Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  We passed through Paris in darkness and halted just outside the city to the north, listening to the whistle of engines and the clatter of trams on a road nearby. But we were forbidden to leave the truck, except for half a dozen men who were sent to the head of the train where we could see the glimmer of flames. The cooks had got a fire going against a wall, and they returned carrying black dixies of tea and a greasy-looking swill of bully-beef which restored life a little.

  Then we went on again, jerking and jolting in a grey morning light past linked pools of water flung like a broken string of beads along low-lying rivers and criss-crossed dykes that were full of reeds and willows and pollards.

  ‘Looks like the Somme,’ Locky said, his head out of the door. ‘I spent a walking holiday here once.’

  We halted alongside a low field curving round the shoulder of a hill where an old woman was working. She wore a black skirt, and a red petticoat kilted up to her knees. Her skinny legs were covered in thick grey stockings that ended in clumsy ploughman’s boots.

  ‘Look,’ Mason shouted. ‘Girls!’

  There was an immediate rush for the door and a disappointed howl, and laughter.

  We shouted. ‘Vive la France!’ and the old woman looked round, her nut-brown wrinkled face startled. She stared for a moment, unmoving, then sank down on her knees and began to pray. The simplicity of the action stopped the shouting and we became silent again until the train moved on.

  Eventually, we passed row on row of poplars and a wild-looking grass-covered canal bank.

  ‘This is Somme country, sure enough,’ Locky said.

  As it happened it was only a lower tributary and we didn’t stop there. We rattled on again, passing a trainload of Welshmen drawn up in a grassy siding, who were singing hymns in perfect time and tune, their high strong voices echoing out of their trucks as though they were chanting Handel’s Messiah back in their chapels at Cardiff or Pontypridd. They didn’t return our cheers but continued, absorbed, rapt in their harmonies.

  ‘Them bastards sound a lot ’appier than I feel,’ Eph said. ‘I’m proper fed up, and far from ’ome.’

  The cards had disappeared. We were all sick of cards by this time and merely lolled against each other, bored, weary, dirty, wanting only to be able to see farther than the four walls of that damned truck.

  ‘Locky,’ Eph said thoughtfully, ’do you think they’re ever going to let us out of ’ere, or do you think they’re just going to go on ’auling us up and down France till we die of old age?’

  He raised himself on one elbow from where he was lying. He’d managed, being Eph, to stretch himself full-length, pushing Henny Cuthbert and young Murray out of his way, and his fat little body looked a lot more comfortable than most of us.

  Locky looked up. Inevitably he was reading, his book held sideways to a crack in the planks that formed the side of the truck, trying to get a little light on the pages.

  ‘Have no fear, Eph,’ he said with a grin. ‘Now they’ve got you here they won’t let you go again in a hurry. You made a mistake, old boy. “Much wiser is he who, rather than go to war, stays at home, caressing the breast of his mistress.”’

  ‘’Oo said that?’ Eph asked, impressed by Locky’s knowledge as he always was.

  ‘Horace,’ Locky told him.

  ‘’Orace ’oo?’

  Locky grinned and turned back to his book and Eph scratched his head. ‘I don’t know ’ow you do it,’ he commented. ‘Straight I don’t. I’ve played cards till I’ve wore me fingers down to the knuckle-joints. I’ve played crown and anchor, and pitch and toss, and sung songs till I’m pie-eyed. And all you’ve done is read that bloody book. Don’t you ever git mad?’

  Locky chuckled. ‘I have no evil feelings on earth,’ he said. ‘Except about army biscuits.’

  ‘You’re lucky, that’s all I can say. We’ve sat in ’ere three days now – or is it four? – soppy as a lot of prozzies at a christening. The niff alone’s enough to put half-inch hairs on you. Every time we stop they shove us back in afore we get properly out, and a little bloke with a ’unting ’orn goes tearing round like a load of mad dogs. I feel like ten men – nine dead and one dying. Gawd stiffen the bloody rooks, it’s enough to send a bloke off his onion.’

  Locky moved and the watery sunlight that streamed through the ventilator slats of the truck striped him with pale gold. ‘Eph,’ he said. ‘For a man whose oratory is normally restricted to words of one syllable, you express your disgust at the war in general, and the French railways in particular, with a considerable amount of verve.’

  Eph settled back with a sigh, shuffling his plump body about until Henny had backed away a little farther and Murray was jammed hard up against Mason.

  ‘Tell my valet to run me bath,’ he said. ‘I’m sick of this “bring your own grub and fleas” atmosphere. Tell him to lay on the champagne, and invite the colonel. He must be getting bored with them uncomfortable first class carriages.’

  We passed through deep cuttings and at last began to see farmhouses and cottages with smashed windows or collapsed roofs, and once a broken bridge. Trees seemed to have been cut down everywhere.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Catchpole announced, his eye to the ventilator slats, ‘I suspect we are at last approaching the war.’

  The lice we’d picked up seemed to have bred a thousandfold already, and we were weary with crouching on the floor of the truck. Then we began to notice the countryside was filling with horses and waggons, and men in khaki and the grey-blue of the French.

  Finally, we reached an old unbattered city where the tall spire of a cathedral rose high over uneven roofs into a clear sunny sky and the train clanked to a stop with an escape of steam like a tired thankful sigh.

  ‘Amiens,’ Locky announced. ‘That’s the cathedral. Murray, your cup of happiness should be full to overflowing. You’re safely in the Big Push.’

  ‘Three cheers for that,’ Murray said fervently. ‘Perhaps we can get out of the damn’ truck now.’

  But orders came that we’d to sleep the night in the train because there was nowhere else for us to go.

  ‘’Aven’t they even got an old cemetery or a muck-’eap they don’t want,’ Eph wailed. ‘I’m getting proper vexed in ’ere.’

  Inevitably, they woke us before dawn, just as we’d finally dropped off, and turned us out, stiff with cold, and swearing and grumbling about the authorities, hitching at packs and rifles and buttoning up coats.

  There was a feeling of urgency about Amiens, though, that soon brought us to life. Wrinkled Picardy farmers and well-fed businessmen mixed across the crowded pavements with trim-legged girls and buxom country women with baskets. Here and there you could see the red, white and black crest of Picardy or a speck of horizon-blue or the scarlet-and-gold kepi of a French general. There appeared to be hundreds of staff officers about, with their red hat-bands and collar gorgets, old ones, young ones, all well-fed, all of them immaculate, and most of them on well-groomed sleek horses and accompanied by smart-looking cavalrymen with polished bandoliers and buttons, or sitting back in brown, high-built, spoke-wheeled staff cars.

  As they produced breakfast for us from cookers parked under the shadow of the cathedral, and we tried to wash and shave at a communal pump, we began to absorb some of the atmosphere of the growing offensive that reached out to us from the sandbagged buildings and the men sleeping in hundreds along the streets under the trees, from the horses and lorries and waggons and guns, in quantities we’d never seen before. This was the beginning of the war for us. You could smell it in the air, see it in the teeming movement in the streets, hear it in the hubbub of hooves and feet and rolling wheels over the pavé. It was all around us, stretching out to sweep us away, swamping the normality of the city’s life, quickening the senses, heightening the atmosphere of urgency and haste.

  Many of the soldiers moving about the streets seemed most unwarlike, however, and I saw looks of surprise about me as half a dozen shifty-eyed men, who had a little of
the look of Eph Lott about them, sidled among us offering German helmets for sale, black metal spiked affairs with gilded eagles on the front.

  ‘Only ten bob, matey,’ they announced. ‘They’re eleven and six in Albert.’

  ‘Are they real?’ Murray’s eyes almost popped out of his head.

  ‘Real? ’Course they’re real. Captured ’em meself up near the Ancre. You can see the German words inside ’em if you look.’

  As they drifted past us, one of the cooks wiped his hands on his trousers and shook his head.

  ‘Watch out for that lot,’ he advised.

  It seemed there was a medical board in the city, housed somewhere behind the cathedral, that attracted all the malingerers and cast-offs who’d been called up on reserve and were too old to fight and too young to discharge.

  The cook clearly had no love for any of them and he slammed his pans about as though he could measure his disgust only in the amount of noise he could make.

  ‘Them bastards spoil it for the genuine articles,’ he said, letting his cigarette ash fall into the stew he was preparing. ‘There are plenty of blokes round ’ere who’ve been smuggled back out of the line because they’d do a bunk if they ’ad to go in again. Out since 1914, some of ’em. They’ve ’ad more than they can take. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of good blokes fretting to get back to their pals, and clerks working twenty hours a day who ain’t letting the side down, but that bloody lot gets us all a bad name with the staff.’

  It came as a bit of a shock to realise just how much wreckage war left in its wake, not merely smashed guns and torn ground, but broken men, and dodgers on the lookout for a quick penny, enjoying their triumph over a medical board and determined, since they couldn’t get a discharge, to make as much as they could while the going was good. We’d met them at home, but out here I’d expected it to be different. They seemed to reduce the war to a sordid little scuffle round a market place, and, more than ever, I felt we were amateurs at the game in this atmosphere of sharp practice and experience.

  Still stiff with travelling, we fell in in companies outside the station, among the waggons that seemed to line the vast square, and, as we waited, a tremendous cavalcade of cavalry went past, magnificent phalanxes of men, flat-capped British with sabres and carbines and black-bearded blue-turbaned Indians with fluttering lance-pennants, jostling each other on well-fed, well-groomed mounts whose steel-shod hooves struck sparks from the cobbles.

  ‘Well, we ain’t much money but we do see life, don’t we?’ Eph said, caught up by the sense of power behind those clattering squadrons. ‘I could make a fortune with a few of them nags at Derby ’orse fair.’

  ‘Let’s give ’em a cheer,’ Murray suggested, and old Corker turned on him at once, his flat boozy face contemptuous, his yellow eyes cold.

  ‘Don’t you ever git sick of cheering people?’ he demanded. ‘It’s a wonder you don’t get ’oarse, the way you go on. Besides,’ he snorted as he moved along the lines, shoving men into place, ‘yer cheering the wrong lot, lad. Cavalry never did do much but clutter the roads up and pull down all the telephone wires so the infantry ’ad to shove ’em up again. All they do is cover retreating infantry on horseback and hunt foxes and ’ares and shoot pigeons.’

  He turned and stared after the last files of the cavalry, and his brows came down.

  ‘They’ll let you down when the time comes, you see,’ he growled. ‘Their ’osses’ll not be groomed or fed, or they won’t ’ave sharpened their swords or summat. When the fighting starts, it’ll be the old mud-crusher on his two flat feet that’ll finish it. You see.’

  Murray became indignant and disbelieving at once. He seemed to spend half his life being indignant and disbelieving.

  ‘If they’re so damned useless,’ he demanded, ‘why do we have to have so many of ’em,’

  ‘Because French’s a cavalryman,’ Corker said. ‘And so is Haig and Gough and Allenby and all the others at the top. We won the war in South Africa with mounted troops. Right, we’ll win the war in France with mounted troops. Now shut up and git in line.’

  We set off north to the tap of drums and the high shriek of fifes and the oompah-oompah of ‘Yorkshire Johnny’ from the band in front. Within an hour, on the long road that led to Albert and Bapaume, the sun had vanished. It clouded over rapidly and the rain that started pecking at the puddles changed to sleet and snow, and we discovered that our boots, burned dry by the Egyptian sands, were completely useless. They’d lost their elasticity and leaked badly at the seams.

  We stopped for a meal of uncooked bully-beef and biscuits in a village several miles outside Amiens, sitting on the pavement with our backs to the one-storey, red-brick houses that lined the only street.

  ‘Nice place for a holiday,’ Spring said flatly, staring round him at the shabby, tasteless buildings and the blank-faced women and children who stood in the doorways staring at us.

  ‘A proper whirl of gaiety ’ere at night, I bet!’ Eph said. ‘’Urry up, boys, they’ve lit the lights at the butchers’.’

  An old man came along offering us pamphlets. He looked about sixty but he told us he was ninety.

  ‘I bet he doesn’t live on bully-beef,’ Henry Oakley commented.

  ‘Comment vivre cent ans,’ the old man kept saying, shaking the pamphlets in our faces. ‘Comment vivre cent ans. How to live to be a hundred.’

  ‘In view of the coming joust with the Germans,’ Locky said dryly, ‘I think his estimate’s a little generous.’

  All that day we marched, halting from time to time to let convoys of guns and horses pass us, standing stiff-kneed by the side of the road as they jingled past.

  There seemed to be every kind and size of man – men from Bermuda, Newfoundland, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Canada, I saw – some of them mere boys, some of them proudly displaying the medal ribbons of long-dead campaigns.

  There were miners from Wales and the Midlands, factory hands from the industrial centres, clerks and shop boys, plough-men and shepherds, blond Saxons from the old south-east and swarthy Celts from the west and the north, college graduates and dock labourers, men who’d come from the distant places of the earth where death was a normal event, and men like me whose chief adventure in life had been a Sunday-afternoon bicycle ride. I saw men who ought to have been digging their allotments, their eyes alight with eagerness, and one I spoke to was a man of sixty who’d come all the way from South America and knocked twenty years off his age because his only son had been killed at Mons, and he was determined to avenge him.

  Everywhere you looked the earth was brown with humanity. Every field seemed to be full of men and horses, and the arrow-straight road was jammed with waggons and guns and vehicles. Convoy after convoy came past, rumbling carts with whining axles and square-nosed, brass-bonneted Crossley ASC lorries, nose-to-tail, men nodding at the wheels as they drove. Thousands of pack mules with tossing heads and wild eyes, trudging southwards and westwards from the front, their legs and bellies caked with the chalky mud of the trenches, and remounts moving up in twos, tramped the brick-and-rubble-filled shell-holes flat; and near every village and farm you could see carpenters at work, both civilian and military, smocked and uniformed alongside each other, hammering two- and three-tiered bunks together outside barns and sheds.

  ‘There’ll be no mistake this time,’ Murray said, his eyes alight with enthusiasm. ‘It’ll be a walkover. It’s a dead cert.’

  He was staring round him at the batteries upon batteries of guns, light and heavy, that were ranked ready in the fields, with thousands of men behind them stacking great piles of shining shells into dumps. Beyond them, the hills rose green and brown and studded with little clumps of woodland. After the dusty dryness of Egypt it was good to see the rich earth and the first spring foliage. The houses had not been touched by the war, and they looked prosperous and peaceful and full of hope.

  ‘You know,’ Locky said thoughtfully, ‘thinking about it, seeing it, feeling it, scenting i
t, knowing what’s going on, I don’t think I’d have missed this for all the tea in China. I’m enjoying the swank of it.’

  I nodded, caught by the same emotions. This time, I was telling myself, this time we were going to smash through Kaiser Bill’s fortifications and bring the war to an end for good and all. There were enough of us – that was obvious – and we were clearly backed up by enough guns and shells and reserves for it not to go wrong again. This time it was going to be different.

  For nearly two years now, the Allies had faced the Germans across a soggy strip of No Man’s Land that ran all the way down from the North Sea to the Vosges, a narrow ribbon of stale, stagnant, churned-up land criss-crossed by rusty barbed wire and littered with all the ugly rubbish of war. For nearly two years they’d fought across that narrow stretch of blood-stained ground and, with the exception of the biting off of a salient or the thrusting out of other salients, the line hadn’t changed much since October 1914.

  Now, though, here on the Somme, there was a new spirit abroad. You could sense it in the air. You could see it in all these eager faces. Kitchener’s new armies were arriving in their tens of thousands, untouched by the cynicism of the older soldiers. The munitions shortage had been overcome by Lloyd George, the little Welshman from Criccieth who’d turned the Government upside down after Loos and damn’ near toppled Kitchener from his pedestal at the War Office. This was untainted country, hardly fought over before, dry, well-drained land unlike the soggy ditch-lined fields of Flanders to the north, land where cavalry could move, good open country perfectly fitted for the break through that would take us to Berlin.

  This time, that sausage machine of the old soldiers, fed with men and churning out corpses, was not to remain screwed in place. We were going to shift it.

  I don’t think there was a man among us who wasn’t convinced of that. There’d be casualties, we knew, but inevitably it would be the other chap, the man in front of you, or the man behind you, the man waving a brown arm at a blank-faced woman working with a long hoe in the fields, who regarded him with the same hatred she would have regarded the Germans. It might be your friend, your enemy, your sergeant, your officer, but never you yourself.