My great grandmother told me that most of the young men of Sheffield died in that battle and it took a long time for the city to recover. Every house was in mourning. The book gave us the contrast between the years of preparation and the moment of destruction of a single generation of a cities’ population on 1 July 1916. If you can picture this scene in many towns and cities throughout England and the British Empire with all their young men dead or wounded you will then understand why they changed the rules and never again allow regiments of men from the same city. And your covenant with death shall wiped out and your bond with Sheol shall not stand. When the overwhelming scourge will pass through, you will be for treading under foot It's an old time courtroom drama about a man accused of killing his beautiful flirtatious wife in small town Soledad City, and the newly appointed young judge Ben Lewis (who while struggling with plenty of his own personal problems) will be called upon to make sure justice is served in his case. This is a classic literary offering with all the delicious quandaries and insights. I love to read books written by men about men... they are so much more authentic than books about men written by women or vice versa. This has the same flavor that "A Prayer for Owen Meany" had.

I will cancel the bargain you made to cheat death, and I will overturn your deal to dodge the grave. When the terrible enemy sweeps through, you will be trampled into the ground. A COVENANT WITH DEATH is a remarkable, deep and entertaining book, with a non-stop plot that will convey the reader into a better understanding of how justice is carried out. This is a book about justice, the difficult kind, the kind that calls into question the most basic tenets around which we operate and tests the foundation of the system it rests upon. Man is not clairvoyant and judges and juries are men, and therein lies the rub, as Hamlet might tell us.

Therefore hear the word of the LORD, you scoffers, who rule this people in Jerusalem! Because you have said, 'We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we have an agreement, when the overwhelming whip passes through it will not come to us, for we have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter' . . .

The year is 1923 somewhere in the southwest where the oppressive heat is a part of life. A young judge, newly appointed by the state, struggles with this honor and responsibility against his personal life, which is still not completely baked. Righteousness is believing in His son. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”Ben Lewis is a very young judge, appointed more because of the friendship of the governor with Ben's deceased father. When a young woman is strangled in her home and her husband is accused of the crime, he has to face his own demons and how he interprets the law. I bought this in a second hand bookshop in Bangkok of all places and it's spent the last thirty years travelling around the world with me. Superficially, it's a straight forward tale of Kitchener's Army (a thinly disguised version of the Sheffield Pals) from formation in 1914 to destruction on the Somme in 1916.