Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  The place had grown up haphazardly round a well, which stood by the village green, moss on its log-made hood, its base surrounded by puddles of curdled grey washing-water. With its ancient orchards, fringed with charlock, scabious and cornflower shoots, its rusting iron crucifix, its one street and single-storeyed cottages, it looked poverty-stricken and cheerless under the wheeling pigeons and the cawing rooks that circled in the grey sky. The peasant buildings were built of warped beams and baked mud and laths, which were exposed here and there where a shell splinter had swiped away the surface, and all of them seemed to be falling into decay, except for the jerry-built red-brick Mairie with its gilded weathervane and the slate-roofed schoolhouse where brigade headquarters had been established. Every farm seemed to be jammed with men – in barns and huts and tents – and every field contained waggons and horses and guns.

  There was a smell of burning vegetation in the air, and the newly turned fields nearby were rich and brown and red, here and there running into white where a vein of chalk came up near the surface. Down by the banks of the streams, in the misty basin of the valley, the air was noisy with the cries of waterfowl and other birds, and the hedges were full of early flowers, and long lush grass among the sycamores, pollards, planes and willows.

  Higher up, where the Germans squatted, their four lines of defences built long since by Russian prisoners from the Eastern Front, there were no hedges and the land seemed to be reaching towards the sky. Here you could just see the beginning of the flattish acres of the uplands, with trees in round compact clumps beyond the withered wheat and corn and barley and beet which had been abandoned since 1914.

  It was a rich sloping area of ridges and folds which had been fought over a hundred times by everyone who had ever made war in France. Colinqueau Farm itself had been occupied by Cossacks during Napoleon’s retreat in 1814 and by Bavarians in 1870. Half a century later it had been occupied again and the farmer and his family had fled, and it had stood deserted for six months, its garden going to seed, its harvest rotting in the fields, until the Germans had fallen back again from the Marne and they’d returned to take possession once more.

  Locky, who knew the district well, told us the Ancre had good trout in it when we felt like finding them, and Tom Creak and the Mandys, who almost every Saturday and Sunday of their summers before the war had gone off with their bait, their covered rods and their baskets in horse-drawn coaches hired by their miners’ lodges, sat up at once, their eyes gleaming, on the lookout immediately for suitable poles on the willow trees.

  Tim Williams, who’d lectured at the University on the subject, said the place was known in history as Santerre.

  ‘Sancta terra,’ he said. ‘Sacred land. Peter the Hermit was a Picard, and a lot of Crusaders came from Amiens. Or perhaps it was Sangua terra. Bloody land. Take your pick. What’s the difference? Charlemagne lived here in Picardy…’

  ‘Who’s Charlie Mann?’ Eph asked.

  ‘He was in your line of business,’ Tim said. ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘What? Bettin’?’

  ‘No, fathead, soldiering.’

  ‘Who’d he fight? Germans?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Eph, dry up,’ Murray said eagerly, and you could see he was excited by the knowledge that he was surrounded by history and on the point of making more. ‘Go on, Tim. Tell us some more.’

  ‘Well’ – Williams smiled and gestured, looking more like a lecturer than a soldier for a moment with his long hands and thinning hair – ‘it’s been ravaged round here by the Normans and the English…’

  Catchpole looked up from the mug of cold water he was trying to shave from. ‘Wouldn’t mind doing a bit of ravaging myself,’ he grinned. ‘Or is it ravishing I’m thinking about? Anyway, whatever it is, away with protracted virginity! A soldier’s life’s too bloody pure these days. No loot. No women. I always thought they were the perquisites of the profession.’

  Murray scowled, resenting the intrusion of flippancy. ‘I wish you lot’d shut up,’ he snapped. ‘Go on, Tim. Who else fought here?’

  ‘Louis XI and Charles the Bold…’

  ‘Charles the what?’ Eph looked round. ‘Come again, mate!’

  ‘Charles the Bold.’

  ‘That’s a name for a Sat’dy night, ain’t it? Imagine me bein’ announced to the colonel. Eph the Bold’s ’ere, sir. Come to apply for leave. Go on, mate.’

  ‘It suffered in the Hundred Years War…’

  Eph’s eyebrows popped up again. ‘The ’Undred Years what?’ he said.

  ‘The Hundred Years War.’

  ‘Was there a war that lasted a hundred years?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What, with brass-’ats and kit-’umping, and wearing your boots down to the lace-’oles gitting from one place to the next?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Cor!’ Eph’s eyebrows popped up again. ‘Fancy filling sandbags for a hundred years. I bet business went down the drain a bit. What they fight all that time for?’

  ‘A small matter of property rights, I believe,’ Locky grinned.

  Tim nodded. ‘They couldn’t agree who was boss,’ he said. ‘This is Henry V’s “tawny ground”…’

  ‘I thought that was a port wine.’

  Murray, who had been growing more and more impatient during the interruptions, burst out now in an explosion of anger. ‘For God’s sake,’ he shouted in disgust. ‘Can’t you shut up? I’m trying to listen to Tim, not your bloody silly comments!’

  Eph turned to Catchpole, his small eyes wide in mock horror. ‘Did you hear what he said to me, Vicar?’ he demanded. ‘I bet ’e never learned them words in Sunday School.’

  ‘Take the child away at once,’ Catchpole said. ‘Wash his mouth out with lysol and saddle soap, and anoint him with chloride of lime.’

  Murray quivered, trying hard to ignore the comments, his face red, disapproval shining even from the back of his neck.

  ‘Why did they always fight here, Tim?’ he asked deliberately, in a low, bitter voice, his words coming slowly with a precision that was designed to show dignity and composure under duress.

  Tim was grinning all over his face and he found it hard to reply.

  ‘Because it’s perfect terrain for battle, I suppose,’ he said. ‘The last shot of Napoleon’s 1814 campaign was fired from the walls of Peronne, which is just to the south of here…’

  ‘Seems we’re in good company,’ Locky commented, and Murray raised his eyes in despair.

  ‘Doesn’t it just?’ Eph stared at Tim admiringly, marvelling at his erudition. ‘Ain’t education wonderful?’

  ‘It would be,’ Murray burst out, ‘if you silly bloody lot would let a man get the benefit of it!’

  ‘Oh, my!’ Eph shrieked in mock horror and put his fingers to his ears. ‘’E’s at it again!’

  Murray was still standing there, red-faced and furious, searching for an answer, the rest of us rolling on the ground laughing at him, when old Corker came up, shouting to us to fall in. Locky began to fasten his tunic, softly singing ‘Let me like a soldier fall’, and Murray exploded again.

  ‘It’s all right for you lot,’ he snorted as he reached for his cap. ‘You’ve got no bloody feeling for history! We’re in big things here. We ought to appreciate it.’

  Locky laughed. ‘Dear Murray,’ he said. ‘You and I never did see eye to eye on what constituted “big things”. It’s often occurred to me that the cleverest soldiers of all must be the ones who arrive not so early as to be involved in the bloodshed; and not so late as to miss the glory.’

  Corker eyed him as he took his place in the ranks forming up in the lane, and cast a sly glance in the direction of the seething Murray.

  ‘If you ain’t careful, ’Addo,’ he said, ‘you’ll ’ave this young feller busting ’isself with rage, and then where will we be when Sir Douglas ’Aig says “Let it rip, boys,” and we ain’t got Murray’s soldierly spirit to fall back on?’

  We’d thought that now we
’d arrived at the war our fatigues might be finished, and they’d let us get on with the fighting, but they’d called us out to load equipment on lorries at the station, and, as we waited for the transport to arrive, they marched off C Company to search for wash-tubs for baths, A Company to dig latrine and refuse pits, and B Company to spend the day unloading shells at a dump down the lane, a tremendous barbed-wire enclosure where huge piles of ammunition were covered with tarpaulin sheets.

  D Company, enjoying the bliss of riding in lorries after the previous day’s marching, and with that cool spring air about us after the heat and dust of Egypt and the appalling journey up from the south, made it a day out, enjoying the countryside, absorbed in everything – French cooking, French farming, French words even. Corker actually found us an estaminet with beer. By the time we got back, the camp seemed to be in some sort of order, with tents erected in rows and battalion headquarters firmly established in the ruined farmhouse with the farmer and Madame and her daughters, two sexless women around thirty. All our personal equipment had been cleared for us, and we flung ourselves down, prepared to stretch out and enjoy life, but Corker was after us again immediately.

  ‘What, again?’ Murray wailed.

  ‘Yes, again. And why not? Ain’t it the principle of the Army to keep men busy?’

  ‘It’s the principle of the Army,’ Locky said, ‘to find out what you can’t do and then to proceed to make you do it. I was never built for labouring.’

  Corker grinned. ‘You ’orrible men, you,’ he shouted gaily, as though the holiday spirit that lay behind the hopes of approaching victory had affected him too. ‘We got work to do. We came ’ere to make war – and – war – we – ’ave – got – to – make. We will therefore,’ he announced, ‘march over to that there field next door and proceed to erect, lift, or otherwise put up, a few rows of tents.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Murray said, his expression lifting. ‘We might get some benefit from that.’

  Corker grinned. ‘’Ave no fear,’ he said. ‘They ain’t for us. ’Ave some sense, boy. That’d be too easy. These are for a new battalion just out from England, still wet behind the ears, who don’t know how to go about it. We can’t win the war on our own, can we? We’ve got to ’ave ’elp. We ain’t all blood-crazy like you.’

  We returned to Colinqueau Farm to find they’d jammed us into barns and outhouses. They’d been occupied many times before and the lice we’d picked up seemed to double their numbers within an hour, and we gave up trying to keep free of them.

  ‘They’re calling up their relations,’ Catchpole shouted. ‘Help!’

  ‘I’m being eaten alive!’ Mason was rolling on the floor, pretending to fight with millions of imaginary insects.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind ’em eating me flesh,’ Eph mourned. ‘But these spiteful bastards just take a bite and spit it out again.’

  ‘Leave ’em alone,’ Billy Mandy said. ‘They’ve got to earn their living somehow.’

  All the same, the barns and the deep, damp-smelling straw were signs that we were really soldiering at last. Tents suddenly seemed to hold a suggestion of amateurism, a hint of weekend camps, and we sprawled with unbuttoned jackets and loosened puttees, our equipment hanging on every kind of projection, the holes in the walls stuffed up with packs and greatcoats. Men hung over the edge of the lofts, joking by the light of candles with their friends on the ground floor, jeering at the lice and pretending to crow like roosters. This was real campaigning.

  We had believed in our enthusiasm that, with the offensive hanging over us like a shadow, any battle training we might still have to endure would be a specialised form of instruction, with particular emphasis laid on what we were expected to do when they flung us at the German lines, but to our disgust it turned out to be the same weary routine all over again, day after day after day, everything we’d done at Blackmires and Romstone and in Egypt, advancing under imagined shell- or shrapnel- or machine-gun fire, digging trenches and building sandbag parapets. We fought the same old imaginary battles over the rolling ground between Albert and Amiens, in companies, battalions and brigades, and practised trench fighting in bombing squads of three men, the first man with a bayonet, the second with a ‘potato masher’, an Indian club studded with horseshoe nails or wrapped with barbed wire, the third with the Mills bombs, neat little fragmentation weapons which had at last taken the place of the home-made milk-tin grenades they’d used at Loos.

  ‘Is this all we’re going to do?’ Murray asked plaintively. ‘Just dash up and down again like we’ve always done?’

  ‘War is made up of individual sorrows and personal miseries,’ Locky said. ‘My individual sorrow is training and my personal misery more training.’

  ‘We can do the bloody job blindfold!’

  ‘Well, now, in case of some extraordinary emergency that might arise, you’ve got to be able to do it backwards, upside-down and inside-out. Only then will the Army be satisfied.’

  Locky beamed on young Murray and humped his equipment ready for the next spasm, his complaints good-humoured, his manner imperturbable, his spirit as untouched as ever.

  We could always hear the sound of the artillery as we trained, and the tap of rifles and machine guns in front, especially in the early morning, when the firing swelled up into a tornado of sound. You could always distinguish the machine guns because they made a noise like the giant tearing of calico and it galled us to listen to lectures and practise movements by numbers, while away to the east and the north men were fighting the war we’d come to finish. We felt we’d been there long enough looking on.

  Easter had come and gone, and with it the news in the Daily Mails they sent up to us of the German-inspired rebellion in Dublin, which had brought a howl from the leader-writers because it was considered to be in danger of drawing troops from the coming offensive in France. In spite of our first enthusiasm for barns, we’d soon had enough of sharing our lodgings with the pigs and the cockerels and the hens, and we were anxious to be on the march eastwards. We soon grew tired of promoting allied comradeship with the few French soldiers we saw, and bored with hunting eggs to put to our rashers of bacon. We’d learned all the tricks – how to ask always for Madame at the cottages, because the husbands and the sons were away and there was never anyone else but Madame and her daughters or sometimes some ancient grandfather or an imbecile or crippled son. The Picards were a taciturn lot, uncommunicative and fatalistic on the whole, to whom ‘C’est la guerre’ was the answer to everything. They probably hated us as much as they hated the Germans, because we were trespassers on their land.

  ‘When’s our turn coming?’ Murray begged again and again.

  ‘It’ll come in good time,’ Corker reassured him. ‘Just ’old your water, son.’

  ‘But we’re only learning stuff we’ve learned before. Half a dozen times.’

  ‘All stands you in good stead.’ Corker was unmoved by Murray’s anguish. ‘That’s ’ow it should be.’

  ‘That’s no bloody answer,’ Murray said disgustedly, flinging his cap to the ground as Corker disappeared.

  His face was sullen as he marched backwards and forwards from the training areas, frustrated and sickened by repetition, convinced like the rest of us that the Army had got us there and didn’t know what to do with us.

  Even the instructors irritated us. The bayonet-fighting sergeants were even more bloodthirsty than the ones in England.

  ‘You’ve got to get into a state of wild excitement,’ they told us. ‘Blood-madness, if you like. The bayonet is an offensive weapon and with it you go in to kill or be killed. You must all get the spirit of the bayonet. Put on a special face, instil fear into ’em, let ’em know they’re for it. You’re not dancing with a tart. Stick ’em in the eyes, in the throat, in the chest. Six inches are enough. If you shove it in a long way, you’ve only got to pull it out again, and somebody might get you while you’re doing it. Even three inches’ll do at a pinch. Don’t lurch. Don’t overbalance. Do it one-’ande
d, the other ’and outstretched to balance the body. Simply throw up the rifle with the ’and on the small of the butt. The weight of the rifle and the sharpness of the bayonet’ll do the rest.’

  We practised short points, long points, jabs and parries till our arms ached; then, as though it had been done deliberately to drive us to despair at the power the Army had over us, a new lieutenant was posted to the company from the armies of the north, and he told us sourly and without preamble that bayonet-fighting was a ‘bloody waste of time and best left alone’.

  In his constant search for efficiency, Ashton had drawn us up in a hollow square to hear the methods preached by this veteran of twenty-seven who’d been sent to add his experience to our theory, and I saw his eyebrows pop up at the sacrilege. All our training had been based on bayonet-fighting, and he glanced quickly at young Welch and Bickerstaff and the other officers alongside him, with that agonised crucified expression on his face, then he took off his spectacles and began to polish them vigorously, as though by doing so he’d avoided an unpleasant disagreement in public.

  The newcomer was called Blackett and he was a former sergeant attached to the Egyptian Army who’d paid his own fare to England to enlist at the beginning of the war. He’d joined us from a battalion which had been decimated at Loos and, like Appleby, was inclined to be cynical. He was as ugly as sin, with narrow green eyes and a teak-hard face. He wore wide breeches of a livid salmon-pink colour and a peak cap with the crown crushed in, which, with his light trousers and shirt and tie and the hair-oil you could smell a mile away, made him seem a bit cheap and nasty. Nevertheless, he had a curious unboastful confidence in himself that came from experience.

  ‘Never mind what they tell you,’ he said. ‘It won’t be so bloody easy as all that on the day. You might as well face it. There’ll certainly be somebody shooting at you, won’t there? There’ll be ’ell going off all round you, in fact, shells going up, and bullets whizzing about. And there’ll be wire. Wire. Don’t forget that. That there wire’ll be the death of you if you get caught up in it. For God’s sake, keep out of that wire, boys, because you’ll be stuck there for ’em to pick off at their leisure if you don’t. If the wire gets you, it’s bon soir, toodle-oo, goodbyee! I saw ’em hanging on it at Loos in their ’undreds, like a lot of old scarecrows.’