NO MORE
PARADES
by
FORD MADOX FORD
GROSSET & DUNLAP
Publishers New York
by arrangement with A. & C. BONI
_Copyright, 1925, By Albert y Charles Boni, Inc_
To WILLIAM BIRD
MY DEAR BIRD,--
I have always held--and I hold as strongly now as ever--that a novel
should have no preface. It should have no preface for æsthetico-moral
reasons, and because prefatory matter takes away from the reality of,
and therefore damages, a book. A dedicatory letter is a subterfuge. That
subterfuge I feel forced to adopt, and must take the consequences.
The reason is this: All novels are historical, but all novels do not
deal with such events as get on to the pages of history. This _No More
Parades_ does. It becomes, therefore, necessary to delimit what, in it,
is offered as, on the author's responsibility, observed event.
State, underline and emphasize the fact how you will it is impossible to
get into the heads of even intelligent public critics the fact that the
opinions of a novelist's characters as stated in any novel are not of
necessity the opinions of the novelist. It cannot be done. How it may be
with one's public one has no means of knowing. Perhaps they read one
with more generosity and care. Presumably they do, for they have either
spent money on, or taken some trouble to obtain, the volume.
In this novel the events, such as it treats of, are vouched for by
myself. There was in France, at the time covered by this novel, an
immense base camp, unbelievably crowded with men whom we were engaged in
getting up the line, working sometimes day and night in the effort. That
immense army was also extremely depressed by the idea that those who
controlled it overseas would--I will not use the word betray, since that
implies volition--but "let us down." We were oppressed, ordered,
counter-ordered, commanded, countermanded, harassed, strafed,
denounced--and, above all, dreadfully worried. The never-ending sense of
worry, in fact, far surpassed any of the "exigencies of troops actually
in contact with enemy forces," and that applied not merely to the bases,
but to the whole field of military operations. Unceasing worry!
We took it out in what may or may not have been unjust suspicions of the
all-powerful ones who had our lives in their hands--and seemed
indifferent enough to the fact. So this novel recounts what those
opinions were: it does not profess to dictate whether those opinions
were or were not justified. There is, I think, not one word in it which
records any opinions or words of mine as being my words or opinions. I
believe I may say that, as to the greater part of such public matters as
are here discussed, I have no opinions at all. After seven or eight
years I have been unable to form any. I present therefore only what I
observed or heard.
Few writers can have engaged themselves as combatants in what, please
God, will yet prove to be the war that ended war, without the intention
of aiding with their writings, if they survived, in bringing about such
a state of mind as should end wars as possibilities.
This obviously is a delicate task. If you overstate horrors you induce
in your reader a state of mind such as, by reaction, causes the horrors
to become matters of indifference. If you overstate heroisms you induce
indifference to heroisms--of which the late war produced, Heaven knows,
plenty enough, so that to be indifferent to them is villainy. Casting
about, then, for a medium through which to view this spectacle, I
thought of a man--by then dead--with whom I had been very intimate and
with whom--as with yourself--I had at one time discussed most things
under the sun. He was the English Tory.
Even then--it must have been in September, 1916, when I was in a region
called the Salient, and I remember the very spot where the idea
came to me--I said to myself: How would all this look in the eyes of
X . . .--already dead, along with all English Tories? For, as a medium
through which to view struggles that are after all in the end mostly
emotional struggles--since as a rule for every twenty minutes of actual
fighting you were alone with your emotions, which, being English, you did
not express, for at least a month!--as a medium, what could be better than
the sceptical, not ungenerous, not cold, not unconvincible eyes of an
extinct frame of mind? For by the time of my relative youth when I knew
X . . . so intimately, Toryism had gone beyond the region of any
practising political party. It said for a year or two: A plague on all
your houses, and so expired.
To this determination--to use my friend's eyes as a medium--I am
adhering in this series of books. _Some Do Not_--of which this one is
not so much a continuation as a reinforcement--showed you the Tory at
home during war-time; this shows you the Tory going up the line. If I am
vouchsafed health and intelligence for long enough I propose to show you
the same man in the line and in process of being re-constructed.
There is nothing more to it: I no more back the political opinions of
General Campion than those of Sylvia Tietjens, who considered that the
World War was just an excuse for male agapemones; I no more accept
responsibility for the inaccuracies of Tietjens quoting King's
Regulations than for the inaccuracies of the general in quoting _Henry
V_. I was roundly taken to task by the only English critic whose review
of my last book I read--after he had _horribly_ misrepresented the plot
of the work at a crucial point--for _my_ inaccuracy in stating that poor
Roger Casement was shot. As a matter of fact, I had been struck by the
fact that a lady with whom I had been discussing Casement twice
deliberately referred to the shooting of Casement, and stated that she
did so because she could not bear to think that we had hanged him. In
making therefore a lady--who had loved Casement--refer to his execution
in the book in question, I let her say that Casement was shot. . . .
Indeed, I should prefer to think that he had been shot, myself. . . . Or
still more to think that we had allowed him to escape, or commit
suicide, or be imprisoned during His Majesty's pleasure. . . . The
critic preferred to rub in the hanging. It is a matter of relative
patriotism.
Whilst we are chipping, I may as well say that I have been informed that
a lively controversy has raged over the same work in the United States,
a New York critic having stated that I was a disappointed man intent on
giving a lurid picture of present-day matrimonial conditions in England.
I hope I am no rabid patriot, but I pray to be preserved from the
aspiration of painting any nation's lurid matrimonial conditions. The
peculiar ones adumbrated in _Some Do Not_ were suggested by the fate of
a poor fellow living in a place in the south of France in which I
happened to be stopping when I began the book. His misfortunes were much
those of my central character, but he drank himself to death, it was
said deliberately, after he had taken his wife back. He came from
Philadelphia.
So, in remembrance of our joint labours and conspiracies, and in token
of my admiration for your beautiful achievements in another art,
I subscribe myself, my dear Bird,
Your humble, obedient and obliged
F. M. F.
PARIS, 31 _October_, '24--
GUERMANTES, 25 _May_, '25.
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
PART II
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
PART III
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
PART I
CHAPTER I
When you came in the space was desultory, rectangular, warm after the
drip of the winter night, and transfused with a brown-orange dust that
was light. It was shaped like the house a child draws. Three groups of
brown limbs spotted with brass took dim high-lights from shafts that
came from a bucket pierced with holes, filled with incandescent coke and
covered in with a sheet of iron in the shape of a tunnel. Two men, as if
hierarchically smaller, crouched on the floor beside the brazier; four,
two at each end of the hut, drooped over tables in attitudes of extreme
indifference. From the eaves above the parallelogram of black that was
the doorway fell intermittent drippings of collected moisture,
persistent, with glass-like intervals of musical sound. The two men
squatting on their heels over the brazier--they had been miners--began
to talk in a low sing-song of dialect, hardly audible. It went on and
on, monotonously, without animation. It was as if one told the other
long, long stories to which his companion manifested his comprehension
or sympathy with animal grunts. . . .
An immense tea-tray, august, its voice filling the black circle of the
horizon, thundered to the ground. Numerous pieces of sheet-iron said,
"Pack. Pack. Pack." In a minute the clay floor of the hut shook, the
drums of ears were pressed inwards, solid noise showered about the
universe, enormous echoes pushed these men--to the right, to the left,
or down towards the tables, and crackling like that of flames among vast
underwood became the settled condition of the night. Catching the light
from the brazier as the head leaned over, the lips of one of the two men
on the floor were incredibly red and full and went on talking and
talking. . . .
The two men on the floor were Welsh miners, of whom the one came from
the Rhondda Valley and was unmarried; the other, from Pontardulais, had
a wife who kept a laundry, he having given up going underground just
before the war. The two men at the table to the right of the door were
sergeants-major; the one came from Suffolk and was a time-serving man of
sixteen years' seniority as a sergeant in a line regiment. The other was
Canadian of English origin. The two officers at the other end of the hut
were captains, the one a young regular officer born in Scotland but
educated at Oxford; the other, nearly middle-aged and heavy, came from
Yorkshire, and was in a militia battalion. The one runner on the floor
was filled with a passionate rage because the elder officer had refused
him leave to go home and see why his wife, who had sold their laundry,
had not yet received the purchase money from the buyer; the other was
thinking about a cow. His girl, who worked on a mountainy farm above
Caerphilly, had written to him about a queer cow: a black-and-white
Holstein--surely to goodness a queer cow. The English sergeant-major was
almost tearfully worried about the enforced lateness of the draft. It
would be twelve midnight before they could march them off. It was not
right to keep men hanging about like that. The men did not like to be
kept waiting, hanging about. It made them discontented. They did not
like it. He could not see why the depot quartermaster could not keep up
his stock of candles for the hooded lamps. The men had no call to be
kept waiting, hanging about. Soon they would have to be having some
supper. Quarter would not like that. He would grumble fair. Having to
indent for suppers. Put his accounts out, fair, it would. Two thousand
nine hundred and thirty-four suppers at a penny half-penny. But it was
not right to keep the men hanging about till midnight and no suppers. It
made them discontented and them going up the line for the first time,
poor devils.
The Canadian sergeant-major was worried about a pig-skin leather
pocket-book. He had bought it at the ordnance depot in the town. He
imagined himself bringing it out on parade, to read out some return or
other to the adjutant. Very smart it would look on parade, himself
standing up straight and tall. But he could not remember whether he had
put it in his kitbag. On himself it was not. He felt in his right and
left breast pockets, his right and left skirt pockets, in all the
pockets of his overcoat that hung from a nail within reach of his chair.
He did not feel at all certain that the man who acted as his batman had
packed that pocket-book with his kit, though he declared he had. It was
very annoying. His present wallet, bought in Ontario, was bulging and
split. He did not like to bring it out when Imperial officers asked for
something out of a return. It gave them a false idea of Canadian troops.
Very annoying. He was an auctioneer. He agreed that at this rate it
would be half-past one before they had the draft down to the station and
entrained. But it was very annoying to be uncertain whether that
pocket-book was packed or not. He had imagined himself making a good
impression on parade, standing up straight and tall, taking out that
pocket-book when the adjutant asked for a figure from one return or the
other. He understood their adjutants were to be Imperial officers now
they were in France. It was very annoying.
An enormous crashing sound said things of an intolerable intimacy to
each of those men, and to all of them as a body. After its mortal
vomiting all the other sounds appeared a rushing silence, painful to
ears in which the blood audibly coursed. The young officer stood
violently up on his feet and caught at the complications of his belt
hung from a nail. The elder, across the table, lounging sideways,
stretched out one hand with a downwards movement. He was aware that the
younger man, who was the senior officer, was just upon out of his mind.
The younger man, intolerably fatigued, spoke sharp, injurious, inaudible
words to his companion. The elder spoke sharp, short words, inaudible
too, and continued to motion downwards with his hand over the table. The
old English sergeant-major said to his junior that Captain Mackenzie had
one of his mad fits again, but what he said was inaudible and he knew
it. He felt arising in his motherly heart that yearned at the moment
over his two thousand nine hundred and thirty-four nurslings a
necessity, like a fatigue, to extend the motherliness of his functions
to the orfcer. He said to the Canadian that Captain Mackenzie there
going temporary off his nut was the best orfcer in His Majesty's army.
And going to make a bleedin' fool of hisself. The best orfcer in His
Majesty's army. Not a better. Careful, smart, brave as an 'ero. And
considerate of his men in the line. You wouldn't believe. . . . He felt
vaguely that it was a fatigue to have to mother an officer. To a
lance-corporal, or a young sergeant, beginning to go wrong you could
mutter wheezy suggestions through your moustache. But to an officer you
had to say things slantways. Difficult it was. Thank God they had a
trustworthy, cool hand in the other captain. Old and good, the proverb
said.
Dead silence fell.
"Lost the -----, they 'ave," the runner from the Rhondda made his voice
startlingly heard. Brilliant illuminations flickered on hut-gables
visible through the doorway.
"No reason," his mate from Pontardulais rather whined in his native
sing-song, "why the bleedin' searchlights, surely to goodness, should
light us up for all the ---- 'Un planes to see. I want to see my
bleedin' little 'ut on the bleedin' Mumbles again, if they don't."
"Not so much swear words, O Nine Morgan," the sergeant-major said.
"Now, Dai Morgan, I'm telling you," 09 Morgan's mate continued. "A queer
cow it must have been whatever. Black-and-white Holstein it was. . . ."
It was as if the younger captain gave up listening to the conversation.
He leant both hands on the blanket that covered the table. He exclaimed:
"Who the hell are you to give me orders? I'm your senior. Who the
hell . . . Oh, by God, who the hell . . . Nobody gives me orders . . ."
His voice collapsed weakly in his chest. He felt his nostrils to be
inordinately dilated so that the air pouring into them was cold. He felt
that there was an entangled conspiracy against him, and all round him.
He exclaimed: "You and your ---- pimp of a general . . .!" He desired to
cut certain throats with a sharp trench-knife that he had. That would
take the weight off his chest. The "Sit _down_" of the heavy figure
lumping opposite him paralysed his limbs. He felt an unbelievable
hatred. If he could move his hand to get at his trench-knife . . .
09 Morgan said: "The ----'s name who's bought my bleedin' laundry is
Williams. . . . If I thought it was Evans Williams of Castell Goch, I'd
desert."
"Took a hatred for its cawve," the Rhondda man said. "And look you,
before you could say . . ." The conversation of orfcers was a thing to
which they neither listened. Officers talked of things that had no
interest. Whatever could possess a cow to take a hatred of its calf? Up
behind Caerphilly on the mountains? On an autumny morning the whole
hillside was covered with spider-webs. They shone down the sun like spun
glass. Overlooked the cow must be.
The young captain leaning over the table began a long argument as to
relative seniority. He argued with himself, taking both sides in an
extraordinarily rapid gabble. He himself had been gazetted after
Gheluvelt. The other not till a year later. It was true the other was in
permanent command of that depot, and he himself attached to the unit
only for rations and discipline. But that did not include orders to sit
down. What the hell, he wanted to know, did the other mean by it? He
began to talk, faster than ever, about a circle. When its circumference
came whole by the disintegration of the atom the world would come to an
end. In the millennium there would be no giving or taking orders. Of
course he obeyed orders till then.
To the elder officer, burdened with the command of a unit of
unreasonable size, with a scratch headquarters of useless subalterns who
were continually being changed, with N.C.O.'s all unwilling to work,
with rank and file nearly all colonials and unused to doing without
things, and with a depot to draw on that, being old established, felt
that it belonged exclusively to a regular British unit and resented his
drawing anything at all, the practical difficulties of his everyday life
were already sufficient, and he had troublesome private affairs. He was
lately out of hospital; the sackcloth hut in which he lived, borrowed
from the Depot medical officer who had gone to England on leave, was
suffocatingly hot with the paraffin heater going, and intolerably cold
and damp without it; the batman whom the M.O. had left in charge of the
hut appeared to be half-witted. These German air-raids had lately become
continuous. The Base was packed with men, tighter than sardines. Down in
the town you could not move in the streets. Draft-finding units were
commanded to keep their men out of sight as much as possible. Drafts
were to be sent off only at night. But how could you send off a draft at
night when every ten minutes you had two hours of lights out for an
air-raid? Every man had nine sets of papers and tags that had to be
signed by an officer. It was quite proper that the poor devils should be
properly documented. But how was it to be done? He had two thousand nine
hundred and ninety-four men to send off that night and nine times two
thousand nine hundred and ninety-four is twenty-six thousand nine
hundred and forty-six. They would not or could not let him have a
disc-punching machine of his own, but how was the Depot armourer to be
expected to punch five thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight extra
identity discs in addition to his regular jobs?
The other captain rambled on in front of him. Tietjens did not like his
talk of the circle and the millennium. You get alarmed, if you have any
sense, when you hear that. It may prove the beginnings of definite,
dangerous lunacy. . . . But he knew nothing about the fellow. He was too
dark and good-looking, too passionate, probably, to be a good regular
officer on the face of him. But he _must_ be a good officer: he had the
D.S.O. with a clasp, the M.C., and some foreign ribbon up. And the
general said he was: with the additional odd piece of information that
he was a Vice-Chancellor's Latin Prize man. . . . He wondered if General
Campion knew what a Vice-Chancellor's Latin Prize man was. Probably he
did not, but had just stuck the piece of information into his note as a
barbaric ornament is used by a savage chief. Wanted to show that he,
General Lord Edward Campion, was a man of culture. There was no knowing
where vanity would not break out.
So this fellow was too dark and good-looking to be a good officer: yet
he _was_ a good officer. That explained it. The repressions of the
passionate drive them mad. He must have been being sober, disciplined,
patient, absolutely repressed ever since 1914--against a background of
hell-fire, row, blood, mud, old tins. . . . And indeed the elder officer
had a vision of the younger as if in a design for a full-length
portrait--for some reason with his legs astride, against a background of
tapestry scarlet with fire and more scarlet with blood. . . . He sighed
a little; that was the life of all those several millions. . . .
He seemed to see his draft: two thousand nine hundred and ninety-four
men he had had command of for over a couple of months--a long space of
time as that life went--men he and Sergeant-Major Cowley had looked
after with a great deal of tenderness, superintending their morale,
their morals, their feet, their digestions, their impatiences, their
desires for women. . . . He seemed to see them winding away over a great
stretch of country, the head slowly settling down, as in the Zoo
you will see an enormous serpent slowly sliding down into its
water-tank. . . . Settling down out there, a long way away, up against that
impassable barrier that stretched from the depths of the ground to the
peak of heaven. . . .
Intense dejection: endless muddles: endless follies: endless villainies.
All these men given into the hands of the most cynically care-free
intriguers in long corridors who made plots that harrowed the hearts of
the world. All these men toys: all these agonies mere occasions for
picturesque phrases to be put into politicians' speeches without heart
or even intelligence. Hundreds of thousands of men tossed here and there
in that sordid and gigantic mud-brownness of midwinter . . . by God,
exactly as if they were nuts wilfully picked up and thrown over the
shoulder by magpies. . . . But men. Not just populations. Men you
worried over there. Each man a man with a backbone, knees, breeches,
braces, a rifle, a home, passions, fornications, drunks, pals, some
scheme of the universe, corns, inherited diseases, a greengrocer's
business, a milk walk, a paper stall, brats, a slut of a wife. . . . The
Men: the Other Ranks! And the poor ---- little officers. God help them.
Vice-Chancellor's Latin Prize men. . . .
This particular poor ---- Prize man seemed to object to noise. They
ought to keep the place quiet for him. . . .
By God, he was perfectly right. That place was meant for the quiet and
orderly preparation of meat for the shambles. Drafts! A Base is a place
where you meditate: perhaps you should pray: a place where in peace the
Tommies should write their last letters home and describe 'ow the guns
are 'owling 'orribly.
But to pack a million and a half of men into and round that small town
was like baiting a trap for rats with a great chunk of rotten meat. The
Hun planes could smell them from a hundred miles away. They could do
more harm there than if they bombed a quarter of London to pieces. And
the air defences there were a joke: a mad joke. They popped off,
thousands of rounds, from any sort of pieces of ordnance, like
schoolboys bombarding swimming rats with stones. Obviously your best
trained air-defence men would be round your metropolis. But this was no
joke for the sufferers.
Heavy depression settled down more heavily upon him. The distrust of the
home Cabinet, felt by then by the greater part of that army, became like
physical pain. These immense sacrifices, this ocean of mental
sufferings, were all undergone to further the private vanities of men
who amidst these hugenesses of landscapes and forces appeared pigmies!
It was the worries of all these wet millions in mud-brown that worried
him. They could die, they could be massacred, by the quarter million, in
shambles. But that they should be massacred without jauntiness, without
confidence, with depressed brows: without parade. . . .
He knew really nothing about the officer in front of him. Apparently the
fellow had stopped for an answer to some question. What question?
Tietjens had no idea. He had not been listening. Heavy silence settled
down on the hut. They just waited. The fellow said with an intonation of
hatred:
"Well, what about it? That's what I want to know!"
Tietjens went on reflecting. . . . There were a great many kinds of
madness. What kind was this? The fellow was not drunk. He talked like a
drunkard, but he was not drunk. In ordering him to sit down Tietjens had
just chanced it. There are madmen whose momentarily subconscious selves
will respond to a military command as if it were magic. Tietjens
remembered having barked: "About . . . turn," to a poor little lunatic
fellow in some camp at home and the fellow who had been galloping
hotfoot past his tent, waving a naked bayonet with his pursuers fifty
yards behind, had stopped dead and faced about with a military stamp
like a guardsman. He had tried it on this lunatic for want of any better
expedient. It had apparently functioned intermittently. He risked
saying:
"What about what?"
The man said as if ironically:
"It seems as if I were not worth listening to by your high and
mightiness. I said: 'What about my foul squit of an uncle?' Your filthy,
best friend."
Tietjens said:
"The general's your uncle? General Campion? What's he done to you?"
The general had sent this fellow down to him with a note asking him,
Tietjens, to keep an eye in his unit on a very good fellow and an
admirable officer. The chit was in the general's own writing, and
contained the additional information as to Captain Mackenzie's
scholastic prowess. . . . It had struck Tietjens as queer that the
general should take so much trouble about a casual infantry company
commander. How could the fellow have been brought markedly to his
notice? Of course, Campion was good-natured, like another man. If a
fellow, half dotty, whose record showed that he was a very good man, was
brought to his notice Campion would do what he could for him. And
Tietjens knew that the general regarded himself Tietjens, as a heavy,
bookish fellow, able reliably to look after one of his protégés. . . .
Probably Campion imagined that they had no work to do in that unit: they
might become an acting lunatic ward. But if Mackenzie was Campion's
nephew the thing was explained.
The lunatic exclaimed:
"Campion, _my_ uncle? Why, he's _yours_!"
Tietjens said:
"Oh, no, he isn't." The general was not even a connection of his, but he
did happen to be Tietjen's godfather and his father's oldest friend.
The other fellow answered:
"Then it's damn funny. _Damn_ suspicious. . . . Why should he be
interested in you if he's not your filthy uncle? You're no soldier. . . .
You're no sort of a soldier. . . . A meal sack, that's what you look
like. . . ." He paused and then went on very quickly: "They say up at
H.Q. that your wife has got hold of the disgusting general. I didn't
believe it was true. I didn't believe you were that sort of fellow. I've
heard a lot about you!"
Tietjens laughed at this madness. Then, in the dark brownness, an
intolerable pang went all through his heavy frame--the intolerable pang
of home news to these desperately occupied men, the pain caused by
disasters happening in the darkness and at a distance. You could do
nothing to mitigate them! . . . The extraordinary beauty of the wife
from whom he was separated--for she was extraordinarily
beautiful!--might well have caused scandals about her to have penetrated
to the general's headquarters, which was a sort of family party!
Hitherto there had, by the grace of God, been no scandals. Sylvia
Tietjens had been excruciatingly unfaithful, in the most painful manner.
He could not be certain that the child he adored was his own. . . . That
was not unusual with extraordinarily beautiful--and cruel!--women. But
she had been haughtily circumspect.
Nevertheless, three months ago, they had parted. . . . Or he thought
they had parted. Almost complete blankness had descended upon his home
life. She appeared before him so extraordinarily bright and clear in the
brown darkness that he shuddered: very tall, very fair, extraordinarily
fit and clean even. Thoroughbred! In a sheath gown of gold tissue, all
illuminated, and her mass of hair, like gold tissue too, coiled round
and round in plaits over her ears. The features very clean-cut and
thinnish; the teeth white and small; the breasts small; the arms thin,
long and at attention at her sides. . . . His eyes, when they were
tired, had that trick of reproducing images on their retinas with that
extreme clearness, images sometimes of things he thought of, sometimes of
things merely at the back of the mind. Well, to-night his eyes were very
tired! She was looking straight before her, with a little inimical
disturbance of the corners of her lips. She had just thought of a way to
hurt terribly his silent personality. . . . The semi-clearness became a
luminous blue, like a tiny gothic arch, and passed out of his vision to
the right. . . .
He knew nothing of where Sylvia was. He had given up looking at the
illustrated papers. She had said she was going into a convent at
Birkenhead--but twice he had seen photographs of her. The first showed
her merely with Lady Fiona Grant, daughter of the Earl and Countess of
Ulleswater--and a Lord Swindon, talked of as next minister for
International Finance--a new Business Peer. . . . All three walking
straight into the camera in the courtyard of Lord Swindon's castle . . .
all three smiling! . . . It announced Mrs. Christopher Tietjens as
having a husband at the front.
The sting had, however, been in the second picture--in the description
of it supplied by the journal! It showed Sylvia standing in front of a
bench in the park. On the bench in profile there extended himself in a
guffaw of laughter, a young man in a top hat jammed well on to his head,
which was thrown back, his prognathous jaw pointing upwards. The
description stated that the picture showed Mrs. Christopher Tietjens,
whose husband was in hospital at the Front, telling a good story to the
son and heir of Lord Brigham! . . . Another of these pestilential,
crooked newspaper-owning financial peers . . .
It had struck him for a painful moment whilst looking at the picture in
a dilapidated mess anteroom after he had come out of hospital--that,
considering the description, the journal had got its knife into
Sylvia. . . . But the illustrated papers do not get their knives into
society beauties. They are too precious to the photographers. . . . Then
Sylvia must have supplied the information; she desired to cause comment by
the contrast of her hilarious companions and the statement that her husband
was in hospital at the Front. . . . It had occurred to him that she was
on the warpath. But he had put it out of his mind. . . . Nevertheless,
brilliant mixture as she was, of the perfectly straight, perfectly
fearless, perfectly reckless, of the generous, the kind even--and the
atrociously cruel, nothing might suit her better than positively to show
contempt--no, not contempt! cynical hatred--for her husband, for the
war, for public opinion . . . even for the interest of their child! . . .
Yet, it came to him, the image of her that he had just seen had been
the image of Sylvia, standing at attention, her mouth working a little,
whilst she read out the figures beside the bright filament of mercury in
a thermometer. . . . The child had had, with measles, a temperature
that, even then, he did not dare think of. And--it was at his sister's
in Yorkshire, and the local doctor hadn't cared to take the
responsibility--he could still feel the warmth of the little mummy-like
body; he had covered the head and face with a flannel, for he didn't
care for the sight, and lowered the warm, terrible, fragile weight into
a shining surface of crushed ice in water. . . . She had stood at
attention, the corners of her mouth moving a little: the thermometer
going down as you watched it. . . . So that she mightn't want, in
damaging the father, atrociously to damage the child. . . . For there
could not be anything worse for a child than to have a mother known as a
whore. . . .
Sergeant-Major Cowley was standing beside the table. He said:
"Wouldn't it be a good thing, sir, to send a runner to the depot
sergeant cook and tell him we're going to indent for suppers for the
draft? We could send the other with the 128's to Quarter. They're
neither wanted here for the moment."
The other captain went on incessantly talking--but about his fabulous
uncle, not about Sylvia. It was difficult for Tietjens to get what he
wanted said. He wanted the second runner sent to the depot quartermaster
with a message to the effect that if G.S. candles for hooded lamps were
not provided for the use of his orderly room by return of bearer he
Captain Tietjens, commanding Number XVI Casual Battalion, would bring
the whole matter of supplies for his battalion that same night before
Base Headquarters. They were all three talking at once: heavy fatalism
overwhelmed Tietjens at the thought of the stubbornness showed by the
depot quartermaster. The big unit beside his camp was a weary obstinacy
of obstruction. You would have thought they would have displayed some
eagerness to get his men up into the line. Let alone that the men were
urgently needed, the more of his men went the more of _them_ stayed
behind. Yet they tried to stop his meat, his groceries, his braces, his
identification discs, his soldiers' small books. . . . Every imaginable
hindrance, and not even self-interested common sense! . . . He managed
also to convey to Sergeant-Major Cowley that, as everything seemed to
have quieted down, the Canadian sergeant-major had better go and see if
everything was ready for falling his draft in. . . . If things remained
quiet for another ten minutes, the "All Clear" might then be
expected. . . . He knew that Sergeant-Major Cowley wanted to get the Other
Ranks out of the hut with that captain carrying on like that, and he did
not see why the old N.C.O. should not have what he wanted.
It was as if a tender and masculine butler withdrew himself. Cowley's
grey walrus moustache and scarlet cheeks showed for a moment beside the
brazier, whispering at the ears of the runners, a hand kindly on each of
their shoulders. The runners went; the Canadian went. Sergeant-Major
Cowley, his form blocking the doorway, surveyed the stars. He found it
difficult to realize that the same pinpricks of light through black
manifolding paper as he looked at, looked down also on his villa and his
elderly wife at Isleworth beside the Thames above London. He knew it to
be the fact, yet it was difficult to realize. He imagined the trams
going along the High Street, his missus in one of them with her supper
in a string bag on her stout knees. The trams lit up and shining. He
imagined her having kippers for supper: ten to one it would be kippers.
Her favourites. His daughter was in the W.A.A.C.'s by now. She had been
cashier to Parks's, the big butchers in Brentford, and pretty she had
used to look in the glass case. Like as if it might have been the
British Museum where they had Pharaohs and others in glass cases. . . .
There were threshing machines droning away all over the night. He always
said they were like threshing machines. . . . Crikey, if only they
were! . . . But they might be our own planes, of course. A good welsh
rarebit he had had for tea.
In the hut, the light from the brazier having fewer limbs on which to
fall, a sort of intimacy seemed to descend, and Tietjens felt himself
gain in ability to deal with his mad friend. Captain Mackenzie--Tietjens
was not sure that the name was Mackenzie: it had looked something like
it in the general's hand--Captain Mackenzie was going on about the
wrongs he had suffered at the hands of some fabulous uncle. Apparently
at some important juncture the uncle had refused to acknowledge
acquaintanceship with the nephew. From that all the misfortunes of the
nephew had arisen. . . . Suddenly Tietjens said:
"Look here, pull yourself together. Are you mad? Stark, staring? . . .
Or only just play-acting?"
The man suddenly sank down on to the bully-beef case that served for a
chair. He stammered a question as to what--what--what Tietjens meant.
"If you let yourself go," Tietjens said, "you may let yourself go a tidy
sight farther than you want to."
"You're not a mad doctor," the other said. "It's no good your trying to
come it over me. I know all about you. I've got an uncle who's done the
dirty on me--the dirtiest dirty ever was done on a man. If it hadn't
been for him I shouldn't be here now."
"You talk as if the fellow had sold you into slavery," Tietjens said.
"He's your closest friend," Mackenzie seemed to advance as a motive for
revenge on Tietjens. "He's a friend of the general's, too. Of your
wife's as well. He's in with every one."
A few desultory, pleasurable "pop-op-ops" sounded from far overhead to
the left.
"They imagine they've found the Hun again," Tietjens said. "That's all
right; you concentrate on your uncle. Only don't exaggerate his
importance to the world. I assure you are mistaken if you call him
a friend of mine. I have not got a friend in the world." He added: "Are
you going to mind the noise? If it is going to get on your nerves you can
walk in a dignified manner to a dugout, now, before it gets bad. . . ." He
called out to Cowley to go and tell the Canadian sergeant-major to
get his men back into their shelters if they had come out. Until the
"All Clear" went.
Captain Mackenzie sat himself gloomily down at table.
"Damn it all," he said, "don't think I'm afraid of a little shrapnel.
I've had two periods solid of fourteen and nine months in the line. I
could have got out on to the rotten staff. . . . It's damn it: it's the
beastly row. . . . Why isn't one a beastly girl and privileged to
shriek? By God, I'll get even with some of them one of these days. . . ."
"Why not shriek?" Tietjens asked. "You can, for me. No one's going to
doubt your courage here."
Loud drops of rain spattered down all round the hut; there was a
familiar thud on the ground a yard or so away, a sharp tearing sound
above, a sharper knock on the table between them. Mackenzie took the
shrapnel bullet that had fallen and turned it round and round between
finger and thumb.
"You think you caught me on the hop just now," he said injuriously.
"You're damn clever."
Two stories down below some one let two hundred-pound dumb-bells drop on
the drawing-room carpet; all the windows of the house slammed in a race
to get it over; the "pop-op-ops" of the shrapnel went in wafts all over
the air. There was again sudden silence that was painful, after you had
braced yourself up to bear noise. The runner from the Rhondda came in
with a light step bearing two fat candles. He took the hooded lamps from
Tietjens and began to press the candles up against the inner springs,
snorting sedulously through his nostrils. . . .
"Nearly got me, one of those candlesticks did," he said. "Touched my
foot as it fell, it did. I did run. Surely to goodness I did run,
cahptn."
Inside the shrapnel shell was an iron bar with a flattened, broad nose.
When the shell burst in the air this iron object fell to the ground and,
since it came often from a great height, its fall was dangerous. The men
called these candlesticks, which they much resembled.
A little ring of light now existed on the puce colour of the
blanket-covered table. Tietjens showed, silver-headed, fresh-coloured
and bulky; Mackenzie, dark, revengeful eyes above a prognathous jaw. A
very thin man; thirtyish.
"You can go into the shelter with the Colonial troops, if you like,"
Tietjens said to the runner. The man answered after a pause, being very
slow thinking, that he preferred to wait for his mate, 09 Morgan
whatever.
"They ought to let my orderly room have tin hats," Tietjens said to
Mackenzie. "I'm damned if they didn't take these fellows' tin hats into
store again when they attached to me for service, and I'm equally damned
if they did not tell me that, if I wanted tin hats for my own
headquarters, I had to write to H.Q. Canadians, Aldershot, or some such
place in order to get the issue sanctioned."
"Our headquarters are full of Huns doing the Huns' work," Mackenzie said
hatefully. "I'd like to get among them one of these days."
Tietjens looked with some attention at that young man with the Rembrandt
shadows over his dark face. He said:
"Do you believe that tripe?"
The young man said:
"No . . . I don't know that I do. . . . I don't know what to think. . . .
The world's rotten. . . ."
"Oh, the world's pretty rotten, all right," Tietjens answered. And, in
his fatigue of mind caused by having to attend to innumerable concrete
facts like the providing of households for a thousand men every few
days, arranging parade states for an extraordinarily mixed set of troops
of all arms with very mixed drills, and fighting the Assistant Provost
Marshal to keep his own men out of the clutches of the beastly Garrison
Military Police who had got a down on all Canadians, he felt he had not
any curiosity at all left. . . . Yet he felt vaguely that, at the back
of his mind, there was some reason for trying to cure this young member
of the lower middle classes.
He repeated:
"Yes, the world's certainly pretty rotten. But that's not its particular
line of rottenness as far as we are concerned. . . . We're tangled up,
not because we've got Huns in our orderly rooms, but just because we've
got English. That's the bat in our belfry. . . . That Hun plane is
presumably coming back. Half a dozen of them. . . ."
The young man, his mind eased by having got off his chest a confounded
lot of semi-nonsensical ravings, considered the return of the Hun
planes with gloomy indifference. His problem really was: could he stand
the ---- noise that would probably accompany their return? He had to get
really into his head that this was an open space to all intents and
purposes. There would not be splinters of stone flying about. He was
ready to be hit by iron, steel, lead, copper, or brass shell rims, but
not by beastly splinters of stone knocked off house fronts. That
consideration had come to him during his beastly, his beastly, his
infernal, damnable leave in London, when just such a filthy row had been
going on. . . . Divorce leave! . . . Captain McKechnie, second attached
ninth Glamorganshires, is granted leave from the 14/11 to the 29/11 for
the purpose of obtaining a divorce. . . . The memory seemed to burst
inside him with the noise of one of those beastly enormous tin-pot
crashes--and it always came when guns made that particular kind of
tin-pot crash: the two came together, the internal one and the crash
outside. He felt that chimney-pots were going to crash on to his head.
You protected yourself by shouting at damned infernal idiots; if you
could out-shout the row you were safe. . . . That was not sensible, but
you got ease that way! . . .
"In matters of Information they're not a patch on us." Tietjens tried
the speech on cautiously, and concluded: "We know what the Enemy rulers
read in the sealed envelopes beside their breakfast bacon-and-egg
plates."
It had occurred to him that it was a military duty to bother himself
about the mental equilibrium of this member of the lower classes. So he
talked . . . _any_ old talk, wearisomely, to keep his mind employed!
Captain Mackenzie was an officer of His Majesty the King: the property,
body and soul, of His Majesty and His Majesty's War Office. It was
Tietjens' duty to preserve this fellow as it was his duty to prevent
deterioration in any other piece of the King's property. That was
implicit in the oath of allegiance. He went on talking:
The curse of the army, as far as the organization is concerned, was our
imbecile national belief that the game is more than the player. That was
our ruin, mentally, as a nation. We were taught that cricket is more
than clearness of mind, so the blasted quartermaster, O.C. Depot
Ordnance Stores next door, thought he had taken a wicket if he refused
to serve out tin hats to their crowd. That's the Game! And if any of
his, Tietjens', men were killed, he grinned and said the game was more
than the players of the game. . . . And of course if he got his bowling
average down low enough he got promotion. There was a quartermaster in a
west country cathedral city who'd got more D.S.O.'s and combatant medals
than anyone on active service in France, from the sea to Peronne, or
wherever our lines ended. His achievement was to have robbed almost
every wretched Tommie in the Western Command of several weeks'
separation allowance . . . for the good of the taxpayer, of course. The
poor ---- Tommies' kids went without proper food and clothing, and the
Tommies themselves had been in a state of exasperation and resentment.
And nothing in the world was worse for discipline and the army as a
fighting machine. But there that quartermaster sat in his office,
playing the romantic game over his A.F.B.'s till the broad buff sheets
fairly glowed in the light of the incandescent gas. "And," Tietjens
concluded, "for every quarter of a million sterling for which he bowls
out the wretched fighting men he gets a new clasp on his fourth D.S.O.
ribbon. . . . The game, in short, is more than the players of the game."
"Oh, damn it!" Captain Mackenzie said. "That's what's made us what we
are, isn't it?"
"It is," Tietjens answered. "It's got us into the hole and it keeps us
there."
Mackenzie remained dispiritedly looking down at his fingers.
"You may be wrong or you may be right," he said. "It's contrary to
everything that I ever heard. But I see what you mean."
"At the beginning of the war," Tietjens said, "I had to look in on the
War Office, and in a room I found a fellow . . . What do you think he
was doing . . . what the hell do you think he was doing? He was devising
the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion. You can't
say we were not prepared in one matter at least . . . Well, the end of
the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease: the
band would play _Land of Hope and Glory_, and then the adjutant would
say: _There will be no more parades_. . . . Don't you see how symbolical
it was: the band playing _Land of Hope and Glory_, and then the adjutant
saying _There will be no more parades_? . . . For there won't. There
won't, there damn well won't. . . . No more Hope, no more Glory, no more
parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country . . . Nor for the
world, I dare say . . . None . . . Gone . . . Na poo, finny! No . . .
more . . . parades!"
"I dare say you're right," the other said slowly. "But, all the same,
what am I doing in this show? I hate soldiering. I hate this whole
beastly business. . . ."
"Then why didn't you go on the gaudy Staff?" Tietjens asked. "The gaudy
Staff apparently was yearning to have you. I bet God intended you for
Intelligence: not for the footslogging department."
The other said wearily:
"I don't know. I was with the battalion. I wanted to stop with the
battalion. I was intended for the Foreign Office. My miserable uncle got
me hoofed out of that. I was with the battalion. The C.O. wasn't up to
much. _Someone_ had to stay with the battalion. I was not going to do
the dirty on it, taking any soft job. . .
"I suppose you speak seven languages and all?" Tietjens asked.
"Five," the other said patiently, "and read two more. And Latin and
Greek, of course."
A man, brown, stiff, with a haughty parade step, burst into the light.
He said with a high wooden voice:
"'Ere's another bloomin' casualty." In the shadow he appeared to have
draped half his face and the right side of his breast with crape. He
gave a high, rattling laugh. He bent, as if in a stiff bow, woodenly at
his thighs. He pitched, still bent, on to the iron sheet that covered
the brazier, rolled off that and lay on his back across the legs of the
other runner, who had been crouched beside the brazier. In the bright
light it was as if a whole pail of scarlet paint had been dashed across
the man's face on the left and his chest. It glistened in the
firelight--just like fresh paint, moving! The runner from the Rhondda,
pinned down by the body across his knees, sat with his jaw fallen,
resembling one girl that should be combing the hair of another recumbent
before her. The red viscousness welled across the floor; you sometimes
so see fresh water bubbling up in sand. It astonished Tietjens to see
that a human body could be so lavish of blood. He was thinking it was a
queer mania that fellow should have, that his uncle was a friend of
his, Tietjens. He had no friend in trade, uncle of a fellow who in
ordinary times would probably bring you pairs of boots on approval. . . .
He felt as he did when you patch up a horse that has been badly hurt.
He remembered a horse from a cut on whose chest the blood had streamed
down over the off foreleg like a stocking. A girl had lent him her
petticoat to bandage it. Nevertheless his legs moved slowly and heavily
across the floor.
The heat from the brazier was overpowering on his bent face. He hoped he
would not get his hands all over blood, because blood is very sticky. It
makes your fingers stick together impotently. But there might not be any
blood in the darkness under the fellow's back where he was putting his
hand. There was, however: it was very wet.
The voice of Sergeant-Major Cowley said from outside:
"Bugler, call two sanitary lance-corporals and four men. Two sanitary
corporals and four men." A prolonged wailing with interruptions
transfused the night, mournful, resigned, and prolonged.
Tietjens thought that, thank God, someone would come and relieve him of
that job. It was a breathless affair holding up the corpse with the fire
burning his face. He said to the other runner:
"Get out from under him, damn you! Are you hurt?" Mackenzie could not
get at the body from the other side because of the brazier. The runner
from under the corpse moved with short sitting shuffles as if he were
getting his legs out from under a sofa. He was saying:
"Poor ---- O Nine Morgan! Surely to goodness I did not recognice the
pore ---- . . . Surely to goodness I did not recognice the pore ----"
Tietjens let the trunk of the body sink slowly to the floor. He was more
gentle than if the man had been alive. All hell in the way of noise
burst about the world. Tietjen's thoughts seemed to have to shout to him
between earthquake shocks. He was thinking it was absurd of that fellow
Mackenzie to imagine that he could know any uncle of his. He saw very
vividly also the face of his girl who was a pacifist. It worried him not
to know what expression her face would have if she heard of his
occupation, now. Disgust? . . . He was standing with his greasy, sticky
hands held out from the flaps of his tunic. . . . Perhaps disgust! . . .
It was impossible to think in this row. . . . His very thick soles moved
gluily and came up after suction. . . . He remembered he had not sent a
runner along to I.B.D. Orderly Room to see how many of his crowd would
be wanted for garrison fatigue next day, and this annoyed him acutely.
He would have no end of a job warning the officers he detailed. They
would all be in brothels down in the town by now. . . . He could not
work out what the girl's expression would be. He was never to see her
again, so what the hell did it matter? . . . Disgust, probably! . . . He
remembered that he had not looked to see how Mackenzie was getting on in
the noise. He did not want to see Mackenzie. He was a bore. . . . How
would her face express disgust? He had never seen her express disgust.
She had a perfectly undistinguished face. Fair . . . O God, how suddenly
his bowels turned over! . . . Thinking of the girl . . . The face below
him grinned at the roof--the half face! The nose was there, half the
mouth with the teeth showing in the firelight. . . . It was
extraordinary how defined the peaked nose and the serrated teeth were in
that mess . . . The eye looked jauntily at the peak of the canvas
hut-roof. . . . Gone with a grin. Singular the fellow should have
spoken! After he was dead. He must have been dead when he spoke. It had
been done with the last air automatically going out of the lungs. A
reflex action, probably, in the dead. . . . If he, Tietjens, had given
the fellow the leave he wanted he would be alive now! . . . Well, he was
quite right not to have given the poor devil his leave. He was, anyhow,
better where he was. And so was he, Tietjens. He had not had a single
letter from home since he had been out this time! Not a single letter.
Not even gossip. Not a bill. Some circulars of old furniture dealers.
They never neglected him! They had got beyond the sentimental stage at
home. Obviously so. . . . He wondered if his bowels would turn over
again if he thought of the girl. He was gratified that they had. It
showed that he had strong feelings. . . . He thought about her
deliberately. Hard. Nothing happened. He thought of her fair,
undistinguished, fresh face that made your heart miss a beat when you
thought about it. His heart missed a beat. Obedient heart! Like the
first primrose. Not _any_ primrose. The _first_ primrose. Under a bank with
the hounds breaking through the underwood. . . . It was sentimental to
say _Du bist wie eine Blume_. . . . Damn the German language! But that
fellow was a Jew. . . . One should not say that one's young woman was
like _a_ flower, _any_ flower. Not even to oneself. That was sentimental.
But one might say one special flower. A _man_ could say that. A man's job.
She smelt like a primrose when you kissed her. But, damn it, he had
never kissed her. So how did he know how she smelt! She was a little
tranquil, golden spot. He himself must be a ---- eunuch. By temperament.
That dead fellow down there must be one, physically. It was probably
indecent to think of a corpse as impotent. But he was, very likely. That
would be why his wife had taken up with the prize-fighter Red Evans
Williams of Castell Goch. If he had given the fellow leave the
prize-fighter would have smashed him to bits. The police of Pontardulais
had asked that he should not be let come home--because of the
prize-fighter. So he was better dead. Or perhaps not. Is death better
than discovering that your wife is a whore and being done in by her
cully? _Gwell angau na gwillth_, their own regimental badge bore the
words. "_Death is better than dishonour_" . . . No, not death, _angau_
means pain. Anguish! Anguish is better than dishonour. The devil it is!
Well, that fellow would have got both. Anguish and dishonour. Dishonour
from his wife and anguish when the prize-fighter hit him. . . . That was
no doubt why his half-face grinned at the roof. The gory side of it had
turned brown. Already! Like a mummy of a Pharaoh, _that_ half looked. . . .
He was born to be a blooming casualty. Either by shell-fire or by the
fist of the prize-fighter. . . . Pontardulais! Somewhere in Mid-Wales.
He had been through it once in a car, on duty. A long, dull village. Why
should anyone want to go back to it? . . .
A tender butler's voice said beside him: "This ain't your job, sir.
Sorry you had to do it. . . . Lucky it wasn't you, sir. . . . This was
what done it, I should say."
Sergeant-Major Cowley was standing beside him holding a bit of metal
that was heavy in his hand and like a candlestick. He was aware that a
moment before he had seen the fellow, Mackenzie, bending over the
brazier, putting the sheet of iron back. Careful officer, Mackenzie. The
Huns must not be allowed to see the light from the brazier. The edge of
the sheet had gone down on the dead man's tunic, nipping a bit by the
shoulder. The face had disappeared in shadow. There were several men's
faces in the doorway.
Tietjens said: "No: I don't believe that did it. Something bigger. . . .
Say a prize-fighter's fist. . . ."
Sergeant Cowley said:
"No, no prize-fighter's fist would have done that, sir. . . ." And then
he added, "Oh, I take your meaning, sir . . . O Nine Morgan's wife,
sir. . . ."
Tietjens moved, his feet sticking, towards the sergeant-major's table.
The other runner had placed a tin basin with water on it. There was a
hooded candle there now, alight; the water shone innocently, a half-moon
of translucence wavering over the white bottom of the basin. The runner
from Pontardulais said:
"Wash your hands first, sir!"
He said:
"Move a little out of it, cahptn." He had a rag in his black hands.
Tietjens moved out of the blood that had run in a thin stream under the
table. The man was on his knees, his hands rubbing Tietjens' boot welts
heavily, with the rags. Tietjens placed his hands in the innocent water
and watched light purple-scarlet mist diffuse itself over the pale
half-moon. The man below him breathed heavily, sniffing. Tietjens said:
"Thomas, O Nine Morgan was your mate?"
The man's face, wrinkled, dark and ape-like, looked up.
"He was a good pal, pore old ----," he said. "You would not like, surely
to goodness, to go to mess with your shoes all bloody."
"If I had given him leave," Tietjens said, "he would not be dead now."
"No, surely not," One Seven Thomas answered. "But it is all one. Evans
of Castell Goch would surely to goodness have killed him."
"So you knew, too, about his wife!" Tietjens said.
"We thocht it wass that," One Seven Thomas answered, "or you would have
given him leave, cahptn. You are a good cahptn."
A sudden sense of the publicity that life was came over Tietjens.
"You knew that," he said. "I wonder what the hell you fellows don't know
and all!" he thought. "If anything went wrong with one it would be all
over the command in two days. Thank God, Sylvia can't get here!"
The man had risen to his feet. He fetched a towel of the
sergeant-major's, very white with a red border.
"We know," he said, "that your honour is a very goot cahptn. And Captain
McKechnie is a _fery_ goot cahptn. And Captain Prentiss, and Le'tennant
Jonce of Merthyr . . ."
Tietjens said:
"That'll do. Tell the sergeant-major to give you a pass to go with your
mate to the hospital. Get someone to wash this floor."
Two men were carrying the remains of O Nine Morgan, the trunk wrapped in
a ground sheet. They carried him in a bandy chair out of the hut. His
arms over his shoulders waved a jocular farewell. There would be an
ambulance stretcher on bicycle wheels outside.