Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  ‘We’re here for the offensive that’s brewing up,’ he went on after a pause. ‘And nothing else. That’s what we’ve been training for two years for. Besides…’ He paused and smiled unexpectedly. ‘Besides, now that Sergeant-Major Bold’s managed at long last to get you promoted, we don’t want you knocking out.’

  Blackett had stopped writing now and was grinning and I saw young Welch, who was leaning on the wooden post that held up the door, manage a faint twisted smile.

  ‘Mr Blackett told me what happened,’ Ashton went on more gently. ‘It’s a good job you stayed behind or his party wouldn’t have got away. Why did you stay?’

  ‘I couldn’t think of anything else to do,’ I said.

  Ashton laughed and Blackett looked up again.

  ‘That’s honest anyway,’ he said. ‘Pity there aren’t a few more of ’em who can’t think what to do.’

  Ashton jiggled the whisky round in the mug a little more, then he stared at me.

  ‘Well, now I’ve got another surprise for you,’ he said. ‘They got Bernard, as you know, and we’re a sergeant short, and Sergeant-Major Bold tells me you’re the best man for his job. So you’d better cut along to find where Bernard kept his overcoat and get his stripes off it, because you’ve been promoted lance-sergeant in his place.’

  ‘Me?’ I said. I was a little bewildered by the speed of my advance.

  I saw Bold’s eyes roll up to the roof in disgust, then Ashton thrust the mug of whisky at me. ‘Here, man,’ he said. ‘Don’t look so alarmed. You won’t die of it. You’ll get used to it in the end. Sergeant-Major Bold’s promised you will.’

  I took the whisky uncertainly. The thought that had crossed my mind immediately was that I was now entitled to regard Sergeant-Major Bold almost as an equal, and the thought of being on those terms with that magnificent, chilly, aloof man startled me more than the thought of the third stripe.

  ‘Better drink it, Sergeant,’ Ashton said, ‘because I’ve got the colonel’s permission to put you in for something else as well as an extra stripe – whatever they can spare at headquarters after they’ve helped themselves. There’s been a big argument going on at Division about whether fetching someone in’s worth a medal or not. Some of ’em don’t think it is, but I’m going to try. We’d like a medal in the battalion and we might as well have it in D Company.’

  We went out of the line two nights later and arrived back at Colinqueau to find that everybody was due for leave. The fact that we’d got to get it in as quickly as possible indicated that the Big Push wasn’t very far away.

  There was an uproarious ten minutes of cheering and singing and throwing things, then we went round to the orderly room, to find they were so busy filling in their own passes they hardly had time to attend to us.

  We drew lots to see who should go first, and Locky and Mason and I were among the lucky ones, and there was another explosion of riotous merriment and envious glances from people like Tim Williams and Barraclough and the Mandy brothers who’d been unlucky. Then Bold came along and told me he’d have to hold my pass back until the next batch, because there was a lot I’d got to get used to first, and I was back to my normal state of wishing I could murder him.

  ‘Never mind, Fen,’ Mason said with a trace of malice in his voice as he began to pack his kit. ‘I’ll give your love to Helen.’

  His spirits seemed to have returned, as though, now that he was out of the line, he’d shrugged off a load he’d been carrying for a long time with aching bones, hating every minute of the toil. He was a light-hearted individual to whom the good things of life were important, and the squalid experiences in the trenches, full of nervous shocks and sudden fears, had hit him harder than most of us. But he seemed gay now, almost too gay, as though he were fleeing from reality to a little peaceful fantasia that he’d made of England.

  ‘It’s just the way it is,’ he went on gaily. ‘Some of us make good soldiers and get our names in the Victoria Cross department of the newspapers. The rest of us, the normal ones, find they do better at more civilised things.

  ‘I hope you enjoy the battle,’ he ended. ‘With a bit of luck, it’ll be over by the time I get back. I’ll send you a piece of cake.’

  ‘Cake?’ Locky looked up quickly.

  ‘That’s right, old fruit,’ Mason grinned. ‘I’ve arranged to lay on a special licence.’

  ‘You getting married or something?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘Helen, of course.’

  ‘Does she know?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t asked her yet, if that’s what you mean. Not in so many words.’

  ‘Oh!’ Locky turned away. ‘I thought I hadn’t heard.’

  ‘I’m going to pop the question as soon as I get home.’

  ‘I see!’ Locky nodded and bent over his kit again. ‘I suppose I ought to congratulate you.’

  We went into Rippy to celebrate before they left, but Mason was nervous in case something went wrong before he could get away, and Locky was thoughtful and not inclined to be merry.

  The reeking candle-lit room was noisy with celebrating men, and prices were ridiculous. Eph made a pass at the woman serving the drinks and, encouraged by the fact that she didn’t register any objection, he pinched her bottom and got his face slapped for his trouble. The military police were fetched by Madame and we were asked to leave.

  Outside, we tried to buy vin blanc at the village shop, but the proprietress pointed out the ticket attached to the bottles. ‘Reservées pour les officiers,’ she said, and we left in disgust.

  ‘This is a bloody silly war,’ Murray complained. ‘And if Haig allows this sort of thing, then he’s no good.’

  ‘Who said that aboot Haig?’ A Scottish soldier standing with a group of friends, staring longingly into the shop window, turned round angrily.

  ‘I did,’ Murray said belligerently.

  ‘Naebody says yon aboot a guid Scot.’

  ‘I do,’ Murray retorted with a carefree indifference, and, knowing we were in trouble already, we dragged him away.

  Eph had some money with him, winnings from his crown-and-anchor board, and when we ran into Blackett, Tim Williams persuaded him with all his silky lecturer’s eloquence to buy us, as an ex-ranker who understood our position, some of the wine we wanted and we retired to camp to drink it between us.

  When I woke up the leave men had gone.

  I found it strange to stand on the sideline with a list in my hand, ticking things off, airing my three stripes and telling other people what to do. I found it a nice change, in fact, when I got used to it, and began to wonder why I hadn’t gone after them before. As a private soldier, I’d spent most of my time fighting against too much weariness, and the absence of manual labour made a great lightening of the load.

  They’d marched us south to build a road to an ammunition dump, from the rubble of some old buildings that had had a direct hit, laying bricks thinly on the muddy surface of a battered cart-track.

  ‘This ain’t t’way to make a road,’ Tom Creak said in his solemn foreman’s manner. ‘You just can’t put bricks over pot-’oles. They’ll all get knocked out again, just as quick.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Murray said. ‘After the first few days of the Push, we’ll be using German roads. We shall be twenty miles away from here the week after it starts. This time, old boy, it’s open country and cavalry.’

  ‘Cavalry!’ Tim Williams was sucking a split thumb he’d caught between the bricks. ‘All cavalry ever do is clutter the roads up with horses and the dumps with forage.’

  Nobody yet knew when the offensive was due to begin, but it was pretty obvious now it wasn’t very far away and the end of the month was being freely whispered as the date. The German advance at Verdun was slowing down and the Russians were going great guns against them in Galicia, and the time seemed ripe. Even the old soldiers around us were looking forward to ending the stalemate.

  A battery of howitzer
s appeared in the corner of the field next to ours, hugging the orchard where they might avoid being spotted by aircraft, digging their gunpits among the maimed fruit trees and making our days miserable as the crash of their firing shook the dust from the timbers of our barns and flapped the canvas of our tents.

  More guns were moving into position all round us, and long-range naval guns which stood on the railway line somewhere far in the rear disturbed the night with their ragged orange flashes and the shuffling hum of their vast shells as they waddled off on their ten-mile journeys.

  Trench-mortar schools were banging away all over the place, and once a bomb dump went up in a great mushroom of smoke that caught the sunshine in browns, yellows and blues. They said nine thousand tons of ammunition had vanished in the bang.

  All sorts of comic units began to be seen and pigeons were issued. More navvies appeared with sanitary squads, and every tent and barn seemed to be crammed with men. Wells were dug and more railways laid. Companies were set up for the manufacture of snipers’ loopholes and imitation snipers’ heads to draw the German fire. More roads were screened with camouflage nets, and dumps as big as small towns grew up almost overnight, prepared to issue anything – periscopes, grenades, compasses, rations, mortar bombs, smoke helmets, tools. Casualty clearing stations and advanced dressing stations were erected and airfields were prepared for the Flying Corps.

  Because we came from the north, some clown on the staff, who’d probably never been out of London, took it for granted that we were all miners and they set us to work clearing an old trench that had been used for a mass grave for a lot of French dead. We threw chloride of lime around in bucketfuls and had to take it in short spells because of the appalling smell.

  ‘God help the mob who jumps off from this one,’ Tim Williams said. ‘It’ll bring things home to them a bit.’ His hand was swollen now and bandaged by the stretcher-bearers, and we’d been trying for some time to persuade him to go to hospital with it.

  Signs and maps sprang up, giving directions for traffic and men, all of them pointing towards the east. Ambulances appeared by the thousand. Half the British Empire seemed to be assembling on the Somme, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of splendid young men, all crammed uncomfortably together, quarrelling and fighting among themselves, nervous and edgy with anticipation, but still cheering – everything that happened seemed to produce a cheer, whether it was a rifle going off by accident or a horse getting stuck or a battalion moving up or returning. And still singing too! They weren’t singing to keep their spirits up but because they were young and confident and had the utmost faith in themselves. I never heard them sing again as I did on the Somme.

  There was a never-ending stream of grenades, rockets, Very lights and Stokes bombs moving up. The whole forward area was becoming a huge dump. Day and night there was always this maddening carrying, as we humped ammunition, equipment and stores and hid them in tarpaulin-covered dumps in woods and under hedges, sometimes even when the Germans had the paths taped and we were damn’ glad to get away and back to greasy maconochie by the roadside that tasted like duck and green peas.

  The Germans, who’d seemed indifferent up to then about the coming attack – probably they’d thought the activity was so open it couldn’t be for anything but a feint move – suddenly began to wake up and dig, and everything we did began to be interrupted by shelling, which grew worse as May crept into June. We had our share of tear gas, mustard and phosgene in the evenings; but none of it was concentrated. The brass shell-cases hanging on the trees clanged, and the klaxons roared, and you could see the gas hanging about in the folds of the low ground, moving along slowly on the wind, but it always seemed to have blown away by the next morning, leaving nothing behind except for the stink – which seemed to taint cigarettes and food – and the dozens of dead rats lying with their feet in the air.

  Tim Williams went off at last to hospital with a hand the size of a football, and we lost a few men from shellfire, but not many. Barraclough was one, and it seemed a bit ironic that he of all people should have copped it before the battle, when he’d worked so hard to avoid being snatched from the battalion before we left England, spinning the tribunal who’d tried to put him on munitions some long-winded yarn about not being mechanically minded. He might just as well have saved his breath because, when he recovered, there was a good chance that munitions was where he’d end up.

  His disappearance cast a blight over Murray and me for a day or two. He was the first of the group who’d joined up from the newspaper to be hurt, although Sainsbury was long since dead and Arnold Holroyd had vanished – to Mesopotamia, we’d heard from someone. Barraclough had been one of those curiously anonymous people who never impressed his personality much on you, but he’d been on the Post with us and was one of the platoon who’d clung together ever since the Edward Road Drill Hall days.

  The farms and billets around us grew daily more dilapidated as the Germans searched out the back areas for the troops and artillery installations they knew were there. The church at the end of the street at Rippy fell to bits slowly under repeated near-misses, then it got a direct hit and collapsed like a house of cards in a rolling cloud of dust and smoke that billowed across the street, leaving the place a wilderness of broken glass and scattered bricks that was marked by one or two sprawling figures.

  Why we didn’t lose more men, I don’t know, because the district was stiff with troops and more were being added all the time. With every new gun and every new battalion that arrived we felt better, and there was a resurgence of that old spirit we’d felt when we’d first marched off to the Town Hall to join up.

  We did another spell in the line and this time things went right and we all came out as cocky as ten men with the feeling that at last we were getting the hang of it and would pull our weight when the attack started. The offensive was talked of openly now in the villages and estaminets in spite of the notices that appeared: Mind what you say. The enemy has listening apparatus. A few orders from headquarters couldn’t hope to hold down the boiling excitement which was growing daily more intense.

  There was a feeling about it all that this time we would not, we could not, be stopped. In spite of the ugly stain of Loos, and the known faults of the staff and the pettinesses that had given rise to grievances, in spite of the aspersions cast on the skill of the commanders by the old soldiers, and the trivial jealousies, and all the other things that had happened to damp the fire in the months since 1914, the first ardour was blazing up anew, fanned by optimism and the enthusiasm of the newcomers.

  E Company, which had been raised at Blackmires to provide reinforcements and left behind in England, caught up with us at last. They marched in singing, like all the rest – not the straightforward old songs which were good to march to and easy to sing, but some sort of half-baked song they roared out in instalments, with one man as a pace-setter to sing the verses, a bit like the fiddlers Nelson’s Navy used when they were manning the windlasses and the pumps.

  I wasn’t surprised to find Hardacre among them, complete with a stripe and strangely unfamiliar in uniform, and I remembered Frank’s words when he’d first tried to join up: ‘We shall have music wherever we go.’ It wasn’t hard to see where the part-songs had sprung from.

  ‘I got in with the West Yorks,’ he said. ‘But I wangled a transfer to this lot. Dicehart’s here too.’

  They brought with them news of a Zeppelin raid at home, where a few bombs had been dropped on Cotterside Common, and horrifying stories of the number of ships the Fleet had lost at Jutland.

  I took them along to Ashton and, for old times’ sake, got them into D Company. The rest of them were absorbed into the battalion but somehow they always remained slightly apart, because they hadn’t belonged to the original crowd who’d fought on the Town Hall steps for the privilege of joining. They were led by a new officer as pale as the rest of them and just as nervous and anxious to please. Surrounded by the rest of us, with our brown faces and to
rn uniforms and battered rifles, they seemed a little bewildered and out of their depth.

  ‘Did you see Locky?’ I asked Dicehart. ‘Or Mason?’

  ‘I saw Mason going into a pub.’

  ‘Into a pub? I thought he was getting married.’

  ‘Perhaps he was going in for a final drink before the chopper dropped, but he looked a bit down in the mouth all the same.’

  While we were talking, Murray came running up the field from battalion headquarters. He was in a tearing hurry as usual and it was clear that he was the bearer of tremendous tidings of some sort.

  They were surprised to see the stripe on his arm and the obvious inner toughness of his slight frame. When they’d last met him he’d been only a chubby-faced boy, eager and keen to please, swept along by his own ardour, but still little more than the messenger he’d been at the office.

  ‘What-ho, Hardy!’ he said, panting. ‘What-ho, Dicey! Fancy seeing you here. This is a bon place and you’re in a bon mob.’ He dragged at his breath, trying to speak, his face flushed, his eyes bright with excitement. ‘You’ve arrived just in time to see the balloon go up. Have you heard the news? Kitchener’s dead. Some ship he was travelling in on some potty mission to Russia. It hit a mine. They got it at headquarters from the Warwicks who’ve just come out of the line. They saw it on a notice the Germans hoisted on their wire.’

  Kitchener’s death came as a shock to us all. To the K battalions he was founder, father and patron saint all in one, and it shook us to think that anyone with as much might as he had could die just like an ordinary private in one of the vast armies he’d raised. He’d long since been jostled from power by the politicians who’d undermined his reputation and authority at the War Office, and now the Germans had obligingly removed him from the scene altogether. Perhaps what his enemies said of him was true. Perhaps he wasn’t as efficient as he seemed to be. Perhaps he had made mistakes. But, to me, he was rather more than some obscure field marshal I’d never clapped eyes on. Somehow, I’d always regarded him as one of us.