Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  ‘Send for the Boys of the Girls’ Brigade,’

  we sang

  ‘To set old England free.

  Send for my mother, send for my sister,

  But, for God’s sake, don’t send for me.’

  By the time we crossed Greville Road we’d got a whole host of enthusiastic dogs barking round us, and in St George Street the vicar decanted the kids from the Church School on to the wet pavement to cheer us on, and they all stood there in an untidy mob by the door, in long black stockings and sailor suits with HMS Tiger on the pocket, in jerseys and knitted ties, and pinafores and hair-ribbons, waving grubby handkerchiefs and uttering little treble cries.

  On Sidepool Hill, Corker fell us out on a patch of waste ground alongside a pub and told us we’d got ten minutes to rest before we finished the journey. It was cold and inclined to drizzle and in our innocence we waited uncomplainingly, huddled against the damp wall while the leaves drifted down all round us; then Eph Lott went round to the back door to see if he could get a whisky to warm him up, and came back bog-eyed with the news that the pub was kept by Corker’s sister and Corker was inside by the fire drinking hot rum-and-lemon.

  ‘We didn’t join up for this,’ young Murray shouted indignantly. ‘We joined up to fight the Boche, not to provide Corker with a free bloody rum!’

  ‘They can’t get away with it,’ Mason said indignantly, his new stripe burning a hole in his arm. ‘They can’t do this to us.’

  It was hard for us to understand soldiers like Corker. Though he’d probably have flogged for booze, if he’d had a chance, every scrap of equipment we possessed – and it wasn’t much at that time, God knows! – his rotten, loyal old heart was solidly in the Army and he had no favourites.

  There were others who gave nothing as a collateral for the lessons in drill they offered to ambitious privates, with false promises of stripes at the end of the course; or for the illegal subscriptions they got out of us for parting gifts when Fitz-Jimmy and the adjutant left us, and which never saw the light of day. These men we could appreciate, but the company could never have existed without Bold and Corker – for all the harsh nagging of one and the boozy face and the professed desire for a cushy billet of the other. Between them they coached Ashton in court-martial procedure, the subalterns in drill, the chaplain in church-parade order, the MO on how to conduct sick parades, and the NCOs in hygiene and discipline.

  Bold we understood. He was a machine. He was a dedicated Regular with no warmth or feeling in him anywhere for us. But that Corker, with his sly humour and friendliness and merry boot-button eyes, could take advantage of our lack of knowledge was beyond us. Perhaps it was all part of an unconscious desire on the part of the once-despised Regulars to make us realise we were now no better than they were and that they, with their sure knowledge of what they could get away with and what they couldn’t get away with, had the advantage of us, despite our superior education.

  Only Locky didn’t raise his voice in protest and I suspect that of us all he was probably the only one who understood.

  ‘Never fear,’ he said gravely. ‘Doubtless we shall win the war in spite of – or perhaps because of – the Regular Army.’

  There was a hurried indignant debate about what we should do, because none of us had the sense or the courage to go and call Corker’s bluff by joining him at the bar, then MacKinley, because he was a Canadian and, as such, got away with things on the ground that he didn’t understand our way of life, agreed to go in and complain. Corker was no Bold. Corker was one of us, like most of the officers, and we had no awe of him.

  He came out behind MacKinley, fastening his waistcoat and adjusting his checked cap, and stood staring at us as we formed up again, all of us glowering and anxious to be off.

  ‘I’ve never seen nothing like you lot ever before,’ he said, in bewilderment, his flat red face baffled. ‘Never in all me puff. I never thought I’d see the day when soldiers’d be keen to get to work. Right honest, I didn’t.’

  He marched to the head of the column, shaking his head. It was beyond his experience that men could demand to be worked, could even practise arms drill with broomsticks in their spare time, as we did, so they’d be able to mount guard when they had rifles and something to guard.

  The other companies were already hard at it when we arrived at Suffolk Park and had already started to carve up the turf with trenches, watched by a morose head park keeper.

  The officers were fidgeting impatiently as we swung into line in front of them, Ashton with a hurt disembowelled look on his face as though he’d been wondering where the hell we’d got to. They were in a group, surrounding the new colonel in his old-fashioned overcoat with its fur collar and the yellow piping on the shoulder straps. His tunic was as out-of-date as his overcoat, with a choker collar and starched stock, and he stood there under the dripping trees, his long nose red with the nip in the air and his head well down on his shoulders. He’d joined us from the Indian Army, together with a new adjutant, Lieutenant Pine, and, with the permanent dew-drop on the end of his nose, seemed to be perpetually thinking of a warmer climate and the less boisterous, dark little men he used to command in some Gurkha regiment.

  As we came to a stop, he moved restlessly among the group of officers, sharp against the mistiness of the background, where the distant trees were mere shadows in the drizzly rain.

  ‘Your company’s late, Mr Ashton,’ he snapped fretfully, slapping at his boots with his cane. ‘We’re wasting time! Get them busy, please.’

  There were no traverses in the trenches we dug, of course, because we still had no knowledge of the blast effects of high-explosive shells. We used picks and shovels – all of them with the City Councils’s initials still burned into the handles – which made it a great deal easier than it would have been with entrenching tools; and as Tom Creak and the Mandy brothers and the other miners among us, spare and hard as the tools they’d used since boyhood, regarded the efforts of the rest of us with something not far from contempt, we were inclined to stand back and cheer them on while they did it for us.

  When we’d finished and had stood back to admire our handiwork, hot and tired and with our suits covered with mud, an elderly brigadier with boiled blue eyes like marbles, whom we’d never seen before, came galloping across the turf. ‘No, no, no,’ he said irritably as he came to a stop. ‘For God’s sake, not like that!’

  There was a hurried conference among the officers, then Corker came clambering along the heaps of soil towards us, slipping on the clayey slopes.

  ‘Fill ’em in,’ he said. He looked angry and fed up.

  ‘Fill ’em in?’ Eph Lott stared down at the scarred turf at his feet, ‘I only just dug ’em,’ he said indignantly.

  ‘Well, fill ’em in again.’

  ‘Just cos that old bastard with the red ’at-band and the ’orse says so? ’Oo’s ’e think ’e is, anyway?’

  ‘Fill ’em in.’

  ‘There’s a bleeden park keeper over there,’ Eph said, pointing. ‘Looking like a sick cat because we’ve mucked his bloody park up. He’s going to go ’ome tonight and tell his old Dutch: “You know what them soldiers – Kitchener’s mob – did today? They dug all my bleeden park up till it looked like an allotment. And what you think they did then? Some bloke with a red ’at-band and a face like a vegetable came along and told ’em, ‘Fill ’em in.’ And they did.” Well, they didn’t. I’m not going to fill ’em in,’ he announced. ‘Let ’im with the red ’at-band fill ’em in. If ’e wants payin’ for the job, I don’t mind slipping ’im ’alf a bar.’

  Just then Bold strode across from where he’d been talking to Ashton. His stride was jerky and puppet-like and his bone-white face had two red spots on it, high on his cheekbones.

  ‘Fill ’em in, lads,’ he said, his voice more gentle than I’d ever heard it.

  ‘What, now?’ Eph said.

  ‘Fill ’em in, I said.’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant-Major.’

  So we
filled them in while the brigadier sat and waited on his horse and the colonel stood and slapped his boot morosely with his cane, and Sergeant-Major Bold glowered at them and fidgeted with his stick.

  ‘My God,’ Eph muttered. ‘Ain’t it enough to turn you pie-eyed?’

  For a long time we worked in silence, the clay clinging to our shoes in great lumps, muttering to each other, and swearing softly, then I heard the colonel talking to the brigadier.

  ‘What about barbed wire?’ he asked. ‘Shouldn’t they learn something about that?’

  The brigadier fiddled with his reins and the horse curvetted, kicking up clods of turf to the disgust of the head park keeper. The brigadier’s red gorgets looked new and he’d probably just been promoted, and his manner was anxious and impatient, as though he weren’t very certain himself what should be done.

  ‘There isn’t any wire,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got any. In any case, you don’t need wire, Colonel. If the Hun sees posts he’ll think there’s wire all right. It looks like wire from a distance. It always fooled the Boers.’

  The colonel looked surprised and the brigadier gestured angrily with the crop he was carrying.

  ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I think all this damn’ trench-digging’s a lot of nonsense. Stops movement. Impedes the cavalry. Somebody’s got the wind up in France. That’s the trouble. You’d be better employed getting your men to learn to advance against shell-fire.’

  So, to please the brigadier, we ‘advanced against shell-fire’ and charged up the slopes under the trees, tearing up the gravel surfaces of the paths and flinging ourselves down in the puddles that had collected.

  ‘Here goes my last suit,’ I said to Mason as we lay in the dirt, and got a swipe across the behind from Bold’s cane for my trouble.

  ‘Never mind about your suit,’ he snapped. ‘Just git your ’ead down. The other end’ll look after itself. You won’t worry about your best suit when the Hun starts shooting at you.’

  ‘I hope when the Hun starts shooting at us,’ I muttered, ‘I shan’t have my best suit on.’

  Bold stared down at me. He looked as cold and disgusted as we were, and the bones of his jaw seemed to stick through the skin.

  ‘You’ve got a damn’ sight too much to say for yourself, altogether, Private Fenner,’ he told me harshly. ‘A lot too much. Maybe you’d like to come back tonight and do a little cleaning up around the Drill Hall, just so you’ll learn in the Army it pays to ’old your tongue and not question orders. Take his name, Sergeant Corker.’

  They kept us there till dusk, most of the time lying down on the wet earth, until Bold found young Murray fast asleep at the end of the line, wearied by all the digging and running in the open air.

  ‘’Aving a nice dream?’ he demanded loudly, giving him a shove with his boot.

  Murray looked up and blinked as he tried to make out where he was. Then his smooth young face broke into a wide unashamed grin.

  ‘Not half, Sergeant-Major,’ he said. ‘I dreamt the war was over and I was chasing the girls down the Unter den Linden.’

  ‘Oh, you did, did you?’ Bold snapped. ‘Well, just to show you it ain’t, you can join Fenner here at the Drill Hall tonight. I expect we’ve got some nice fire buckets that need scraping and painting.’

  He slapped his calf with his cane and stalked off with Corker. As he vanished, we could hear him muttering.

  ‘Bloody old dugouts,’ he was saying. ‘These lads’ll get their death of cold. That blasted brigadier wants his ’ead examining.’

  Murray looked at me and we both stared after Bold, startled. The fact that he ever stopped to think about our health and welfare came as a surprise to both of us.

  ‘He loves me,’ Murray breathed in mock ecstasy. ‘He loves me. He’s actually noticed that I exist. Mother, I can now die happy.’

  When orders to parade for uniforms appeared at last on the noticeboard at the Drill Hall, a howl of joy went up.

  I’d ruined two suits and three pairs of shoes already and had had to buy myself a pair of officer’s boots at the Public Benefit Shoe Company for thirty bob. Even some of the instructors still wore cloth caps and bowlers and there’d been no sign yet of the money we’d been promised for wear and tear. Even pay was still a bit irregular and it was fortunate that most of us could afford to be soldiers.

  ‘Being a volunteer’s becoming bloody expensive,’ Frank Mason complained.

  Shoes had started to fall to pieces as soon as the first blisters had begun to emerge, and our clothes were suffering badly from the strain. Once, when we’d marched through Nethersedge village, they’d thought we were Germans captured at Ypres and one old dear with a softer heart than the rest had offered an apple to Locky because she thought he looked as though he hadn’t eaten for days.

  Milton had bought more than one pair of boots for men who needed them and Eph Lott had seen to it that some of his market-stall friends had dug deep into their pockets to provide clothing.

  ‘The bastards can afford it,’ he’d said. ‘With watches at five bob a time with ’alf the works missing, and two ’undred per cent profit on fruit? ’Course they can. I know. I was selling ’em both meself last month.’

  Then young Welch had managed to get a few cheap suits and shirts sent down from his father’s store, and the men whose breeches behinds were hanging out had been able to hold up their heads again.

  Curiously enough, it never occurred to me – and I’m sure it didn’t to anyone else – to feel particularly neglected. I just assumed naïvely that Kitchener was pretty busy in other directions and would get around to us when he’d got the time, and I was quite prepared to endure until he did. I’d been fortified all along, I think, by the knowledge that I’d got in on the fight before all the best places in the ring were taken and was quite prepared to supply myself with all that the Army couldn’t manage. In fact, I’d been taken in by every profiteer on the market, buying more than my share of special non-wear socks and patent foot-salves. When its feet give out, the Army gives in, they told us and, like everyone else, I’d swallowed it whole and bought the damn’ stuff in crate-loads.

  But now, with uniforms, real uniforms, within our grasp, there wasn’t one of us who wasn’t prepared to forgive and forget the penny-catching efforts to get our pay off us. We were dazzled by the thought of parading down High Street with at least one girl on each arm.

  The Drill Hall was jammed with excited men in a variety of frayed suits and battered hats and worn shoes long before Company Quartermaster-Sergeant Twining deigned to arrive from the digs he occupied on Cotterside Common.

  It was raining a little outside and thin veils of autumn mist were drifting in through the door, making a wet smear on the floorboards near the entrance that shone in the grey light from outside. Ashton appeared, his coat sparkling with damp, his spectacles gleaming, then Milton and Welch, all hurrying through to company headquarters. There was a long-drawn-out sigh of thankfulness as we heard the bolts of the quartermaster’s store being drawn.

  ‘They’re coming,’ Murray said.

  But it was Sergeant-Major Bold who stepped out, ramrod-straight, his moustache bristling, his eyes glinting under the peak of his cap.

  ‘’Ello,’ he said cheerfully, feigning surprise. ‘What’s this? The lions at feeding time? A mob of bloody fuzzy-wuzzies starting a war dance?’ He paused and stared, his eyebrows shooting up. ‘Or can it be soldiers?’ he asked. ‘Real soldiers, ready to do and die for King and Country?’

  He glared at us and his milky tones suddenly changed. ‘Get yourselves into line, you sloppy lot,’ he stormed. ‘Let’s ’ave a bit o’ discipline, do!’

  ‘There’s too much bloody discipline in the British Army,’ Arnold Holroyd muttered as we shuffled into a queue. ‘The war might be tolerable if it weren’t for that.’

  But we got into line. We not only wanted to behave like soldiers, we wanted to look like soldiers. There were plenty of people in high places ready to sneer at us, and we were an
xious to show them they were wrong. We’d been called ‘Kitchener’s ridiculous regiments’ and ‘the laughing-stock of all the armies of Europe’, and a uniform seemed to be one of the first requisites for a true martial bearing and the quickest route possible to a bit of respect.

  But when Murray, who was inevitably the first into the store, re-emerged, he had a look of shocked misery on his face.

  ‘Look,’ he choked. ‘Look what they’re giving us!’

  He held up for us all to see an outfit that was nothing more than a militarised blue-grey flannel suit, hurriedly adapted by a multiple tailor. They’d added another couple of buttons to the jacket and left the turn-ups off the trousers and there was a glengarry of the same material, with a red stripe, to go with them. There were no badges, no brass buttons, nothing that could conceivably catch a girl’s eye – only an arm-band which stated what unit we belonged to. You could only call them uniforms because they happened to all be alike.

  ‘My God!’ Spring said. ‘Here I’ve been complaining all this time that a boater’s not quite the thing to wage war in, and now look what they’ve given me.’ He turned over the glengarry in his hands disgustedly. ‘It looks like a coffin for a cat,’ he said bitterly.

  Bold was grinning all over his hard handsome face, enjoying the rage around him. ‘They wouldn’t waste good uniforms on you lot,’ he said. ‘They’re a cheap job just thrown together quick.’

  ‘A cheap job!’

  ‘Just thrown together!’

  Bold chuckled. ‘Well, ain’t that what you lot are? – ain’t that what the ’ole of Kitchener’s Army is? – a cheap job, just thrown together till they can get something better. Give me time, though,’ he promised earnestly, ‘and I’ll make you fit to wear His Majesty’s uniform. I’ll make ’em anxious to give you a decent uniform. Get ’em on, and let’s see what you look like.’