Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  ‘Fen, Fen,’ she whispered. ‘Steady!’

  She looked concerned and anxious for me in a way that did my heart good. All the puckish fire had gone from her and I realised she’d grown up and had her own private sorrows too.

  ‘Is it over now?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s finished.’

  I sat up and looked round. The curtains were drawn and the lights were on in the other room. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

  ‘You fell asleep. So I let you sleep on. You looked so tired. Fen, is it really so awful out there? Tell me the truth.’

  She was looking at me steadily, her eyes demanding honesty I couldn’t give her. She couldn’t ever have understood if I had, so I hedged a little.

  ‘Awful?’ I grinned. ‘Not really. We manage. Helen, this is a hell of a way to call on a girl. I didn’t sleep much last night on that damn’ train and I seemed to have been travelling for days. I expect that’s it.’

  ‘Why have you come down here?’ she asked.

  ‘To find you.’

  ‘Is that the only reason?’

  ‘It’s the best one I could think of.’

  She looked up at me and managed a little twisted smile, but there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Fen, darling, you could always be relied upon to do the unexpected. Stay where you are. We’ll eat here.’

  She kissed me quickly and turned to the gas stove and fiddled with a match.

  ‘Thank God I woke up,’ I said. ‘What a waste if I’d slept till it was time to go.’

  She turned to face me and gave a curious little throaty laugh that didn’t seem normal.

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ she said unsteadily. ‘And you don’t have to go at all if you don’t want to.’

  ‘What about this friend of yours?’ I asked. ‘Won’t she be in soon?’

  She was looking at me with shining eyes, her face full of light, the old Helen, the old slender exciting Helen who’d always reduced me to witless stupidity every time she looked at me.

  ‘No, Mark,’ she said slowly, her voice clear and steady again. ‘She’s away for the week. I’m on my own. You don’t have to go at all.’

  What she was suggesting hit me like the blast of a bomb, and I got slowly to my feet.

  ‘We’ve grown broad-minded since the war, Mark,’ she went on, no trace of a tremor in her voice. ‘And this is London. And there’s this big battle coming soon. I may never see you again.’

  She stared at me a little longer, and suddenly the spine seemed to go out of her, all the courage she’d been putting on for my benefit. Her shoulders drooped and she stood by the gas stove with the kettle still in her hand, looking smaller and strangely frail, staring at me with tears streaming down her cheeks.

  ‘Mark,’ she whispered. ‘We’ve waited so long and there’s so little time.’

  6

  I said goodbye to Helen at the flat. We both agreed it was best.

  Victoria Station was crammed with men returning from leave, all humpbacked under their kit, all looking for seats and enviously eyeing the half-empty coach reserved for the staff, its corner seats jammed with red tabs and gold oak leaves. The platform was full of wives and mothers and sweethearts, all wearing a crucified look or pretending unconcern, some of them in black with mourning veils and crêpe on their hats. Porters stumbled over kitbags and valises and the hand-luggage trucks crowded with equipment. Serious old men with white moustaches were seeing off their sons, pink-faced subalterns obviously not long out of school. Drafts of new men were going out under officers, smart by comparison with the older soldiers who were returning from leave but bewildered by the throng and the noise, and not quite knowing where they were. There were tears, red eyes and white faces, and I was glad I’d said goodbye in private.

  The crossing was easy this time and we could hear the rolling thuds of gun-fire long before we saw the French coast. The staff had a deck to themselves and the officers another. The other ranks were crammed together like cattle.

  There were German prisoners working on the docks at Boulogne, whitewashing stones and carrying sacks. Huge notices were displayed everywhere. 34th Div., 31st Div., 46th Div. An officer with a megaphone was shouting: ‘Leave men to the right. Drafts to the left. 1st Army men to the end of the platform. 3rd and 4th Army men across the track. Captain Eastergate, Durham Light Infantry, report to the RTO’s office at once.’

  I felt at ease again to be there. I was still suffering from the confusion of joy, doubt, impatience and misery we call being in love, but, after so long, England had been like a foreign land and I felt curiously happy to be back.

  Every arm of the services was represented – infantry, artillery, cavalry, engineers, signalmen, service corps, medical corps, Navy, marines, young pale-faced boys with RFC wings and hollow eyes.

  Everybody seemed to be going to the 4th Army – Warwicks, Inniskillings, Gloucesters, Bedfords, Durhams, KOYLIs, the Jocks and the Buffs and the Irish. The new drafts looked as though they’d just come off parade – buttons shining, puttees exact, boots bright, peaked caps still stiffened with wire, packs mathematically correct, overcoats buttoned to the throat in spite of the weather. The leave men looked like scarecrows by comparison, in goatskins and sheepskins and overcoats which had been hacked off short with jack-knives to keep them out of the mud. Their makeshift leather equipment looked as if it had become part of them and some of them hadn’t even bothered to put it together properly, wearing it as it suited them best. They greeted familiar faces with shouts and catcalls.

  ‘I thought you were dead!’

  ‘Enjoying the war?’

  ‘How’s Wipers?’

  I saw familiar badges and faces and, as I looked round for someone from D Company, I caught sight of Murray approaching, tougher-looking, somehow, in spite of his youth, than the men in the new drafts, with a lean, curiously fine-drawn look about him, and eyes that had a faraway different stare from theirs. He looked older than they did too, young as he was, and, in his greasy-edged coat with its grimy buttons, filled with a kind of enduring energy. He was humping his equipment casually as he drew near, as though it weighed nothing, glorying in the fact that he could handle it while the new drafts obviously found it wearisome. As he greeted me, he shrugged it off and threw it down nonchalantly with his rifle.

  He was cheerful and happy to be back, as though he’d known no other life. He’d spent most of his leave with the girl next door, and was still a little sentimental about it.

  ‘Did you pop the question?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ He looked at me shyly. ‘I – I thought I’d wait.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh…’ He shrugged uneasily. ‘The offensive coming off and all that. And she’s a bit young and if anything happened to me – well, it just didn’t seem fair. That’s all.’

  He gave me a grown-up, face-the-facts look that seemed older than his years, and tried to laugh it off.

  Then Catchpole appeared from the crowd behind him, barging his way through to slap him on the back.

  ‘Hello, Vicar!’

  ‘Where’d you get to, boys?’

  ‘I’ve been holidaying in London,’ I said. ‘I’ve just come out to spend the summer on the Somme.’

  Catchpole grinned. ‘Think I’ll join you for the season’s shooting,’ he said. ‘“One generation passeth away. Another generation cometh.” They’re calling up the war-babies now, I hear.’

  Farther along the dock a sergeant was chivvying men towards a train, and Murray picked up his kit.

  ‘Have a good time?’ he asked, and Catchpole grinned.

  ‘Not half,’ he said. ‘My brother was home for three days. We painted the place red. He’s in the artillery. Do you know…’ His expression changed. ‘He was telling me about the high percentage of dud shells and obsolete guns they’re getting. Burst in the bloody barrel, he said, or as soon as they’ve left it. They call the four-five batteries suicide clubs. That twister Lloyd George’s doing
, I suppose.’

  He grinned abruptly. ‘Get yourself fixed up with a girl? I did. Keen amateur. We came to a very amicable arrangement. Only she knew more about the bloody offensive than I did. Even my old man was at it, and all his Mothers’ Union Knitting Circle. I’d have liked to have told ’em to send us a lot less balaclavas and a few more girls. Less wool and more whisky. Less heaven and a few more frisky harlots.’

  While we were talking an RTO officer and a couple of sergeants came along, and, forming us into rough columns, marched us off through all the war-material, guns, lorries and ammunition that crowded the docks. They jammed us into the same old train with the same old slogans chalked on its battered sides, in what appeared to be the same old compartment even, with hard seats and windows that wouldn’t open.

  At Amiens they marched us out into the square and formed us up again in various units. We were next to a draft who were out for the first time and full of ideas of the open warfare that the papers preached so glibly. A few of them were disgruntled because their battalion had been split up and they’d been drafted to another unit, but they were all as enthusiastic for battle as only untried troops can be, a little bewildered and as amazed as we’d been once by the uncanny ability of the youngest childen to speak fluent French.

  The officer in charge of them, who’d been out before, called across to me, grinning cynically.

  ‘You got it in just in time, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Have you heard? All leave’s been stopped. The Push’s due any day. It’s a dead cert now.’

  We set off by a long, slow, clanking train towards Albert, where young Welch was waiting for us in the forecourt of the station, under the shadow of the ruined Basilica, among all the jammed waggons and guns and limbers and chalk-stained soldiers.

  On the Bapaume road I noticed immediately the increased amount of air activity. A whole line of balloons had appeared in the sky to the east, yellow-bright like a lot of fat slugs, and planes seemed to be constantly buzzing overhead, whirring low over the trees to wave at us and stunting from the sheer joy of living.

  ‘Heard about Immelmann?’ Welch asked, as we tramped alongside the thickly wooded slopes of Aveluy that were throbbing with the songs of thousands of birds.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘What about him?’ Immelmann was a German ace who’d been playing havoc with our flying crews.

  ‘He’s been killed.’

  Somehow, the news seemed like a good omen to start the offensive with, as though Immelmann was the symbol of our success

  ‘We’ve moved to Bos,’ Welch went on, enjoying the high spirits of the marching men behind him. They were singing and jeering at other units as we passed, and they seemed in fine fettle and very little troubled by coming back. Nobody had overstayed his leave and, in fact, most of them seemed pleased to see their friends again.

  ‘We had another spell in the line,’ Welch said, ‘then we moved farther north. We’re due to take up battle positions any day now, they say.’

  ‘When’s it to be?’

  ‘End of the month. They’re feeding us like fighting cocks now.’

  ‘Fattening us for the slaughter, eh?’

  If the roads had been choked before, they were beyond description now. There were men everywhere, sitting by the roadside eating or getting their breath back, swinging along to ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Long, Long Trail’, riding on lorries and horses and gun-carriages and limbers. The chalk dust had turned everyone’s boots and legs and faces to a dirty grey-white and there seemed to be millions of buzzing blowflies over the patches of horse-dung that had been flattened into the road by the solid-tyred wheels of lorries. The whole countryside seemed to be soiled by the dusty sprawling of the Army.

  Querrieu seemed to be more than ever overpopulated with staff and communication-line troops, then, as we topped the rise to the north-east of the village, we swung past a great dump of shells in a field crimson with clover, and thousands and thousands of dirty-grey bell-tents belonging to a Red Cross camp, and rows of creosoted huts for hospitals and billets. Crooked chalky lines cut the green grass in the distance.

  ‘Practice trenches,’ Welch said. ‘We’re practising all the time now. We can do the job blindfold. Oh, by the way, you’ve got a mention in despatches. They wouldn’t make it a medal. Ashton was a bit hipped.’

  ‘Can’t say I’m bothered,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard you have to walk all the way to Querrieu to get ’em pinned on.’

  We turned north, passing Colinqueau and the old dilapidated barns we’d got to know so well. We all looked back at them, as though they were houses where we’d lived as children, then we came upon country that looked like the Sussex downs, great stretches of green grass, cut here and there with neglected growing land where the chalk came up through the surface to show grey-white against the brown. It looked a little like Newmarket at one point, and we even passed a racing stable that was the core of a sprawling cavalry camp, still with a list of winners it had trained nailed up outside. Everything was overlaid by a grey-white film of dust stirred up by wheels and hooves, and the fields around were full of watering troughs and hundreds of horses in their glossy summer coats, their tails twitching, their legs being groomed by stooping, shirt-sleeved men.

  There was a heady excitement in the air, a strange intense feeling that victory was near. In every face you passed you could see a distinct expression of expectancy. Everybody was alert and cheerful and looking constantly towards the east and the open country ahead of us. The sense of impending triumph had grown stronger since I’d gone on leave and you could almost reach out and touch it, a surging new spirit that grew from the sight of this vast army hitching up its straps for a battle that now could not be more than a few days away. The sound of it all, the smell of it, the sight of it, couldn’t help but stir the imagination.

  ‘Half a million men,’ Welch said. ‘Just think of it. A generation, you might almost say. The best of a generation anyway. And a gun for every yard of front. It’s “finis” for the Boche this time.’

  Heavy with dust and sweat, we turned off the main road. The grass verges here were white with dust, and clamorous with old petrol and bully-beef tins and pieces of corrugated iron. Motor convoys passed us, all heading in the same direction. Then we swung down a lane and passed through a tidy-looking village and turned alongside a wood.

  It was dead ground here, Welch said, and no shells had fallen to disturb the peace. I noticed mayflies in the meadows and blossom on the apple trees in the orchards that we passed, and squirrels in the copses that fringed the lane. The horse-chestnuts were in flower and there were peonies and pink roses in the neglected garden of a deserted cottage. A few isolated aspens were showing the trembling white of their leaves in the breeze that was blowing, and in the distance you could see hills and valleys hazy with the sun’s rays. There were bees about and the welcome smell of bacon frying. It looked like a Sunday camp back in England.

  There were no tents except for the officers, only bivouacs made out of groundsheets laced together with string and shared by two men. Sunshine filtered through the trees of a swampy woodland and at the bottom of the slope white-bodied men with brown arms and faces were splashing in the clear water of the chalky stream.

  Tim Williams was back, I saw, reading inevitably, stretched out on the grass with his head on a rolled overcoat, a book of poetry in a still-bandaged fist; and Tom Creak, plodding past with a home-made fishing rod, stopped to wave as he saw us.

  ‘T’river’s full o’ fish farther down,’ he said. ‘I’ve been after t’biggest carp you ever saw for four days now.’

  Then I saw Locky squatting in the grass, running a thumb-nail up his shirt seam for lice, and I felt I was home.

  We leapt upon each other like little boys and wrestled and scuffled until we trod on one of the bivouac tents and brought it down, and Hardacre – a strangely different and browner Hardacre already – came out cursing, and promptly joined in.

  The summer evening made the war seem almost pleasan
t. Fires shone along the edge of the stream and the faint thin note of mouth organs came through the slow chatter of voices. A few old women in sabots shuffled across the fringe of the wood heading for Bos, carrying their long-pronged forks, a man following them with a water cart pulled by an ancient horse.

  The sun dropped behind the eastern ridge and the air in the distance began to turn pearl-grey with mist. You could still hear the rumble of wheels everywhere, and somewhere out of sight the steady crunch of tramping feet. The smoke of cooking fires rose straight up into the air and you could hear the soft call of card-players.

  Like Tom Creak and the Mandys, Eph had accepted the cancellation of his leave philosophically.

  ‘Easy come. Easy go,’ he said. ‘That’s me.’

  I told him a string of lies that sounded all right to me, but I wasn’t certain whether they convinced him or not. He seemed puzzled, but disinclined to probe. ‘Pity I shan’t see her,’ was all he said.

  ‘You will,’ I reassured him. ‘After the offensive.’

  He grinned at me, his little eyes distant. ‘After the offensive,’ he said, ‘maybe I won’t be ’ere. Maybe a lot of us won’t be ’ere.’

  Bold greeted me like an old friend and offered me a mug of whisky. He’d accepted the stoppage of leave without turning a hair.

  ‘That’s what we’re here for,’ he said bluntly. ‘It’s ’appened before. It’ll ’appen again. Pity, though. I’d ’ave liked to ’ave seen my old ma.’

  It surprised me to hear he had a mother and thought about her sometimes. I’d somehow never thought of him as a child. It had always seemed to me that he’d appeared in the world fully grown, bone-hard, ginger-haired, white-skinned, straight as a ramrod and hung about with equipment, slamming his feet down – bang-bang-bang – and shouting in his high-pitched voice; bullying, chivvying, jockeying, carrying the weaker vessels on his own strong back. I just couldn’t imagine him being affectionate to a mother or making love to a wife.