Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  ‘Locky says you’re due for overseas,’ she went on, and her voice seemed to drown the gramophone blaring in my ear.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Any day now, I suppose.’

  ‘Poor Locky,’ she said softly. ‘Poor Molly!’ She sighed and toyed with the glass between her fingers.

  ‘Will it be France, Fen, do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘What did Frank say?’

  ‘He said it would.’

  ‘Then I suppose it will. Frank gets to know more than me.’

  She laughed. ‘I don’t suppose he does, if the truth’s known.’ She looked serious for a second then raised her eyes to mine. ‘Look after Locky, Fen. He means rather a lot to us here. And we can trust you.’

  I was wondering if it was part of the arrangement for Locky to look after me, when she spoke again, simply, but in a way that knocked all the stuffiness out of me.

  ‘I’ll pray for you,’ she said simply.

  Before I could think of anything to say in reply, someone shouted her name and she left my side, and the next time I saw her she was laughing with Frank.

  When I got up to go, though, she was there to see me to the door. Mason had gone to start up the Morris to give me a lift into town.

  ‘Aren’t you going to kiss me goodbye?’ she said quietly. ‘Frank did.’

  ‘He would,’ I said.

  I put my hands on her waist and touched her lips with mine, but she put her arms round me and held me close. With Frank’s words at the station still roaring in my ears, I wondered wildly what was behind it, then I heard the horn of the Morris and the slam of a door, and saw Frank tramping up the drive, and before I could ask her he’d taken her hand and pulled her gently away.

  ‘Come on, you two,’ he said. ‘Cheese it, troops! Hands off my girl!’

  On the train going back, I felt I wanted to be alone and pretended to go to sleep, listening all the time to what the others had done with their leave. Under the threat of going overseas, several of them had got married, and even young Murray had fallen heavily for the girl next door.

  Locky sat reading silently, as he always did, withdrawn yet always part of us, while Mason tried hard to make conversation with him, the sort of conversation that seemed to concern Helen or Locky’s new wife, the sort of conversation that to me seemed ominously to suggest they were related already. Locky’s replies were largely nods, and he didn’t seem disposed to talk, and in the end Mason sighed and started teasing young Murray and pretending to give him fatherly advice on how to go about wooing the girl next door.

  At Romstone, they formed us up outside the station and marched us to headquarters on the seafront. We were surprised to see Ashton standing at the door with a list in his hand and the schoolyard full of packing-cases and stores and all the orderly-room clerks looking hot and busy for a change.

  ‘What’s up?’ Mason hissed anxiously. ‘What’s going on?’

  It didn’t take us long to find out. Orders for overseas had come through, and as we split up and went to our billets everybody was shouting questions.

  ‘When do we leave?’

  ‘Where’s it to be?’

  Tom Creak announced he’d got something urgent to do, and we discovered he’d got a girl at the other end of the town, and he and the Mandys got their heads together and in the end we started a diversion to enable him to dodge the pickets the provost marshal had posted to see that we remained in our billets.

  An hour later Murray arrived in our room, bursting with excitement as usual. He’d arrived by the back way, climbing over a couple of walls to dodge the military police.

  ‘I heard the colonel talking to Ashton,’ he said eagerly. ‘It sounded like Souippes or Souisse or something. I couldn’t quite make it out. But we’ve looked it up. Tim William’s got an atlas. There’s a place called Suippes near Rheims. It’s just behind Verdun. That must be the place.’

  ‘Looks as though we’re being thrown in to support the French there,’ Mason said knowledgeably. ‘There’s been talk of a big German attack coming off round that area in the spring. I expect they’re using us to stiffen the Frogs. They’ve been pretty severely mauled.’

  ‘I’ve got a cousin,’ Spring announced, ‘who’s a liaison officer with the French on that front. I saw him on leave. He says they’re badly in need of new blood.’

  ‘Perhaps they’re going to try to get in our attack first,’ Arnold Holroyd said. ‘Perhaps they’re going to try and knock the old Boche off-balance before he can get started.’

  Murray clapped his hands together and did a little excited jig, hardly able to contain himself.

  ‘This is something like,’ he laughed excitedly. ‘We’re in it at last. Suippes, here we come!’

  Locky, who’d been leaning on the door of the room listening to the chatter, suddenly laughed, and we all turned round to him. He’d got that superior, knowledgeable look on his face that always quietened us down.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ Murray demanded.

  ‘You are.’

  ‘All right,’ Mason snorted angrily. ‘Let’s have it! What’s the Great-I-Am got that we haven’t got? You’ve got something. It’s written all over your face.’

  Locky grinned.

  ‘Peace, children,’ he said. ‘You can stop your worrying. I know exactly what’s going to happen. Instead of chasing the breezes round the town, I made a point of getting permission from the military police to see Ashton about a marriage allowance, and while I was there I asked my old friend and colleague just where we are going. It’s not Souippes or Souisse or even Soups. It’s Suez.’

  7

  It was Suez all right. Two days later we paraded in our little streets and schoolyards in full marching order at five o’clock in the morning and stood waiting. Farewells had been said and weeping girls left behind. All around us in the little houses people were sleeping. We’d been forbidden to leave billets the day before, but most of those with girls had managed it long enough to say goodbye.

  A stiff coldish wind was blowing ragged shreds of cloud across the house-tops and gusts of chilly rain kept whipping into our faces. There was a lot of fidgeting as we bent forward to ease the weight of straps or jiggled packs higher up our shoulders with a jerk of the spine.

  The previous day we’d spent parading, first at one little hall or warehouse and then at another, to draw completely new kits, waiting hours in the drizzle for the tropical uniforms which made us all look like strangers when we tried them on. Then there’d been endless kit inspections and more visits to the Quartermaster’s stores. We’d been issued with field dressings and iodine for the first time and been lectured by half a dozen different individuals on the importance of secrecy and the necessity to keep away from foreign women. Sergeant-Major Bold gave us another little talk while we waited, but we were all getting rather irritated and impatient by this time, and wishing he’d shut up so we could get on with it.

  None of us was particularly looking forward to Suez, but we’d reached the stage now when all we wanted to do was get moving. The indignation that they weren’t sending us to France where it was becoming increasingly clear the decisive battles would be fought was slowly dying now, but Murray had it firmly as a fact that we were going on to the Dardanelles to pull a wasting campaign out of the doldrums and we consoled ourselves with that. Life seemed to be as perilously short at Gallipoli as in France, and we felt there was no dishonour attached to our destination.

  ‘Wish we could get moving,’ MacKinley said.

  ‘I wish a lot of things,’ Mason said. ‘That this bloody drizzle wouldn’t beat into my face for one, and that my pack wasn’t so blasted heavy for another.’

  For a long time we whispered together, growing more and more weary with the weight on our backs.

  ‘Let’s get a move on, for God’s sake,’ Henry Oakley muttered. ‘Let’s get there and get it over with.’

  ‘Wish it were France,’ Murray said dreamily.

  Eph Lott grunted and hitched at th
e straps of his pack. ‘Somebody’s stuck the colonel’s horse in this bloody thing, I think,’ he murmured.

  We were beginning to groan with boredom and frustration when we saw the doors open in the little schoolhouse which was our headquarters, and a beam of yellow light streamed across the dark yard.

  ‘Company…’ Bold’s voice brought heads up. ‘Company … a – tten – shun!’

  Four hundred-odd heels slapped together. Catchpole looked out of the corner of his eye, and spoke without moving his lips.

  ‘Appleby’s blotto,’ he said.

  ‘Silence, that man,’ Corker roared from behind. ‘Look to your front.’

  We were inspected by Ashton, with Sheridan and Welch and Bickerstaff and Milton and all the others trailing along behind him. Appleby was indeed blotto and slightly wild-eyed.

  His pince-nez shining in the faint light from the open door of the schoolroom, Ashton made a speech which was again on the need for secrecy, but no one could hear properly because of the wind, and when they marched us off to the station all secrecy went immediately by the board, because the colonel had cheerfully decided that if we were going, we were bloody well going to let people know it. The band was waiting for us on the front and took its position at the head of the column, blowing and wheezing and thumping for all it was worth, and as we set off towards the town windows slapped up all along the route, as though they’d known all the time and were waiting for us, and the cheering and flag-wagging started all over again. A few girls hurriedly dressed themselves and began to run alongside. March discipline relaxed and half the town seemed to appear at their doors and windows as the brassy music rebounded from the house-fronts.

  ‘So long, Eph! So long, Henny! Give ’em one for me!’

  Several girls had broken into the ranks and were marching with us, weeping or swinging their arms to the music. It was the same as when we’d first left home, the same noise, the same cheering, the same riotous station platform, the same crowd alongside the railings, the same waving arms, the same tearful singing of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘Goodbyeee, Don’t Cryeee’.

  Oakley chalked On to Berlin on the side of the carriage and an officious station foreman came up and demanded that he wipe it off.

  ‘This here’s government property,’ he said.

  ‘So are we,’ Murray shouted delightedly. ‘And so are you. We’re all government property!’

  The foreman became difficult and the complaint became a shouting match, then, as the train jerked, MacKinley jumped out and grabbed the foreman round the waist and pushed him head-first through the door.

  ‘Let’s take the goddarned bloke with us,’ he shouted. ‘Then he can register his complaint to Kaiser Bill himself.’

  The foreman began to shriek about his wife and family as the train jerked again, and in the end we pushed him out and he fled to the opposite end of the platform. As the train slowly moved away, we all collapsed on the seats, weak with merriment.

  We spent the greater part of the day in sidings watching other trains pass by, and arrived at Southampton in the evening, the train edging slowly past the backs of shabby houses where sooty chickens pecked at soil among the dying summer flowers round the entrances to their coops.

  We tumbled out of carriages that had been over-heated by too many occupants, and stood in little bunches on the platform, yawning and cold, in the light of blue-painted gaslamps that came on in groups as the daylight died. Behind us the compartments were a litter of cigarette-ends and paper and bits of crust.

  ‘Gallipoli, here we come,’ Murray said gaily, his spirits undiminished.

  ‘Who says we’re going to Gallipoli?’ Tom Creak asked.

  ‘Well,’ Murray said, ‘where else can we go? They wouldn’t waste troops like us on garrison duties in Egypt.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What, after all our experience?’

  ‘I always thought we were frighteningly inexperienced,’ Locky said thoughtfully.

  There was a great deal of hither and thither among the officers and the military police on the platform, then the colonel went into a long angry conference with the Railway Transport Officer and they moved away, waving arms and sheaves of paper at each other.

  In the end, we discovered someone had sent us a day too soon, and we were marched to another schoolroom exactly like the one we’d just left and told to bed down there on the bare floor for the night.

  ‘Any moment now,’ Locky said slowly, ‘I shall give vent to a pageant of age-old martial vituperation.’

  The following afternoon they marched us through the cheering crowds who lined the streets, all hope of secrecy vanishing for good as we clumped towards the docks with our solar topees strapped to our packs and singing fit to raise the roof:

  ‘The bells of hell go tingalingaling

  For you and not for me,

  I hear the angels singalingaling,

  With them we soon shall be.

  Oh, death, where is thy stingalingaling,

  Oh, grave, thy victoree?…’

  In the docks we filed aboard the troopship Ordenia, which had ferried troops to the Boer War fifteen years before and had actually carried old Corker to Cape Town. She was old then and by 1915 was almost falling apart at the seams. D Company was on the lowest deck of all, well below the waterline, in a stuffy hold smelling of rotting potatoes and crammed with kit and humanity.

  As the ship moved out of the harbour, we lined the decks, shivering in the raw autumn wind that blew from across the Continent, watching the spill of the searchlights on the water, and red and green lamps that seemed to be everywhere in the darkness. All the way down Southampton Water to Spithead, ships’ sirens blared at us, long blasts on steam whistles and little whooping sounds from destroyers, and shrill little toots from torpedo boats.

  The rumours started again at once. A ship had been sunk that morning and the submarines were waiting just outside the boom for us. Once we heard a thumping bang against the ships side that seemed to echo through the whole structure of the vessel and Murray told us it was a depth-charge going off somewhere.

  ‘They’ve got the U-boat,’ he announced cheerfully.

  We went down the Channel escorted by four plunging little black torpedo boats which didn’t look big enough to face the waves that were rolling up past the Isle of Wight, and from the signal station above Portsmouth a light began to flicker at us, and the battalion signallers read out the message.

  Good luck, it said. Bon voyage.

  We stood at the rails and sent cheer after cheer into the night. When it was all over I remained on deck, staring back at the land, long after everyone else had gone to the canteen at the stern for a beer or cocoa. After a while Locky joined me.

  ‘How do you feel, Mark?’ he asked.

  ‘Homesick,’ I said. ‘Which is funny, considering I haven’t got a home.’

  ‘Same here.’ Locky hitched up his collar and stared back at the land with me. ‘I suppose it’s just the knowledge that we’ve put England behind us now. Wonder if we’ll ever see it again?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t we?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just that the partition’s so final. It makes you feel there’s no return.’

  ‘We’ll be back all right.’

  ‘I hope so. But it has the effect of making you feel suddenly lonely, doesn’t it?’

  ‘A bit,’ I said. ‘How did Molly take it?’

  ‘She expected it,’ he said, his voice flat and unemotional. ‘It’s a funny thing about women. They seem to take these things far better than anybody ever expects them to or gives them credit for. She tried hard to be very matter-of-fact about it. I think her only regret was that we hadn’t got a family.’

  He paused, staring into the darkness. ‘It’s a flattering feeling,’ he said, ‘when you realise that, in spite of a very doubtful future, a woman wants something like that, something she can hold on to, I suppose – a sort of insurance in case anything happens to you.’
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br />   ‘Nothing’ll happen to you, Locky,’ I said.

  Locky grinned ‘I’ve never had quite the same innocent faith that Murray has,’ he said. ‘And martial glory never appealed to me much. I joined up because I felt it was my duty to join up, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to a hero’s death in battle as a prize for my patriotism. Especially now. There seems too much to live for.’

  He was quiet for a long time, then he stirred.

  ‘Ever thought you’d like to marry Helen?’ he asked suddenly.

  I tried to think that one out. I’d often thought I’d like to marry Helen. She had a lot to offer. More than most girls. Laughter and happiness, and something that was always exciting. It had often been a temptation to pop the question. But I never had done.

  I think as much as anything else it was the awareness of the war and the possibility of the sudden death that was looking over my shoulder which had held me back. Perhaps I wasn’t even ready for marriage or the time didn’t seem opportune. Perhaps I felt I already had enough responsibilities and that Helen was too young to be saddled with sorrow. Whatever it was, I’d never got around to it, and now it was too late. Mason hadn’t had the same caution and, being older and more mature – or more devil-may-care, call it what you will – he’d taken the plunge and I was out.

  ‘We always seemed to start fighting,’ I said lamely.

  Locky laughed. ‘That’s nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘Not at this stage.’ He became serious again. ‘Still, it’s not my affair,’ he said. ‘I’m not matchmaking. Only curious. Did she ever say anything to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you ever say anything to her?’

  ‘No.’

  He nodded and was silent for a while. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said in the end. ‘Intelligent people always seem to have about as much intuition as a boiled egg. She sent her love,’ he concluded.