Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  As we waited, we were accosted by a horde of grubby little boys offering bottles of wine for sale, and long French loaves. They ran in and out of the ranks as we hitched up packs and adjusted straps, yelling and shrieking at the tops of their voices. Several of them were touting for their sisters, bright-eyed urchins who looked too young to know what they were offering.

  ‘She very nice,’ one of them said to me. ‘Not much money.’

  Some of the older women, like crows with their thin pinched faces and black dresses, were crying, the tears running unashamedly down their faces with the raindrops, and one of them touched Murray’s cheek with a gentle motherly gesture and called him a ‘pauvre p’tit’.

  He blushed and seemed flattered. ‘What’s she want?’ he demanded.

  ‘Nothing,’ Locky said. ‘She just says you’re a nice little boy.’

  Several men were writing letters as we waited and, in halting French and with a vast amount of gesturing, were asking the women to post them, giving them cigarettes in place of stamps.

  ‘No censor ’ere,’ Eph observed brightly. ‘Might as well get our last bit of love and kisses in without everybody reading all about it. No flowers by request. On with the bloody motley.’

  Frank Mason was busy with a dark-eyed girl who sidled up to him and was whispering urgently to him and smiling.

  ‘I don’t know what she wants,’ he said, ‘but here goes! Steady, the Buffs!’

  And he swept her into his arms and planted a smacking kiss full on her mouth. She shrieked and struggled for a moment, then she responded willingly, and a cheer went up.

  ‘Remember Kitchener’s message to the soldier going on active service,’ someone warned. ‘“While treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.”’

  ‘Kitchener’s a bachelor and doesn’t know what he’s talking about,’ Spring said.

  When the colonel had received his directions from an RTO sergeant with two wound stripes and a livid scar on his cheek, who appeared with a sheaf of cyclostyled instructions from an office just off the square, we set off again through the narrow streets to the squeal of fifes and the shrill cheers of the crowds, boots clattering on the cobbles and the lines of the steam-trams that ran from the port. There were lengthy halts as we were held up by traffic – motor vans with strange French names, high-wheeled heavy carts with squeaking wheels pulled by enormous horses, box-bodied cars, British army GS waggons with canvas hoods, and lorries with rectangular brass bonnets and square wooden mudguards. In spite of the icy rain, the streets still managed to have a strong summer smell of drains, and occasionally you could hear an accordion whining as someone tried to play ‘Tipperary’, and made it sound somehow like something saucy from a French revue.

  ‘Bravo, mon vieux!’ A grizzled-looking French cavalryman in a blue-grey uniform with a sabre and a long beard shook Billy Mandy’s hand as he passed, clinging to his fist and walking alongside him, his face a picture of welcome. ‘A Berlin! A bas les Boches!’

  ‘Same to you, mate,’ Billy grinned. ‘Nice to know Father Christmas is on our side.’

  A blowzy woman in black clothes and sabots and with breath smelling strongly of liquorice and garlic ran out and planted a kiss on my face and a child offered me a bunch of primroses. Only the old men in smocks and mufflers stared unemotionally at us we passed. You could see their thoughts on their faces, and their memories of Sedan and Metz and humiliation. They’d had their turn, they seemed to say. It was ours now. A few of them spat and drew their fingers across their throats and shouted ‘Allemands’ and ‘Verdun’, and as we reached the station one of them who seemed to be drunk and merrier than the rest came up alongside me and marched arm-in-arm for a while.

  There were no young men about anywhere and it came home forcefully to me just how many Frenchmen there must be in the firing line. There were only these grey-beards and soldiers left it seemed – the men of 1870 and the men of 1914.

  The old man at my side pointed at himself and jabbered at me in quick French I didn’t understand.

  ‘Soixante-dix,’ he said. ‘Moi. Soldat. Soixante-dix,’ and in the end I gathered he’d fought against the Germans in 1870.

  ‘That’s the stuff, Dad,’ Eph Lott grinned. ‘’Ere we are. They can git on with the war now.’

  The troop train seemed to be miles long and appeared to consist almost entirely of straw-filled grey-painted cattle trucks, stamped with the initials PLM and stencilled in white paint with 40 hommes, 8 chevaux.

  ‘Every mod con,’ Eph grinned. ‘Good beds. Five minutes from sea.’

  The confusion at the sidings, even to us – and by this time we were well used to the confusion of a battalion on the move – seemed worse than ever. Elderly smocked porters seemed to be everywhere, all shouting gibberish at us, and we’d still got our escort of small boys and dogs. There were a few German prisoners standing about in the station yard, handling equipment, pale silent men in grey-green uniforms who wore red-banded pork-pie caps. On their clothes were great patches of red and black and blue. They eyed us without hostility and even managed to smile and wave.

  ‘Germans,’ Murray breathed.

  ‘Don’t get too excited,’ Mason said. ‘They look as meek as Moses to me.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be?’ Spring said. ‘If I’d been taken prisoner and found myself in a cushy billet in the South of France, you wouldn’t get me trying to escape.’

  Locky, who could read French, managed to beg a newspaper from one of the porters and began to read it aloud to us. They were still holding on at Verdun, it seemed, but there was a great need, the leaders said quite plainly, for a relieving battle to be fought farther north, and it was high time their British allies made a move.

  ‘The sands are running out,’ Locky grinned. ‘They’re beginning to consider we should stop talking and get on with the washing.’

  ‘Well, you can tell Sir Douglas Haig he can go right ahead now,’ Mason announced. ‘Murray’s arrived!’

  It took most of the day to load the equipment, the horses and the field kitchens, the limbers and the waggons, then they marched us over from where we’d waited, smoking, bored, impatient and leg-weary, and crammed us into the trucks, drawing us up in companies and telling us off in fours, jamming us in until it seemed impossible we’d ever be able to sit down, turn round or even move.

  ‘It’s crowded in here,’ Henny Cuthbert wailed.

  ‘Pass along the car, please,’ Eph Lott shouted. ‘Standing room only. Have the correct fares ready!’

  We sat in the open doorways on the straw, shouting catcalls, while the officers walked past us with sheaves of papers, nervous and uncertain, and Bold and the sergeants tramped up and down to check any high-spirited attempt to jump out again. When a British Press photographer in army uniform came along to take our pictures, we stuck our shaven heads out in tiers and plagued him with idiotic instructions.

  ‘Me left’s me best profile,’ Eph shouted.

  ‘Hang on a minute till I part my hair,’ Catchpole grinned, running a hand over his cropped head.

  Finally, in a bloody smear of sunset, when they were just beginning to switch on the arc lights around the station, a whistle blew.

  ‘Half-time,’ someone shouted immediately, and Bold came along slamming the doors. The engine gave a tremendous sneeze of smuts and sparks, and you could hear the wheels spinning on the metals, then there was a violent jolt that threw us to the floor, and we started to move.

  ‘We’re off,’ Murray screamed excitedly. ‘Let’s give ’em a cheer, lads.’

  We were all growing a little bored and cold and hungry by this time, and because it seemed to warm us up we sat in our packed truck and cheered. The yell was taken up by the next truck and the next until it passed through the whole forty-seven that made up the train, and cheering we bumped and rattled over the points and out of Marseilles.

  We were four days in that damned train.

  The floors of the trucks, under the straw,
consisted of planks set an inch or so apart, presumably for washing out after cattle, and we had to lay our groundsheets on the floor to keep the draughts out. We could none of us lie down properly, so we sat up all that first night, through the mists of cold that put a frosty rime on the outside of the truck as the blood-red sunset turned to the blue-green glow of clear wintry darkness.

  Our breath formed little clouds of vapour, and mufflers and collars became damp with condensation as we played cards with freezing fingers by candlelight and sang all the old songs all over again – ‘Tipperary’, ‘Long, Long Trail’, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’. They were foolish and sentimental and not very clever but there was something nostalgic about them that was warming, and that was what we needed.

  We crouched over the cards until the candle burned out, then we sang again because it was too cold to sleep. Finally, with flurries of snow coming in through the ventilation slats above our heads, we dropped off into an uneasy, uncomfortable doze to the rattle-clack of the wheels over the rails, heads lolling against each other, feet entangled with equipment; overcoats and boots undone, heads on knees or across the next man’s thighs.

  It was surely the slowest train in the world. We reached Lyons the next morning and, as the train came to a halt, someone came along the platform shouting that tea was being served. We all poured out on to the snow-sprinkled platform, rubbing our prickling eyes and stretching limbs to get the life back into them. There was ice on the puddles and the wind that blew along the line had fangs and claws in it. If there was tea, it was forty-seven trucks away from us and none of D Company got any.

  There was a French Red Cross train opposite us and we all stood alongside, curious, sympathetic, a little awed, trying to talk to the pale-faced men inside through the windows.

  ‘Where’d you get it, Johnny?’ Spring shouted up. ‘Verdun?’

  ‘Oui! Verdun!’ There were nods and gestures. ‘Terrible, Tommee! Terrible!’

  They were unloading the wounded into horse ambulances and the Frenchmen were groaning as they were lifted out.

  There seemed to be only two doctors in charge, together with a couple of dressers and a few women from the town. A gaunt-faced nurse was going round giving the injured men hot soup as they lay on the ground. Many of their wounds were rotten and covered with pus, and one or two who were ominously still were laid quietly to one side, covered with stiffened bloody blankets. In the distance a priest and a sergeant walked behind a coffin covered with a threadbare black cloth edged with white, which was carried by four soldiers.

  Over the whole train hung a sickening stench of dirt and decay. The soldiers were dishevelled, bearded, long-haired and wild-eyed, and a few of them cried out as they were jolted on their stretchers into the ambulances.

  Murray visibly blenched. ‘Did you see that?’ he asked, jerking his head away, his eyes sickened. ‘Maggots in his wounds.’

  One of the stretchers was dropped by accident and the man on it screamed, a shuddering scream of pain that stopped us dead in our tracks. We’d never heard a man scream in that hideous rasping agony before, and in our misery and embarrassment we didn’t know where to look.

  I saw Bold farther along the train jerk his head round at the sound and stare at us. Then he pointed hurriedly, and old Corker came along, his flat boozy face grim, the spiked ends of his moustaches sticking out angrily.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, pushing us back into the trucks. ‘Don’tcha know it’s rude to stare. Git moving. You make the place look slovenly.’

  We’d none of us had the tea we’d been promised, but we weren’t sorry to get away from that trainload of misery and pain.

  Mason was thoughtfully scratching the inside of his thighs by the truck. ‘I’ve picked something up,’ he said slowly. ‘Some bloody skin disease or something.’

  Corker snorted. ‘Skin disease, my Aunt Fanny,’ he said. ‘You’re lousy!’

  Mason stared. ‘Lousy?’ he said. ‘Me?’

  ‘Lice, me lad,’ Corker said, suddenly more cheerful, as though here was something we could all understand, something earthy and far removed from pain. ‘Off the straw in the truck. I’ve got ’em too. So has everybody else. You want to go ’unting ’em before they start breeding. Catch ’em while they’re young. Before they become grannies and grandpas.’

  Mason gaped for a moment, then he scrambled back inside the truck and took down his trousers.

  ‘By God,’ he said. ‘He’s right! It is! It’s lice!’

  They scooped us all back into the train and we began to jolt onwards again. North of Lyons we pulled into a wayside station surrounded by skeletal trees and caught our first sight of British Red Cross nurses. They were serving tea with rum in it, and we queued up half an hour for that tea, stamping our feet and blowing on our hands and shivering in the wind. But it was worth it, not only for the warmth it provided, but for the sight of those young, clean, feminine faces. By this time we were all unshaven and dirty and uncomfortable with scratching. One or two men lined up to shave with icy water from a single dripping tap, but for those of us at the end of the queue it didn’t seem worthwhile.

  We still saw no male labour below the age of sixty, and the country women here were fat and ugly, old dames dressed in white bonnets, or young women as sturdy as the oxen they drove, carrying yoked buckets of milk on their broad shoulders.

  It began to grow still colder as we got farther north and that night it was again hard to sleep for the draughts that forced their way up through the floor of the truck. Every time we were at last on the point of dropping off into an uneasy doze, we seemed to stop in some ugly siding lit by spluttering arc lamps, and we all promptly sat up to see if we’d arrived at our destination. We were shunted backwards and forwards, waiting interminably at times in grassy areas where the rails had gone to rust and the bare branches of the trees brushed the sides of the trucks, while other trains sped derisively by in both directions.

  ‘They’ve forgotten us,’ Murray mourned. ‘They’ve just left us here to starve.’

  He sat disconsolately in a corner of the waggon, his eyes against a crack in the boards, an expression of utter misery and frustration on his face.

  ‘Oh, why did I join the Army, boys?’ Eph sang in his rasping bar-room voice. He was crouching in the straw, his eyes blank and bored, dealing cards with an instinctive flick of the hand.

  ‘Oh, why did I join the Army, boys?

  Why did I join the Army?

  Why did I come to France to fight?

  Because I was bloody well barmy!’

  Catchpole, his face half-hidden in a muffler, began to conduct an imaginary choir.

  ‘Now, girls,’ he said. ‘Let’s take the treble first. The alto to come in when they’ve finished their knitting. Loosen your stays, sisters, and let it rip. Count your blessings, count them one by one; count your blessings, see what the Lord has done.’

  Always there seemed to be the stamp of horses outside and the flash of lights through the ventilators and the quick jabber of argument in French and English moving along the train in the dark. Inside the trucks, we crouched in rows, our eyes glued to the cracks in the woodwork. The door was sometimes opened and shut again, sometimes not, then there’d be the toot of the guard’s horn and away we’d go again, with ringing clouts on the buffers that rattled the head on your shoulders and were enough to wake the dead – bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk – all the way along the train, the coupling chains clanking and the wheels rattling over the points beneath us.

  We spent the night sitting half-frozen with bent backs again, lolling over each other’s arms, and thighs and boots. The following morning, when they let us out to stretch our legs at a small halt in the Midi, I went wandering off round the outbuildings and found two or three blackened fire buckets which the track workers obviously used, standing upside down on a stack of coal.

  I took a quick look round and picked one up. Everybody seemed to be queueing up for bully-beef an
d biscuits and I marched back to the truck with it as bold as brass, deciding that was the way to look the least conspicuous.

  As I came from behind the building, though, Bold appeared in front of me, as tall as a house, his feet apart, his hands on his hips, his bone-hard face thrust down at me.

  ‘Where are you going with that?’ he demanded.

  There wasn’t much point in trying to lie to Bold. He could pick out a liar as though he’d got an alarm bell on him.

  ‘I’m taking it back to the truck, Sergeant-Major,’ I said. ‘To keep us warm.’

  His eyes glittered and his teeth were bared in a grimace of a smile. Even his little gingery moustache seemed hostile.

  ‘You pinched it?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yes, Sar’-Major.’

  His face softened, and there was a sly sideways look in his eyes.

  ‘Stoves, coal, troops for the use of,’ he said softly. ‘You’re a bloody miracle, Fenner! Are there any more?’

  My breath came out in a rush of relief. ‘Yes, Sergeant-Major,’ I said. ‘At least two. And some coal. But you’ll have to look slippy.’

  Bold’s hard white face cracked into a wide grin. ‘I always did say I’d make a soldier outta you, Fenner,’ he said. ‘Right,’ he snapped. ‘Git going. I ain’t seen yer. I’ll now go and arrange to acquire one for meself.’

  We got the stove going and rattled along merrily with the half-open door providing enough draught to keep the coals hot. During the night, though, I woke abruptly, feeling as if I were choking, to find that Henny Cuthbert who was sleeping nearest the door had shut it to keep out the draught, so that we were all slowly suffocating in the smoky fumes of carbon monoxide. We were already as black as nigger minstrels with the smuts, and I shoved the door open and went round the pile of lolling figures, waking them all up to make sure they were alive.