The "All Clear" went at once after that. Its suddenness was something
surprising, the mournful-cheerful, long notes dying regretfully on a
night that had only just gone quiet after the perfectly astonishing row.
The moon had taken it into its head to rise; begumboiled, jocular and
grotesque, it came from behind the shoulder of one of the hut-covered
hills and sent down the lines of Tietjen's huts, long, sentimental rays
that converted the place into a slumbering, pastoral settlement. There
was no sound that did not contribute to the silence, little dim lights
shone through the celluloid casements. Of Sergeant-Major Cowley, his
numerals gilded by the moon in the lines of A Company, Tietjens, who was
easing his lungs of coke vapours for a minute, asked in a voice that
hushed itself in tribute to the moonlight and the now keen frost:
"Where the deuce is the draft?"
The sergeant-major looked poetically down a ribbon of whitewashed stones
that descended the black downside. Over the next shoulder of hill was
the blur of a hidden conflagration.
"There's a Hun plane burning down there. In Twenty-Seven's parade
ground. The draft's round that, sir," he said.
Tietjens said:
"Good God!" in a voice of caustic tolerance. He added, "I did think we
had drilled some discipline into these blighters in the seven weeks we
have had them. . . . You remember the first time when we had them on
parade and that acting lance-corporal left the ranks to heave a rock at
a sea-gull. . . . And called you 'OI' Hunkey! . . . Conduct prejudicial
to good order and military discipline? Where's that Canadian
sergeant-major? Where's the officer in charge of the draft?"
Sergeant-Major Cowley said:
"Sergeant-Major Ledoux said it was like a cattle-stampede on the . . .
some river where they come from. You _couldn't_ stop them, sir. It was
their first German plane. . . . And they going up the line to-night,
sir."
"To-night!" Tietjens exclaimed. "Next Christmas!"
The sergeant-major said:
"Poor boys!" and continued to gaze into the distance. "I heard another
good one, sir," he said. "The answer to the one about the King saluting
a private soldier and he not taking any notice is: when he's dead. . . .
But if you marched a company into a field through a gateway and you
wanted to get it out again but you did not know any command in the drill
book for change of direction, what would you do, sir? . . . You have to
get that company out, but you must not use About Turn, or Right or Left
Wheel. . . . There's another one, too, about saluting. . . . The officer
in charge of draft is Second-Lieutenant Hotchkiss. . . . But he's an
A.S.C. officer and turned of sixty. A farrier he is, sir, in civil life.
An A.S.C. major was asking me, sir, very civil, if you could not detail
someone else. He says he doubts if Second-Lieutenant Hitchcock . . .
Hotchkiss could walk as far as the station, let alone march the men, him
not knowing anything but cavalry words of command, if he knows them.
He's only been in the army a fortnight. . . ."
Tietjens turned from the idyllic scene with the words:
"I suppose the Canadian sergeant-major and Lieutenant Hotchkiss are
doing what they can to get their men to come back."
He re-entered the hut.
Captain Mackenzie in the light of a fantastically brilliant hurricane
lamp appeared to be bathing dejectedly in a surf of coiling papers
spread on the table before him.
"There's all this bumph," he said, "just come from all the headquarters
in the bally world."
Tietjens said cheerfully:
"What's it all about?" There were, the other answered, Garrison
Headquarter orders, Divisional orders, Lines of Communication orders,
half a dozen A.F.B.W. two four two's. A terrific strafe from First Army
forwarded from Garrison H.Q. about the draft's not having reached
Hazebrouck the day before yesterday. Tietjens said:
"Answer them politely to the effect that we had orders not to send off
the draft without its complement of four hundred Canadian Railway
Service men--the fellows in furred hoods. They only reached us from
Etaples at five this afternoon without blankets or ring papers. Or any
other papers for the matter of that."
Mackenzie was studying with increased gloom a small buff memorandum
slip:
"This appears to be meant for you privately," he said. "I can't make
head or tail of it otherwise. It isn't _marked_ private."
He tossed the buff slip across the table.
Tietjens sank down bulkily on to his bully-beef case. He read on the
buff at first the initials of the signature, "E.C. Genl.," and then:
"For God's sake keep your wife off me. I _will_ not have skirts round my
H.Q. You are more trouble to me than all the rest of my command put
together."
Tietjens groaned and sank more deeply on to his beef case. It was as if
an unseen and unsuspected wild beast had jumped on his neck from an
overhanging branch. The sergeant-major at his side said in his most
admirable butler manner:
"Colour-Sergeant Morgan and Lance-Corporal Trench are obliging us by
coming from depot orderly room to help with the draft's papers. Why
don't you and the other officer go and get a bit of dinner, sir? The
colonel and the padre have only just come in to mess, and I've warned
the mess orderlies to keep your food 'ot. . . . Both good men with
papers, Morgan and Trench. We can send the soldiers' small books to you
at table to sign. . . ."
His feminine solicitude enraged and overwhelmed Tietjens with blackness.
He told the sergeant-major that he was to go to hell, for he himself was
not going to leave that hut till the draft was moved off. Captain
Mackenzie could do as he pleased. The sergeant-major told Captain
Mackenzie that Captain Tietjens took as much trouble with his rag-time
detachments as if he had been the Coldstream adjutant at Chelsea sending
off a draft of Guards. Captain Mackenzie said that was why they
damn well got their details off four days faster than any other I.B.D.
in that camp. He _would_ say that much, he added grudgingly and dropped
his head over his papers again. The hut was moving slowly up and down
before the eyes of Tietjens. He might have just been kicked in the
stomach. That was how shocks took him. He said to himself that by God he
must take himself in hand. He grabbed with his heavy hands at a piece of
buff paper and wrote on it in a column of fat, wet letters:
a
b
b
a
a
b
b
a and so on.
He said opprobriously to Captain Mackenzie:
"Do you know what a sonnet is? Give me the rhymes for a sonnet. That's
the plan of it."
Mackenzie grumbled:
"Of course I know what a sonnet is. What's your game?"
Tietjens said:
"Give me the fourteen end-rhymes of a sonnet and I'll write the lines.
In under two minutes and a half."
Mackenzie said injuriously:
"If you do I'll turn it into Latin hexameters in three. In _under_ three
minutes."
They were like men uttering deadly insults the one to the other. To
Tietjens it was as if an immense cat were parading, fascinated and
fatal, round that hut. He had imagined himself parted from his wife. He
had not heard from his wife since her four-in-the-morning departure from
their flat, months and eternities ago, with the dawn just showing up the
chimney-pots of the Georgian roof-trees opposite. In the complete
stillness of dawn he had heard her voice say very clearly "Paddington"
to the chauffeur, and then all the sparrows in the inn waking up in
chorus. . . . Suddenly and appallingly it came into his head that it
might not have been his wife's voice that had said "Paddington," but her
maid's . . . He was a man who lived very much by rules of conduct. He
had a rule: _Never think on the subject of a shock at a moment of
shock_. The mind was then too sensitized. Subjects of shock require to
be thought all round. If your mind thinks when it is too sensitized its
then conclusions will be too strong. So he exclaimed to Mackenzie:
"Haven't you got your rhymes yet? Damn it _all_!"
Mackenzie grumbled offensively:
"No, I haven't. It's more difficult to get rhymes than to write
sonnets. . . . death, moil, coil, breath . . ." He paused.
"Heath, soil, toil, staggereth," Tietjens said contemptuously. "That's
your sort of Oxford young woman's rhyme. . . . Go on . . . _What is
it_?"
An extremely age-faded and unmilitary officer was beside the blanketed
table. Tietjens regretted having spoken to him with ferocity. He had a
grotesquely thin white beard. Positively, white whiskers! He must have
gone through as much of the army as he had gone through, with those
whiskers, because no superior officer--not even a field-marshal--would
have the heart to tell him to take them off! It was the measure of his
pathos. This ghost-like object was apologizing for not having been able
to keep the draft in hand: he was requesting his superior to observe
that these Colonial troops were without any instincts of discipline.
None at all. Tietjens observed that he had a blue cross on his right arm
where the vaccination marks are as a rule. He imagined the Canadians
talking to this hero. . . . The hero began to talk to, Major Cornwallis
of the R. A. S. C.
Tietjens said apropos of nothing:
"Is there a major Cornwallis in the A.S.C.? Good God!"
The hero protested faintly:
"The _R.A.S.C._"
Tietjens said kindly:
"Yes. Yes. The _Royal_ Army Service Corps."
Obviously his mind until now had regarded his wife's "_Paddington_" as
the definite farewell between his life and hers. . . . He had imagined
her, like Eurydice, tall, but faint and pale, sinking back into the
shades. . . . "_Che faro senz' Eurydice_? . . ." he hummed. Absurd! And
of course it might have been only the maid that had spoken. . . . She
too had a remarkably clear voice. So that the mystic word "Paddington"
might perfectly well be no symbol at all, and Mrs. Sylvia Tietjens, far
from being faint and pale, might perfectly well be playing the very
devil with half the general officers commanding in chief from Whitehall
to Alaska.
Mackenzie--he _was_ like a damned clerk--was transferring the rhymes
that he had no doubt at last found, onto another sheet of paper.
Probably he had a round, copy-book hand. Positively, his tongue followed
his pen round, inside his lips. These were what His Majesty's regular
officers of to-day were. Good God! A damned intelligent, dark-looking
fellow. Of the type that is starved in its youth and takes all the
scholarships that the board schools have to offer. Eyes too big and
black. Like a Malay's. . . . Any blasted member of any subject race.
The A.S.C. fellow had been talking positively about horses. He had
offered his services in order to study the variation of pink-eye that
was decimating all the service horses in the lines. He had been a
professor--positively a professor--in some farriery college or other.
Tietjens said that, in that case, he ought to be in the A.V.C.--the
_Royal_ Army Veterinary Corps perhaps it was. The old man said he didn't
know. He imagined that the R.A.S.C. had wanted his service for their own
horses. . . .
Tietjens said:
"I'll tell you what to do, Lieutenant Hitchcock. . . . For, damn it,
you're a stout fellow. . . ." The poor old fellow, pushing out at that
age from the cloisters of some provincial university . . . He certainly
did not look a horsy sportsman. . . .
The old lieutenant said:
"Hotchkiss . . ." And Tietjens exclaimed:
"Of course it's Hotchkiss . . . I've seen your name signing a
testimonial to Pigg's Horse Embrocation. . . . Then if you don't want to
take this draft up the line . . . Though I'd advise you to . . . It's
merely a Cook's Tour to Hazebrouck . . . No, Bailleul . . . And the
sergeant-major will march the men for you . . . And you will have been
in the First Army Lines and able to tell all your friends you've been on
active service at the real front. . . ."
His mind said to himself while his words went on . . .
"Then, good God, if Sylvia is actively paying attention to my career I
shall be the laughing-stock of the whole army. I was thinking that ten
minutes ago! . . . What's to be done? What in God's name is to be done?"
A black crape veil seemed to drop across his vision . . . Liver . . .
Lieutenant Hotchkiss said with dignity:
"I'm _going_ to the front. I'm going to the real front. I was passed A1
this morning. I am going to study the blood reactions of the service
horse under fire."
"Well, you're a damn good chap," Tietjens said. There was nothing to be
done. The amazing activities of which Sylvia would be capable were just
the thing to send laughter raging like fire through a cachinnating army.
She could not, thank God, get into France: to that place. But she could
make scandals in the papers that every Tommie read. There was no game of
which she was not capable. That sort of pursuit was called "pulling the
strings of shower-baths" in her circle of friends. Nothing. Nothing to
be done. . . . The beastly hurricane lamp was smoking.
"I'll tell you what to do," he said to Lieutenant Hotchkiss.
Mackenzie had tossed his sheet of rhymes under his nose. Tietjens read:
_Death, moil, coil, breath_. . . _Saith_--"The dirty Cockney!" _Oil, soil,
wraith_. . . .
"I'd be blowed," Mackenzie said with a vicious grin, "if I was going to
give you rhymes you had suggested yourself . . ."
The officer said:
"I don't of course want to be a nuisance if you're busy."
"It's no nuisance," Tietjens said. "It's what we're for. But I'd suggest
that now and then you say 'sir' to the officer commanding your unit. It
sounds well before the men. . . . Now you go to No. XVI I.B.D.
Mess ante-room . . . The place where they've got the broken
bagatelle-table. . . ."
The voice of Sergeant-Major Cowley exclaimed tranquilly from outside:
"Fall in now. Men who've got their ring papers and identity disks--three
of them--on the left. Men who haven't, on the right. Any man who has not
been able to draw his blankets tell Colour-Sergeant Morgan. Don't
forget. You won't get any where you're going. Any man who hasn't made
his will in his Soldier's Small Book or elsewhere and wants to, to
consult Captain Tietjens. Any man who wants to draw money, ask Captain
Mackenzie. Any R.C. who wants to go to confession after he has got his
papers signed can find the R.C. padre in the fourth hut from the left in
the Main Line from here. . . . And damn kind it is of his reverence to
put himself out for a set of damn blinking mustard-faced red herrings
like you who can't keep from running away to the first baby's bonfire
you sees. You'll be running the other way before you're a week older,
though what good they as asks for you thinks you'll be out there God
knows. You _look_ like a squad of infants' companions from a Wesleyan
Sunday school. That's what you look like and, thank God, we've got a
Navy."
Under cover of his voice Tietjens had been writing:
"Now we affront the grinning chops of _Death_," and saying to Lieutenant
Hotchkiss: "In the I.B.D. anteroom you'll find any number of dirty
little squits of Glamorganshires drinking themselves blind over _La Vie
Parisienne_. . . . Ask any one of them you like. . . ." He wrote:
"And in between our carcass and the _moil_
Of marts and cities, toil and moil and _coil_. . ."
"You think this difficult!" he said to Mackenzie. "Why, you've written a
whole undertaker's mortuary ode in the rhymes alone," and went on to
Hotchkiss: "Ask anyone you like as long as he's a P.B. officer. . . . Do
you know what P.B. means? No, not Poor B----y, Permanent Base. Unfit . . .
If he'd like to take a draft to Bailleul."
The hut was filling with devious, slow, ungainly men in yellow-brown.
Their feet shuffled desultorily; they lumped dull canvas bags along the
floor and held in unliterary hands small open books that they dropped
from time to time. From outside came a continuing, swelling and
descending chant of voices; at times it would seem to be all one laugh,
at times one menace, then the motives mingled fugally, like the sea on a
beach of large stones. It seemed to Tietjens suddenly extraordinary how
shut in on oneself one was in this life. . . . He sat scribbling fast:
"Old Spectre blows a cold protecting _breath_ . . . Vanity of vanities,
the preacher _saith_ . . . No more parades, Not any more, no _oil_ . . ."
He was telling Hotchkiss, who was obviously shy of approaching the
Glamorganshires in their ante-room . . . "Unambergris'd our limbs in the
naked _soil_ . . ." that he did not suppose any P.B. officer would
object. They would go on a beanfeast up into the giddy line in a
first-class carriage and get draft leave and command pay too probably . . .
"No funeral instruments cast before our wraiths . . ." If any fellow
does object, you just send his name to me and I will damn well shove it
into extra orders. . . .
The advanced wave of the brown tide of men was already at his feet. The
extraordinary complications of even the simplest lives; . . . A fellow
was beside him . . . Private Logan, formerly, of all queer things for a
Canadian private, a trooper of the Inniskillings: owner, of all queer
things, of a milk-walk or a dairy farm, outside Sydney, which is in
Australia . . . A man of sentimental complications, jauntiness as became
an Inniskilling, a Cockney accent such as ornaments the inhabitants of
Sydney, and a complete distrust of lawyers. On the other hand, with the
completest trust in Tietjens. Over his shoulder--he was blonde, upright,
with his numerals shining like gold, looked a lumpish, _café-au-lait_,
eagle-nosed countenance: a half-caste member of one of the Six Nations,
who had been a doctor's errand boy in Quebec . . . He had his troubles,
but was difficult to understand. Behind him, very black-avised with a
high colour, truculent eyes and an Irish accent, was a graduate of
McGill University who had been a teacher of languages in Tokio and had
some sort of claim against the Japanese Government . . . And faces, two
and two, in a coil round the hut . . . Like dust: like a cloud of dust
that would approach and overwhelm a landscape: every one with
preposterous troubles and anxieties, even if they did not overwhelm you
personally with them . . . Brown dust . . .
He kept the Inniskilling waiting while he scribbled the rapid sestet to
his sonnet which ought to make a little plainer what it all meant. Of
course the general idea was that, when you got into the line or near it,
there was no room for swank: typified by expensive funerals. As you
might say: No flowers by compulsion . . . No more parades! . . . He had
also to explain, while he did it, to the heroic veterinary sexagenarian
that he need not feel shy about going into the Glamorganshire Mess on a
man-catching expedition. The Glamorganshires were bound to lend him,
Tietjens, P.B. officers if they had not got other jobs. Lieutenant
Hotchkiss could speak to Colonel Johnson, whom he would find in the mess
and quite good-natured over his dinner. A pleasant and sympathetic old
gentleman who would appreciate Hotchkiss's desire not to go
superfluously into the line. Hotchkiss could offer to take a look at the
colonel's charger: a Hun horse, captured on the Marne and called
Schomburg, that was off its feed. . . . He added: "But don't do anything
professional to Schomburg. I ride him myself!"
He threw his sonnet across to Mackenzie, who with a background of
huddled khaki limbs and anxious faces was himself anxiously counting out
French currency notes and dubious-looking tokens . . . What the deuce
did men want to draw money--sometimes quite large sums of money, the
Canadians being paid in dollars converted into local coins--when in an
hour or so they would be going up? But they always did and their
accounts were always in an incredibly entangled state. Mackenzie might
well look worried. As like as not he might find himself a fiver or more
down at the end of the evening for unauthorized payments. If he had only
his pay and an extravagant wife to keep, that might well put the wind up
him. But that was _his_ funeral. He told Lieutenant Hotchkiss to come and
have a chat with him in his hut, the one next the mess. About horses. He
knew a little about horse-illnesses himself. Only empirically, of
course.
Mackenzie was looking at his watch.
"You took two minutes and eleven seconds," he said. "I'll take it for
granted it's a sonnet . . . I have not read it because I can't turn it
into Latin here . . . I haven't got your knack of doing eleven things at
once. . . ."
A man with a worried face, encumbered by a bundle and a small book, was
studying figures at Mackenzie's elbow. He interrupted Mackenzie in a
high American voice to say that he had never drawn fourteen dollars
seventy-five cents in Thrasna Barracks, Aldershot.
Mackenzie said to Tietjens:
"You understand. I have not read your sonnet. I shall turn it into Latin
in the mess: in the time stipulated. I don't want you to think I've read
it and taken time to think about it."
The man beside him said:
"When I went to the Canadian Agent, Strand, London, his office was shut
up . . ."
Mackenzie said with white fury:
"How much service have you got? Don't you know better than to interrupt
an officer when he is talking. You must settle your own figures with
your own confounded Colonial paymaster. I've sixteen dollars thirty
cents here for you. Will you take them or leave them?"
Tietjens said:
"I know that man's case. Turn him over to me. It isn't complicated. He's
got his paymaster's cheque, but doesn't know how to cash it and of
course they won't give him another. . . ."
The man with slow, broad, brown features looked from one to the other
officer's face and back again with a keen black-eyed scrutiny as if he
were looking into a wind and dazed by the light. He began a long story
of how he owed Fat-Eared Bill fifty dollars lost at House. He was
perhaps half-Chinese, half-Finn. He continued to talk, being in a state
of great anxiety about his money. Tietjens addressed himself to the
cases of the Sydney Inniskilling ex-trooper and the McGill graduate who
had suffered at the hands of the Japanese Educational Ministry. It made
altogether a complicated effect. "You would say," Tietjens said to
himself, "that, all together, it ought to be enough to take my mind up."
The upright trooper had a very complicated sentimental history. It was
difficult to advise him before his fellows. He, however, felt no
diffidence. He discussed the points of the girl called Rosie whom he had
followed from Sydney to British Columbia, of the girl called Gwen with
whom he had taken up in Aberystwyth, of the woman called Mrs. Hosier
with whom he had lived maritally, on a sleeping-out pass, at Berwick St.
James, near Salisbury Plain. Through the continuing voice of the
half-caste Chinaman he discussed them with a large tolerance, explaining
that he wanted them all to have a bit, as a souvenir, if he happened to
stop one out there. Tietjens handed him the draft of a will he had had
written out for him, asked him to read it attentively and copy it with
his own hand into his soldier's small book. Then Tietjens would witness
it for him. He said:
"Do you think this will make my old woman in Sydney part? I guess it
won't. She's a sticker, sir. A regular July bur, God bless her." The
McGill graduate was beginning already to introduce a further
complication into his story of complications with the Japanese
Government. It appeared that in addition to his scholastic performances
he had invested a little money in a mineral water spring near Kobe, the
water, bottled, being exported to San Francisco. Apparently his company
had been indulging in irregularities according to Japanese law, but a
pure French Canadian, who had experienced some difficulties in obtaining
his baptismal certificate from a mission somewhere in the direction of
the Klondike, was allowed by Tietjens to interrupt the story of the
graduate; and several men without complications, but anxious to get
their papers signed so as to write last letters home before the draft
moved, overflowed across Tietjen's table. . . .
The tobacco smoke from the pipes of the N.C.O.'s at the other end of the
room hung, opalescent, beneath the wire cages of the brilliant hurricane
lamps hung over each table; buttons and numerals gleamed in the air that
the universal khaki tinge of the limbs seemed to turn brown, as if into
a gas of dust. Nasal voices, throat voices, drawling voices, melted into
a rustle so that the occasional high, sing-song profanity of a Welsh
N.C.O.: Why the _hell_ haffn't you got your 124? Why the ---- hell
haffn't you got your 124? Don't you _know_ you haff to haff your
bleedin' 124's? seemed to wail tragically through a silence . . . The
evening wore on and on. It astounded Tietjens, looking at one time at
his watch to discover that it was only 21 hrs. 19. He seemed to have
been thinking drowsily of his own affairs for ten hours. . . . For, in
the end, these were his own affairs. . . . Money, women, testamentary
bothers. Each of these complications from over the Atlantic and round
the world were his own troubles: a world in labour: an army being moved
off in the night. Shoved off. Anyhow. And over the top. A lateral
section of the world. . . .
He had happened to glance at the medical history of a man beside him and
noticed that he had been described as C1. . . . It was obviously a slip
of the pen on the part of the Medical Board, or one of their orderlies.
He had written C instead of A. The man was Pte. 197394 Thomas Johnson, a
shining-faced lump of beef, an agricultural odd jobman from British
Columbia where he had worked on the immense estates of Sylvia Tietjens'
portentous ducal second cousin Rugeley. It was a double annoyance.
Tietjens had not wanted to be reminded of his wife's second cousin,
because he had not wanted to be reminded of his wife. He had determined
to give his thoughts a field day on that subject when he got warm into
his flea-bag in his hut that smelt of paraffin whilst the canvas walls
crackled with frost and the moon shone. . . . He would think of Sylvia
beneath the moon. He was determined not to now! But 197394 Pte. Johnson,
Thomas, was otherwise a nuisance and Tietjens cursed himself for having
glanced at the man's medical history. If this preposterous yokel was C3
he could not go on a draft . . . C1 rather! It was all the same. That
would mean finding another man to make up the strength and that would
drive Sergeant-Major Cowley out of his mind. He looked up towards the
ingenuous, protruding, shining, liquid, bottle-blue eyes of Thomas
Johnson. . . . The fellow had never had an illness. He could not have
had an illness--except from a surfeit of cold, fat, boiled pork--and for
that you would give him a horse's blue ball and drench which, ten to
one, would not remove the cause of the belly-ache. . . .
His eyes met the non-committal glance of a dark, gentlemanly thin fellow
with a strikingly scarlet hatband, a lot of gilt about his khaki and
little strips of steel chain-armour on his shoulders. . . . Levin . . .
Colonel Levin, G.S.O. II, or something, attached to General Lord Edward
Campion. . . . How the hell did fellows get into these intimacies of
commanders of units and their men? Swimming in like fishes into the
brown air of a tank and there at your elbow . . .----spies! . . . The
men had all been called to attention and stood like gasping codfish. The
ever-watchful Sergeant-Major Cowley had drifted to his, Tietjens',
elbow. You protect your orfcers from the gawdy Staff as you protect your
infant daughters in lambswool from draughts. The dark, bright, cheerful
staffwallah said with a slight lisp:
"Busy, I see." He might have been standing there for a century and have
a century of the battalion headquarters' time to waste like that. "What
draft is this?"
Sergeant-Major Cowley, always ready in case his orfcer should not know
the name of his unit or his own name, said:
"No. 16 I.B.D. Canadian First Division Casual Number Four Draft, sir."
Colonel Levin let air lispingly out between his teeth.
"No. 16 Draft not off yet . . . Dear, dear! Dear, dear! . . . We shall
be strafed to hell by First Army. . . ." He used the word hell as if he
had first wrapped it in eau-de-cologned cotton-wadding.
Tietjens, on his feet, knew this fellow very well: a fellow who had been
a very bad Society water-colour painter of good family on the mother's
side: hence the cavalry gadgets on his shoulders. Would it then be
good . . . say good taste to explode? He let the sergeant-major do it.
Sergeant-Major Cowley was of the type of N.C.O. who carried weight
because he knew ten times as much about his job as any Staff officer.
The sergeant-major explained that it had been impossible to get off the
draft earlier. The colonel said:
"But surely, sergeant-majah . . ."
The sergeant-major, now a deferential shopwalker in a lady's store,
pointed out that they had had urgent instructions not to send up the
draft without the four hundred Canadian Railway Service men who were to
come from Etaples. These men had only arrived that evening at 5.30 . . .
at the railway station. Marching them up had taken three-quarters of an
hour. The colonel said:
"But surely, sergeant-majah . . ."
Old Cowley might as well have said "madam" as "sir" to the red
hat-band. . . . The four hundred had come with only what they stood up in.
The unit had had to wangle everything: boots, blankets, toothbrushes,
braces, rifles, iron-rations, identity disks out of the depot store. And
it was now only twenty-one twenty. . . . Cowley permitted his commanding
officer at this point to say:
"You must understand that we work in circumstances of extreme
difficulty, sir. . . ."
The graceful colonel was lost in an absent contemplation of his
perfectly elegant knees.
"I know, of course. . . ." he lisped. "Very difficult . . ." He
brightened up to add: "But you must admit you're unfortunate. . . . You
must admit that. . . ." The weight settled, however, again on his mind.
Tietjens said:
"Not, I suppose, sir, any more unfortunate than any other unit working
under a dual control for supplies. . . ."
The colonel said:
"What's that? Dual . . . Ah, I see you're there, Mackenzie. . . .
Feeling well . . . feeling fit, eh?"
The whole hut stood silent. His anger at the waste of time made Tietjens
say:
"If you understand, sir, we are a unit whose principal purpose is
drawing things to equip drafts with. . . ." This fellow was delaying
them atrociously. He was brushing his knees with a handkerchief! "I've
had," Tietjens said, "a man killed on my hands this afternoon because we
have to draw tin-hats for my orderly room from Dublin on an A.F.B.
Canadian from Aldershot. . . . Killed here. . . . We've only just
mopped up the blood from where you're standing. . . ."
The cavalry colonel exclaimed:
"Oh, good gracious me! . . ." jumped a little and examined his
beautiful, shining, knee-high aircraft boots. "Killed! . . . . Here! . . .
But there'll have to be a court of inquiry. . . . You certainly are
_most_ unfortunate, Captain Tietjens. . . . Always these mysterious . . .
Why wasn't your man in a dug-out? . . . Most unfortunate. . . . We
cannot have casualties among the Colonial troops. . . . Troops from the
Dominions, I mean. . . ."
Tietjens said grimly:
"The man was from Pontardulais . . . not from any Dominion. . . . One of
my orderly room. . . . We are forbidden on pain of court martial to let
any but Dominion Expeditionary Force men go into the dugouts. . . . My
Canadians were all there. . . . It's an A.C.I. local of the eleventh of
November. . . ."
The Staff officer said:
"It makes, of course, a difference! . . . Only a Glamorganshire? You
say . . . Oh, well. . . . But these mysterious . . ."
He exclaimed, with the force of an explosion, and the relief:
"Look here . . . can you spare, possibly, ten . . . twenty . . . eh . . .
minutes? . . . It's not exactly a service matter . . . so per . . ."
Tietjens exclaimed:
"You see how we're situated, colonel . . ." and, like one sowing grass
seed on a lawn, extended both hands over his papers and towards his
men. . . . He was choking with rage. Colonel Levin had, under the
chaperonage of an English dowager, who ran a chocolate store down on the
quays in Rouen, a little French piece to whom he was quite seriously
engaged. In the most naïve manner. And the young woman, fantastically
jealous, managed to make endless insults to herself out of her almost too
handsome colonel's barbaric French. It was an idyll, but it drove the
colonel frantic. At such times Levin would consult Tietjens, who passed
for a man of brains and a French scholar as to really nicely turned
compliments in a difficult language. . . . And as to how you explained
that it was necessary for a G.S.O. II, or whatever the colonel was, to
be seen quite frequently in the company of very handsome V.A.D.'s and
female organizers of all arms . . . It was the sort of silliness as to
which no gentleman ought to be consulted. . . . And here was Levin with
the familiar feminine-agonized wrinkle on his bronzed-alabaster brow. . . .
Like a beastly soldier-man out of a revue. Why didn't the ass burst
into gesture and a throaty tenor. . . .
Sergeant-Major Cowley naturally saved the situation. Just as Tietjens
was as near saying _Go to hell_ as you can be to your remarkably senior
officer on parade, the sergeant-major, now a very important solicitor's
most confidential clerk, began whispering to the colonel. . . .
"The captain might as well take a spell as not. . . . We're through with
all the men except the Canadian Railway batch, and they can't be issued
with blankets not for half an hour . . . not for three-quarters. If
then! It depends if our runner can find where Quarter's lance-corporal
is having his supper, to issue them. . . ." The sergeant-major had
inserted that last speech deftly. The Staff officer, with a vague
reminiscence of his regimental days, exclaimed:
"Damn it! . . . I wonder you don't break into the depot blanket store
and take what you want. . . ."
The sergeant-major, becoming Simon Pure, exclaimed:
"Oh, no, sir, we could never do that, sir. . . ."
"But the confounded men are urgently needed in the line," Colonel Levin
said. "Damn it, it's touch and go! . . . We're rushing . . ." He
appreciated the fact again that he was on the gawdy Staff, and that the
sergeant-major and Tietjens, playing like left backs into each other's
hands, had trickily let him in.
"We can only pray, sir," the sergeant-major said, "that these 'ere
bloomin' 'Uns has got quartermasters and depots and issuing departments,
same as ourselves." He lowered his voice into a husky whisper. "Besides,
sir, there's a rumour . . . round the telephone in depot orderly room . . .
that there's a W.O. order at 'Edquarters . . . countermanding this
and other drafts. . . ."
Colonel Levin said: "Oh, my God!" and consternation rushed upon both him
and Tietjens. The frozen ditches, in the night, out there; the agonized
waiting for men; the weight upon the mind like a weight upon the brows;
the imminent sense of approaching unthinkableness on the right or the
left, according as you looked up or down the trench; the solid
protecting earth of the parapet then turns into pierced mist . . . and
no reliefs coming from here. . . . The men up there thinking naïvely
that they were coming, and they not coming. Why not? Good God, why not?
Mackenzie said:
"Poor ---- old Bird . . . His crowd had been in eleven weeks last
Wednesday. . . . About all they could stick. . . ."
"They'll have to stick a damn lot more," Colonel Levin said. "I'd like
to get at some of the brutes. . . ." It was at that date the settled
conviction of His Majesty's Expeditionary Force that the army in the
field was the tool of politicians and civilians. In moments of routine
that cloud dissipated itself lightly: when news of ill omen arrived it
settled down again heavily like a cloud of black gas. You hung your head
impotently. . . .
"So that," the sergeant-major said cheerfully, "the captain could very
well spare half an hour to get his dinner. Or for anything else. . . ."
Apart from the domestic desire that Tietjens' digestion should not
suffer from irregular meals he had the professional conviction that for
his captain to be in intimate private converse with a member of the
gawdy Staff was good for the unit. ... "I suppose, sir," he added
valedictorily to Tietjens, "I'd better arrange to put this draft, and
the nine hundred men that came in this afternoon to replace them, twenty
in a tent. . . . It's lucky we didn't strike them. . . ."
Tietjens and the colonel began to push men out of their way, going
towards the door. The Inniskilling-Canadian, a small open brown book,
extended deprecatingly stood, modestly obtrusive, just beside the
doorpost. Catching avidly at Tietjens' "Eh?" he said:
"You'd got the names of the girls wrong in your copy, sir. It was Gwen
Lewis I had a child by in Aberystwyth that I wanted to have the lease of
the cottage and the ten bob a week. Mrs. Hosier that I lived with in
Berwick St. James, she was only to have five guineas for a soovneer. . . .
I've took the liberty of changing the names back again. . . ."
Tietjens grabbed the book from him, and bending down at the
sergeant-major's table scrawled his signature on the bluish page. He
thrust the book back at the man and said:
"There . . . fall out." The man's face shone. He exclaimed:
"Thank you, sir. Thank you kindly, captain. . . . I wanted to get off
and go to confession. I did bad. . . ." The McGill graduate with his
arrogant black moustache put himself in the way as Tietjens struggled
into his British warm.
"You won't forget, sir, . . ." he began.
Tietjens said:
"Damn you, I've told you I won't forget. I never forget. You instructed
the ignorant Jap in Asaki, but the educational authority is in Tokio.
And your flagitious mineral-water company had their headquarters at the
Tan Sen spring near Kobe. . . . Is that right? Well, I'll do my best for
you."
They walked in silence through the groups of men that hung round the
orderly room door and gleamed in the moonlight. In the broad country
street of the main line of the camp Colonel Levin began to mutter
between his teeth:
"You take enough trouble with your beastly crowd . . . a whole lot of
trouble. . . . Yet . . ."
"Well, what's the matter with us?" Tietjens said. "We get our drafts
ready in thirty-six hours less than any other unit in this command."
"I know you do," the other conceded. "It's only all these mysterious
rows. Now . . ."
Tietjens said quickly:
"Do you mind my asking: Are we still on parade? Is this a strafe from
General Campion as to the way I command my unit?"
The other conceded quite as quickly and much more worriedly:
"God forbid." He added more quickly still: "Old bean!" and prepared to
tuck his wrist under Tietjens' elbow. Tietjens, however, continued to
face the fellow. He was really in a temper.
"Then tell me," he said, "how the deuce you can manage to do without an
overcoat in this weather?" If only he could get the chap off the topics
of his mysterious rows they might drift to the matter that had brought
him up there on that bitter night when he should be sitting over a good
wood fire philandering with Mlle Nanette de Bailly. He sank his neck
deeper into the sheepskin collar of his British warm. The other, slim,
was with all his badges, ribands and mail, shining darkly in a cold that
set all Tietjens' teeth chattering like porcelain. Levin became
momentarily animated:
"You should do as I do. . . . Regular hours . . . lots of exercise . . .
horse exercise. . . . I do P.T. every morning at the open window of my
room . . . hardening. . . ."
"It must be very gratifying for the ladies in the rooms facing yours,"
Tietjens said grimly. "Is that what's the matter with Mlle Nanette,
now? . . . I haven't got time for proper exercise. . . ."
"Good gracious, no," the colonel said. He now tucked his hand firmly
under Tietjens' arm and began to work him towards the left hand of the
road: in the direction leading out of the camp. Tietjens worked their
steps as firmly towards the right and they leant one against the other.
"In fact, old bean," the colonel said, "Campy is working so hard to get
the command of a fighting army--though he's indispensable here--that we
might pack up bag and baggage any day. . . . That is what has made
Nanette see reason. . . ."
"Then what am I doing in this show?" Tietjens asked. But Colonel Levin
continued blissfully:
"In fact I've got her almost practically for certain to promise that
next week . . . or the week after next at latest . . . she'll . . . damn
it, she'll name the happy day."
Tietjens said:
"Good hunting! . . . How splendidly Victorian!" "That's, damn it," the
colonel exclaimed manfully, "what I say myself. . . . Victorian is what
it is. . . . All these marriage settlements. . . . And what is it . . .
_Droits du Seigneur_? . . . And notaires . . . And the Count, having his
say . . . And the Marchioness . . . And two old grand aunts . . . But . . .
Hoopla! . . ." He executed with his gloved right thumb in the
moonlight a rapid pirouette . . . "Next week . . . or at least the week
after . . ." His voice suddenly dropped.
"At least," he wavered, "that was what it was at lunch-time. . . . Since
then . . . something happened. . . ."
"You've not been caught in bed with a V.A.D.?" Tietjens asked.
The colonel mumbled:
"No . . . not in bed. . . . Not with a V.A.D. . . . Oh, damn it, at the
railway station. . . . With . . . The general sent me down to meet
her . . . and Nanny of course was seeing off her grandmother, the
Duchesse . . . The giddy cut she handed me out. . . ."
Tietjens became coldly furious.
"Then it _was_ over one of your beastly imbecile rows with Miss de Bailly
that you got me out here," he exclaimed. "Do you mind going down with me
towards the I.B.D. headquarters? Your final orders may have come in
there. The sappers won't let me have a telephone, so I have to look in
there the last thing. . . ." He felt a yearning towards rooms in huts,
warmed by coke-stoves and electrically lit, with acting lance-corporals
bending over A.F.B.'s on a background of deal pigeon-holes filled with
returns on buff and blue paper. You got quiet and engrossment there. It
was a queer thing: the only place where he, Christopher Tietjens of
Groby, could be absently satisfied was in some orderly room or other.
The only place in the world. . . . And why? It was a queer thing. . . .
But not queer, really. It was a matter of inevitable selection if you
came to think it out. An acting orderly-room lance-corporal was selected
for his penmanship, his power of elementary figuring, his
trustworthiness amongst innumerable figures and messages, his
dependability. For this he differed a hair's breadth in rank from the
rank and file. A hairbreadth that was to him the difference between life
and death. For, if he proved not to be dependable, back he
went--returned to duty! As long as he was dependable he slept under a
table in a warm room, his toilette arrangements and washing in a
bully-beef case near his head, a billy full of tea always stewing for
him on an always burning stove. . . . A paradise! . . . No! Not a
paradise: _the_ paradise of the Other Ranks! . . . He might be awakened at
one in the morning. Miles away the enemy might be beginning a strafe. . . .
He would roll out from among the blankets under the table amongst
the legs of hurrying N.C.O.'s and officers, the telephone going like
hell. . . . He would have to manifold innumerable short orders on buff
slips, on a typewriter. . . . A bore to be awakened at one in the
morning, but not unexciting: the enemy putting up a tremendous barrage
in front of the village of Dranoutre: the whole nineteenth division to
be moved into support along the Bailleul-Nieppe road. In case . . .
Tietjens considered the sleeping army. . . . That country village under
the white moon, all of sackcloth sides, celluloid windows, forty men to
a hut . . . That slumbering Arcadia was one of . . . how many?
Thirty-seven thousand five hundred, say for a million and a half of
men. . . . But there were probably more than a million and a half in that
base. . . . Well, round the slumbering Arcadias were the fringes of
virginly glimmering tents. . . . Fourteen men to a tent. . . . For a
million. . . . Seventy-one thousand four hundred and twenty-one tents
round, say, one hundred and fifty I.B.D.'s, C.B.D.'s, R.E.B.D.'s. . . .
Base depots for infantry, cavalry, sappers, gunners, airmen,
anti-airmen, telephone-men, vets, chiropodists, Royal Army Service Corps
men, Pigeon Service men, Sanitary Service men, Women's Auxiliary Army
Corps women, V.A.D. women--what in the world did V.A.D. stand
for?--canteens, rest-tent attendants, barrack damage superintendents,
parsons, priests, rabbis, Mormon bishops, Brahmins, Lamas, Imams, Fanti
men, no doubt, for African troops. And all really dependent on the
acting orderly-room lance-corporals for their temporal and spiritual
salvation. . . . For, if by a slip of the pen a lance-corporal sent a
Papist priest to an Ulster regiment, the Ulster men would lynch him, and
all go to hell. Or, if by a slip of the tongue at the telephone, or a
slip of the typewriter, he sent a division to Westoutre instead of to
Dranoutre at one in the morning, the six or seven thousand poor devils
in front of Dranoutre might all be massacred and nothing but His
Majesty's Navy could save us. . . .
Yet, in the end, all this tangle was satisfactorily unravelled; the
drafts moved off, unknotting themselves like snakes, coiling out of
inextricable bunches, sliding vertebrately over the mud to dip into
their bowls--the rabbis found Jews dying to whom to administer; the
vets, spavined mules; the V.A.D.'s, men without jaws and shoulders in
C.C.S.'s; the camp-cookers, frozen beef; the chiropodists, ingrowing
toenails; the dentists, decayed molars; the naval howitzers, camouflaged
emplacements in picturesquely wooded dingles. . . . Somehow they got
there--even to the pots of strawberry jam by the ten dozen!
For if the acting lance-corporal, whose life hung by a hair, made a slip
of the pen over a dozen pots of jam, back he went, _Returned to duty_ . . .
back to the frozen rifle, the ground-sheet on the liquid mud, the
desperate suction on the ankle as the foot was advanced, the landscapes
silhouetted with broken church towers, the continual drone of the
planes, the mazes of duckboards in vast plains of slime, the unending
Cockney humour, the great shells labelled _Love to Little Willie_. . . .
Back to the Angel with the Flaming Sword. The wrong side of him! . . . So,
on the whole, things moved satisfactorily. . . .
He was walking Colonel Levin imperiously between the huts towards the
mess quarters, their feet crunching on the freezing gravel, the colonel
hanging back a little; but a mere light-weight and without nails in his
elegant bootsoles, so he had no grip on the ground. He was remarkably
silent. Whatever he wanted to get out he was reluctant to come to. He
brought out, however:
"I wonder you don't apply to be returned to duty . . . to your
battalion. I jolly well should if I were you. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"Why? Because I've had a man killed on me? . . . There must have been a
dozen killed to-night."
"Oh, more, very likely," the other answered. "It was one of our own
planes that was brought down. . . . But it isn't that. . . . Oh, damn
it! . . . Would you mind walking the other way? . . . I've the greatest
respect . . . oh, almost ... for you personally. . . . You're a man of
intellect. . . ."
Tietjens was reflecting on a nice point of military etiquette.
This lisping, ineffectual fellow--he was a very careful Staff officer or
Campion would not have had him about the place!--was given to moulding
himself exactly on his general. Physically, in costume as far as
possible, in voice--for his lisp was not his own so much as an
adaptation of the general's slight stutter--and above all in his
uncompleted sentences and point of view. . . . Now, if he said:
"Look here, colonel . . ." or "Look here, Colonel Levin . . ." or "Look
here, Stanley, my boy . . ." For the one thing an officer may not say to a
superior whatever their intimacy was: "Look here, Levin . . ." If he
said then:
"Look here, Stanley, you're a silly ass. It's all very well for Campion
to say that I am unsound because I've some brains. He's my godfather and
has been saying it to me since I was twelve, and had more brain in my
left heel than he had in the whole of his beautifully barbered skull. . . .
But when you say it you are just a parrot. You did not think that
out for yourself. You do not even think it. You know I'm heavy, short in
the wind, and self-assertive . . . but you know perfectly well that I'm
as good on detail as yourself. And a damned sight more. You've never
caught me tripping over a return. Your sergeant in charge of returns may
have. But not you. . . ."
If Tietjens should say that to this popinjay, would that be going
farther than an officer in charge of detachment should go with a member
of the Staff set above him, though not on parade and in a conversation
of intimacy? Off parade and in intimate conversation all His Majesty's
poor ---- officers are equals . . . gentlemen having His Majesty's
commission: there can be no higher rank and all that Bilge! . . . For
how off parade could this descendant of an old-clo'man from Frankfurt be
the equal of him, Tietjens of Groby? He wasn't his equal in any
way--let alone socially. If Tietjens hit him he would drop dead; if he
addressed a little sneering remark to Levin, the fellow would melt so
that you would see the old spluttering Jew swimming up through his
carefully arranged Gentile features. He couldn't shoot as well as
Tietjens, or ride, or play a hand at auction. Why, damn it, he,
Tietjens, hadn't the least doubt that he could paint better water-colour
pictures. . . . And, as for returns . . . he would undertake to tear the
guts out of half a dozen new and contradictory A.C.I.'s--Army Council
Instructions--and write twelve correct Command Orders founded on them,
before Levin had lisped out the date and serial number of the first
one. . . . He had done it several times up in the room, arranged like a
French blue stocking's salon, where Levin worked at Garrison
headquarters . . . He had written Levin's blessed command orders while
Levin fussed and fumed about their being delayed for tea with Mlle de
Bailly . . . and curled his delicate moustache . . . Mlle de Bailly,
chaperoned by old Lady Sachse, had tea by a clear wood fire in an
eighteenth-century octagonal room, with blue-grey tapestried walls and
powdering closets, out of priceless porcelain cups without handles. Pale
tea that tasted faintly of cinnamon!
Mlle de Bailly was a long, dark, high-coloured Provençale. Not heavy,
but precisely long, slow, and cruel; coiled in a deep arm-chair, saying
the most wounding, slow things to Levin, she resembled a white Persian
cat luxuriating, sticking out a tentative pawful of expanding claws.
With eyes slanting pronouncedly upwards and a very thin hooked nose . . .
Almost Japanese . . . And with a terrific cortège of relatives, swell
in a French way. One brother a chauffeur to a Marshal of France . . . An
aristocratic way of shirking!
With all that, obviously even off parade, you might well be the social
equal of a Staff colonel: but you jolly well had to keep from showing
that you were his superior. Especially intellectually. If you let
yourself show a Staff officer that he _was_ a silly ass--you could say it
as often as you liked as long as you didn't prove it!--you could be
certain that you would be for it before long. And quite properly. It was
not English to be intellectually adroit. Nay, it was positively
un-English. And the duty of field officers is to keep messes as English
as possible. . . . So a Staff officer would take it out of such a
regimental inferior. In a perfectly creditable way. You would never
imagine the hash headquarters warrant officers would make of your
returns. Until you were worried and badgered and in the end either you
were ejected into, or prayed to be transferred to . . . any other
command in the whole service. . . .
And that was beastly. The process, not the effect. On the whole Tietjens
did not care where he was or what he did as long as he kept out of
England, the thought of that country, at night, slumbering across the
Channel, being sentimentally unbearable to him. . . . Still, he was fond
of old Campion, and would rather be in his command than any other. He
had attached to his staff a very decent set of fellows, as decent as you
could be in contact with . . . if you had to be in contact with your
kind. . . . So he just said:
"Look here, Stanley, you are a silly ass," and left it at that, without
demonstrating the truth of the assertion.
The colonel said:
"Why, what have I been doing now? . . . I _wish_ you would walk the other
way. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"No, I can't afford to go out of camp. . . . I've got to come to witness
your fantastic wedding-contract to-morrow afternoon, haven't I? . . . I
can't leave camp twice in one week. . . ."
"You've got to come down to the camp-guard," Levin said. "I hate to keep
a woman waiting in the cold . . . though she _is_ in the general's
car. . . ."
Tietjens exclaimed:
"You've not been . . . oh, extraordinarily enough, to bring Miss de
Bailly out here? To talk to me?"
Colonel Levin mumbled, so low Tietjens almost imagined that he was not
meant to hear:
"It isn't Miss de Bailly!" Then he exclaimed quite aloud: "Damn it all,
Tietjens, haven't you had hints enough? . . ."
For a lunatic moment it went through Tietjens' mind that it must be Miss
Wannop in the general's car, at the gate, down the hill beside the camp
guard-room. But he knew folly when it presented itself to his mind. He
had nevertheless turned and they were going very slowly back along the
broad way between the huts. Levin was certainly in no hurry. The broad
way would come to an end of the hutments; about two acres of slope would
descend blackly before them, white stones to mark a sort of coastguard
track glimmering out of sight beneath a moon gone dark with the frost.
And, down there in the dark forest, at the end of that track, in a
terrific Rolls-Royce, was waiting something of which Levin was certainly
deucedly afraid. . . .
For a minute Tietjens' backbone stiffened. He didn't intend to interfere
between Mlle de Bailly and any married woman Levin had had as a
mistress. . . . Somehow he was convinced that what was in that car was a
married woman. . . . He did not dare to think otherwise. If it was not a
married woman it might be Miss Wannop. If it was, it couldn't be. . . .
An immense waft of calm, sentimental happiness had descended upon him.
Merely because he had imagined her! He imagined her little, fair, rather
pug-nosed face: under a fur cap, he did not know why. Leaning forward
she would be, on the seat of the general's illuminated car: glazed in: a
regular raree show! Peering out, shortsightedly on account of the
reflections on the inside of the glass. . . .
He was saying to Levin:
"Look here, Stanley . . . why I said you are a silly ass is because Miss
de Bailly has one chief luxury. It's exhibiting jealousy. Not feeling
it; exhibiting it."
"_Ought_ you," Levin asked ironically, "to discuss my fiancée before
me? As an English gentleman. Tietjens of Groby and all."
"Why, of course," Tietjens said. He continued feeling happy. "As a sort
of swollen best man, it's my duty to instruct you. Mothers tell their
daughters things before marriage. Best men do it for the innocent
Benedict. . . . And you're always consulting me about the young
woman. . . ."
"I'm not doing it now," Levin grumbled direly.
"Then what, in God's name, are you doing? You've got a cast mistress,
haven't you, down there in old Campion's car? . . ." They were beside
the alley that led down to his orderly room. Knots of men, dim, and
desultory, still half filled it, a little way down.
"I _haven't_," Levin exclaimed almost tearfully. "I never _had_ a
mistress. . . ."
"And you're not married?" Tietjens asked. He used on purpose the
schoolboy's ejaculation "Lummy!" to soften the jibe. "If you'll excuse
me," he said, "I must just go and take a look at my crowd. To see if
your orders have come down."
He found no orders in a hut as full as ever of the dull mists and odours
of khaki, but he found in revenge a fine upstanding, blond,
Canadian-born lance-corporal of old Colonial lineage, with a moving
story as related by Sergeant-Major Cowley:
"This man, sir, of the Canadian Railway lot, 'is mother's just turned up
in the town, come on from Eetarpels. Come all the way from Toronto where
she was bedridden."
Tietjens said:
"Well, what about it? Get a move on."
The man wanted leave to go to his mother who was waiting in a decent
estaminet at the end of the tramline, just outside the camp where the
houses of the town began.
Tietjens said: "It's impossible. It's absolutely impossible. You know
that."
The man stood erect and expressionless; his blue eyes looked
confoundedly honest to Tietjens who was cursing himself. He said to the
man:
"You can see for yourself that it's impossible, can't you?"
The man said slowly:
"Not knowing the regulations in these circumstances I can't say, sir.
But my mother's is a very special case. . . . She's lost two sons
already."
Tietjens said:
"A great many people have. . . . Do you understand, if you went absent
off my pass I might--I quite possibly might--lose my commission? I'm
responsible for you fellows getting up the line."
The man looked down at his feet. Tietjens said to himself that it was
Valentine Wannop doing this to him. He ought to turn the man down at
once. He was pervaded by a sense of her being. It was imbecile. Yet it
was so. He said to the man:
"You said good-bye to your mother, didn't you, in Toronto, before you
left?"
The man said:
"No, sir." He had not seen his mother in seven years. He had been up in
the Chilkoot when war broke out and had not heard of it for ten months.
Then he had at once joined up in British Columbia, and had been sent
straight through for railway work, on to Aldershot where the Canadians
have a camp in building. He had not known that his brothers were killed
till he got there and his mother, being bedridden at the news, had not
been able to get down to Toronto when his batch had passed through. She
lived about sixty miles from Toronto. Now she had risen from her bed
like a miracle and come all the way. A widow: sixty-two years of age.
Very feeble.
It occurred to Tietjens as it occurred to him ten times a day that it
was idiotic of him to figure Valentine Wannop to himself. He had not the
slightest idea where she was: in what circumstances, or even in what
house. He did not suppose she and her mother had stayed on in that
dog-kennel of a place in Bedford Park. They would be fairly comfortable.
His father had left them money. "It is preposterous," he said to
himself, "to persist in figuring a person to yourself when you have no
idea of where they are." He said to the man:
"Wouldn't it do if you saw your mother at the camp gate, by the
guard-room?"
"Not much of a leave-taking, sir," the man said; "she not allowed in the
camp and I not allowed out. Talking under a sentry's nose very likely."
Tietjens said to himself:
"What a monstrous absurdity this is of seeing and talking, for a minute or
so! You meet and talk . . ." And next day at the same hour. Nothing. . . .
As well not to meet or talk. . . . Yet the mere fantastic idea of
seeing Valentine Wannop for a minute. . . . She not allowed in the camp
and he not going out. Talking under a sentry's nose, very likely. . . .
It had made him smell primroses. Primroses, like Miss Wannop. He said to
the sergeant-major:
"What sort of a fellow is this?" Cowley, in openmouthed suspense, gasped
like a fish. Tietjens said:
"I suppose your mother is fairly feeble to stand in the cold?"
"A very decent man, sir," the sergeant-major got out, "one of the best.
No trouble. A perfectly clean conduct sheet. Very good education. A
railway engineer in civil life. . . . Volunteered, of course, sir."
"That's the odd thing," Tietjens said to the man, "that the percentages
of absentees is as great amongst the volunteers as the Derby men or the
compulsorily enlisted. . . . Do you understand what will happen to you
if you miss the draft?"
The man said soberly:
"Yes, sir. Perfectly well."
"You understand that you will be shot? As certainly as that you stand
there. And that you haven't a chance of escape."
He wondered what Valentine Wannop, hot pacifist, would think of him if
she heard him. Yet it was his duty to talk like that: his human, not
merely his military duty. As much his duty as that of a doctor to warn a
man that if he drank of typhoid-contaminated water he would get typhoid.
But people are unreasonable. Valentine too was unreasonable. She would
consider it brutal to speak to a man of the possibility of his being
shot by a firing party. A groan burst from him. At the thought that
there was no sense in bothering about what Valentine Wannop would or
would not think of him. No sense. No sense. No sense. . . .
The man, fortunately, was assuring him that he knew, very soberly, all
about the penalty for going absent off a draft. The sergeant-major,
catching a sound from Tietjens, said with admirable fussiness to the
man:
"There, there! Don't you hear the officer's speaking? Never interrupt an
officer."
"You'll be shot," Tietjens said, "at dawn. . . . Literally at dawn." Why
did they shoot them at dawn? To rub it in that they were never going to
see another sunrise. But they drugged the fellows so that they wouldn't
know the sun if they saw it: all roped in a chair. . . . It was really
the worse for the firing party. He added to the man:
"Don't think I'm insulting you. You appear to be a very decent fellow.
But very decent fellows have gone absent. . . ." He said to the
sergeant-major:
"Give this man a two-hours' pass to go to the . . . whatever's the name
of the estaminet. . . . The draft won't move off for two hours, will
it?" He added to the man: "If you see your draft passing the pub you run
out and fall in. Like mad, you understand. You'd never get another
chance."
There was a mumble like applause and envy of a mate's good luck from a
packed audience that had hung on the lips of simple melodrama . . . an
audience that seemed to be all enlarged eyes, the khaki was so
colourless. . . . They came as near applause as they dared, but there
was no sense in worrying about whether Valentine Wannop would have
applauded or not. . . . And there was no knowing whether the fellow
would not go absent, either. As likely as not there was no mother. A
girl very likely. And very likely the man would desert. . . . The man
looked you straight in the eyes. But a strong passion, like that for
escape--or a girl--will give you control over the muscles of the eyes. A
little thing that, before a strong passion! One would look God in the
face on the day of judgment and lie, in that case.
Because what the devil did he want of Valentine Wannop? Why could he not
stall off the thought of her? He could stall off the thought of his
wife . . . or his not-wife. But Valentine Wannop came wriggling in. At all
hours of the day and night It was an obsession. A madness. . . . What
those fools called "a complex"! . . . Due, no doubt, to something your
nurse had done, or your parents said to you. At birth . . . A strong
passion . . . or no doubt not strong enough. Otherwise he, too, would
have gone absent At any rate, from Sylvia . . . Which he hadn't done.
Which he hadn't done. Or hadn't he? There was no saying. . . .
It was undoubtedly colder in the alley between the huts. A man was
saying: "Hoo . . . Hooo . . . Hoo . . ." A sound like that, and flapping
his arms and hopping . . . "Hand and foot, mark time! . . ." Somebody
ought to fall these poor devils in and give them that to keep their
circulations going. But they might not know the command. . . . It was a
Guards' trick, really. . . . What the devil were these fellows kept
hanging about here for? he asked.
One or two voices said that they did not know. The majority said
gutturally:
"Waiting for our mates, sir. . . ."
"I should have thought you could have waited under cover," Tietjens said
caustically. "But never mind; it's your funeral, if you like it. . . ."
This getting together . . . a strong passion. There was a warmed
recreation-hut for waiting drafts not fifty yards away. . . . But they
stood, teeth chattering and mumbling "Hoo . . . Hooo . . ." rather than
miss thirty seconds of gabble. . . . About what the English
sergeant-major said and about what the officer said and how many dollars
did they give you. . . . And of course about what you answered back. . . .
Or perhaps not that. These Canadian troops were husky, serious
fellows, without the swank of the Cockney or the Lincolnshire
Moonrakers. They wanted, apparently, to learn the rules of war. They
discussed anxiously information that they received in orderly rooms, and
looked at you as if you were expounding the gospels. . . .
But, damn it, he, he himself, would make a pact with Destiny, at that
moment, willingly, to pass thirty months in the frozen circle of hell,
for the chance of thirty seconds in which to tell Valentine Wannop what
he had answered back . . . to Destiny! . . . What was the fellow in the
Inferno who was buried to the neck in ice and begged Dante to clear the
icicles out of his eyelids so that he could see out of them? And Dante
kicked him in the face because he was a Ghibelline. . . . Always a bit
of a swine, Dante. . . . Rather like . . . like whom? . . . Oh, Sylvia
Tietjens. . . . A good hater! . . . He imagined hatred coming to him in
waves from the convent in which Sylvia had immured herself. . . . Gone
into retreat. . . . He imagined she had gone into retreat. She had said
she was going. For the rest of the war. . . . For the duration of
hostilities or life, whichever were the longer. . . . He imagined
Sylvia, coiled up on a convent bed. . . . Hating. . . . Her certainly
glorious hair all round her. . . . Hating. . . . Slowly and coldly. . . .
Like the head of a snake when you examined it. . . . Eyes motionless:
mouth closed tight. . . . Looking away into the distance and hating. . . .
She was presumably in Birkenhead. ... A long way to send your hatred. . . .
Across a country and a sea in an icy night. . .! Over all that
black land and water . . . with the lights out because of air-raids and
U-boats. . . . Well, he did not have to think of Sylvia at the moment.
She was well out of it. . . .
It was certainly getting no warmer as the night drew on. . . . Even that
ass Levin was pacing swiftly up and down in the dusky moon-shadow of the
last hutments that looked over the slope and the vanishing trail of
white stones. . . . In spite of his boasting about not wearing an
overcoat: to catch women's eyes with his pretty Staff gadgets he was
carrying on like a leopard at feeding time. . . .
Tietjens said:
"Sorry to keep you waiting, old man. . . . Or rather your lady. . . .
But there were some men to see to. . . . And, you know . . . 'The
comfort and--what is it?--of the men comes before every--is it
"consideration"?--except the exigencies of actual warfare' . . . My
memory's gone phut these days. . . . And you want me to slide down this
hill and wheeze back again. . . . To see a woman! . . ."
Levin screeched: "Damn you, you ass! It's your wife who's waiting for
you at the bottom there."