Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  We stood waiting, leg-weary, eyes closing with fatigue, while Pine’s horse was brought up and he adjusted the stirrup leathers, then we shuffled across the field where we’d seen the Jack Johnson explode. The scar was still there, livid in the green turf alongside the worn, muddy path, the grass round its edges burned, the soil charred and pulverised.

  We scrambled across the ditch, struggling under equipment which suddenly seemed to have grown heavier, boots clattering sharply as we climbed on to the pavé road.

  There were no buses for the return journey. It was as though they’d introduced us to warfare the easy way and had decided we were now capable of managing without help. We had to march the whole ten miles back to Rippy, tramping into the drizzling rain down the wet road, furious and frustrated in our weariness at the delays caused by traffic jams, snarling at the man in front every time he stopped suddenly because the man in front of him had stopped suddenly too.

  There was a lack of life about us now. Boots shuffled instead of ringing on the road, and knees and arms were slack, and there was a lot of hitching up of packs.

  Only Sergeant-Major Bold walked with any erectness, in a sort of untiring lope under his equipment, and I realised that in all the time I’d known him I’d never seen him looking anything but tough, humourless, harsh and efficient, and I thought bitterly that he probably wasn’t human.

  As we tramped round a corner by a high brick wall, where rusty dried grass grew along the top, we bumped into a staff cavalcade – spotless-looking men on sleek horses, surrounding a car in which a general was sitting. As we passed, the general glanced round at us and jerked his hand, and one of the mounted officers whirled his horse abruptly and clattered across to Pine.

  He said something sharply and Pine reined in, lifting his arm, and we halted. The staff officer was still speaking, his horse curvetting skittishly about so that the front rank had to jump clear of the flashing heels, then Pine dismounted slowly and walked across to the car.

  We shuffled and fidgeted under our loads, feeling like old soldiers who’d been singled out for praise, but then I saw Pine’s face was white with anger, the black eye-patch stark against his cheek. He was clearly being ticked off, and I sensed a feeling of hatred for the smooth, clean-looking unscarred staff officer flickering like lightning among the ranks behind me.

  Pine was one of us. He came from the same city. He was popular. We knew he was brave and he never neglected us. He was a remote individual because of his rank, but our feelings towards him had never been without warmth, and even his stammer was regarded with affection.

  ‘Don’t know as I like that bastard there, got up to look like Vesta Tilley,’ Eph growled, jerking his head at the staff officer who’d spoken to Pine.

  ‘Can’t say I’m sweet on him myself, bud,’ MacKinley muttered. ‘He looks a bit of an oily beggar, if you ask me.’

  Pine was stepping back now, quivering with the earnestness of his salute. As he crossed the muddy road towards us again, the general nodded at the men on the horses, ignoring Pine, and the staff car roared away. The horsemen sat a moment longer, talking, then they too cantered off.

  ‘Bastards,’ Eph said, by way of farewell.

  Pine halted in front of us. He was frowning, his single eye glittering in the tired hollow of his left cheek. He put one hand behind his back and with the other began to fiddle with one of his buttons as he always did when he had to address us.

  ‘I’ve just b-been told your marching’s – bad,’ he said. ‘Damn’ bad. Well, if it is, it’s – got to improve. From now. Let’s see it does.’

  He turned away to his horse, his eyes hot and angry, and Bold stalked slowly down the column, staring bitterly at us, as though we’d let him down. Even as we straightened up we were shocked by the injustice of the reprimand, and I could see sullen expressions around me. We’d come to France to fight, and we’d fought as well as we knew how. We’d buried men who’d been our friends and here they were, with no word of praise, not even a little sympathy, only a complaint about our marching. It was hard to understand.

  ‘Come on,’ Bold was shouting. ‘You heard what the colonel said. Get them shoulders back. Let’s have you looking like soldiers, even if you ain’t. Get your ’eads up.’

  ‘They say they wear their red tabs all the way down to their undervests,’ Mason muttered bitterly as he hitched up his pack. ‘Even tattooed on their skin so their batmen have to salute them in their bloody baths.’

  Somebody sniggered and Bold told him to shut his rattle.

  ‘Like something hanging off his boot,’ Eph was grumbling in his low boozy voice. ‘Did you see him? Spoke to the Old Man as if he was a scruffy little lance-jack. They want chopping off by the stocking-tops, that lot. They do straight.’

  I’d listened to this kind of talk in England and believed it of the dugouts we’d had to put up with there. Out here, I hadn’t expected this sort of treatment. But the old stale jokes softened the blow a little and made me feel that these smart-looking men who’d obviously never been anywhere near the trenches weren’t quite real.

  Locky, of course, had the last word, quoting Shakespeare in a dry precise manner that brought Eph’s head up with a jerk, as it always did.

  ‘“I remember when the fight was done,”’ he said, ‘“when I was dry with rage and extreme toil, breathless and faint, leaning on my sword, came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed, fresh as a bridegroom.”’

  Eph began to stare.

  ‘“And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by, he called them untaught knaves, unmannerly, to bring a slovenly unhandsome corse betwixt the wind and his nobility.”’

  Eph grinned. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Sergeant Shakespeare,’ Locky said. ‘Hotspur. Me. You. Fen. Murray. The immortal soldier’s grouse against the staff.’

  We had a long way to go still, and as we neared Colinqueau Farm I was marching half-asleep, just awake enough to be aware of a vague feeling of relief and pleasure as I caught the fresh clean scent of crops and fields after the damp decay of the trenches.

  As we turned into the lane that led to the farm, I saw the rest of the battalion waiting up ahead by the gate and round the corner of the field, complete with the band drawn up in a tight half-circle to welcome us in, faces smiling and eager.

  Pine pulled his horse to the side of the lane and spoke to Ashton. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘let’s march in like soldiers. Get ’em singing or something.’

  Ashton started to whistle ‘Tipperary’, and when he’d been through it once there were half a dozen men singing it with him.

  ‘Come on, you sloppy shower of old women,’ Bold roared, halting at the side of the lane, ramrod-straight in the tall grass as we tramped past him. ‘Get them ’eads up. Get them feet down all at once, do. Ep! Ri! Ep! Ri! It ain’t the staff you’re pleasing now. It’s your own pals. What’ll they think of their future if you come back looking like something the cat dragged in? Let’s have a song.’

  Tommy Mandy pulled out a mouth organ and in a few moments we were all at it, and we swung up the lane, slamming our feet down as though we didn’t know the meaning of weariness.

  It was a relief to shrug free of the dragging weight of my pack. Mason had flung down his equipment and was sitting on the ground in a corner of the barn, unwinding his puttees. For a second he stopped, staring in front of him, then he rubbed his hand across his face, as though he were trying to brush away a stain.

  ‘What’s up, Frank?’ I asked.

  He looked up, his expression strained and reproachful. ‘Did you expect it to be like that up there?’ he said abruptly in a quiet voice.

  ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘Not really. I don’t think I did. But it’s no good brooding, Frank.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ He shook his head. ‘I think a bit of me died,’ he went on in a wondering voice. ‘I’m sure I’ll crack and go yellow, if it’s all like that.’

  He was still like that, dazed and bewilder
ed, when Barraclough and Henny Cuthbert and Spring appeared, admiring and demanding to know all about it. I began to feel a bit like one of the Light Brigade back from Balaclava, and put on a bit of a swagger as I unfastened my tunic, wearing my mudstains like medals.

  Then Henny mentioned old Corker and at once all the shocks I’d tried to put out of sight behind me, hurriedly stuffing them away like nightmares I didn’t want to remember, came hurrying back.

  ‘They say he’s gone west,’ Henny said, his long features anxious, the breeze ruffling his thin colourless hair, and it came back to me how scared I’d been and how I’d clutched at the earth with my fingers, trying to drag myself away from the noise and beyond the range of those flying pieces of steel. Death had none of the glory Murray associated with it. It was noisy, impersonal, degrading and dirty.

  Henny was watching me, his eyes on my face, a little worried, eager to learn.

  ‘Is it true?’ he asked. ‘About Corker, I mean.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Poor old Corker. What happened?’

  ‘He got hit.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but how? They said Oakley was wounded the first day in. Where? In the arm?’

  ‘No,’ I said, remembering that gibbering blinded figure that had bounced past me. ‘Not in the arm.’

  ‘Well, come on, then, tell us all about it. You’re damn’ quiet, you lot.’

  I pushed him away.

  ‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Oh!’ Henny looked startled, his narrow face concerned and apologetic. ‘Sorry. I never thought. I’ll see if I can get some tea for you.’

  He turned aside and began to bustle off towards the cookhouse, then he stopped and, glancing back towards me, spoke across the heads of several, sprawling weary men. ‘What was it really like?’ he asked.

  I’d sat down and started to unwind my puttees, and I looked up at him. Mason was sitting sipping a mug of tea someone had given him and Henny was watching him, his face anxious and worried. I managed a reassuring grin.

  ‘Grub’s none too good,’ I said. ‘Otherwise pretty cushy.’

  We spent the whole of one blissful day with nothing to do but scrape mud off our clothes, and while I slept Henny took away my tunic and overcoat and brought them back clean, his long face beaming.

  ‘Thought you’d be pleased,’ he said. ‘There’s an inspection tomorrow.’

  ‘What sort of inspection?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some general from Querrieu. They’ve all gone batchy in the orderly room getting things straight. It’s enough to make you feel poorly.’

  I was still brooding over that stripe on my arm. I didn’t want the damn’ thing. There was a rumour floating about that NCOs could be detached to fresh battalions to give them the benefit of experience, and I wanted to stay with my friends. I hadn’t been particularly troubled about joining up with them in 1914, but now, after two years, I just couldn’t imagine life without them. If I’d got to put up with a lot more of what I’d just been through, I thought, I wanted to do it with men I knew and was used to, not with a lot of strangers.

  In the evening, after we’d slept and shaved, I went across to Bold’s billet, which was in a little outhouse behind the farm, a drab little place smelling of age and decay.

  He looked up and smiled, and I was startled to see how much it changed that rock-hard special face he always wore for us, warming it and bringing life to eyes I’d always thought could only be cold and angry. Suddenly, I realised he was a man like myself, not a great deal older even, a human being with emotions and anxieties like the rest of us, for all that aura of experience and aloofness he wrapped around himself.

  ‘What’s up, Fen?’ he said, and I was surprised at the friendliness of his tone. Before I could reply, he reached over to a boxwood table for a dixie full of rum and sloshed some of it into a chipped tin mug and offered it to me. ‘Sit down,’ he said, pushing a box forward. ‘Try the stalls.’

  Suddenly, I found there was no gulf between us. There never had been with Ashton and Welch and Corker, because we seemed to have known them all our lives, but with Bold it was different. He’d been a stranger, a Londoner, and he had about him that inescapable glow of authority, the stamp of service in the Household Brigade, that made us all feel like amateurs and kept us all at a distance.

  ‘Pity about Corker,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘I got on all right with Corker. A chap gets fond of another chap. Women clutter the place up. Fussy as five folk, they are. You got a girl, Fenner?’

  I told him I hadn’t.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  ‘I was never much good with girls.’

  ‘Funny that,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Neither was I. You got to be a bit soft, I often think, to have a way with women. P’r’aps that’s why I never married. I was always shy as hell with ’em. That’s why I stayed in the Army and did my time. Some bloke married a girl I was keen on because I couldn’t manage to ask her meself. I’m still a bit that way, I reckon.’

  I was a little surprised, but not entirely. There had to be some explanation for Bold’s spartan way of life, uncluttered as it was with unnecessary comforts or emotions, as ascetic as a cleric’s.

  Then I realised with a start he’d been drinking, and when he asked again what I wanted I found myself hesitating before I told him of the stripe I didn’t want.

  He listened carefully to me while I spoke, his face expressionless, but when I’d finished he slammed down his mug, slopping rum to the table, and stared up at me angrily, all the friendliness gone from his face again at once.

  ‘My Christ,’ he said. ‘You’ve a nerve! I was bloody glad to get my first stripe, I can tell you.’ He stood up unsteadily, knocking over the table with the mug on it, but he didn’t seem to notice it. His rage startled me.

  ‘That’s the worst of you Kitchener blokes,’ he went on, his bony face jammed up close to mine. ‘The way you stay such bloody amateurs is enough to drive a man absolutely fanti. You’re a good lot. I’ve enjoyed showing you how to go on because you’ve learned fast. You’ve got a hell of a lot more guts and savvy than most. But you don’t need promotion. That’s the trouble – you’re all getting your wages made up. You want to play at being soldiers all the time. You want to stay with your pals, just as if you was still at a tennis party or the YMCA or a girls’ high school. You want to fight the Germans fairly. No kicking. No gouging. No going behind their backs. No fouls and no offside. A great big beautiful game of cricket. Well played, chaps! Jolly good show! Scrag the Hun, fellows, and hurrah for General ’Aig.’

  He stared at me, breathing heavily, then he raised his arm and pointed. ‘There’s a bloody battery of guns down the lane there,’ he went on. ‘Another amateur lot. All Kitchener men. All clever book-reading sods like you lot. I ’ad a drink with ’em just before we went up the line, and do you know what they were boasting about? That they could see the Fritz postman in their forward position and could make him drop his letters. Not kill him. Not get rid of one more Fritz who might one day knock me off or you off, or who at the very least brought a little comfort to the bastards who are trying to knock us off. Not that. Christ, not that! Oh, no! They only want to make him drop his letters. That’s all. Just a bit o’ fun. Up the old school and down with war. God, what a bloody army!’

  I didn’t know what to say against the outburst. For a moment he stared at me, his eyes blazing, his face whiter and bonier than ever, his ginger moustache bristling along his cheeks, then he picked up the mug, sloshed some rum in it from the dixie, took a swig from it and put it down again.

  ‘You want to remember, Mr Lance-Corporal Bloody-Reporter Fenner, that this is war,’ he snapped. ‘We kick and gouge and scratch and bite, and go for their ghoulies. And if we can get a bloke from behind before he sees us, then we have a go at it. In wartime people sometimes get killed and sometimes we’ve got to leave our pals. In South Africa, I once lost the whole of my section. ’Alf an hour, first
to last. That’s all it took, and when it was over I was the only one on me feet. Thank God I didn’t stay with my pals. They’re in ’eaven. What’s the matter?’ he demanded. ‘Didn’t the war come up to expectations?’

  ‘I’m not grumbling, Sergeant-Major,’ I said.

  ‘I should think not, not you of all people. Not you, Fenner. Come on, I’ll take you to the captain.’

  Having endured his outburst, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to object any more, but Bold wasn’t listening to me now and there was no choice except to follow him.

  He marched me in to Ashton, still white with rage, and Ashton put on his agonised expression and polished his pince-nez and said uneasily that it was Pine’s responsibility since he’d given me the stripe. He looked at Bold as though uncertain what to do and wanting to put it off till later, but Bold said bitterly that he thought the colonel ought to be able to sort it out and, in the end, the two of them marched me to Pine’s room in the farmhouse.

  The colonel was shaving when we arrived, standing in his shirtsleeves and braces, his feet straddling his dog which was stretched out on a blanket in front of the fire, and he started to swear at me with the shaving-brush still in his hand and the lather still on his face, his eye-patch lying on the table, his right eye milky and staring and dead.

  ‘You d-d-damned amateurs are all the – same,’ he said, taking the same line that Bold had taken, spluttering and gagging as his fury made his stammer worse. ‘You won’t face your bub-blasted responsibilities. We want NCOs and you’re gug-going to be one. In this battalion you don’t – get asked what you like and what you don’t like. Sergeant-Major, cuc-call me the – quartermaster. He’s in the office outside.’

  When Twining arrived in the doorway, Pine cocked his thumb at me. ‘Take this NCO away,’ he said bluntly, reaching for his razor. ‘And g-give him two stripes. And see they’re sewn in place in time for tomorrow’s inspection. If they’re not, Sergeant-Major, put him on a charge.’

  I marched out, blushing, with Bold grinning all over his face.