Covenant with Death by Harris John

Author:Harris, John [Harris, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2014-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

he said

‘In flippin’ mud what’s four foot deep,

If I’m not ’ere when you awake,

Just scrape me out wiv a garden rake.’

He finished with a fervent ‘Amen’ and seemed to go to sleep immediately.

Locky stared at me. I knew his mind was still on the boy we’d dug out too late.

‘I feel a bit like Frank did,’ he said slowly, as though making a plea for sanity. ‘I feel I need help.’

We crept in with Bert but we found it difficult to sleep. Bert’s snores were enough to wake the dead and, after a while, numb with the damp chill that struck up through the ground, we crawled out again and sat on the firestep.

Eventually, Bert reappeared, clearly refreshed, and got a fire going that wouldn’t have warmed a rat. All the time he was cursing the shortage of fuel, and the company signallers who appeared with their odd-shaped leather cases and coils of coloured wire, and pushed hurriedly past him along the trench, one finger on the telephone lines, looking for breaks, disappearing round corners, intent and unspeaking until they found the damage.

As we sat down to bacon rashers and tea, another mortar bomb landed somewhere just beyond the parapet, and a shower of pulverised dirt came over on to us as we cowered down.

‘Them damn’ Germans’ll be the death of me,’ Bert muttered. ‘Their sergeant must have got a liver or something this morning. They nearly put the fire out.’

He was back on the job long before we’d stopped shaking, swearing as he brushed the soil from his bread and bacon. The tea was full of pieces of dirt and bits of grass, and we examined each other’s handkerchiefs to decide which was cleanest so that we could sieve it into another dixie.

‘Might as well ’ave it nice and dainty,’ Bert said, passing bacon round on the end of his bayonet.

Later in the day he had to take his turn as sentry, and asked us if we’d like a squint through his periscope. I’m not sure what I’d expected, but I was startled to see wide acres of fresh green, stretching away slightly uphill, and no sign of the enemy. There were a few strands of rusty barbed wire decorated with seed fluff sticking out of the lush grass, and dozens of old bully-beef tins and scraps of broken equipment just in front, which had been thrown over the parapet. It didn’t seem possible that those murderous mortar bombs could have come from this direction.

Not far in front, lying across a little mound of earth, was what seemed to be a blackened skeleton in a few rags of red and blue, the weeds growing up through the cage of the ribs. There was a stiff claw-like object sticking straight up alongside it which I took to be the hand of another dead man.

‘Frogs,’ Bert said. ‘They musta caught it in a raid some time back when the French held this sector. They’ve been there ever since we first came in here.

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