Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  He stared at me with dazed stupid eyes that were milky with pain and quite uncomprehending. He never moved as I took the rifle off him.

  Then I saw it had an orthoptic sight. I don’t know where Eph had picked it up, because none of our section had had one and Eph had been empty-handed when I’d last seen him. I’d fired with an orthoptic sight once or twice and, as it occurred to me that I hadn’t done much so far towards winning the battle, I swung round with the rifle and flung myself down, bitter and savage.

  Everybody seemed to be dead or dying around me. Corpses were lying all over the place and I could still see that clawing hand with the two shrapnel balls in it, clutching at the air. It was the stillness of the dead that seemed so awful. Even their boots didn’t seem to lie on the earth like those of living men. They rested on the ground with such an appalling unnatural limpness.

  There was a big German who looked like an officer, standing on the parapet, waving and cheering. He had a spiked helmet on the end of a rifle and he was laughing at other men who were climbing out to join him, triumphant in their victory, certain that there was nothing we could do to them.

  I pulled the trigger and he disappeared backwards into the trench and the other Germans dived out of sight after him. Then I remembered I still had my bombs with me and, in a rage, not so much at the Germans but at the people who’d caused the disaster, I flung them towards the trench. I was too far away to do much damage and, with a feeling of frustration and futility, I saw them burst just in front of the parapet. The Germans who’d stuck their heads up again to see where my shot had come from vanished once more, abruptly, like a lot of Aunt Sallys at a fairground shy.

  There were still a lot of them visible on my right, certain they were safe, but there didn’t seem much point in shooting any more. So I turned round and tried to bandage Eph as best I could.

  An officer was lying on the rear edge of the shell-hole. He was on his back and his face and hands were white as marble. He’d been hit several times in the chest and his shattered ribs were sticking in red and white splinters through the blood-soaked tatters of his tunic. He lungs were labouring like broken bellows, and although he was still alive his soul had already gone from him. When I turned him over, I saw it was Arnold Holroyd.

  I tried to find the morphia tablets I knew he should be carrying, but I couldn’t, and had to give up, so I did the best I could without them. Eph didn’t seem to be in pain, just stupefied. I expect it was the head injury. His brains were bulging out behind his ear and I didn’t know how to push them back. In the end I took my jack-knife out and used the flat of the blade.

  It seemed strange to see Eph like that. He’d been a cheerful soul and, in spite of his reputation, he’d never given any trouble. I couldn’t move him and I decided in the end to stay with him, and I lay in that hole all day, waiting for the reserves to come up and drive the Germans away.

  There were other men out in front – from time to time I saw them wave to one another or heard them shout. After a while, one of them got up and ran towards me, dragging an injured leg, and fell in beside me. He’d been shot through the knee and I tried to make him comfortable.

  It was breathlessly hot now and he began to gasp for water. But I hadn’t any and Eph’s bottle was empty, punctured by a bullet. He’d drunk all his own and I was just debating whether to risk going out to find a full bottle on one of the corpses when shrapnel shells started to bang around us again and we crouched back to back in the sparse shelter of the shell-hole to dodge the flying metal. When it had stopped I sat up and discovered the other man was dead. He’d been hit by a shrapnel bullet as he lay there and I was covered with his blood.

  Eph hadn’t moved and was still staring fixedly at me. The wounded began to cry dreadfully in the heat now, and one of them shouted for water until his voice grew thick and finally faded away. Behind me, another man was screaming in a harsh way which tore at the nerves, shouting that his head hurt, so that I realised I hadn’t got a helmet and I put the dead man’s on.

  The sun rose higher and it became witheringly hot and in the lull I felt unutterably lonely. Eph’s eyes seemed to grow more opaque and dead-looking, though he was still alive, his gaze fixed on me in a terrible stare, his chest heaving steadily and slowly, almost as though his breathing were normal. Then, not far in front of me, I saw a man lying on his back, moaning for help, and after a while I couldn’t stand it any more and went out to him, turning over every body I came to on the way, certain a dozen times that I’d found Locky. When I got to him, I saw it was Tommy Mandy. A shell must have burst near him – probably the same one that had caught Eph – for there were several other men lying nearby, all burnt and torn.

  The blast had blown off his puttees and scorched his trousers. Both legs were bloodily smashed and drenched with blood, and the thigh bones were exposed. There was a splinter stuck in his cheek like a dart and he was moaning softly and didn’t recognise me, so I tried to put on a tourniquet with a strap and an entrenching tool, and started to drag him to where Eph was lying. As soon as I moved him he started to scream.

  ‘Kill me,’ he begged. ‘For God’s sake, kill me!’

  I didn’t know what to do about it. Crouching in the grass, I got the iodine out of his field dressing and poured it on the wounds and he promptly fainted, so I finished dragging him back towards Eph. I knew it wouldn’t do his legs much good, but lying there he’d have got shot eventually, because I’d seen the Germans firing at anything that moved.

  Later in the day, when things were quieter, I saw another man trying to crawl towards us and I went out to him. When I got closer, I saw it was Billy Mandy. He’d been hit in the chest and his face had turned a grey putty colour. The whole front of his uniform was soaked with blood and the ground underneath him was brown with it. His hands were full of grass, as though he’d tried to drag himself along by it.

  He was quite conscious and he recognised me at once.

  ‘’Ello, Fen,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Hang on. I’ll get you in.’

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ he said.

  He was right. I got him into the hole in the end but he died like his brother.

  It was about this time that Eph suddenly seemed to recover consciousness. He didn’t move and that awful fixed stare in his eyes didn’t waver, but his breathing seemed to quicken and he began to mutter.

  ‘’Oo’s that?’ he said after a while, as though he could hear but not see, and I scrambled across to him.

  ‘It’s me, Eph,’ I said. ‘Fenner.’

  ‘I’m done for,’ he muttered. ‘Say us a prayer, Fen.’

  I recited the Lord’s Prayer but he seemed to have lapsed back into his coma and showed no sign of whether he’d heard, or even whether he was still aware that I was there.

  One or two other men had crawled in from the tangle of corpses by this time and rolled into the hole. By midday, there were about nine of us in there, all of them wounded except me. I’d brought three in myself because I couldn’t bear their crying.

  The Germans were standing on their parapet again now, in groups, indifferent to us, and whenever anyone moved they sniped at him or turned their machine guns on him. Once or twice I saw odd men get up and run to the rear, singly or in little bunches, but they all seemed to be bowled over, going down like shot rabbits in a tangle of arms and legs.

  Just after midday, over on the right, there seemed to be an informal truce and I could see stretcher-bearers moving about. But it didn’t seem to happen where we were and eventually the machine gun fire started again and the stretcher-bearers all disappeared.

  Eph died during the afternoon and by evening the Germans had climbed down into their trenches again, though we could hear them from time to time, jeering at the men who crouched in holes in front of their wire. The guns were still firing sporadically and the shells were still going over, but there was nothing near us. The barrage had swept miles away to the rear, sea
rching out the second-line and third-line trenches. Down to the south you could hear the rumble of fierce fighting, but just round me the battle seemed to have died away of inanition.

  5

  I shall never forget that day. It was a day of birdsong and intense midsummer beauty that was made all the more heartbreaking by contrast with the carnage around me. It burned its agonising way past midday and into the afternoon as we prayed for dark and tried to tell the time by the shadows.

  The sunlight in the blue arc of the sky became harsh and sizzling in its heat, so that the earth seemed to glow and shimmer around us. No Man’s Land still seemed like a summer field, for the long grass and the flowers hid the dead except on the slopes where you could see them lying in heaps.

  Eph’s face turned to the colour of old bone, dead white and stiff-looking, and someone took off his jacket and put it over the staring eyes.

  There seemed to be no indication that further attacks were coming, though we could still see the smoke drifting in pink and blue clouds to the south. It seemed incredible that all those vast singing armies we’d seen such a short time before could have sunk into the earth within a few short minutes. There was no longer any sign of the iron strength we’d felt in the morning. The wave of emotional excitement had passed in the tragedy, and the frenzy was spent. We were only derelicts now in a ruined world.

  As we crouched there, all the spine blasted out of us, I saw the obscene flies descend in their thousands on to the disfigured dead, grim bloated carrion-eaters darkening the bloody wounds and crawling in blue-black hundreds over the stiff lips and yellowing eyes. There were rats, too, scuttling up from the old shell-holes and through the morbid patches of poppies that grew along their white lips, to explore the heaps of dead. But the larks were singing, too, as though they’d recovered from their early fright, and they were filling the air again with cascades of glowing notes. With my face on the edge of the shell-hole, I could see flowers everywhere, unreal among the carnage – scabious, poppies, marigolds, yellow weeds shaking in the breeze – and thousands of insects, bees, grasshoppers and beetles, trudging round the scattered packs and rifles and bayonets and helmets and scabbards and cartridges and bodies, indifferent to the sickly scent of death, as though nothing had happened, as though whole armies hadn’t died in the hours between dawn and midday.

  All the time in my mind was the chorus – I must get back, I must get back; I shall die if I stay here. Sooner or later, the Germans are bound to attack, I thought, and I’m no damn’ good to Helen dead. Mason was already dead, crucified on the wire, bringing to an end all the jealousy and unhappiness that had passed between us. It seemed odd that it should be Mason and not me, because once he’d always seemed so lucky and untouchable. But now the flies were on him and I was still alive and hardly hurt.

  I started wondering if I’d done my duty as I ought. I’d seen Ashton and men like him give everything of courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice, trying to press on when it was clearly hopeless to press on, because they’d been told to capture certain objectives and because they felt it was their duty to try to the limit of their strength and courage. Hundreds must have died in those few hours between seven-thirty and midday solely because their courage led them to go on trying when there was no longer any hope.

  Then I began to wonder why it was that I’d been picked out to remain alive. Why not Mason or Bold or Catchpole or Ashton? Why me? Why was I so favoured? We were all the same shape, wore the same clothes, suffered much the same hopes and fears, yet I’d been left alive when all the others were dead. I didn’t know whether to be overjoyed or saddened. Mostly, I just wanted to cry.

  It didn’t start to grow dark until nearly ten o’clock. It had been a glorious summer day and the light hung on and hung on. About ten o’clock the dusk set in with a bloody smear of sunset and we decided to try and make it to our own lines. As we scrambled and pulled each other out of the shell-hole, I saw the whole of No Man’s Land had come to life, with wounded men rising like ghosts, silently and slowly crawling out of the dips and hollows and making their painful way back.

  The Germans started firing flares and there was still the rattle of machine guns and the tap of rifles, but the place was shadowy now and it was difficult to see much at a distance. I set off with two men hanging on to me. I still had Eph’s rifle, because I’d heard somewhere they could charge you with cowardice if you came out of it unhurt without your weapons, and it kept getting between my legs and tripping me up.

  We seemed to stumble around in the dark for hours, then we saw a trench in front of us. We weren’t certain whether it was ours or the Germans’, so I put the other men down and scrambled forward. When I reached the parapet, I hung over it, head down, ready to slip back again if it proved to be the wrong one. Dead men were lying anyhow inside it but it was too dark to see what uniform they wore. Then I heard an English voice and saw lights and by them, stretcher-bearers moving along, trying to clear away the wounded. I brought the two men in and lowered them down. Someone handed me a mess-tin full of tea and rum and it tasted like heaven, and I sat with my head flung back against the earth wall, my eyes closed, frowning, perplexed, unable to believe I was still sane.

  After a while I felt better and went back to see if I could find any more wounded, and when I returned the second time, I saw Appleby standing in the trench. There was a light from a dugout shining on him and I was startled at his appearance. His arm was in a bloodstained sling and he was plastered with mud, his hair spiky with matted dirt. I must have looked much the same, I suppose.

  ‘Fenner!’ he said. ‘You all right?’

  ‘I’m all right. How many are there left?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think I’m the only one on his feet. Me and you. The colonel’s down. I saw him go. And Blackett. They brought Mr Sheridan in. He must have been caught by shrapnel. They said he’d got about fifteen holes in him.’

  ‘Ashton’s dead,’ I said, and I felt again as though I wanted to cry. ‘I saw him. And Bold. And Holroyd.’

  ‘We ought to try and get the lads together,’ he said brokenly. ‘That’s why I’m hanging on here. This has been a bad day for us. A damned bad day. They’ve been trying to send me back for a couple of hours now but I can’t go without seeing everybody’s all right. I’m just waiting for the lads to come in.’

  All that night – and under the red sickle of the midsummer moon and the inaccessible peace of the stars it was only half-dark most of the time – the unhurt and the wounded kept coming in. No Man’s Land was teeming with them now, and all the time the reserves waiting in the front line, nervous of the German counter-attack that was expected hourly, were challenging everyone who came near.

  But the Germans never came. In spite of what he’d done to us, we must have hurt him too. He could have walked in if he’d wanted, and in the confusion that existed we could never have stopped him. But he never came.

  Men were stumbling in all night, calling out the names of their units and asking if anyone had seen their friends. Nobody ever had. Tired men staggered in, and wounded crawled in, faces smashed, arms and legs broken, crying for help or stubbornly brushing aside assistance and saying, ‘I’ll manage.’

  Men were sitting on the broken firestep weeping, and there was a padre, bare-headed, his face martyred, bending over the dying. All night we went backwards and forwards over the parapet. There were stretcher-bearers everywhere, calling out softly in the darkness. From time to time, you heard whispered answering cries and, following them, you found someone making his painful way back, dragging his lacerated, punctured body on hands and knees, or little groups of wounded men in the hollows as though they’d crept together for comfort, sagging men with every bone in their bodies broken but still managing to give out inarticulate little cries.

  In other hollows were the dead and wounded who’d found momentary shelter and hadn’t been able to withstand the pain and the thirst. And all around us were those pathetic mounds of men – four
foot high in places they were, crouching in huddles – and still more, lying in rows like sheaves of corn after the reaper’s been past, thick as flies on fly-paper, with the noticeboards and pennants, and the pathetic-looking home-made flags that proclaimed their enthusiasm and their faith and their exaltation, still grasped in dead hands. They’d died crawling, stiffening as they moved, or bandaging each other’s wounds.

  I’d no idea who was alive and who was dead but, no matter how much we searched, there were always more alive and just alive to bring in. I seemed to have lost touch with our own people for I saw no one I knew.

  Once, in the wan daylight, just as dawn was breaking, I saw a colonel and a brigadier lying together, both unarmed except for walking sticks, face down in the grass, their arms outstretched towards the German trenches as though they were still trying to point the way to the legions of dead behind them. The flayed earth around them seemed to be covered with scrap-iron, shards of old shell-cases, spent bullets, bomb splinters and shrapnel balls, and it amazed me to realise that men had got as far as they had through all that sleet of flying metal.

  As the light increased, I stumbled back into the trench for the umpteenth time and saw young Murray coming towards me. His face was foul with dirt and his clothes were torn and covered with blood. He looked dazed and older and grimmer but he didn’t appear to be hurt. He was licking his lips and his tongue seemed strangely pink and clean in the squalor of his blackened face.

  He appeared to be drunk and I saw he was carrying a rum jar. ‘Found it out there,’ he said. ‘Have a swig!’

  He was laughing in a way that was nearer to crying, and as he passed the jar round, he jerked a thumb. ‘I got up to their bloody wire,’ he said. ‘Then we stuck. A shell bowled me over and Tim Williams took the gun. God knows what happened to him. When I got my breath back he’d gone and it was too late to do anything then. If only we’d not had those bloody packs we’d have made it. They’re all out there, Fen. They’re all out there in front. Every last one of ’em. I saw Tom Creak just now. He’d crawled in with a smashed thigh. He said he saw Locky. He said he was hit but still alive. There’s nobody else though. Only me and you.’