Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  Bold crawled towards me, flinching at every bang, pulling himself over the dead, the wounded and the living. He looked like a man who’d been buried and dug up again. His face was stained and grimy and his hands looked like great lumps of mud. He glanced quickly at the pathetic little wire barricade we’d thrown up around us, made of scraps of timber and wire that we’d pulled out of the debris of the trench. It was useless for the purpose of stopping anything, but it gave us a measure of confidence and made us feel that we were doing what we’d come for.

  His face twisted as though in a spasm of pain and disgust, then he swung round to me again.

  ‘It’s a wash-out!’ he said viciously. ‘We’re finished! All them fine lads!’ He seemed to choke over the words, then he pulled himself together. ‘We’d better just ’ang on,’ he said calmly. ‘The reserves ought to be over soon.’

  As he spoke, an officer came along the trench in a scrambling, crouching run. He stopped dead when he saw us, his face startled. He was only a boy and he looked frightened.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I didn’t think there was anyone else left alive! Were you with us, or in front?’

  ‘Second and first waves,’ Bold said. ‘This is all that’s left.’

  ‘Well played, chaps,’ the officer said. ‘You’re a bloody fine lot…’ His voice trailed off unsteadily and he looked around him, his eyes staring.

  ‘I’ve got nobody…’ He paused and gulped, looking like a lost child. ‘…I’ve lost all my chaps. Every bloody one of them. They’re all out there.’

  Tears started into his eyes, then he seemed to pull himself together. ‘We ought to try and do something,’ he said. ‘What do you think, Sergeant-Major?’

  ‘We ought to ’ang on, sir. We’ve been told to ’ang on.’

  ‘There’s not much to hang on to,’ the officer said. ‘But perhaps you’re right. What do you suggest?’

  ‘We can try and build the parapet up a bit more,’ Bold suggested. ‘Reverse the trench. Give ourselves room to move. We might get a gun eventually. There ain’t much else we can do.’

  ‘All right. Let’s get going.’

  We tried to clear the trench, hastily shoving the dead to one side, but it wasn’t deep enough to stand upright and the Germans were watching and kept turning their machine guns on us. Behind us, the battlefield seemed to have emptied of men and they were able to direct their attention to the portions of their own line that had fallen into our hands.

  Gradually we cleared the debris, summoning up a few last dregs of strength for the effort, digging and swearing and panting, trying to carve out a new firestep. We lowered the trench bottom and filled sandbags with what we dug out, and raised the parapet with them and with the German dead, and crowned it with a jumble of wire we dragged up from farther along the trench, pulling out broken stakes and twisted iron rods to support it. Then we collected the water bottles and the cigarettes and the iron rations from the corpses, and huddled together in what was still not much more than a hole in the ground, dead, wounded and living together, hugging the earth, unable to do anything but wait.

  The officer glanced at his watch. ‘The reserves ought to be up now,’ he said. ‘God, they should have been sent forward half an hour ago!’

  As the Germans started to bombard their own trenches, the shells began to clump down around us again, and we gripped the quivering dirt closer, clawing at it with grimy fingers, stupefied by the heat and the blind terror and the noise, and by the shock and tragedy of the battle. I was blown off my feet and when I picked myself up I realised the party had dwindled to about a dozen unwounded men. By this time I was terrified of being hit, and even more terrified that Bold would realise it.

  Nobody suggested going back, though hanging on in that quivering little hole grew more and more senseless. I saw the sun rise higher and the heat in that filthy ditch seemed to grow unbearable. There was no sign of any reserves coming forward to help us. The attack in front of Serre had died away in slaughter and utter defeat.

  The Germans were probing all the little pockets of resistance in their front line now. Out in front of us were the remains of those four vast waves of the attack, and Mason still there on the wire, in a hideously alive attitude, his head back, his eyes wide open and staring. Occasionally, an arm or a leg moved among the heaped bodies but for the most part the battlefield was curiously still.

  ‘This is bloody silly,’ the officer said in a shrill nervous voice. ‘They’ve obviously called the attack off. We’d better get back.’

  Bold stared at me, then he nodded. As the shelling lifted, we scrambled out of the trench. The officer waited on top for us and then began to lead the way back. I pushed Ashton after the others, and when I left there was only Bold behind me, scrambling about the trench, pawing at the bodies to see if there was anyone left alive. I reached back to give him a hand up, but, as he grasped my fingers, a machine gun started again from somewhere and he went limp, half in and half out of the trench, and slid back. For a second he tottered on his long legs, as though trying to hold himself upright, then he sat down abruptly, his back against the sandbags, his feet out in front of him, his boots among the rubble and the scattered cartridge cases.

  I saw there were small red patches on his uniform across his chest and stomach, and there was a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Not you!’

  I fell into the trench again beside him, sliding down the loose dirt across the sandbags, but he shook his head from side to side, lolling limply against the trench wall.

  ‘Git going,’ he said. ‘I’m done for.’

  ‘Don’t talk barmy!’ I shouted, almost sobbing with misery, ‘I can carry you.’

  He brushed my hands away angrily. ‘I’m done for,’ he said. ‘I know when I’m done for.’ His head lifted and he snarled at me. ‘Git going,’ he said. ‘What ’ave I always told you? Don’t behave like a bloody amateur! I thought I taught you better’n that.’

  I stared at him sitting there, his eyes turned up to me, unemotional, expressionless, waiting for death like the soldier he’d always been, and I felt as though something had been carved out of me, inside. My eyes were full of tears.

  ‘So long, Pat,’ I said. ‘So long!’

  I caught up with the others as they huddled in the sunshine in a little hollow just beyond the wire. The dead lay thickly just there and we found one or two desperately wounded men, waiting for help, grey-faced, their teeth exposed in haggard painful grins that sent a chill through you.

  We tried to make them comfortable and picked up those who might survive and carried them tenderly to the top of the hollow. I could hear rifle-fire and bombing, but I couldn’t see much fighting now, though the British front and reserve trenches were being shelled to blazes.

  Someone started to rush over the lip of the slope and a heavy machine gun started rattling at once from the direction of Serre and I saw several men fall as the bullets started cutting the grass and sending chips of earth and stone flying.

  Suddenly there seemed to be only Ashton, Catchpole and Tom Creak left with me, and we were running now, crouched low and stumbling, frightened and wanting to survive. I saw Tom Creak go flying as a shell blew us both over, and I caught a glimpse of his helmet as it went sailing through the air, end over end, twenty feet up, the strap whipping as it turned. As I got up, I was raving a little, swearing and praying and cursing to myself.

  Ashton was still on his legs, still weakly waving that damned orange handkerchief on his stick, but even as I looked at him, I saw him spin round as a blast of bullets caught him and lifted him off his feet. As he disappeared, I saw a hand come up out of the grass, still holding the ash-plant – the handkerchief was wet and shining now in the sun with the blood on it – then it slowly sagged and vanished from sight.

  There seemed to be nobody left now but me, out in front of the German trenches on my own. There were great piles of dead in front of me and just behind, and more of them h
anging on the wire, sprawling against the looping strands like a lot of scarecrows. There was no one else on his feet beyond a few scattered figures in the distance running in and out of the heaps of dead like frightened rabbits, trying to seek shelter from that awful fire.

  Shrapnel was bursting over us in little puff balls and I saw more of the running figures go down, then something hit my helmet and knocked it over my eyes. The chin-strap tore my ears and made me bite my tongue. Lights flashed in front of me and I tasted blood, and I remember the grass coming up to meet me as I fell over.

  The crash as my head hit the ground knocked me silly. My helmet fell off and rolled away and I was certain I was dead or dying.

  4

  When I came round I was lying on my back in the grass, staring up at the blue sky and the brilliant sunshine, and the first thing I heard was someone crying out in a long dying shout of pain, fear and incredulous disbelief.

  A machine gun was firing over the top of me, and I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me every time the traverse brought the bullets hissing into the ground near me. I could hear them cracking as they went over me, kicking up the dust and chinking as they hit the stones among the grass.

  My head was splitting but I couldn’t feel any serious pain, and, squirming round in the grass, I felt myself all over. But there appeared to be no fresh blood anywhere and I realised I was unhurt.

  For a long time I lay there, trying to decide which way was safety, staring up at the sun which was beating down now out of a brassy sky, then I realised I was lying with my head towards our own trenches.

  I’d lost my rifle and I’d no idea where the Lewis-gun had gone. There seemed to be no one left of my section and no sign of the rest of the battalion. I’d seen many of them go down – Ashton, Mason, Henny, Spring and Bold.

  At the thought of Bold dead, I almost sat upright. Of all the men I’d seen fall, I felt Bold’s loss most keenly. Without my being aware of it, friendship had grown up between us, unnoticed almost, and never mentioned because Bold wasn’t the man to show friendship and I’d been too stupid to realise just how much I’d admired him. From an inauspicious start when I’d hated him, I’d grown closer to Bold than to anyone else, save perhaps Locky, and I was consumed with misery that I’d realised it too late to be able to show it to him. At the thought of him sitting in that tumbled trench, not knowing how much I’d liked him, his back to the sandbags, his rifle still in his hand, his head still up, unafraid of death, the tears flooded into my eyes and I started to sob.

  I lay there, among all the scattered equipment, the punctured water-cans, the pigeon baskets, the rolls of wire, and the dead men, still staring upwards, my fingers clutching at the grass in paroxysms of misery, then after a while, when it grew easier to think about it, I turned on my face. I knew what Bold would have said: ‘It’s up to you. You’ve got to survive for next time.’ And as the machine gun bullets passed beyond me, I scrambled to my feet and went in a flat diving run for the nearest shell-hole. The grass was fairly long and partly hid me.

  There were several men in the shell-hole. I saw Catchpole among them and I felt like hugging him.

  It was impossible to get to the front for the crowd, and I cowered on the edge of the huddle of bodies that seemed to shudder every time a shell cracked nearby.

  ‘Think we pulled it off?’ Catchpole shouted.

  ‘Not here, we didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘Where’s our barrage?’

  ‘Up ahead. Miles away, I expect.’

  Catchpole started to beat at the earth wall of the shell-hole in a bitter frustrated way.

  ‘It was a bloody brainless plan,’ he snarled. ‘But for all that bloody equipment and trying to walk instead of running, the first wave would have got in before they got the machine guns going, and then we’d all have got in.’

  We were all a little shocked. We’d been spurred along by the thought of the heroic in war and we’d been suddenly initiated into all that was terrible about it. We’d come to the harsh realisation that the price of all the hardships we’d paid and the long period of waiting had been wasted on a result that never had a chance of being attained. Where we could go from here, I couldn’t think. I could only foresee years more of pain and darkness.

  ‘I suppose the bloody papers’ll say a strong party penetrated into the German trenches,’ Catchpole went on in a low angry snarl. ‘I suppose there’ll be speeches in the House and the flags’ll be run up.’

  ‘Shut up, Vicar,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t help much.’

  ‘I saw Mason get it,’ he said heavily. ‘And poor old Spring. He was the first to go.’

  He pointed to a line of men lying on their faces on our right. ‘Why don’t those bloody fools get under cover?’ he asked irrationally.

  ‘They don’t need cover now,’ I said. ‘They’re dead.’

  An aeroplane came over us, buzzing along about fifty feet up. The pilot seemed to be waving to us, either to encourage us to go forward or to stay where we were. It was impossible to tell which.

  ‘“Varus, give me back my legions,”’ Catchpole said, and it sounded odd to hear him quoting anything but the sacrilegious prayers he’d liked to give us. ‘Not much chance of that now. They’re all dead. Thousands of ’em. The whole bloody army’s dead!’

  Somewhere under the pile of bodies, a man was weeping hysterically and I could hear someone praying in a flat shocked tone.

  ‘“Almighty God, Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men …”’

  A shell cracked nearby and as the shower of dirt came down and the pieces of earth and fragments of metal hit the rear side of the hole, the prayer stopped abruptly. I decided it was too dangerous to stay there, and pulled at Catchpole’s sleeve.

  ‘I’m moving,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘All right,’ Catchpole said. ‘I’m coming.’

  I scrambled out and dived for the next hole, but as I went I heard a machine gun start rattling again and Catchpole ducked back again until it stopped.

  It was only as I slithered into the next hole that I realised it was an old one and half-full of slimy water. I scrambled to my feet, spluttering and gasping, and hugged the side. I was dying for a cigarette, but I’d left them all in my pack – three hundred of them – somewhere out there in front of me.

  ‘Try the next one, Vicar,’ I shouted. ‘This one’s full of water!’

  But even as I put my head up to direct him, I saw a shell drop in the hole I’d just left and the whole lot – Catchpole and everyone – went up in a flurry of stones and smoke and fragments of shattered bodies, and I buried my face in the earth. Now even Catchpole had gone and there was no one left. I just wanted to cry at the uselessness of it all.

  The battlefield seemed to have emptied of human beings now and, as the smoke drifted away, I could see the ridges and folds of ground quite clearly, all covered with bodies, as thick as sleepers in a London park on a summer afternoon.

  Where the Germans were shelling their own trenches, I saw a few scattered figures climb out as we had and start running back, some of them without helmets, some without packs, some without rifles. But they were caught by an enfilading machine gun as we’d been caught and they all disappeared into the grass, dead, wounded or hiding, and there were only the grey-clad figures standing on the parapet fifty yards away, jeering at them.

  A shell dropped just in front of me and as it shoved earth into the shell-hole, it pushed me out. I lay dazed for a while, then I got up and ran in a scrambling run for another hole. I was frightened. I’d survived that first awful slaughter and I was terrified now that I’d be hit as I found shelter. I still couldn’t believe I was unhurt and alive. I knew Bold and Mason and Catchpole and Ashton and one or two others were dead because I’d seen them die with my own eyes. Tom Creak was certainly hit, and Murray, Tim Williams and Locky seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth, lost somewhere in that vast golgotha of a battlefield.

  There wa
s still no sign of the reserves, and it looked as though they’d stopped them – perhaps to end the slaughter, for the German wire seemed to be hardly touched and, although his trenches were a tumbled mass of sandbags, they seemed to be still full of men.

  I remembered the rumours I’d heard about deep dugouts big enough to house whole companies in safety. Obviously, that was what had happened. They’d stayed down there, snug and safe during the bombardment, and it was only our slow advance and that awful weight we’d carried that had stopped us. If it hadn’t been for that, we’d have been among them before they could get to the parapet. We’d failed by minutes.

  I lay staring with burning eyes over the scorched lip of the shell-crater. In front of me, I saw a man raise himself on his hands, then his strength seemed to give out and he fell on his face and rolled over, and I saw one hand come slowly upwards and claw the air. It stayed there, like a plea for mercy, and I saw there were a couple of shrapnel bullets embedded in the fingers, like two black balls.

  Suddenly the banging of shells seemed to have fallen off and the smoke began to clear and I noticed there were a couple of larks singing above me. There didn’t appear to be much point in staying where I was, and I made up my mind to get back, in short rushes so that snipers wouldn’t have time to shoot at me.

  In the next shell-hole, though, Eph Lott was lying. He’d been hit in the head and his left arm was gone. I could see the smashed bone and pearly ligaments of his shoulder, and his face was pitted with dull grey little holes as though some explosion had driven stones and dirt into his flesh.

  The bloody fingers of his right hand clutched a rifle and I bent over him to take it away. Just then it seemed more than likely that the Germans might counter-attack and throw us all back while the confusion was at its height and I thought it unwise for a wounded man to hold his rifle like that.

  ‘I should get rid of that, Eph,’ I said gently. ‘If they come and find you with it, they’ll shoot you.’