Parade's End (100 page)

The lance-corporal was deft… . He set the coffee tin, cup, and towel on a flat stone that stuck out of that heap;
the
towel unfolded, served as a table-cloth; there appeared three heaps of ethereal sandwiches. He said he had eaten half a tin of warm mutton and haricot beans, whilst he was cutting the sandwiches. The meat in the sandwiches consisted of
foie gras
, that pile: bully beef reduced to a paste with butter that was margarine, anchovy paste out of a tin and minced onion out of pickles; the third pile was bully beef
nature
-seasoned with Worcester sauce… . All the materials he had at disposal!

Tietjens smiled on the boy at his work. He said this must be a regular
chef
. The boy said:

‘Not a
chef
, yet, sir!’ He had a camp stool hung on his trenching tool behind his hip. He had been chief assistant to one of the chief cooks in the Savoy. He had been going to go to Paris. ‘What you call a
marmiton
, sir!’ he said. With his trenching tool he was scooping out a level place in front of the flat rock. He set the camp stool on the flattened platform.

Tietjens said:

‘You used to wear a white cap and white overalls?’

He liked to think of the blond boy resembling Valentine Wannop dressed all in slim white. The lance-corporal said:

‘It’s different now, sir!’ He stood at Tietjens’ side, always caressing his instep. He regarded cooking as an Art. He would have preferred to be a painter, but Mother hadn’t enough money. The source of supply dried up during the War… . If the C.O. would say a word for him after the War … He understood it was going to be difficult to get jobs after the War. All the blighters who had got out of serving, all the R.A.S.C., all the Lines of Communication men would get first chance. As the saying was, the further from the Line the better the pay. And the chance, too!

Tietjens said:

‘Certainly I shall recommend you. You’ll get a job all right. I shall never forget your sandwiches.’ He would never forget the keen, clean flavour of the sandwiches or the warm generosity of the sweet, berummed coffee! In the blue air of that April hillside. All the objects on that white towel were defined, with iridescent edges. The boy’s face, too! Perhaps not physically iridescent. His breath, too, was very easy. Pure air! He was going to write to
Valentine
Wannop: ‘Hold yourself at my disposal. Please. Signed …’ Reprehensible! Worse than reprehensible! You do not seduce the child of your father’s oldest friend. He said:

‘I shall find it difficult enough to get a job after the War!’

Not only to seduce the young woman, but to invite her to live a remarkably precarious life with him. It isn’t done!

The lance-corporal said:

‘Oh, sir; no, sir! … You’re Mr. Tietjens, of Groby!’

He had often been to Groby of a Sunday afternoon. His mother was a Middlesbrough woman. Southbank, rather. He had been to the Grammar School and was going to Durham University when … Supplies stopped. On the eight nine fourteen… .

They oughtn’t to put North Riding, Yorkshire, boys in Welsh-traditioned units. It was wrong. But for that he would not have run against this boy of disagreeable reminiscences.

‘They say,’ the boy said, ‘that the well at Groby is three hundred and twenty feet deep, and the cedar at the corner of the house a hundred and sixty. The depth of the well twice the height of the tree!’ He had often dropped stones down the well and listened: they made an astonishingly loud noise. Long: like echoes gone mad! His mother knew the cook at Groby. Mrs. Harmsworth. He had often seen … he rubbed his ankles more furiously, in a paroxysm … Mr. Tietjens, the father, and him, and Mr. Mark and Mr. John and Miss Eleanor. He once handed Miss Eleanor her riding crop when she dropped it… .

Tietjens was never going to live at Groby. No more feudal atmosphere! He was going to live, he figured, in a four-room attic flat, on the top of one of the Inns of Court. With Valentine Wannop.
Because
of Valentine Wannop!

He said to the boy:

‘Those German shells seem to be coming back. Go and request Captain Gibbs as soon as they get near to take his fatigues under cover until they have passed.’

He wanted to be alone with Heaven… . He drank his last cup of warm, sweetened coffee, laced with rum… . He drew a deep breath. Fancy drawing a deep breath of
satisfaction
after a deep draft of warm coffee, sweetened with condensed milk and laced with rum! … Reprehensible! Gastronomically reprehensible! … What would they say at the Club? … Well, he was never going to be at the Club! The Club claret was to be regretted! Admirable claret. And the cold side-board!

But, for the matter of that, fancy drawing deep breaths of satisfaction over the mere fact of lying in command of a battalion! – on a slope, in the clear air, with twenty thousand – two myriad! – corks making noises overhead and the German guns directing their projectiles so that they were slowly approaching! Fancy!

They were, presumably, trying out their new Austrian gun. Methodically, with an infinite thoroughness. If, that is to say, there really was a new Austrian gun. Perhaps there wasn’t. Division had been in a great state of excitement over such a weapon. It stood in Orders that everyone was to try to obtain every kind of information about it, and it was said to throw a projectile of a remarkable, high explosive efficiency. So Gibbs had jumped to the conclusion that the thing that had knocked to pieces his projected machine-gun emplacement had been the new gun. In that case they were trying it out very thoroughly.

The actual report of the gun or guns – they fired every three minutes, so that might mean that there was only one and that it took about three minutes to re-load – was very loud and rather high in tone. He had not yet heard the actual noise made by the projectile, but the reports from a distance had been singularly dulled. When, presumably, the projectile had effected its landing, it bored extraordinarily into the ground and then exploded with a time-fuse. Very likely it would not be very dangerous to life, but, if they had enough of the guns and the H.E. to plaster the things all along the Line, and if the projectiles worked as efficiently as they had done on poor Gibbs’ trench, there would be an end of trench-warfare on the Allied side. But, of course, they probably had not either enough guns or enough high explosive and the thing would very likely act less efficiently in other sorts of soils. They were very likely trying that out. Or, if they were firing with only one gun they might be trying how many rounds could be fired before the gun became ineffective.
Or
they might be trying only the attrition game: smashing up the trenches, which was always useful, and then sniping the men who tried to repair them. You could bag a few men in that way, now and then. Or, naturally, with planes… . There was no end to these tiresome alternatives! Presumably, again, our planes might stop that gun or battery. Then it would stop!

Reprehensible! … He snorted! If you don’t obey the rules of your club you get hoofed out, and that’s that! If you retire from the post of Second-in-Command of Groby, you don’t have to … oh, attend battalion parades! He had refused to take any money from Brother Mark on the ground of a fantastic quarrel. But he had not any quarrel with Brother Mark. The sardonic pair of them were just matching obstinacies. On the other hand you had to set to the tenantry an example of chastity, sobriety, probity, or you could not take their beastly money. You provided them with the best Canadian seed corn; with agricultural experiments suited to their soils; you sat on the head of your agent; you kept their buildings in repair; you apprenticed their sons; you looked after their daughters, when they got into trouble and after their bastards, your own or another man’s. But you must reside on the estate.
You must reside on the estate
. The money that comes out of those poor devils’ pockets must go back into the land so that the estate and all on it, down to the licensed beggars, may grow richer and richer and richer. So he had invented his fantastic quarrel with Brother Mark; because he was going to take Valentine to live with him. You could not have a Valentine Wannop having with you in a Groby the infinite and necessary communings. You could have a painted doxy from the servants’ hall, quarrelling with the other maids, who would want her job, and scandalising the parsons for miles round. In their sardonic way the tenants appreciated that: it was in the tradition and all over the Riding they did it themselves. But not a lady, the daughter of your father’s best friend! They wanted Quality women to
be
Quality and they themselves would go to ruin, spend their ‘dung and seed’ money on whores and wreck the fortunes of the Estate, sooner than that you should indulge in infinite conversation… . So he hadn’t taken a penny of their money from his brother, and he wouldn’t take a
penny
when he in turn became Groby. Fortunately, there was the heir… . Otherwise he could not have gone with that girl!

Two pangs went through him. His son had never written to him; the girl might have married a War Office clerk! On the re-bound! That was what it would be: a civilian War Office clerk would be the most exact contrast to himself! … But the son’s letters would have been stopped by the mother. That was what they did to people who were where
he
was. As the C.O. had said! And Valentine Wannop, who had listened to his conversation, would never want to mingle intimately in another’s! Their communion was immutable and not to be shaken!

So he was going to write to her: freckled, downright, standing square on feet rather widely planted apart, just ready to say: ‘Oh,
chuck
it, Edith Ethel!’ She made the sunlight!

Or no, by Heavens, he could not write to her! If he stopped one or went dotty… . Wouldn’t it make it infinitely worse for her to know that his love for her had been profound and immutable? It would make it far worse, for by now the edges of passion had probably worn less painful. Or there was the chance of it! … But impenitently he would go on willing her to submit to his will; through mounds thrown up by Austrian projectiles and across the seas. They would do what they wanted and take what they got for it!

He reclined, on his right shoulder, feeling like some immense and absurd statue: a collection of meal-sacks done in mud, with grotesque shorts revealing his muddy knees… . The figure on one of Michelangelo’s Medici tombs. Or perhaps his
Adam
… He felt the earth move a little beneath him. The last projectile must have been pretty near. He would not have noticed the sound, it had become such a regular sequence. But he noticed the quiver in the earth… .

Reprehensible! He said. For God’s sake
let
us be reprehensible! And have done with it! We aren’t Hun strategists for ever balancing pros and cons of militant morality!

He took, with his left hand, the cup from the rock. Little Aranjuez came round the mound. Tietjens threw
the
cup downhill at a large bit of rock. He said to Aranjuez’s wistful, enquiring eyes:

‘So that no toast more ignoble may ever be drunk out of it!’

The boy gasped and flushed:

‘Then you’ve got someone that you love, sir!’ he said in his tone of hero-worship. ‘Is she like Nancy, in Bailleul?’

Tietjens said:

‘No, not like Nancy… . Or, perhaps, yes, a little like Nancy!’ He did not want to hurt the boy’s feelings by the suggestion that anyone unlike Nancy could be loved. He felt a premonition that that child was going to be hurt. Or, perhaps, it was only that he was already so suffering.

The boy said:

‘Then you’ll get her, sir. You’ll certainly get her!’

‘Yes, I shall probably get her!’ Tietjens said.

The lance-corporal came, too, round the mound. He said that ‘A’ Company were all under cover. They went all together round the heap in the direction of ‘B’ Company’s trench down into which they slid. It descended sharply. It was certainly wet. It ended practically in a little swamp. The next battalion had even some yards of sandbag parapet before entering the slope again with its trench. This was Flanders. Duck country. The bit of swamp would make personal keeping in communication difficult. Where Tietjens had put in his tile-siphons a great deal of water had exuded. The young O.C. Company said that they had had to bale the trench out, until they had made a little drain down into the bog. They baled out with shovels. Two of the shovels still stood against the brushwood revetments of the parapet.

‘Well, you should not leave your shovels about!’ Tietjens shouted. He was feeling considerable satisfaction at the working of his siphon. In the meantime we had begun a considerable artillery demonstration. It became overwhelming. There was some sort of Bloody Mary somewhere a few yards off, or so it seemed. She pooped off. The planes had perhaps reported the position of the Austrian gun. Or we might be
strafing
their trenches to make them shut up that weapon. It was like being a dwarf at a conversation, a conflict – of mastodons. There
was
so much noise it seemed to grow dark. It was a mental darkness. You could not think. A Dark Age! The earth moved.

He was looking at Aranjuez from a considerable height. He was enjoying a considerable view. Aranjuez’s face had a rapt expression – like that of a man composing poetry. Long dollops of liquid mud surrounded them in the air. Like black pancakes being tossed. He thought: ‘Thank God I did not write to her. We are being blown up!’ The earth turned like a weary hippopotamus. It settled down slowly over the face of Lance-Corporal Duckett who lay on his side, and went on in a slow wave.

It was slow, slow, slow … like a slowed-down movie. The earth manœuvred for an infinite time. He remained suspended in space. As if he were suspended as he had wanted to be in front of that cockscomb in whitewash. Coincidence!

The earth sucked slowly and composedly at his feet.

It assimilated his calves, his thighs. It imprisoned him above the waist. His arms being free, he resembled a man in a life-buoy. The earth moved him slowly. It was solidish.

Below him, down a mound, the face of little Aranjuez, brown, with immense black eyes in bluish whites, looked at him. Out of viscous mud. A head on a charger! He could see the imploring lips form the words: ‘Save me, Captain!’ He said: ‘I’ve got to save myself first!’ He could not hear his own words. The noise was incredible.