Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  ‘For God’s sake, Murray,’ Locky begged, ‘don’t tell us what it is.’

  Murray turned a white, strained, eager face towards him but said nothing.

  The guide was riding on the platform of our bus with Ashton and I heard him say ‘Ours’ laconically, without lifting his head. I envied him his confidence and experience.

  After a while, our bus, which was leading, started to boil and, because we were holding up the traffic behind, they made the lot of us get out so they could drive off the road.

  ‘You’ve only a few hundred yards to go anyway,’ the driver said to the guide. He seemed more concerned with his vehicle than with his passengers and he only lifted his head from his engine with reluctance. ‘You can take a short cut,’ he said. ‘Across that field and down the lane. It’s signed.’ He glanced at Ashton, seeming to sense his inexperience. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said reassuringly. ‘It leads to Worcester Redoubt and that’ll hold anything out.’

  In the glow that caught the underside of the clouds and lit up the land, making the grey dusk of evening curiously bright, I was aware of vast movement about us as we scrambled across a ditch and began to form up in the field, while the guide went off to make sure of his directions.

  The road was congested with waggons and lorries which were moving in both directions, trying to pass the buses. Then a covey of horse ambulances came past, heading back the way we’d come, each with a red cross on a white square painted on the canvas hood. The noise of gunfire from ahead had increased and it sounded like the rolling of a nearby storm, drowning the sound of hooves and the iron-rimmed wheels of the ambulances on the pavé, so that they seemed to be passing us in silence.

  The bus driver glanced round and seemed to sniff the air. ‘Dirty work at the crossroads tonight,’ he said. ‘Looks like the Leicesters are copping it.’

  Under the darkening sky, as we formed up, I could see long-snouted guns painted in the drab browns and greens of camouflage, attended by the shadowy figures of men in their shirtsleeves. There were military police everywhere, trying to bring order to the congestion, revolvers in holsters, bright blancoed webbing distinct in the dusk. On our right, in a long sloping grass field that ran down to a crescent-shaped wood that lay like a black shadow in the valley, thousands of cavalry horses seemed to be picketed.

  As we stood by the roadside, nervously trying not to do the wrong thing and trying to keep out of everyone’s way, I heard a coarse buzzing sound that grew steadily louder and louder until it seemed to fill the air. We all began to look about us and instinctively cowered our heads and shoulders as the threat grew closer.

  ‘’Old it!’ Corker’s rich fruity voice came over the noise, steady and reassuring. ‘Remember ’oo you are and stop looking like a lot of nervous old women.’

  I saw Locky trying to smile at me, a stiff wooden smile that didn’t seem to belong to him, then there was an abrupt crash that lifted my feet from the ground and slammed them down again with a force that jarred my teeth. I saw a flash about two hundred yards away in the field we were about to cross, and an immense mushrooming cloud of grey-black smoke.

  ‘No-ball,’ Eph said with a nervous grin.

  ‘Jack Johnson,’ Blackett announced indifferently. ‘All right, keep your ’eads up. It won’t hurt you. Not now anyway.’

  At the bang, the cavalry on our right had immediately started into action. Men had come running up the slope from the edge of the crescent-shaped wood and lances were snatched from where they were leaning in clusters, the bright blades catching the last of the daylight and reflecting it to the dusk-dulled pennants that fluttered just below. Horses were mounted and swung round into jostling untidy lines, curiously blurred and fuzzy in the poor light, and there was a sharp order. Watched by an officer, the cavalrymen began to file on to the road and canter off to the rear past the buses.

  ‘Six to four the field,’ Eph shouted. ‘I’ll give you evens on the little bloke with two pips in front.’

  Corker was eyeing the horsemen disgustedly, his little currant-like eyes bright and angry, the points of his waxed moustache bristling. ‘First bang and they’re off,’ he growled.

  As we moved across the open field where the Jack Johnson had exploded, I felt as big as a house and as though every eye in the German line was on me. I was restless and impatient, not in a funk but certainly windy, afraid of a second Jack Johnson but probably more afraid still of letting the side down, anxious to put on a good show, nervously acquiescent and trying to look like an old soldier as they made us wait.

  At the far end of the field, we passed a group of men apparently coming up out of the ground on the edge of a small wood. They were all wounded, with bloody crumpled uniforms and stained bandages, walking past us without any interest in anything but getting to where they were going. Dangling limp arms were coagulated with blood that dripped from their finger-ends. Their faces were desperate and pasty in the dusk and the bloodstains looked black. They seemed to have lost all emotion and were only concerned with getting away. They pushed past us stolidly, moving like automata, their puttees loose round their ankles, their clothes torn or slit, some of them with rifles, some without, limping past like shadows, muttering to each other in undertones.

  It seemed strange that they spoke the same language I did. Somehow, in that light, they seemed to belong to another race as they stumbled past, clutching their injuries. You could sense the feeling of apprehension that ran through the group waiting to go in, a sensation of being complete children in war.

  We turned into a wide and muddy path cut into the clay that ran past a cluster of crosses on the edge of the wood. On one or two hung the mouldering caps of the dead, a few torn khaki ones, I noticed, one or two old-fashioned red French kepis torn by bullets and shrapnel, and an occasional German pork pie. At its edge, there was a sign pointing the way we were going. It was marked The Shambles.

  ‘Nice name,’ Oakley said. ‘Nice and grisly.’ And Corker turned on him angrily.

  ‘Keep your mouth shut,’ he said. ‘And your ears open. It makes everybody’s job easier.’

  Here, on the fringe of the wilderness of war, it seemed one mustn’t speak in normal tones – as though the numberless dead and the invisible underground armies and the desolation ahead of us called for whispers and nothing more.

  The path ran downhill now, so that eventually we found ourselves stumbling along below ground level with a strong parapet of clay on either side of us. We began to toil through a trench that was just wide enough to pass along. From time to time I stumbled, sometimes knee-deep in glutinous mud, sometimes bent double where the trench was shallow and where there were ominous notices – Look out, sniper.

  ‘Murray,’ Mason’s voice came through the shuffle of boots, ‘you’ve arrived at the war.’

  Overhead the clouds were clearing and the faint light that remained in the sky enabled us to find our way along the communication trench, following its winding course as it curled and twisted. Every hundred yards or so we passed under a plank bridge or round a great promontory of earth and timber which forced us to take four right-angled turns. The parapet was edged now with sandbags, laid header-stretcher three or four deep. Between them grass was sprouting and occasionally I saw the bloom of a poppy, black in the faint light. The trench looked cold and stark, like a scar cut in the bare flesh of the earth, and the faint luminous mist that hung about in the dips gave it an eerie unreality.

  After a while we ran into a crowd of men standing in a shallow hollow of ground with crumbling earth walls that suggested it might once have been a mine-crater. From what I could see of them, they were dressed in mud-caked sheepskin jackets and looked a pretty tattered lot, with hacked-off overcoats and sloppy-looking unwired caps. They stood patiently, unspeaking, and with no sign of nervousness – all the indications of old soldiers.

  ‘You this city-battalion crowd?’ someone said just ahead.

  ‘That’s it.’ I heard Ashton’s voice.

  ‘
You’re late.’

  ‘Oh!’

  There was a hint of rebuke in the stranger’s voice and of grievous disappointment in Ashton’s, that in our first attempt to move into the line we had not succeeded in pleasing.

  ‘Get your men in with ours,’ the cold voice said. ‘Roughly platoon for platoon – if you can – and let’s get going.’

  There was a suggestion of contempt in those words, ‘if you can’, and for a while the mine-crater was confusion as Ashton and the other officers tried to sort us out in the darkness. The Worcesters cursed a little and jeered and were haughtily impatient with us.

  ‘For Christ’s sake’ – the unseen officer’s voice was nervous and irritable, as though he’d been on the edge of strain for too long – ‘look slippy!’

  Finally, we began to move off again. By this time there was a lot of sporadic rifle-fire from ahead which made me duck from time to time. The Worcesters ignored it all, I noticed, tramping along magnificently unconcerned.

  We came to a crossroads in the trenches, with the signs Princes Street and Sauchiehall Street, and other such names that indicated the Jocks had been there before us. The trenches now were all narrow pathways six feet wide, sometimes less. I was beginning to be aware of the weight of my kit by this time, and was stumbling over the uneven duckboards that tipped up every time I trod on them and threw my foot into the sludgy bottom of the trench.

  Conversation was limited, but I could hear Murray trying to ask questions of the man in front of him every time the shuffling came to a halt.

  ‘What’s it like in the front line?’ I heard him say.

  ‘Grub’s none too good,’ came the reply. ‘Otherwise, pretty cushy.’

  It wasn’t till later when I’d heard it often that I realised the reply was always that it was cushy, no matter what sort of mayhem was going on around you.

  Then, ‘Stop that talking,’ someone snapped, and Murray became silent. ‘And don’t make so much row all the time. Can’t you stop your damned equipment clinking?’

  The guide’s directions came back in monotonous calls. ‘Wire high here!’ ‘Look out, wire low.’ ‘Shallow here. Keep your heads down.’

  Field-telephone wires were fastened along the trench wall with staples, and some of them had fallen out and allowed the wire to hang in loops that kept catching at equipment. In the dark I could see nothing, except for a faint gleam of light occasionally, which showed a puddle or the glow of water that was a shell-hole dug out to make a sump.

  ‘Christ,’ Oakley said in disgust. ‘There’s a foot of bloody water in this trench.’

  ‘Nemmind,’ Corker said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Perhaps Fritz’s got two feet in his.’

  I began to notice now a peculiar, sour, penetrating smell, that seemed to be a compound of chloride of lime, sweat, manure and something else I couldn’t define – something sickly sweet and cloying that seemed to get on to the tongue. Then I found myself in a trench that seemed deeper and better fortified than the rest – a wide place with heavily constructed parapets, fortified and riveted with props of timber and mats of woven willows and osiers that had clearly been cut along the banks of the Somme and the Ancre. Here and there, there were dark caves with curved corrugated-iron roofs, set into the side of the trench. It was a remarkably spacious place, with occasional signs of permanent residence in the form of little doors, sometimes real windows which had been salvaged from some wrecked cottage or other, even once or twice real curtains. On one of them was a carefully printed notice saying ORGANS, CIRCULARS, HAWKERS AND STREET-CRIERS PROHIBITED. On another was NO GERMAN BANDS.

  ‘This is a fine old place to get a bullet through the heart,’ Murray said.

  ‘Ever thought you might be blown up instead?’ Mason asked sourly. ‘Or die of measles or something?’

  Murray looked round. I could see his face, a pale, distraught shadow, in front of me. ‘Well, I mean to say,’ he said. ‘If you fell dead here you’d be trampled into the mud before you could get a decent burial.’

  ‘Might save us a lot of trouble,’ Mason said grimly, and I saw Murray’s eyes flicker in alarm.

  It was raining more heavily now and this, together with the mud and the desolation, began to have a depressing effect on everybody. I could see faces growing longer, backs more stooped, expressions more resigned and fatalistic.

  The silences as we waited grew longer. All the jokes had been used up and we fell back on sarcasm. Murray was trying to brush off the whitish mud that was daubing his uniform, pushing at it distastefully with his fingers as though it soiled his ideas of war and military glory.

  ‘How much farther?’ I asked the Worcester next to me.

  ‘How much farther where?’ he demanded.

  ‘Forward.’

  He grinned and I saw the flash of his teeth. ‘If you go much farther you’ll be ’avin supper with Fritz, mate,’ he said. ‘In front of ’ere it’s No Man’s Land.’

  I stared round me. By the light of the flickering lights to the north, I could see a shabby unfinished wall of chalky mud held together with sagging sandbags. Above the parapet there were strands of rusty wire. There seemed to be nothing about me but bulging ramparts and stagnant pools of muddy water. Above me and behind was a splintered trunk of tree and by my side a tattered ground sheet, flapping wanly against a post. A candle and a brazier glimmered behind a nailed-up blanket and I could hear dim weary voices somewhere out of sight. The place had an air of great age and enduring perpetuity.

  Somehow, I’d never pictured the front line like this. Nothing I’d ever read or seen had prepared me for this muddy atmosphere of boredom. The Germans seemed to be the last thing anyone was concerned with.

  ‘Where are we then?’ I asked.

  ‘Front line. Worcester Redoubt.’

  ‘What? This?’

  ‘What more do you want?’ The dimly seen soldier alongside me sounded indignant. He’d probably helped to build it and was proud of his handiwork.

  ‘That’d keep anybody out,’ he said, jerking a hand. ‘It’s well reinforced – with sandbags and stiffs mostly. You dig ’em out if you ain’t careful. Frogs, from 1914.’

  ‘When do we have a go at the Hun?’ Murray asked.

  ‘At the what?’

  ‘The Hun.’

  ‘We don’t, mate. We sit ’ere quiet and Fritz sits there quiet and if we both be’ave ourselves, and some of them bum-boys on the staff don’t start wanting to wage war, we might both have a quiet week.’

  Eph was staring round him, his fat little body stooping under his equipment. ‘It’s a dark and stormy night,’ he said, trying to force gaiety into his voice. ‘Makes you think of ’ome, don’t it? Makes you think of a nice warm fire and a bit of Mum’s cooking.’

  ‘You can forget your mum,’ Corker said briskly. ‘Nobody was ever any good who took his mum off to war with ’im.’

  We stood around for what seemed ages, conscious of the chilly gusts of wind that came round the corner of the trench and whined drearily through the gaps in the sandbags. Jammed together, we tried hard to keep out of the way as relieved men stumbled past us, eager to be free of the trenches, complaining and swearing at the crowding. They seemed to sense it was all new to us and took a particular pleasure in venting their weariness and spite on us. Once we heard a machine gun firing, and once the crack of a low bullet that struck the wire in front – ‘ping!’ – and went over our heads towards the rear, spinning and misshapen, with a startlingly loud noise – ‘clackety, clackety, clack’. We all ducked except Corker, who laughed.

  ‘Keep your ’air on,’ he said. ‘You’ve no need to duck. You don’t ’ear the one that gits you.’

  Hot sweet tea appeared, tasting of petrol and chloride of lime, and once there was a tremendous crash over on our left and we heard the cry of ‘Stretcher-bearers’ for the first time in our lives. A few minutes later a couple of swearing men, in the blanching flare of a rocket that rose solemnly and made us duck again, came stumbling along the trench c
arrying a bulging stretcher that dripped blood as it moved. On it there was a groaning man whose grimy hands clutched at its sides with a pain-filled desperation. Behind them came another stretcher, but the figure on that one was silent and its face was covered. Only a pair of ominously still boots stuck out.

  I saw Murray peering nervously after them and Mason fiddling uneasily with the straps of his equipment. Then Corker pushed us back into line.

  ‘All right, all right, all right,’ he said, his harsh voice steady. ‘You don’t want to take too much notice of that. It happens all the time. There’s a war on, ain’t there? D’yer want to live for ever? Get into line and shut yer rattle. The captain wants a word with yer.’

  Ashton appeared with Bold, and called out two names, and Bold pushed Eph Lott and Tom Creak into a firebay. Then more names were called out and half a dozen of us moved after Ashton down the trench, stumbling past a gang of men who were ferociously filling sandbags and slamming them into place on a portion of wrecked parapet that seemed to stink of explosives.

  ‘What did that?’ Murray asked.

  ‘Rats, mate,’ one of them snarled. ‘Wotcha think?’

  I was pushed with Locky into a big firing-bay with three other men – a sentry, a thick-set older man with a gravy-dipper moustache who was smoking a clay pipe, and a thin-faced lance-corporal who looked about seventeen.

  ‘They’ll tell you what to do,’ Ashton said. ‘Come on, the rest of you.’

  As Ashton’s voice died away, Locky and I sat down on the firestep, brushing at the mud on our clothes. None of the other three made any attempt to enlighten us about anything, and we waited dismally in the rain for something to happen, like two lost passengers on some windswept country station who’d missed the train.

  Our eyes were growing accustomed to the dark now and we waited nervously, uncertain of ourselves. None of the three men in the firebay made the slightest move to greet us. The sentry remained with his head on the level of the sandbags and the other two went on dozing on the firestep. Apart from making room for us, neither of them showed any interest in us. This was as far from our conception of war as it was possible to get.