Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  As we sat down to bacon rashers and tea, another mortar bomb landed somewhere just beyond the parapet, and a shower of pulverised dirt came over on to us as we cowered down.

  ‘Them damn’ Germans’ll be the death of me,’ Bert muttered. ‘Their sergeant must have got a liver or something this morning. They nearly put the fire out.’

  He was back on the job long before we’d stopped shaking, swearing as he brushed the soil from his bread and bacon. The tea was full of pieces of dirt and bits of grass, and we examined each other’s handkerchiefs to decide which was cleanest so that we could sieve it into another dixie.

  ‘Might as well ’ave it nice and dainty,’ Bert said, passing bacon round on the end of his bayonet.

  Later in the day he had to take his turn as sentry, and asked us if we’d like a squint through his periscope. I’m not sure what I’d expected, but I was startled to see wide acres of fresh green, stretching away slightly uphill, and no sign of the enemy. There were a few strands of rusty barbed wire decorated with seed fluff sticking out of the lush grass, and dozens of old bully-beef tins and scraps of broken equipment just in front, which had been thrown over the parapet. It didn’t seem possible that those murderous mortar bombs could have come from this direction.

  Not far in front, lying across a little mound of earth, was what seemed to be a blackened skeleton in a few rags of red and blue, the weeds growing up through the cage of the ribs. There was a stiff claw-like object sticking straight up alongside it which I took to be the hand of another dead man.

  ‘Frogs,’ Bert said. ‘They musta caught it in a raid some time back when the French held this sector. They’ve been there ever since we first came in here. There’s another one just beyond, a Jerry what caught it a couple of weeks back when they tried to break in. He was there a couple of days before he died, yelling and ’owling all the time. It was enough to make you sick.’

  ‘Didn’t anybody go to him?’ Locky asked.

  ‘One of my mates wanted to, but the officer stopped him. If you look over on yer left a bit, you’ll see one hanging on the wire. He’s been there a lot longer. There ain’t much left of him now, I reckon.’

  I saw a bundle of old rags that had been blackened by the weather, supported by a few strands of wire. It looked like something the old-clothes man had thrown down, but I saw it was a man, face-down on the wire, with the same claw-like hands as the other, his clothes loose over shrivelled arms and legs.

  Late in the afternoon Corker came along and sent us off to help carry wire and sandbags along the communication trench from a dump about a hundred yards back. There were no Worcesters among the party. They were obviously taking advantage of having fresh troops with them to do the work. When we’d finished, they set us digging a drainage sump in a patch of soggy ground where there were one or two bodies in rags of French uniform. We had to throw down chloride of lime to kill the smell.

  Locky’s face looked taut and strained and young Murray’s was perceptibly green. Then someone tapped me on the shoulder and I saw it was Bold. He jerked his head and drew me on one side to where Corker was standing.

  ‘We lost Corporal Oakley,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I told him. ‘I saw it. How is he?’

  ‘He’ll live. But he won’t be playing cricket again.’

  I said nothing and he looked me up and down, his eyes steely in his white, hard face.

  ‘We’ve made Mason up,’ he said. ‘We’ll need another lance-corporal now, though. I’m going to put you up.’

  ‘Not me,’ I said. ‘I don’t want stripes.’

  Bold’s brows came down and his eyes glittered. ‘Why not?’ he said.

  ‘I’d rather stay with the boys.’

  ‘You’ll be with the boys, won’t you? What do you think one stripe makes you? A general?’

  ‘Give it to Murray,’ I said. ‘He’d love a stripe.’

  ‘He’s too young.’

  ‘Well, Henny Cuthbert then. He’s keen.’

  ‘Cuthbert’s not been in the line yet.’

  ‘There are plenty of others.’

  Bold stared at me a little longer, without speaking, then he glanced at Corker. Finally he gave me a little shove. ‘Git on with your work,’ he growled. ‘I’ll be talking to you later. There’s plenty of time.’

  We lived like pigs and soon began to stink like pigs. The smell I’d caught as we’d entered the trenches was around us all the time. It was compounded of turned earth, mud, latrines, the unburied or half-buried corpses beyond the parapets, rotting sandbags, stale human sweat, cordite and lyddite, with occasionally the burnt-grease smell of fried bacon or cigarette smoke to sweeten it.

  We lived on bully-beef and biscuits, and Tickler’s plum-and-apple jam and strong tea sickly with sugar and condensed milk, that was boiled on Tommy-cookers or issue charcoal. We played cards and slept on sandbags and ran short of tobacco so that we shared cigarettes, passing them round and allowing ourselves one suck each.

  With the lack of sleep and the everlasting labour, I found myself dropping off at all sorts of odd times, and one morning I came abruptly back to life to see a big rat sitting on its haunches just in front of me, staring at me as it brushed its whiskers and pink-tipped nose with its fore-paws. As I leapt to my feet, it squealed and shot up the trench wall and out of sight over the sandbags.

  Locky pushed his head out of the dugout as I yelled.

  ‘It pinched my bacon,’ I said. ‘I was asleep!’

  We learned to accept, if not to enjoy, the earthy dens we lived in, and the precarious candlelight with its wobbling shadows, and the dank musty air, and the lumps of chalky soil that fell from the ceiling into your food. Always, awake or asleep, you were aware of trench noises about you, the scrape and clatter of working parties and the squeak of rats, the rattle of dixies, the sound of bacon frying in the adjoining kennel and thin trembling mouth organ music coming from somewhere farther down the muddy alley.

  I learned to disregard whatever noise didn’t immediately concern me. The howitzer shells that sounded like express trains rushing through the air didn’t concern us at all – they were heading for the rear areas – but I kept my eyes and ears well open for the local stuff – the whizzbangs which exploded again and again like a jumping cracker, and the grotesquely somersaulting minenwerfer bombs.

  At night, we scrambled along the communication trench in parties, to bring up supplies from where they’d been hastily dumped for us in the mine-crater or from the corner of the wood where the transport mules snuffled the ground for the rapidly disappearing grass. During the day, we tried none too successfully to wash, old Corker always at our heels, chivvying us to shave. All his scrimshanking seemed to be behind him now, and his loyal old heart was squarely fixed on doing his job. There were no rations here to flog, no new recruits to swindle, and it was almost as though he were showing us what a soldier should be – crafty and cunning at home, one eye always on the main chance, using the vastness of the Army to put aside a little private loot for himself; but never, never letting the side down when we’d been reduced to the elementary necessities of active service.

  ‘A clean soldier’s a good soldier.’ His harsh voice nagged us awake as we sprawled dead-beat on the firestep, trying to catch the warming sunshine. ‘Come on, git on yer feet. Git yerself shaved, you lot. A good soldier can always save a drop of tea to scrape his chin with. Git yerself spruced up. And git them buttons rubbed.’

  Like Bold, he was always unbelievably clean himself, his big moustaches well spiked, his bottle-nose glowing, the worst of the mud always scraped from his clothes.

  I seemed to fill sandbags incessantly, learning to keep my head down instinctively at the places where the parapet was low, and not to hang around the machine gun emplacements where the mortars had a habit of dropping.

  ‘There’s one thing,’ Eph said cheerfully round the corner of the firebay. ‘It’s a tidy way to fight a war. It keeps all the flippin’ mess in one place, ’stead
of strewing it all over the shop. Us on this side. The Germans on that.’

  One night the Worcesters took half a dozen of us out on a raid against the German trenches. Our job was to stay in No Man’s Land and cover them as they came back, and I learned the meaning of girding up my loins that night. A man’s loins can get damned loose when he’s scared.

  ‘Look out for the poppies and the weeds,’ they advised us. ‘They grow tallest round the edges of the shell-holes and if anything happens make a dive for them. And keep that damned equipment from clinking. They’ll hear it in Berlin.’

  We crawled forward on our stomachs, our clothes hissing through the long damp grass, and lay sprawled in a little hollow, crouching in the cold for what seemed hours listening to the rasping cough of a German sentry just ahead of us in the darkness. Then I heard the soft thud of a heavy mallet wrapped in sacking thumping down on iron stakes, and the chink of wire.

  ‘We’re in luck,’ one of the Worcesters whispered. ‘They’ve got a wiring party out. Once the shells come down, we ought to pick up one or two.’

  We waited for what seemed hours, listening to the occasional bullet whimpering by, then at last the expected shells arrived and the bombs went off and the machine guns opened up with shattering bowel-withering suddenness and all hell seemed to be let loose.

  ‘Christ,’ Mason said, hugging the earth alongside me. ‘This isn’t what I joined up for.’

  The Worcesters got their prisoner, a scared boy with a lacerated head, and we had to dive for a shell-hole and crouch there until the hellish racket died down before we could make a final sprint for our own lines.

  I almost fell into the trench and sat there panting, my head hanging, my mouth open, the breath sobbing in my throat, soaked with sweat and exhausted mentally and physically.

  ‘Oh God! Oh Jesus Christ!’ Mason was muttering aloud, abandoning himself to the first moment of panic and sheer terror now that we were safe and nerves and muscles didn’t have to be kept in check any longer.

  The next night, as we were preparing to leave, the Germans retaliated with an evening strafe that made my hair stand on end.

  ‘God help the poor devils coming in,’ Locky said, crouching flat against the quivering wall of the trench, his head down between his shoulders, his eyes blinking with every bang and every trickle of dust that rolled down on top of him.

  A couple of mortar bombs fell in the trench away on the right and Tom Creak, in his stiff dignified foreman’s way, passed the word along that we’d lost a sergeant.

  ‘Who was it?’ Locky asked.

  ‘Don’t know yet. One of t’Worcesters told me. He didn’t catch t’name.’

  Later on a group of stretcher-bearers went past, and I recognised pale features that belonged to a boy in A Company who’d got a splinter in the knee. The familiar faces were starting to disappear already. War seemed less a period of wild excitement than a series of small vicious shocks on the nervous system. Every time someone was hit you suffered another personal brutal blow.

  I gave the boy on the stretcher a cigarette and he drew on it gratefully.

  ‘Who else did it get?’ I asked.

  ‘Dunno. Didn’t see. God, it hurts!’

  ‘Poor, poor lad,’ Tom Creak said as he was carried away.

  Then Ashton and the colonel came along, followed by Bold, who called me towards them.

  Pine looked tired and strained, the black eye-patch like a mark of mourning on his pale face. The wind was keening down the trench and a piece of ground sheet covering a hole under the parapet was flapping from time to time in a harassing noisy way. I saw Locky and Eph and Tom Creak staring.

  ‘Sergeant-Major Bold says you’ve refused to – to take a stripe,’ the colonel said brusquely, trying to quell his stammer.

  I was startled and glanced at Bold, but his face was sharp and expressionless. He looked cold and bitter and hard as nails. There was a lot of blood on his sleeve and trousers, I noticed.

  ‘Well, yes, sir,’ I said. ‘I suppose I did.’

  Pine snorted. ‘Well, you’re a – fool,’ he commented. ‘I’ve b-been watching you on and off all week. You’re the coolest b-beggar we’ve had in the line.’

  ‘I don’t feel it,’ I said.

  Pine frowned. ‘Well, whether you like it or not,’ he said, ‘as of now, you’re a lance-corporal.’ He took an indelible pencil from his pocket and nodded to Bold, who took hold of my sleeve and spat on it. He rubbed the spittle into a damp patch with his finger and the colonel scrawled a big V on it.

  He stared at me for a moment as Bold let go my arm, then without a word he turned round and marched off, poking men aside with his ash-plant as he made way for himself. I stood for a moment, squinting down at the thin blue stripe scrawled on my arm. Bold hadn’t moved. He seemed to be waiting for me to make some comment.

  ‘Sar’-Major,’ I said. ‘I don’t want a stripe…’

  He seemed angry and ready for trouble, as though he’d been hoping I’d object and welcomed the opportunity to snarl at me.

  ‘Well, you’ve got one,’ he snapped. ‘The colonel’s noticed you more than once. That’s why Ashton told me to ask you the other day.’

  ‘Who suggested me?’ I asked.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes.’ He stared at me hostilely. ‘Why not?’

  ‘But I don’t want a stripe!’

  Bold turned and faced me, staring down at me. ‘We’ve only been in the line nine bloody nights,’ he snapped, ‘and we’ve lost nine men, two of ’em NCOs. Oakley went first go off, didn’t he, and now we’ve lost Sergeant Corker.’

  He saw me staring and his face flushed angrily.

  ‘Yes,’ he snarled. ‘Corker. An hour ago. Over there. The poor old bastard bled to death in my arms.’

  He turned on his heel, as if he were on a parade ground, and marched away, still angry. The thought that old Corker was dead had taken away all the arguments I’d begun to think up. If Corker, with his South African medals and his boozy merriment, his vast experience of war and his apparent indestructibility, could be killed, what might happen to the rest of us? Henry Oakley came sneaking back again into the recesses of my mind and I suddenly felt very frail and incapable.

  I caught myself looking at Locky, who seemed as full of grief and pity as I felt myself, his thin face pinched and cold-looking.

  Then Eph managed a lopsided grin at me, his thick red cheeks shining as he showed his teeth. ‘It’s no good, Fen, old cock,’ he said. ‘They’ve caught up with you at last.’

  4

  We took old Corker’s body with us when we marched out.

  Catchpole and Murray were on the rear end of the stretcher, and Murray kept glancing down at the still figure wrapped in the ground sheet, the muddy hobnailed boots sticking out at the other end. He suddenly seemed to have left his boyhood behind him and all the eagerness had left his face. Even the rosiness had been replaced in his cheeks by the grey-whiteness of weariness.

  They put the stretcher down in the little cemetery near the end of the communication trench. There was a soldier working there now, with a little pile of roughly made wooden crosses, hurriedly painted in thin white paint. On them names were pencilled and on one or two, I noticed, it said simply An unknown British soldier. No more. Just that, and the mouldering caps of the dead hanging on top.

  Murray straightened up, staring down at the bundle on the stretcher. Corker looked so still under his blanket, I thought, so dead. He seemed like a reproach to the rest of us that we were untouched and healthy, a reminder to us of just how small and inexperienced we were in the vast sad ramifications of war. Murray seemed to be thinking along the same lines. ‘He seemed to know his way about so well,’ he pointed out wearily, as though he were saying Corker’s epitaph.

  Eph looked up at him, lifting his head with a heavy movement. ‘Poor old sod,’ he said.

  ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ Murray went on thoughtfully, staring unseeingl
y in front of him. ‘With all his experience, he still copped it. It makes you wonder if all that training we had was worthwhile. It’s only a matter of luck, after all, isn’t it?’

  The sorrow about me was sharp and bitter, as though they were half ashamed to be showing their feelings.

  There were two or three stretcher-bearers waiting under the trees, with half a dozen more stretchers with silent loads, and, after a while, a red-faced padre came up on a green army bicycle. He intoned a hurried service while we stood with our caps off for a minute or two, then he acknowledged Pine’s salute and rode off again.

  ‘They don’t waste time putting you away, do they?’ Mason said bitterly. His face looked pinched and irritable, as though he were having difficulty reconciling his beliefs and his ardour with what was reality.

  Nobody mentioned Corker by name again. We were all suddenly concerned with scraping the mud off our clothes with knives, forks and entrenching tools, pretending everything was normal and that we’d never known the warm-hearted boozy old soldier with the red nose and quiff whom we’d just pushed down into the damp earth.

  Bold, who was standing by the grave, signed to us to get into line. Tom Creak was the last to move and he hesitated for a second, gazing back at the little mound of newly turned earth, his square, unhandsome features sombre.

  ‘I’m proper grieved,’ he said simply.

  Bold was still staring down at the grave, his bony face expressionless, the ginger moustache like a wound on his white skin. Then he seemed to snap into life and started shouting at us as though nothing had happened, as though Corker had never existed, and grief and sorrow were alien things we knew nothing about.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘Git into line, do! We ain’t got all day. Don’t you want your grub? Don’t you want your sleep? Jump about a bit!’