Parade's End (47 page)

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 green-grocer’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 pooped 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 Tietjens’ 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. Thorough-bred! 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 ante-room 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 128s 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.