Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  I watched with Locky from inside the barn as the guns opened up, drowning the cries of the waterfowl in the linked pools along the Ancre. The flashes lit up the broken houses and the bare rafters of the ruined barns. Even from where we were, we could hear the spreading crackle of musketry and the racket of gunfire.

  ‘That’s machine guns,’ Murray said, his head on one side, listening.

  ‘There’s more than one by the sound of it, too,’ Mason commented. ‘Business seems a bit brisk.’

  ‘That’s handy, troops! That’s jolly handy!’

  We stared at each other silently, listening to the din, trying to ignore what it meant to us, while the howitzers down the road stopped all time with gigantic orange flashes like bats’ wings that sent the vast shells up into the sky with a high diminishing rush.

  At first light the next morning, ambulances came through the village, carrying black-faced men who’d been in the raid, bandaged and wounded and crying out with pain, but the police kept them moving and nobody could ask questions. When Bold returned, he looked strained, and his face seemed harder and stiffer than ever.

  ‘What’s it like?’ I asked him.

  ‘The ’ole bloody front opened up,’ he said. ‘They lost eight men and got stopped before they even got to his wire. They said you could ’ear Fritz shouting: “Come on, come on. We’re waiting.” If the staff think there’s nothing there, they’ve got another bloody think coming. It was stiff with ’Uns.’

  He was in a tearing rage, and the words tumbled over themselves, but when Ashton appeared, he pulled himself bolt upright and gave his report calmly and factually, and with no trace of anger.

  ‘The trenches was fully manned, sir,’ he said. ‘They was jammed with Huns, as far as I could make out. I counted four machine guns meself. The raiding party said the wire hadn’t been touched. I understand Mr Welch’s reported it to the colonel, who’s got on to Brigade.’

  During the morning, Pine, worried about what was in front of us, sent Welch down to brigade headquarters, but they knew already. Battalions, it seemed, had been reporting the same thing all along the line. Even Brigade was worried. But Division, it seemed, safely back from the line, merely shrugged it off with the suggestion that the K. battalions had got the wind-up. The raids, they claimed, were all completely successful, and there was nothing to fear.

  They even sent an official report of the shooting of a man who’d been found guilty of desertion up in the Ypres Salient – to discourage others, it was said. We were supposed to have been assembled to hear it, but Pine ignored it and we only learned of it through one of his runners.

  The news spread quickly and a howl of indignation went up.

  ‘We don’t desert in this mob,’ Catchpole said angrily.

  ‘Who do they think’s scared?’ Murray demanded. ‘I’m not, anyway. But I wouldn’t mind taking some of those fat little rotters from the staff in with us, all the same.’

  ‘They ain’t got much idea,’ was all Bold said, but it was clear from his expression that he wasn’t very impressed by the psychology of the staff.

  We were all a little quieter during the day as the weather slowly improved, all a little subdued by the news of the machine guns. If that tremendous barrage wasn’t blotting out the Germans, after all, I thought, there was going to be an inevitable and terrible slaughter when we went over.

  During the day, a drying breeze sprang up and we began to see aircraft buzzing about over us again. Murray and a few others took off their clothes and hoisted them on rafters and on bayonets stuck into the plaster walls of barns and houses to dry. The break in the weather cheered us all up and the first gleams of sunshine came like repudiations of all those scares about machine guns.

  The whistles went after dark and we fell in again in the village street. Voices seemed to be pitched lower as the companies numbered off, and orders were given quietly, as though the darkness gave the operation an air of stealth. There was no band to see us off this time, only the shuffling crunch of hundreds of boots, and the quiet grim jokes of men strained to a pitch of nervousness by waiting.

  After a while, we turned off the main road, on to an ash track through a wood where there was an iron calvary among the trees that fringed the fields. The sound of big shells ahead quickened the apprehension and I could hear nervous laughter around me. A star shell rose up ahead, gleaming on the bunched helmets, wavered and hung in the air and, by its light, I caught the quick glimpse of a melancholy landscape and a few shattered tree trunks, petrified like lunatic arms lifted in agony. On the right, there was a smashed farmhouse that gave off a momentary gleam of yellow through a sacking-covered window where some company had its headquarters or some dressing station had been established.

  I could still hear the crunch-crunch of boots on the road behind me as more troops moved into position further south, and the grind of wheels, and the higher distant clatter of led pack mules and horses bringing up more shells for the batteries of field guns hidden in farmyards and orchards and copses and behind hedgerows all the way along the front.

  There was a mist hanging about in the hollows that made the knuckly hills stand out like islands in a pearly sea, and it swirled around me as I moved, clutching at me with ghostly fingers, dripping off my helmet, clinging to my eyelashes and the down at the top of my cheeks. Its dampness was chilling and seemed to get through to the bones.

  There was a momentary halt to pick up more picks and shovels and sandbags and coils of wire and the path became alive with the firefly glow of cigarettes, then we moved off again and into a communication trench where a sign, Chaffinch Trench, was illuminated by a lantern. The trees here were growing alongside and over the trench, and their roots projected from the earth walls and snagged on equipment with a wearying regularity. Above us the branches were thick with foliage, with here and there a gap and splintered fallen branches where a shell had carved its way through.

  The nightingales were singing again all round us with rich nostalgic notes as we moved off once more. The trench, which started behind the broken farmhouse, descended quickly, and the bottom was full of water and wet clinging mud that made it difficult to stand up. There was a sickly sweet smell in the angles that I recognised as gas.

  Battle equipment seemed to have been stacked in every corner, and the walls were festooned with dozens of wires that the signallers had slung from every possible projection. At every yard someone seemed to get tangled up in it.

  The machine-gunners in the strongpoint party were wearying of carrying the gun now. They’d dragged the carts all the way to the ash path and had left them behind as we’d entered the wood, and they were complaining loudly now about the delay and the ache in their arms. But the shuffling file of men came to a halt again, knee-deep in water. We were all already plastered by the mud we’d picked up from stumbling against the trench walls.

  ‘This is war, if you like,’ Catchpole said. ‘Wire, ire, mire and fire.’

  He laughed and started singing a hymn that sounded like a dirge, and a few others joined in.

  ‘Come on, Vicar, how about a prayer?’ Eph called, and Catchpole obliged with a sacrilegious mockery of a psalm.

  Sick of the mud, I climbed out of the trench in the dark and sat on the parapet, deciding to chance it.

  ‘You’ll get knocked off, Sarge,’ Tom Creak warned me.

  ‘I’ll chance it,’ I said. ‘Might as well be now as later.’

  Somehow the waiting and all this maddening carting of equipment didn’t seem quite what any of us had expected.

  There was no excitement now, no half-hearted cheering, not even any movement. We all supposed the battle would start some time, but getting into position seemed to involve more effort than the actual fighting. We were in a black mood just then and if we’d met any Germans it would have been God help them.

  I didn’t know it, but at that point the trench was passing through a battery of eighteen-pounders hidden among the shattered trees, and, while I was sitting
there on the parapet, I heard an officer’s voice call out in the darkness.

  ‘One-three-five, fire!’

  There was a roar and a flare of flame as the battery fired in a piercing stab that was scorching and white, and seemed to fossilise the trees and the sprawled dead mules and the leaping camouflage netting around it. Fragments of cordite bags dropped out of the brown acrid smoke whisping away in the oven-hot air that followed the three buffeting cracks.

  The blast blew my helmet off and very nearly my head, and I fell into the trench and staggered about, slipping in the mud and holding my ringing ears.

  ‘Bull’s-eye,’ someone shouted.

  ‘What did I tell you, Sarge?’ Tom Creak said seriously, his voice full of concern as he handed me my helmet. ‘It’s a mercy you weren’t killed.’

  Everybody seemed to be laughing suddenly and the incident seemed to have done them a lot of good and cheered them up.

  Eventually we moved off once more, boots shuffling on duckboards that wobbled in the gluey bottom of the trench, forced to stop again and again as some more urgent party had to pass up or down. As we got further forward, we moved through squads of military police who’d been posted to deal with prisoners or deserters or men who might hang back when the attack started.

  We were growing weary now and we eyed the policemen with dislike.

  ‘Scabs,’ someone said bitterly.

  ‘Come and join us,’

  Catchpole started to sing.

  ‘Come and join us,

  Come and join our happy throng.’

  Everybody took up the words, staring pointedly at the military police, each deriving some satisfaction from his own derision and scorn, then we moved off again and the song stopped.

  Here and there in the moonless summer night, we came across shaded hurricane lamps that gave us our directions, but at one point a shell had destroyed them and we lost our way in the maze or tapes and signs, and stood in a confused mass, complaining and swearing as they tried to turn us about. An officer with an armband kept appearing to ask who we were, pushing past us to the rear, cursing, thrusting among us, nervous and anxious and worried.

  ‘Where the hell have you lot come from?’ he demanded. ‘Who are you, anyway?’

  ‘Fred Karno’s Army,’ Eph muttered, and there was a muffled snigger of laughter.

  The officer looked at the glowing face of his wristwatch, swore and disappeared again, vanishing into a dugout where we could see a candle burning, and someone shouted, cheerfully and without anger, ‘Put that bloody light out.’

  ‘He looks a bit hipped, poor feller,’ Tom Creak said heavily.

  Then the officer came back, holding a sheet of paper, and began to push at us.

  ‘Keep going,’ he snarled, edgy with weariness and anxiety. ‘Keep going. Along Charley Trench. You’re behind schedule. You must stick to the schedule.’

  Once, we had to crowd against the wall as bangalore torpedoes were brought past us in a last attempt to blow more holes in the German wire.

  ‘The bloody artillery’s let us down again,’ one of the raiders was grumbling as they shuffled past. ‘As usual, the poor bloody infantryman has to do everybody else’s job.’

  We heard the explosive hissing chatter of machine guns and the flurry of shelling as the raiders went over the parapet, then there was silence again, a sudden silence that seemed sinister. Someone coughed and a bullet whined overhead in a melancholy hum, and the silence came again, deep and limitless.

  Bold looked at me, his face a blur in the darkness, but he said nothing. We heard later that nothing came of the attempt. No one was able to get forward for the shell-fire.

  Then Murray dropped the Lewis-gun into the mud and water in the bottom of the trench and, in his disgust and weariness, threatened to stamp it out of sight.

  ‘Pick it up, you bloody fool,’ I said, as tired and angry as he was.

  ‘What’s the good?’ he stormed. ‘Those staff bastards’ll never get us there in time.’ Savagely he kicked at the slurry, and I gave him a shove.

  ‘Pick it up, blast it,’ I told him again, and he stooped wearily. His helmet fell off at once and filled with water and thin liquid mud. He stared at it, almost weeping with exhaustion.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ he mourned. He slammed the helmet back on his head, indifferent to the mud and water that ran across his features, and leaned on the trench wall.

  ‘You’ll have to clean the gun as soon as it’s daylight,’ I said.

  ‘Have a heart, Fen,’ he begged.

  ‘I haven’t got a heart. I’ve got a swinging brick.’

  ‘My God,’ he said bitterly. ‘Bloody jumped-up NCOs!’

  He picked up the gun again and stood holding it in a martyred way, his head up, his helmet lopsided on his head, and started to sing softly:

  ‘Oh, my, I don’t want to die.

  I want to go home.’

  And thankfully we all started laughing again.

  The flares in front were lighting up in black silhouette the uneven edge of the trench and putting pale outlines round the men in front of me. Shells kept dropping to right and left of us, far enough away for safety, but near enough to make us duck and flinch and move restlessly as showers of mud and stones came into the trench. Once we heard screams in the darkness and shouts for the stretcher-bearers, and once or twice there was a flurry of gunfire in front and to the south which swelled into a tremendous racket.

  ‘Raids,’ Spring said. ‘They’re trying to break into Jerry’s trench.’

  We began to shuffle forward again, struggling to keep up to that all-important schedule, passing through a trench which led to a dressing station, and we saw we’d been waiting for a group of wounded to be brought up.

  ‘It’s started already,’ Mason growled.

  There were a lot of men sitting about the trench, victims of the German retaliatory fire, clutching their injuries and moaning, some of them mere heaps of twisting rags, muttering and groaning with pain, with here and there groups of dead men, lying or sitting in curious stiffened attitudes.

  As we took up our positions, we stumbled over blackened butchered bodies that hadn’t been moved and lay about on the firestep and on the duckboards and among the boxes of smoke bombs, most of them uncovered. Their faces were pearl-coloured in the torchlight, the blood on them startlingly vivid. There was one corpse on the firestep with its arms out, its fingers clenched as though in the act of holding a rifle. It had an unnerving effect when you first saw it, but Billy Mandy, a miner well used to death in normal life, shook hands with it.

  ‘So long, mate,’ he said. ‘I’ll give your love to the Kaiser.’

  Mason was glancing about him nervously, his eyes a little wild, his nostrils flared like a young colt’s.

  ‘If this is what it’s like before it starts,’ he said in a high-pitched voice, ‘what’s it going to be like before it finishes?’

  ‘Dry up,’ I said angrily. ‘Don’t take any notice.’

  He turned and managed a twisted smile.

  ‘Don’t worry, Fen,’ he said. ‘I’m all right. Just the old bull smelling blood.’

  The bodies had an unsteadying effect on us all and I got everybody who had a hand to spare to lift them on to the parados and roll them out of sight. We began to feel better then, but the trench walls were splashed with blood and I got them all to dump their equipment and widen the trench to give us more room, cleaning the place up as much as possible with shovels, covering the blackened gobbets of flesh that lay under the duckboards, and burying other remains in sandbags in the trench walls.

  All the time as we worked, there was a steady stream of wounded coming up from the first wave in front of us where A and B companies were, all of them complaining that the Germans had been able to enfilade them as they waited. One company quartermaster-sergeant who’d been trying a last-minute exchange of footwear, said that as fast as he put the old boots on the parapets the Germans shot them off again.

  Beyond the val
ley in front of us and to north and south the noise was growing now, as though some vast symphony was swelling to its climax. Big shells were falling away to the east and they’d set fire to a village just behind the German lines that was sending up a thick column of smoke into the sky. You could see it all the time in the flickering light of shell-fire. All along the eastward horizon behind us, you could see the flashes of field guns and hear the rumble of their thunder that was drowned from time to time by a tremendous crash as the giants to the rear added their terrible voices like the bass of some plutonic orchestra.

  2

  We were finally settled in just before daylight, in a reserve trench marked with the grimly light-hearted name, Cheerio Crescent. Up in front, the bombardment had wakened up and was screeching through the air. The Germans weren’t asleep either and were thickly plastering with shells the ground behind us where the reserves were.

  The place was hopelessly congested with exhausted exasperated men and it wasn’t possible to sit in comfort. Murray had finally set about cleaning the Lewis-gun with a sullen look on his face, and occasional bitter glances in my direction.

  There was still a lot of water in the bottom of the trench, seeping through puttees and turning the soil into clinging mud which stuck to the boots in great stiff blocks that felt like ton weights.

  The second and third waves were crowded together and there was hardly room to move, only to sit still and brood on the blood-stained future. But after a while a group of engineers who’d been occupying a hole cut in the trench wall moved away and I curled up in the hole out of the congestion and tried to sleep. Young Welch came along after a while, also looking for somewhere to rest, but I pretended not to see him and stayed put, and he moved morosely off.

  Then Locky put his head round the corner and I made room for him and he curled up alongside me, strung about with equipment like a Christmas tree.

  ‘How do you feel now?’ I asked.

  His face was pinched and grey-looking as he spoke to me.

  ‘I think I’m going to die,’ he said.