Parade's End (50 page)

‘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 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

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 a shock
. The mind was then too sensitised. Subjects of shock require to be thought all round. If your mind thinks when it is too sensitised 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 apologising 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 AI 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 discs – 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. ante-room 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 struments 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 blond, 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 Tokyo 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!’