Parade's End (52 page)

‘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 agonised 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 door-post. 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 Tokyo. And your flagitious mineral-water company had their head-quarters 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 lunchtime. 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 hair’s breadth 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 sack-cloth 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 boot-soles, 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… .’