Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  There were bodies in all the ditches, and I saw a little machine-gunner, scarcely more than a child, kneeling by the grass verge, his head hanging forward as though he were crying, and an elderly man with grey hair and groping hands. Bodies and still more bodies, most of them brought back from the trenches to give the living room to move, some of them fallen where the shells had caught them on their way up, were packed close together among the dead horses and wreckage, in every kind of grotesque attitude, their uniforms filthy with mud and blood, some of them strangely contorted as though they’d died in agony. One of them had his arms outstretched as though he were playing a violin, and others were flung down shapelessly like clothes without bodies in them. Most of their equipment had already been salvaged and their pockets had been slit for cigarettes and iron rations. Letters and photographs lay scattered about, trampled into the mud by passing boots.

  From the bent iron calvary nearby, Jesus Christ stared down on them with iron unfeeling eyes and iron cheeks. They lay on their backs, their arms crossed, their faces dirty and aghast, their mouths open and their jaws askew in dreadful grins, their eyes closed, their convict-shaven skulls broken. One man had put his elbows on the edge of the ditch to die and was staring with horrible eyes, and I saw another man coming through that army of dead, stumbling to the rear, groping at a lacerated wound in his chest, staggering from one side to the other, one arm feeling into space for support, the blood trickling through the torn hole in his flesh.

  Unwounded men and walking wounded, half-asleep on their feet, passed him unconcernedly or drank tea and slept indifferently among the shambles, exhausted, their faces grimy, their hair matted with mud. Only his friend walked alongside him, begging him to sit down.

  But he kept plodding on. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he kept saying. ‘Leave me alone. If I sit down I’ll get trodden on.’

  And he went staggering on until I saw him stiffen as he walked and fall like a log in the middle of the road, where he lay, forcing a passage through the advancing living until someone dragged him to the side of the road and threw a torn groundsheet over him. All around him men sat indifferently in attitudes of shock, wearing turbans and white body-belts of bandages, absorbed with trying to stanch wounds, going through the dumb, stupefied, mechanical actions of exhaustion, packed on the handcarts that had brought the Lewis-guns up, on chance stretchers, or even on the ladders on which they’d been carried from the trenches.

  A doctor halted us there to help and we seemed to work for hours, sweating, praying, cursing, as we shifted the stark and mangled bodies, dead fists swinging in heavy blows against our legs as we turned the bodies over, spreadeagled and stiff so that we had to stand on them to force them into blankets.

  While we worked, the same harassed staff officer who’d sent us out of the trenches came up to us and stormed at me because we hadn’t made ourselves scarce.

  ‘There’s no room here for scattered groups of men,’ he said. ‘There can be no co-ordination when the place’s full of stragglers. For God’s sake, Sergeant, get your men away! I’ll warn your people you’re coming.’

  When we reached the road, we were told to wait because the Germans had got it thoroughly taped and were stopping traffic all the way along. Every now and then, a clump of shells set us swaying as they stirred the air, but I was indifferent to danger now, just conscious of little things like tilting duckboards or barbed wire catching at my clothes and bringing me to a paroxysm of exhausted fury. Young Murray had fallen asleep where he sat, his head cradled in his arms, lost in an anguish of memories, and he was twitching in fretful uneasy movements, his lips parted, his teeth grinding, his jaws working, whimpering and giving little sobs, long quivering moans and half-incoherent obscenities. Just above him in the sunshine on a fragment of broken wall, a lizard poised, warming itself.

  Somehow, in spite of weariness, I couldn’t sleep and I started thinking of what we’d just come through. It didn’t seem possible that it had happened to me. I still couldn’t believe Locky was gone, and Bold and all the others. I’d wake up soon, I kept thinking, I remember, and I’d find myself back at Bos and hear Locky’s dry humour or Bold’s harsh shout. Then I realised that it had happened and the pain started all over again through the numbness.

  We got word to move on again at last, and I tried to wake Murray up. I shook him and shouted in his ear but he didn’t move. Then, as I started swearing at him, frustrated and angry, he gave a quick convulsive jump and came to wakefulness again with his disordered nerves seeking to readjust themselves. He sat up with a start, still half-asleep, giving a reluctant cry of pain as though I’d touched an exposed nerve, then he reached out wearily and picked up his rifle.

  ‘We can go now,’ I told him.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m ready.’

  Along the road, there were hundreds of fresh soldiers moving up, men who were clean and unstained with blood, probably straight from the Bull Ring at Rouen. They stared at us curiously as we passed them, their faces bearing surprisingly little sign of emotion, and I felt them patting me on the back.

  ‘Well played, chaps,’ someone said.

  Some of them were still cheering and singing, and I envied them that they were untouched by disaster. The man in front of me, a youngster from A Company who couldn’t have been much more than nineteen, was strung up to breaking point and kept shuddering.

  ‘They might have given us a rest,’ I heard him saying.

  As I stood at the side of the trench, watching them file past me, one of the incoming officers took the cigarette from his mouth and offered it to me.

  ‘Cigarette, Sergeant?’ he said unemotionally, and I took it and forgot to thank him.

  ‘What was it like.’ he asked.

  ‘Like a butcher’s shop,’ I said.

  ‘Lose many officers?’

  ‘We lost the lot,’ I said, and somehow drew an immense bitter satisfaction from the shocked look on his clean, well-shaven face.

  We reached a village that seemed nothing but a grey-and-red ruin of charred ribs and broken walls, a skeleton blasted by counter-fire, just a huddle of shell-perforated bullet-spattered walls and splintered beams. Everywhere, there was the same appalling desolation, with the muddy street empty except for us. Shutters hung limply, and doors and windows gaped in utter despair over a brick-strewn road littered with scraps of paper. Here and there, a dead man sprawled like a flattened bag. An ancient French peasant was slumped against a wall, his face angry, as though he’d died hating, and there was a woman lying on her back, half inside a doorway. A British soldier lay twisted on a mattress that had been dragged out for him to breathe his last on, his head back, his face plastered with blood and mud around the mouth and chin, his glazing eyes groping up at the sky. In one or two of the houses, out of reach of shell-splinters, beds had been shoved to one side and graves had been dug and crosses erected. There were more dead horses in muddy clotted heaps.

  Beyond the village, we joined the mainstream of traffic, where artillerymen sat stiffly on tired mounts by the long steel guns, and limping weary infantrymen trudged rearwards in little groups like our own that seemed no bigger than a company or a platoon, heads heavy under helmets, out of step, unspeaking except for an occasional muttered curse, so tired they stumbled straight on into the ditch when the road turned. Mounted officers were asleep on jaded horses, and men drooped over gun limbers, still hanging on while sound asleep. The chink of equipment or the tap of a bayonet against a petrol tin half full of water seemed to be the only sounds over the shuffle of boots.

  On either side of us, there were barley fields and the rich beauty of the countryside with its glowing glistening wheat wreathed in the haze of dust that lay over everything.

  A Ford ambulance jolted past, acridly stinking of disinfectant, and I heard the men inside, roughly wrapped in blankets, calling piteously. ‘Go steady,’ they were saying. ‘For Christ’s sake, go steady!’

  How long we were getting back to Bos Wood I don’t k
now. I was so tired that, after a while, all I noticed was the steel helmets of the men in front of me and the eyes in the blank drawn faces of the men behind.

  As we reached Bos, I remember seeing a little orchard with blossom still out, looking awkward and frail, and I wanted to cry at the sight of it.

  The camp details had been told to expect us and they were ready for us. They’d laid out mugs and plates, and food seemed to be everywhere. There seemed to be a hell of a lot of it for so few men, I thought.

  There were about forty-five of us now. We’d picked up a few more, all of them like ourselves, aged and grown shabby in battle, daubed with chalk dirt and the blood of their friends, their faces and hands brown-grey with mud, their hair tangled under dead men’s helmets, their faces unshaven, one or two with bandages over trivial wounds, bowed under shock and exhaustion, their clothes mere rags.

  As we turned into the lane, I heard someone shout, ‘They’re here,’ and I heard the band strike up.

  ‘Johnny’s a-walking. Oompa, oompa.

  Johnny’s a-walking home.’

  They were gathered in groups, some with cameras, to watch us come in, standing about in the sunshine in shirtsleeves. As we shuffled into the orchard, the cooks, the unfit, and the headquarters details surged forward cheering. There seemed to be a tremendous gulf between them and us. They looked clean and rested and we were just sweating wretches half asleep on our feet, unmoved by the welcome, all the grief and pity gone out of us, broken-hearted, broken-spirited, with no tears left to shed.

  ‘Any souvenirs?’ somebody called. Nobody replied, and the voice asked again more quietly, ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ the shuddering boy in front of me said. ‘It was terrible!’

  I saw the camp details staring down the lane as though they expected more of us to follow, then they saw there weren’t any more and thankfully the damned band had the sense to stop and the cameras were shoved out of sight.

  The major, who’d stayed behind in command, had been called to Brigade, it seemed, and it was Bickerstaff who came towards me, squinting against the sun. He looked scared, as though he didn’t know what to say, and I saw the brigadier behind him, prompting him, his face drawn and tired. He looked about twenty years older.

  ‘Is this A or B Company, Sergeant?’ Bickerstaff asked.

  ‘It’s A and B and C and D,’ I said. ‘This is the lot. All of us. The whole battalion.’

  ‘All?’

  ‘All I know about.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘Just because some bastard on the staff preferred playing polo to learning his bloody job!’ Murray shouted bitterly.

  I saw the brigadier turn away. ‘It’s butchers they want, not brigadiers,’ he muttered.

  He gestured at the cooks and I noticed them begin to whip away mugs and dixies of food that weren’t going to be used. Then the brigadier turned round again, his mouth working.

  ‘I expect some more will be coming in soon,’ he said. ‘I – I…’ He hesitated, searching for words, then he burst out, ‘If it’s any consolation, and I don’t suppose it is, I’m proud to have had you chaps under me.’

  ‘We’ll go in again, sir,’ young Murray shouted.

  ‘Thanks, lads.’

  ‘How did we do?’

  ‘All right, my boy.’

  ‘Did we save Verdun?’

  The brigadier lifted his head slowly. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘How many prisoners did we get, sir?’

  The brigadier paused and his reply was only a whisper. ‘Three,’ he said.

  ‘What? The whole division, sir?’

  ‘The whole division.’

  There was a long silence, then I heard a man sob, and Murray started to laugh in a high-pitched note that came from tiredness and shock and hysteria.

  ‘Three? All those bloody great cages, and only three?’

  The brigadier turned away abruptly, stumbling a little, and we went on just standing there while he spoke to Bickerstaff. I wasn’t angry. Just bewildered, and suffering from a sense of waste that was as bitter as gall.

  The quartermaster sergeant-major stepped forward and saluted. ‘Sir, do you think I ought to call the rolls or leave them till later?’

  ‘Better do it now,’ the brigadier said. ‘The way they look they might not remember later.’

  Twining began to call the roll, starting with D Company because I was in charge, but there weren’t enough of us left to know what had happened to the others. A lot had to be put down as missing but we knew there weren’t any prisoners, and anybody who wasn’t there was either wounded or dead.

  ‘Ashton,’ Twining called. ‘Where’s Mr Ashton?’

  ‘Dead,’ I said. ‘He was hit about four times altogether. He got into the trench with us. He was killed coming back.’

  ‘Are you certain?’ Twining’s face looked anxious and concerned and incredibly clean.

  ‘I saw him,’ I said.

  Twining made a note on a sheet of paper and looked up again. ‘Appleby? Mr Appleby?’

  ‘Wounded,’ Murray said. ‘He’s all right, I think.’

  ‘Mr Blackett?’

  ‘Dead.’ The shout came from somewhere along the line. ‘I saw him go down.’

  ‘Mr Welch?’

  There was silence. No one knew what had happened to Welch. One minute he’d been there, the next he’d vanished.

  And so it went on.

  ‘Sergeant-Major Bold?’

  I found I couldn’t answer at first for the lump in my throat.

  ‘He’s dead,’ I said in the end. ‘He got in. Naturally.’

  ‘Catchpole? Is he here? He’s been told to report back with Spring and Mason. Their commissions are through.’

  ‘They’re dead,’ I said bitterly. ‘The lot of them. The whole bloody lot.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The usual. Spring was the first to go. Catchpole was hit by a shell.’

  ‘What about Mason?’

  ‘They crucified him,’ I said.

  Twining stared at me, as though he were wondering what to say, then he sighed and went on:

  ‘Cuthbert?’

  Name after name was called. In some cases, no particulars were available. No one knew what had happened to Tim Williams. After all the effort he’d made to keep up with us, he seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth, like Dicehart and young Welch. Then some name came up that belonged to someone whose disappearance could be vouched for, and heads craned to see the speaker, sympathy focusing on one spot as the meagre details were given, though in truth they were impressive enough in most cases.

  ‘I saw him, sir! The poor bastard was blown to bits. There were about four of them caught by the same shell.’

  Everybody seemed anxious to restrain their feelings and show no sign of sorrow. Everybody seemed to be gentle just then, keeping their feelings to themselves as though by some tacit understanding they might help in this way. The camp details stood around, clean, respectable men, staring with awe at the huddle of savages that we’d become with our haggard filthy appearance and our bitter pitiless faces.

  ‘Haddo?’ Twining went on.

  ‘Wounded,’ I said, choking over the word. ‘We brought him in.’

  ‘Badly? Will he live?’

  I don’t know what was in my face, but Twining took one look at me and didn’t press the question.

  ‘Hardacre?’ he said hurriedly.

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Lott?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Manderson, T.?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Manderson, W.?’

  ‘Dead.’

  It went on like that until Twining gave it up. He turned to Bickerstaff and the brigadier, his eyes appealing, and the brigadier signed to him to stop.

  Then I noticed that some of the men with me had sunk to the ground and were already asleep. I found myself leaning on Eph’s rifle, staring stupidly at th
e men who slept around me, my eyelids drooping with maddening insistence.

  It didn’t occur to me to lie down until someone pushed me into a bed of fern. There were flowers among the fern and my last thought was a dull wonder that there could still be beauty in the world.

  6

  More than five hundred thousand of Kitchener’s men fell in the unspeakable agony of the Somme before the battle finally withered and died in the winter mud. Five hundred thousand – fourteen thousand that first morning in front of Serre alone, where the casualties were the heaviest of the whole day.

  The Germans lost another five hundred thousand. A million men altogether. A generation of children without fathers. A generation of women without husbands. A quarter of a century of fumbling politics that let Hitler start it all again twenty years later because all that was finest in physique and intelligence and courage, the finest in any army we’d ever put into the field, died there on the Somme. The In Memoriam notices started at once in the newspapers and went on for a quarter of a century and even after another war had swept across the world.

  Lloyd George called it ‘a disastrous loss of the finest manhood in the United Kingdom’, and he should have known. And just for a few miles of tortured ground that was no good to anybody. We never did get Serre, and by Christmas the mud was so deep we couldn’t have advanced if we’d wanted to and neither side bothered to put up wire because we knew nobody could move for the bog.

  Battalions, brigades, divisions went into the fight, were worn down swiftly and soaked into the ground. Growing older and tougher and cannier, we shivered in those trenches we captured one at a time, throughout the whole winter. The papers told us we’d won a major victory, and we stared open-mouthed and laughed out loud. They even tried to tell us July 1st was a victory.

  It was the graveyard of Kitchener’s Army. It was probably the biggest disaster to British arms since Hastings. Nearly sixty thousand men fell on that day alone and still lay there in their rows when winter came. More young men from our city died on July 1st, 1916, than on any other day before or since, and the regimental history contained a virtual blank because there weren’t enough of us left to piece anything coherent together. Bold had been wrong. We’d been good enough all right in spite of our inexperience. But we couldn’t cope with the futile staff work that never gave anybody a chance to show anything but courage. A vast wonder of valour was wasted because there wasn’t a hope right from the beginning, and the only excuse they could think of was to blame it on our lack of know-how and to try to make out we’d had a jolly successful day.