for me as I heard you giving tongue to your own particular brand of patriotism.’

  ‘You’re sneering at me.’

  Locky looked up. ‘I promise you I’m not,’ he said seriously. ‘I solemnly swear by God’s holy trousers that I meant every word I said. If it weren’t for people like you, who see this affair in Europe as something rather above the murk of a dirty political squabble, there wouldn’t be much point in fighting at all, would there?’

  Murray stared down at him, like most of us, always uncertain whether to take him seriously or not, then he shrugged.

  ‘I don’t want anybody to tell me I’m being noble or heroic, like they do,’ he said earnestly. ‘That’s all eyewash. But if anything should happen, I’d just like it to be known that I’d pulled my weight. That’s all.’

  Our arrivals and departures always seemed to be the excuse for an official occasion, and when the train pulled in the Mayor was there waiting, with the city councillors and the station-master and a couple of bands. The platform was jammed with relatives and friends but they all had to wait until some long-winded old donkey had made a speech. Then, as they let us off the train, everything became pandemonium, with kids shrieking, dogs barking and people shouting and laughing and crying all at the same time.

  I saw Colonel Pine kissing a pretty girl and Ashton arm-in-arm with his wife. Young Murray, his brow still troubled, was being swept away by a whole crowd of noisy relatives. Appleby disappeared with a woman who looked like a barmaid, and Welch’s family were there en masse, with two enormous cars, to meet him. To my surprise I saw Molly Miles go quietly up to Locky and put her arm through his, and they left together.

  ‘Now, that’s a new one on me,’ Mason said thoughtfully, staring after them. ‘I used to think she was my girl.’

  ‘It doesn’t look as though she is now,’ I said, enjoying the look on his face. ‘God, how many girls do you want at a time?’

  ‘Master Henry Lockwood Haddo’s a bloody dark horse,’ Mason said, a faint trace of indignation in his voice. ‘I always did say so – with that quiet smile of his and that way he has of hiding behind his own face Ah, well, I’m going for a beer. Going to drown my sorrows in drink. Coming?’

  As we set off for the exit, I saw Earl FitzJimmy, who was said to have lost two of his sons in France with the Guards and a third in the Dardanelles. There was no one now to carry on the title, and he seemed to be taking it hard and looked tired and ill. But he waved to anyone he recognised and wished us luck.

  Locky’s father was at the station entrance, waiting in the big grey Lanchester, and I watched anxiously lest Helen should appear. But there was no sign of her and, after skirmishing round each other for a while in case she turned up, Mason and I went off to have a drink.

  ‘Here’s to women,’ Mason said, hoisting his glass. ‘Bless ’em all – particularly one of ’em.’

  ‘Which one?’ I asked.

  Mason grinned. ‘Helen,’ he said. ‘Who do you think?’

  He slapped me on the back. ‘God, what a face,’ he said. He paused, then put his arm round my shoulders. ‘Hard luck, Fen,’ he said sympathetically. ‘But we’re free, white and twenty-one and all’s fair in love and war. No ill feeling, I hope, old sport.’

  There was quite a lot of ill feeling on my part but I could hardly say so.

  ‘Have you been seeing a lot of Helen?’ I asked, trying not to appear concerned.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘She’s been writing to me.’

  ‘She didn’t write to me.’

  ‘Obviously you haven’t got what it takes.’

  ‘You’ve got more than your share.’

  ‘Well, that’s the way it is.’

  He was staring down at me, handsome, confident, certain of himself. He’d spent hours doing things with his cap which gave it a rakish devil-may-care look that I could never get into mine. I always felt I looked like a bus conductor in mine, and even when I took the wire out it merely seemed to deflate and die, with none of the devilish lines Frank’s always managed to have. He never seemed to have difficulty charming the girls around him, and to me finding it hard to charm even one, he seemed to have more than his fair share of the world’s good things.

  ‘You’re not kidding me, Frank, are you?’ I said. ‘You really have been writing to Helen?’

  He became serious at once. In spite of my attempts to appear indifferent, I expect it showed all over my face.

  ‘I’m not kidding,’ he said. ‘Want me to show you the letters?’

  ‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘No. I don’t want to see the letters. I only wanted to know. Just for certain.’

  He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, Fen,’ he said gently. ‘It’s just the way things have worked out. Was it important?’

  ‘Lord, no,’ I said, the words like ashes in my mouth. ‘There are other fish in the sea.’

  ‘Good, then. No hard feelings?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘You going to bow yourself off the stage now?’

  ‘Not much point in hanging around, is there?’

  He grinned and slapped me on the back. ‘Let’s have a drink, Fen,’ he suggested, ‘We ought to shake hands, you and I. It’s been a good clean fight, old fruit.’

  We got Spring and MacKinley to join us, and eventually several of the other men who had to wait for buses to outlying villages. Finally, when Mason had gone, I teamed up with Spring, who like me had no settled home.

  ‘What are you going to do with your leave, Fen?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. I’d been busily making plans all the way home but Mason seemed to have put an end to all those. He and I had been chasing round each other to get at Helen for so long, I’d merely accepted it without thinking. Somehow, I suppose, I’d imagined Mason would always be there in the background. Now, though, it seemed I was in the background, and there didn’t seem to be much point in trying any more. I’d better put it away from me, I thought. No sense in brooding over things.

  It crossed my mind that I might go to London, which was supposed to be a wonderful place for leave, but it seemed to be an effort just then to find another train and I couldn’t be bothered. I was beset with the wavering uncertainty of a young man whose plans had collapsed about his ears. ‘God knows what I’ll do with it,’ I said. ‘What about you? What’ll you do?’

  Spring grinned. ‘Sleep,’ he said luxuriously. ‘Eat
. Drink. Go out with girls. Let’s start by drinking some beer.’

  But our night out together didn’t quite come off. The city had changed in a subtle way. Like Romstone it had grown shabbier as people economised and builders’ yards closed down for lack of manpower. The drab houses round the station were a shade drabber than they’d been before, and there seemed to be a complete absence of bright colour in a dark landscape that was made even more monotonous by the number of uniforms about. There were a lot more soldiers about than there had been, and a few officers who looked obvious frauds, temporary gentlemen of the worst type, who were clearly intending to sit out the war in the greatest possible comfort. They belonged to the navvies’ battalions or curious new units which had sprung up in the vast dumps around the city.

  The papers were still full of casualties and I was startled to see Willie Julius’ face staring out at me from the For King and Countrys column.

  ‘I knew him,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ Spring said.

  The place was still cheerful, but there was an undertone now of suspicion, as though people were beginning to suspect the war wasn’t going to be the picnic they’d expected it to be. The enthusiastic blood-and-thunder stuff of August 1914 had given place after Loos to something a shade grimmer. It wasn’t the Absent Minded Beggar and Soldiers Three who were being extolled now, so much as the craftier Old Bill of Bairnsfather’s cartoons. People had begun to realise the war was no longer a matter of cheering and charging, but a case of setting your teeth and hanging on.

  Prices were rising rapidly and food was growing more difficult to obtain. The parks had all been torn up for training grounds and every scrap of open space seemed to have horsed transport parked on it, with pamphlets on the gates from the Dumb Friends’ League appealing to the men inside to treat their animals as chums. Everyone seemed a little more noisy than normal, particularly the tough, tired-looking men in goat-skin jackets from France, who expected to be pushing up the daisies before long and naturally went for the beer and the girls.