Parade's End (87 page)

There was a stroking on his leg. A gentle, timid stroking! Well, he
ought
to get down: it was setting a bad example. The admirable trenches were perfectly efficiently fitted up with spy-holes. For himself he always disliked them. You thought of a rifle bullet coming smack through them and guided by the telescope into your right eye. Or perhaps you would not have a telescope. Anyhow you wouldn’t know… .

There were still the three wheels, a-tilt, attached to slanting axles, in a haze of disintegrated wire, that, bedewed, made profuse patterns like frost on a window. There was their own apron – a perfect village! – of wire over which he looked. Fairly intact. The Germans had put up some of their own in front of the lost trenches, a quarter of a mile off, over the reposing untidinesses. In between there was a perfect maze: their own of the night before last. How the deuce had it not been
all
mashed to pieces by the last Hun barrage? Yet there were three frosty erections – like fairy sheds, half-way between the two lines. And, suspended in them, as there would have to be, three bundles of rags and what appeared to be a very large, squashed crow. How the devil had that fellow managed to get smashed into that shape? It was improbable. There was also – suspended, too, a tall melodramatic object, the head cast back to the sky. One arm raised in the attitude of, say, a Walter Scott Highland officer waving his men on. Waving a sword that wasn’t there… . That was what wire did for you. Supported you in grotesque attitudes, even in death! The beastly stuff! The men said that was Lieutenant Constantine. It might well be. The night before last he, Tietjens, had looked round at all the officers that were in H.Q. dug-out, come for a last moment conference. He had speculated on which of them would be killed. Ghostly! Well, they had all been killed, and more on to that. But his premonition hadn’t run to thinking that Constantine would get caught up in the wire. But perhaps it was not Constantine. Probably they would never know. The Huns would be where he stood by lunch-time, if the attack of which Brigade H.Q. had warned them came off. But it mightn’t… .

As a final salute to the on the whole not thrilling landscape, he wetted his forefinger by inserting it in his mouth and held it in the air. It was comfortingly chilly on
the
exterior, towards his back. Light airs were going right in the other fellows’ faces. It might be only the dawn wind. But if it stiffened a very little or even held, those blessed Württembergers would never that day get out of their trenches. They couldn’t come without gas. They were probably pretty well weakened, too… . You were not traditionally supposed to think much of Württembergers. Mild, dull creatures they were supposed to be. With funny hats. Good Lord! Traditions were going by the board!

He dropped down into the trench. The rather reddish soil with flakes of flint and little, pinkish nodules of pebbles was a friendly thing to face closely.

That sergeant was saying:

‘You hadn’t ought to do it, sir. Give me the creeps.’ He added rather lachrymosely that they couldn’t do without superior officers
al
together. Odd creatures these Derby N.C.O.s! They tried to get the tone of the old, timeserving N.C.O. They couldn’t; all the same you couldn’t say they weren’t creditable achievements.

Yes, it was friendly, the trench face. And singularly unbellicose. When you looked at it you hardly believed that it was part of this affair… . Friendly! You felt at peace looking at its flints and pebbles. Like being in the butts up above Groby on the moor, waiting for the grouse to come over. The soil was not of course like those butts which were built of turfs… .

He asked, not so much for information, as to get the note of this fellow:

Why? What difference did it make whether there were senior officers or not? Anyone above eighteen would do, wouldn’t they? They would keep on going on. It was a young man’s war!

‘It hasn’t got that comfortable feeling, sir!’ the sergeant expressed it. The young officers were very well for keeping you going through wire and barrages. But when you looked at them you didn’t feel they knew so well what you were doing it for, if he might put it that way.

Tietjens said:

‘Why? What are you doing it for?’

It wanted thirty-two minutes to the crucial moment. He said:

‘Where are those bloody bombs?’

A trench cut in gravel wasn’t, for all its friendly reddish-orange coloration, the ideal trench. Particularly against rifle-fire. There were rifts, presumably alongside flakes of flint that a rifle-bullet would get along. Still, the chances against a hit by a rifle-bullet were eighty thousand-to-one in a deep gravel trench like that. And he had had poor Jimmy Johns killed beside him by a bullet like that. So that gave him, say 140,000 chances-to-one against. He wished his mind would not go on and on figuring. It did it whilst you weren’t looking. As a well-trained dog will do when you tell it to stay in one part of a room and it prefers another. It prefers to do figuring. Creeps from the rug by the door to the hearth-rug, its eyes on your unconscious face… . That was what your mind was like. Like a dog!

The sergeant said:

‘They do say the first consignment of bombs was ’it ’n smashed. Hin a gully; well behind the line.’ Another was coming down.

‘Then you’d better whistle,’ Tietjens said ‘Whistle for all you’re worth.’

The sergeant said:

‘Fer a wind, sir? Keep the ’Uns’ beck, sir?’

Looking up at the whitewash cockscomb Tietjens lectured the sergeant on Gas. He always
had
said, and he said now, that the Germans had ruined themselves with their gas.

He went on lecturing that sergeant on gas… . He considered his mind: it was alarming him. All through the war he had had one dread – that a wound, the physical shock of a wound, would cause his mind to fail. He was going to be hit behind the collar-bone. He could feel the spot; not itching, but the blood pulsing just a little warmer. Just as you can become conscious of the end of your nose if you think about it!

The sergeant said that ’e wished ’e could
feel
the Germans ’ad ruined theirselves: they seemed to be drivin’ us into the Channel. Tietjens gave his reasons. They were driving us. But not fast enough. Not fast enough. It was a race between our disappearance and their endurance. They had been hung up yesterday by the wind, they were as like as not going to be held up to-day… . They were not going fast enough. They could not keep it up.

The sergeant said ’e wished, sir, you’d tell the men that. That was what the men ought to be told; not the stuff that was hin Divisional Comic Cuts and the ’ome pipers… .

A key-bugle of singular sweetness – at least Tietjens supposed it to be a key-bugle, for he knew the identities of practically no wind-instruments; it was certainly not a cavalry bugle, for there were no cavalry and even no Army Service Corps at all near – a bugle, then, of astounding sweetness made some remarks to the cool, wet dawn. It induced an astonishingly melting mood. He remarked:

‘Do you mean to say, then, that your men, Sergeant, are really damned heroes? I suppose they are!’

He said ‘your men’, instead of ‘our’ or even ‘the’ men, because he had been till the day before yesterday merely the second-in-command – and was likely to be to-morrow again merely the perfectly inactive second-in-command of what was called a rag-time collection that was astonishingly a clique and mutely combined to regard him as an outsider. So he really regarded himself as rather a spectator; as if a railway passenger had taken charge of a locomotive whilst the engine-driver had gone to have a drink.

The sergeant flushed with pleasure. Hit was, he said, good to ’ave prise from Regular officers. Tietjens said that he was not a Regular.

The sergeant stammered:

‘
Hain’t
you, sir, a Ranker? The men all thinks you are a promoted ranker.’

No, Tietjens said, he was not a promoted Ranker. He added, after consideration, that he was a militiaman. The men would have, by the will of chance, to put up with his leadership for at least that day. They might as well feel as good about it as they could – as settled in their stomachs! It certainly made a difference that the men should feel assured about their officers; what exact difference there was no knowing. This crowd was not going to get any satisfaction out of being led by a ‘gentleman’. They did not know what a gentleman was: a quite un-feudal crowd. Mostly Derby men. Small drapers, rate-collectors’ clerks, gas-inspectors. There were even three music-hall performers, two scene shifters and several milkmen.

It was another tradition that was gone. Still, they desired the companionship of elder, heavier men who
had
certain knowledges. A militiaman probably filled the bill! Well, he was that, officially!

He glanced aside and upwards at the whitewash cockscomb. He regarded it carefully and with amusement. He knew what it was that had made his mind take the particular turn it had insisted on taking… . The picks going in the dark under the H.Q. dug-out in the Cassenoisette section. The men called it Crackerjack.

He had been all his life familiar with the idea of picks going in the dark, underground. There is no North Country man who is not. All through that country, if you awake at night you hear the sound, and always it appears supernatural. You know it is the miners, at the pit-face, hundreds and hundreds of feet down.

But just because it was familiar, it was familiarly rather dreadful. Haunting. And the silence had come at a bad moment. After a perfect hell of noise; after so much of noise that he had been forced to ascend the slippery clay stairs of the dug-out… . And heaven knew if there was one thing that on account of his heavy-breathing chest he loathed, it was slippery clay … he had been forced to pant up those slippery stairs… . His chest had been much worse, then … two months ago!

Curiosity had forced him up. And no doubt FEAR. The large battle fear; not the constant little, haunting misgivings. God knew! Curiosity or fear. In terrific noise; noise like the rushing up of innumerable noises determined not to be late, whilst the earth rocks or bumps or quakes or protests, you cannot be very coherent about your thoughts. So it might have been cool curiosity or it might have been sheer panic at the thought of being buried alive in that dug-out, its mouth sealed up. Anyhow, he had gone up from the dug-out where in his capacity of second-in-command, detested as an interloper by his C.O., he had sat ignominiously in that idleness of the second-in-command that it is in the power of the C.O. to inflict. He was to sit there till the C.O. dropped dead: then, however much the C.O. might detest him, to step into his shoes. Nothing the C.O. could do could stop that. In the meantime, as long as the C.O. existed, the second-in-command must be idle; he would be given nothing to do. For fear he got kudos!

Tietjens flattered himself that he cared nothing about kudos. He was still Tietjens of Groby; no man could give him anything, no man could take anything from him. He flattered himself that he in no way feared death, pain, dishonour, the afterdeath, feared very little disease – except for choking sensations! … But his Colonel got in on him.

He had no disagreeable feelings, thinking of the Colonel. A good boy, as boys go; perfectly warranted in hating his second-in-command… . There are positions like that! But the fellow got in on him. He shut him up in that reeling cellar. And, of course, you might lose control of your mind in a reeling cellar where you cannot hear your thoughts. If you cannot hear your thoughts how the hell are you going to tell what your thoughts are doing?

You couldn’t hear. There was an orderly with fever or shell-shock or something – a rather favourite orderly of the orderly room – asleep on a pile of rugs. Earlier in the night Orderly Room had asked permission to dump the boy in there because he was making such a beastly row in his sleep that they could not hear themselves speak and they had a lot of paperwork to do. They could not tell what had happened to the boy, whom they liked. The acting sergeant-major thought he must have got at some methylated spirits.

Immediately, that
strafe
had begun. The boy had lain, his face to the light of the lamp, on his pile of rugs – army blankets, that is to say… . A very blond boy’s face, contorted in the strong light, shrieking – positively shrieking obscenities at the flame. But with his eyes shut. And two minutes after that
strafe
had begun you could see his lips move, that was all.

Well, he, Tietjens, had gone up. Curiosity or fear? In the trench you could see nothing and noise rushed like black angels gone mad; solid noise that swept you off your feet… . Swept your brain off its feet. Something else took control of it. You became second-in-command of your own soul. Waiting for its C.O. to be squashed flat by the direct hit of a four point two before you got control again.

There was nothing to see; mad lights whirled over the black heavens. He moved along the mud of the trench. It amazed him to find that it was raining. In torrents. You
imagined
that the heavenly powers in decency suspended their activities at such moments. But there was positively lightning. They didn’t! A Verey light or something extinguished
that
– not very efficient lightning, really. Just at that moment he fell on his nose at an angle of forty-five degrees against some squashed earth where, as he remembered, the parapet had been revetted. The trench had been squashed in, level with the outside ground. A pair of boots emerged from the pile of mud. How the deuce did the fellow get into that position?

Broadside on to the hostilities in progress! … But, naturally, he had been running along the trench when that stuff buried him. Clean buried, anyhow. The obliging Verey light showed to Tietjens, just level with his left hand, a number of small smoking fragments. The white smoke ran level with the ground in a stiff breeze. Other little patches of smoke added themselves quickly. The Verey light went out. Things were coming over. Something hit his foot; the heel of his boot. Not unpleasantly, a smarting feeling as if his sole had been slapped.

It suggested itself to him, under all the noise, that there being no parapet there… . He got back into the trench towards the dug-out, skating in the sticky mud. The duckboards were completely sunk in it. In the whole affair it was the slippery mud he hated most. Again a Verey light obliged, but the trench being deep there was nothing to see except the backside of a man. Tietjens said: