Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  I thanked God Locky was alive, and thought it odd that it should be Murray and me who were still on our feet, after what Bold had always said of us. We seemed to have an instinct for survival.

  ‘They got Bold,’ I said. ‘I was with him.’

  ‘Poor bloody old Bold,’ Murray said sombrely. ‘He wasn’t a bad bastard, you know, as far as bastards go.’

  We decided to go out to look for Locky, but we were forbidden to try because it was now daylight. But as soon as the sun got up again we saw there was a white flag flying from the German parapet and there were Germans among their own wire attending to the British wounded. They were moving among the piles of dead, pulling living men from among the heaps of corpses.

  ‘Let’s chance it,’ Murray said, and we scrambled out in broad daylight.

  No one fired at us and more men began to scramble after us until No Man’s Land seemed to be dotted with men in khaki and grey. It developed into an informal truce and the Germans didn’t seem to object so long as we went nowhere near their wire. I saw Red Cross flags and ceremonial saluting and even friendly handshakes which seemed to make the whole thing even more futile and heartbreaking, with the wounded crawling back around us and the dead lying in heaps.

  The humiliation of knowing we were there only because the Germans allowed us to be there never occurred to me. All I wanted was to put an end to the sound of crying. They said later, that all the time, even while we couldn’t move for the dead and the wounded, headquarters were urging harassed brigadiers to push on with more attacks.

  We found the battalion dead in rows where they’d fallen, many of them hit not once but half a dozen times. There seemed to be none of the living left by this time and they lay there, mostly huddled forward on their faces, weighted down by those dreadful loads, their rifles, their loads of sandbags and wire, and all the other equipment that had been piled on to them, dusty and utterly without dignity, their features pressed into the grass, stiffening fingers clutching at their wounds.

  There was Hardacre, the flies about his mouth, grit on his staring eyes, and no living hand moving up to brush it away. We saw nine men in a row in the sunshine with no sign of injury on them, victims somehow of blast, and the colonel way out in front with the adjutant, his brother, who shouldn’t have been there at all – lying on his back, his eye-patch blown away somehow, one eye closed and the other, the blind one, staring in a mad milky fashion at the sun.

  The little terrier was still with him, draped across his chest, its head on its forepaws, whining. We tried to take it away with us but when Murray picked it up, it wriggled out of his arms and went back to the body and squatted down again in the same position.

  ‘Leave it,’ I said. ‘It’ll only find its way back here if you take it.’

  Murray nodded and let it go, a taut distressed expression on his face, and we moved on among the dead, taking their pay-books but leaving their identity discs for whoever had to bury them. These were the cleanly dead, the dead of the machine gun bullets, stitched across by that murderous fire, but there were others lying in the shell-holes and round their lips in groups of stark, mangled, half-naked bodies that looked as though they belonged more properly in a slaughterhouse, ghastly pieces of scorched and blackened flesh and bone and blood that were unrecognisable as men.

  Finally I found my own platoon, Spring still where I’d seen him hit, and all the others, one just in front of another in a diagonal line as the bullets had caught them at the top of the crest. Then Ashton, huddled alone on his side, still clutching his home-made orange flag, the moonpenny wilting in his buttonhole, and Eph and the Mandys all together in the same shell-hole.

  Locky was lying a little apart in a hollow that stunk of acid fumes and the smell of corruption. There were other men in there, more dead than living, and one or two old bodies I noticed, mere skeletons in rags of French uniform. One of them had bones the colour of the musty edges of a century-old volume piercing the blue and red cloth, a skull with black matted hair, looking like a mushroom in the grass, and teeth that gleamed in the sunshine. They seemed to belong to another war from ours, another age.

  Locky was lying on his back, and you could see the crushed grass and the trail of blood flecks on the flowers where he’d dragged himself along.

  ‘Molly,’ he was moaning softly to himself. ‘Molly!’

  He’d been hit twice in the chest and looked in a bad way. When we turned him over, we found he had a hole in his back you could get both your fists into. We got his shirt off and went among the dead for bandages.

  In the end we got him into a blanket and carried him back like that, Murray and I and two other men, stumbling and tripping over the scattered equipment and abandoned weapons and the dead.

  Back in the trench we handed him over to the stretcher-bearers. They examined him briefly, then gave me a quick stare that told me he was slipping between our fingers even as we watched, to some realm where he was no longer approachable, no longer able to restore sanity with his calm imperturbability, where it was all cold and comfortless and dark, and for a while I felt bereft of reason and certain I couldn’t stand any more.

  Somehow, going round in my head was the knowledge that his son was alive and bore his name, and I was glad there was another Lockwood Haddo to carry on his name, his sanity, his sense. Just then it seemed important that there should be.

  I watched them carry him away and Murray slapped my shoulder.

  ‘He’ll be all right now,’ he said loudly, but I knew he was as well aware as I was that we’d never see Locky again.

  I turned round and stumbled away, numbed, stupefied, and devoid of emotion. I felt as if tears were falling on to my heart – slowly, one by one. I moved and performed actions, but my heart was still inside me. There was no agony, just an icy living death. If only I could have talked to him, I thought, if only we could have had a few minutes together. I felt I’d never get used to the fact that he was gone.

  There was a stink of rum in the trench but we never found out where it came from. I could have done with some more rum just then, for the place seemed to be littered with corpses. There was one man just on top of the parapet, sitting down, bolt upright, looking as though he were quite comfortable, supported by the bodies of his comrades, gazing back into the trench, his blue eyes wide open, a fine-looking man. He sat there, staring, until the doctor, giving anti-tetanus injections to the wounded by a first-aid post that was recognisable among the rubble only by its Red Cross flag and the smell of carbolic, ether and chloroform, looked up and noticed him.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said irritably. ‘Put a sandbag over that man’s face, someone!’

  After a while, the truce seemed to stop and everybody came in. What happened to those we missed I don’t know. We hung about in the front trench, counting noses, but of our company there seemed to be only Murray and me left.

  Already the ugly name of Gommecourt was filtering through. They said that up there the troops had been wiped clean off the face of the earth, though God knows what they thought had happened to our brigade. Someone said the York and Lancs had got into Serre village only to be destroyed from behind by Germans coming up out of deep shelters. The attack at Fricourt was a failure too and the West Yorks had been swept away before they’d gone a hundred yards. Their second wave didn’t even manage to reach the starting tapes.

  The Irish had smashed through four sets of trenches at Thiepval but there’d been no reserves left to follow them up and they were still there, cut off and isolated, being shelled to blazes. Down in the south by the river and in the French sector, there’d been some success, and someone said the cavalry had got through, because dead men and horses had been seen, but it turned out they were artillerymen.

  All at our end was failure. The Newfoundlanders had been wiped out against Hamel and the South Wales Borderers at Beaumont. The Durhams had been decimated at Ovillers and the Green Howards at Fricourt. Whole battalions, thousands on thousands on thousands of men, had
been swept away in an unbelievable butchery in the first five or ten minutes after seven-thirty.

  Prisoners had been shot in the berserk excitement. Signalling had broken down and runners had failed to get through; and the barrage had gone gaily on, though some of the artillery commanders, ignoring orders, had brought the shells back on their own initiative to help the stranded infantry. But by then it had been too late. The attack had failed. The men were dead. The battalions had vanished.

  There was a Jock piper in the trench, miles from where he should have been, a little drunk or a little shocked or both, marching up and down, sweating in the sunshine, playing a pibroch and swearing at anyone who tried to stop him.

  ‘Where’s the bloody cavalry?’ someone was shouting. ‘Where did they get to?’

  ‘You should have seen it, bhoy,’ a wounded man wearing the Bloody Hand badge of the Ulsters was saying. ‘Real soda-water we found in thim trenches. And cigars as long as your arm.’

  ‘The bastards used flame-throwers on us,’ another man said.

  ‘Where I was, they’d chained their men to the machine guns.’

  A gunner officer, swinging a German helmet in his hand, stalked past, his clothes torn and scorched, his eyes bewildered. ‘Hamel’s full of dead,’ he was saying in shocked tones. ‘Full of dead!’

  Someone started singing in a drunken hysterical voice:

  ‘Après la guerre fini

  Tous les soldats partis

  Mademoiselle avec piccaninny

  Souvenir des bloody Angl’is.’

  ‘Shut your row, Joe,’ he was told. ‘I’ve got a splittin’ headache!’

  ‘That’s all right.’ The singing stopped, and a merry voice, full of rum, was raised. ‘Tell Sir Douglas ’Aig that Private ’Obbins of the York and Lancs congratulates him and hopes ’e’ll be made a dook for this day’s work.’

  The whole area stunk of gas fumes and lyddite. Men of the decimated battalions were trying to find their way back to their units through the uncontrollable stream of wounded and the support troops who were still trying to move forward for follow-up attacks which had long since been cancelled. There wasn’t a single telephone line still intact to stop the reserves moving forward, and with them came the Pioneer Corps who were supposed to repair the German trenches when they’d been captured, but were set to work instead to bury the dead.

  They lay about everywhere still, like pieces of wreckage, their faces senseless and grey, and the salvage parties were busy collecting the bombs and the rifles off them. A harassed sergeant-major was trying to organise stretcher-bearers.

  ‘For God’s sake, get me out of here,’ I heard one wounded man say, and the sergeant-major, driven to the point of exhaustion, turned on him brutally.

  ‘Shut your mouth,’ he said. ‘I’m coming to you.’

  Men were bringing up little stretchers on wheels, bumping them over the rough ground, and we began to lift the wounded on to them, bandaging knees that were bloody with crawling. Beef tea miraculously appeared in basins. A doctor in a blood-soaked apron, crouching over a hideously wounded man in a hacked-out hollow of the trench side, was staring at a blunted needle.

  ‘This damn’ thing’s inhuman,’ he said to an orderly. ‘Take it away.’

  As we helped to carry the wounded back, I saw artillerymen and engineers, all roped in to help the ambulance men, and hundreds of cavalrymen, those wonderful cavalrymen who were going to break through and turn the Germans’ flank. Here they were, shifting the wounded and burying the dead, handing stretchers over the parapet where the trench was too narrow. Old Corker hadn’t been far wrong.

  There was a curious absence of prisoners, just indignant men shouting they’d been let down, and stretcher-bearers, and harassed military police trying to restore order among the shocked, dazed and angry men who were slowly recovering their wits, and the bewildered support troops still trying to fight their way forward.

  ‘We got in and nobody came to help us,’ someone was shouting furiously.

  ‘Lloyd George said this was a fight to the finish,’ he was answered. ‘The bastard wants to come and finish it!’

  I saw an officer with a bandaged head trying to muster a pathetically small group of men. He was swaying with fatigue. None of us seemed to have eaten or slept for days. I was beaten to the wide, light-headed, almost exalted. Somewhere eventually, I knew, I would sleep, and I cared little where we went. The world seemed to have emptied of men I’d known and lived with, and there was only young Murray and one or two others who’d struggled in. Appleby had disappeared at last.

  My throat was dry and my water-bottle empty. Searching for food and drink, I found my way with my little party into a big dugout, groping past the musty folds of a blanket and a piece of Wilson canvas. We lit a candle-end stuck in its own grease in a tin lid and sat staring at it, spent and broken, a greyness in our hearts. The air was thick with smoke and the reek of the dying candle. The faces about me were brooding and enigmatic, and curiously old, mouths munching pieces of bread and cheese or pursed round Woodbine stumps. Murray’s features wore a yellowish pallor and his eyes were red-rimmed with sleeplessness. His hands were trembling, and his voice had an echo of overexcitement in it.

  ‘We could have got in,’ he kept saying, repeating it like a prayer, ‘if we hadn’t had those bloody packs.’

  ‘Don’t talk wet,’ someone answered. ‘We never had a chance. Never! Never in a thousand years! The bloody staff have done it again. The bastards think a battle’s only a matter of a few sums on a piece of paper.’

  After a while, an officer called us out and we got up slowly, glad to have our actions determined for us, all of us still half-stunned by emotions that weren’t under control, all our uniforms torn by bullets and shrapnel.

  ‘’E was still trying to get ’old of ’is rifle,’ one man was saying. ‘And ’e’d got no bloody ’ands. I told ’im, “Fred, lie still,” and ’e tried, but then ’e died.’

  The tears were running down his unshaven face as he spoke. There was no quaver in his voice, only a high abnormal note as bitterness and grief swept over him.

  ‘I’ll have to find Catchpole’s kit when we get back,’ Murray said heavily, picking up his rifle and buckling his belt. ‘He’d got some letters and some smutty photos he asked me to chuck away.’

  His face was expressionless and uninterested, and he moved about like a man condemned. ‘Wonder if they’ll keep us here in support,’ he muttered.

  As we crept out into the sunlight, a staff captain with a startlingly red-and-white bandage over a grimy face came up to me and asked me where our officers were. I said we didn’t appear to have any, so he told me in a cracked voice that wasn’t quite under control to collect what remained of the battalion and get them the hell out of the way.

  I managed to raise about twenty-eight and we stumbled off. As we left the trenches, I noticed a loud wailing sound like huge wet fingers being dragged across an enormous glass pane. It rose and fell, interminable, unbearable, and as we turned an angle of the trench I saw where it came from. All along a muddy sunken roadway they lay, hundreds of wounded, brown blanket shapes, some shouting, some moaning, some singing in delirium.

  The anaesthesia of shock had worn off now and the pain and thirst were setting in among the torn bodies and ownerless arms and legs and equipment. The sound of their cries had a uniform level of muted anguish and despair. During the night, they’d became little boys again and were crying in the heat for their mothers, for help, for water, for death, for God, in a vast and terrible monotone, while an elderly staff officer moved about them, trying to tell them it was worth it as we’d won. We’d thrown the Germans back and victory was within our grasp.

  They gazed at us with piteous eyes and called out to us as we moved past them.

  ‘For God’s sake, come ’ere, mate!’

  ‘Lift this man off me, Sarge, please! He’s snuffed it.’

  ‘No, leave me,’ one man said. ‘Go to that poor sod from the Y
ork and Lancs. He’s in dreadful pain. I might even manage to walk if you can ’elp me up.’

  We passed through the little wood with its calvary and I noticed there were a lot of new graves about, with the caps of the dead askew on them. Except where the path had been cleared, the wood was a dreadful tangle of trees now, the ground criss-crossed with broken bullet-clipped branches and splintered timber. The Germans had been dropping shells on it for two days now and it was just a mass of shell-holes, abandoned equipment, smashed guns, splintered SAA boxes and undergrowth.

  Every tree seemed to have been broken off at the top or bottom to add to the impenetrable tangle that sliced the sun into broken dusty beams. They were burned and scorched till they looked like the blasted heath from Macbeth, their uplifted arms twisted as though begging for mercy. On the fringe, some attempt had been made to set the graves in order and there was a red-faced padre there with lines of new crosses. With all those shattered trees about, it was like being in the graveyard of civilisation. Dead horses and mules lay about, still in their harness, hideously smashed. Some had obviously kicked each other to ribbons trying to get free, and others lay, with their legs starkly in the air, among the smashed waggons and limbers and scattered shells and the incredibly broken guns that showed where the German artillery had done its deadly work. A few morose men were trying to drag them off the road with a tractor and ropes. It was like a Gustave Doré etching of Purgatory.

  Watched over by Indian cavalry sitting their nervous horses, their headdresses the only colour in that grim landscape, the dead lay in untidy groups, their life staining the chalky puddles, their crimson fingers in bloodstained bunches. Battle equipment lay everywhere, trampled into the mud with shreds of clothing, riddled boots and broken rifles. The birds seemed to have vanished from that awful charnel house, and the dead looked as though they’d been dropped in giant handfuls from the sky, with their clutching fingers and liquid eyes staring at the sun.