Parade's End (88 page)

‘If he’s wounded … Even if he’s dead one ought to pull him down… . And get the Victoria Cross!’

The figure slid down into the trench. Speedily, with drill-movements, engrossed, it crammed two clips of cartridges into a rifle correctly held at the loading angle. In a rift of the noise, like a crack in the wall of a house, it remarked:

‘Can’t reload lying up there, sir. Mud gets into your magazine.’ He became again merely the sitting portion of a man, presenting to view the only part of him that was not caked with mud. The Verey light faded. Another reinforced the blinking effect. From just overhead.

Round the next traverse after the mouth of their dug-out a rapt face of a tiny subaltern, gazing upwards at a Verey illumination, with an elbow on an inequality of the trench and the forearm pointing upwards suggested – the
rapt
face suggested The Soul’s Awakening! … In another rift in the sound the voice of the tiny subaltern stated that he had to economise the Verey cartridges. The battalion was very short. At the same time it was difficult to time them so as to keep the lights going… . This seemed fantastic! The Huns were just coming over.

With the finger of his upward pointing hand the tiny subaltern pulled the trigger of his upward pointing pistol. A second later more brilliant illumination descended from above. The subaltern pointed the clumsy pistol to the ground in the considerable physical effort – for such a tiny person! – to reload the large implement. A very gallant child – name of Aranjuez. Maltese, or Portuguese, or Levantine – in origin.

The pointing of the pistol downwards revealed that he had practically coiled around his little feet, a collection of tubular, dead, khaki limbs. It didn’t need any rift in the sound to make you understand that his loader had been killed on him… . By signs and removing his pistol from his grasp Tietjens made the subaltern – he was only two days out from England – understand that he had better go and get a drink and some bearers for the man who might not be dead.

He was, however. When they removed him a little to make room for Tietjens’ immensely larger boots his arms just flopped in the mud, the tin hat that covered the face, to the sky. Like a lay figure, but a little less stiff. Not yet cold.

Tietjens became like a solitary statue of the Bard of Avon, the shelf for his elbow being rather low. Noise increased. The orchestra was bringing in
all
the brass,
all
the strings,
all
the wood-wind, all the percussion instruments. The performers threw about biscuit tins filled with horse-shoes; they emptied sacks of coal on cracked gongs, they threw down forty-storey iron houses. It was comic to the extent that an operatic orchestra’s crescendo is comic. Crescendo! … Crescendo!
CRRRRRESC
… . The Hero
must
be coming! He didn’t!

Still like Shakespeare contemplating the creation of, say, Cordelia, Tietjens leaned against his shelf. From time to time he pulled the trigger of the horse-pistol; from time to time he rested the butt on his ledge and rammed a charge home. When one jammed he took another. He found himself keeping up a fairly steady illumination.

The Hero arrived. Naturally, he was a Hun. He came over, all legs and arms going, like a catamount; struck the face of the parados, fell into the trench on the dead body, with his hands to his eyes, sprang up again and danced. With heavy deliberation Tietjens drew his great trench-knife rather than his revolver. Why? The butcher instinct? Or trying to think himself with the Exmoor stag-hounds. The man’s shoulders had come heavily on him as he had rebounded from the parados-face. He felt outraged. Watching that performing Hun he held the knife pointed and tried to think of the German for
Hands Up
. He imagined it to be
Hoch die Haende!
He looked for a nice spot in the Hun’s side.

His excursion into a foreign tongue proved supererogatory. The German threw his arm abroad, his – considerably mashed! – face to the sky.

Always dramatic, Cousin Fritz! Too dramatic, really.

He fell, crumbling, into his untidy boots. Nasty boots, all crumpled too, up the calves! But he didn’t say
Hoch der Kaiser
, or
Deutschland über alles
, or anything valedictory.

Tietjens fired another light upwards and filled in another charge, then, down on his hams in the mud he squatted over the German’s head, the fingers of both hands under the head. He could feel the great groans thrill his fingers. He let go and felt tentatively for his brandy flask.

But there was a muddy group round the traverse end. The noise reduced itself to half. It was bearers for the corpse. And the absurdly wee Aranjuez and a new loader… . In those days they had not been so short of men! Shouts were coming along the trench. No doubt other Huns were in.

Noise reduced itself to a third. A bumpy diminuendo. Bumpy! Sacks of coal continued to fall down the stairs with a regular cadence; more irregularly, Bloody Mary, who was just behind the trench, or seemed like it, shook the whole house as you might say and there were other naval howitzers or something, somewhere.

Tietjens said to the bearers:

‘Take the Hun first. He’s alive. Our man’s dead.’ He was quite remarkably dead. He hadn’t, Tietjens had observed, when he bent over the German, really got what you might call a head, though there was something in its place. What had done that?

Aranjuez, taking his place beside the trench-face, said:

‘Damn cool you were, sir. Damn cool. I never saw a knife drawn so slow!’ They had watched the Hun do the
danse du ventre
! The poor beggar had had rifles and the young feller’s revolver turned on him all the time. They would probably have shot him some more but for the fear of hitting Tietjens. Half a dozen Germans had jumped into that sector of trenches in various places. As mad as March hares! … That fellow had been shot through both eyes, a fact that seemed to fill the little Aranjuez with singular horror. He said he would go mad if he thought he would be blinded, because there was a girl in the tea-shop at Bailleul, and a fellow called Spofforth of the Wiltshires would get her if his, Aranjuez’s, beauty was spoiled. He positively whimpered at the thought and then gave the information that this was considered to be a false alarm, he meant a feigned attack to draw off troops from somewhere else where the real attempt was being made. There must be pretty good hell going on somewhere else, then.

It looked like that. For almost immediately all the guns had fallen silent except for one or two that bumped and grumped… . It had all been just for fun, then!

Well, they were damn near Bailleul now. They would be driven past it in a day or two. On the way to the Channel. Aranjuez would have to hurry to see his girl. The little devil! He had overdrawn his confounded little account over his girl, and Tietjens had had to guarantee his overdraft – which he could not afford to do. Now the little wretch would probably overdraw still more – and Tietjens would have to guarantee still more of an overdraft.

But that night, when Tietjens had gone down into the black silence of his own particular branch of a cellar – they really had been in wine-cellars at that date, cellars stretching for hundreds of yards under chalk with strata of clay which made the mud so particularly sticky and offensive – he had found the sound of the pick-axes beneath his flea-bag almost unbearable. They were probably our own men. Obviously they were our own men. But it had not made much difference, for, of course, if they were there they would be an attraction, and the Germans might just as well be below them, countermining.

His nerves had been put in a bad way by that rotten
strafe
– that had been just for fun. He knew his nerves were in a bad way because he had a ghostly visit from O Nine Morgan, a fellow whose head had been smashed, as it were, on his, Tietjens’, own hands, just after Tietjens had refused him home leave to go and get killed by a prizefighter who had taken up with his, O Nine Morgan’s, wife. It was complicated, but Tietjens wished that fellows who wished to fall on him when they were stopping things would choose to stop things with something else than their heads. That wretched Hun dropping on his shoulder, when, by the laws of war, he ought to have been running back to his own lines, had given him a jar that still shook his whole body. And, of course, a shock. The fellow had looked something positively Apocalyptic, his whitey-grey arms and legs spread abroad… . And it had been an imbecile affair, with no basis of real fighting… .

That thin surge of whitey-grey objects of whom not more than a dozen had reached the line – Tietjens knew that, because, with a melodramatically drawn revolver and the fellows who would have been really better employed carrying away the unfortunate Hun who had had in consequence to wait half an hour before being attended to – with those fellows loaded up with Mills bombs like people carrying pears, he had dodged, revolver first, round half a dozen traverses, and in quite enough of remains of gas to make his lungs unpleasant… . Like a child playing a game of ‘I spy!’ Just like that… . But only to come on several lots of Tommies standing round unfortunate objects who were either trembling with fear and wet and sweat, or panting with their nice little run.

This surge then of whitey-grey objects, sacrificed for fun, was intended … was intended ulti … ultim … then …

A voice, just under his camp-bed, said:

‘
Bringt dem Hauptmann eine Kerze
… .’ As who should say: ‘Bring a candle for the Captain… .’ Just like that! A dream!

It hadn’t been as considerable a shock as you might have thought to a man just dozing off. Not really as bad as the falling dream, but quite as awakening… . His mind had resumed that sentence.

The handful of Germans who had reached the trench had been sacrificed for the stupid sort of fun called
Strategy,
probably. Stupid! … It was, of course, just like German spooks to go mining by candle-light. Obsoletely Nibelungen-like. Dwarfs probably! … They had sent over that thin waft of men under a blessed lot of barrage and stuff… . A lot! A
whole
lot! It had been really quite an artillery
strafe
. Ten thousand shells as like as not. Then, somewhere up the line they had probably made a demonstration in force.
Great
bodies of men, an immense surge. And twenty to thirty thousand shells. Very likely some miles of esplanade, as it were, with the sea battering against it. And only a demonstration in force… .

It could not be real fighting. They had not been ready for their spring advance.

It had been meant to impress somebody imbecile… . Somebody imbecile in Wallachia, or Sofia, or Asia Minor. Or Whitehall, very likely. Or the White House! … Perhaps they had killed a lot of Yankees – to make themselves Trans-Atlantically popular. There were no doubt, by then, whole American Army Corps in the line somewhere. By then! Poor devils, coming so late into such an accentuated hell. Damnably accentuated… . The sound of even that little bit of fun had been portentously more awful than even quite a big show say in ’15. It was better to have been in then and got used to it… . If it hadn’t broken you, just by duration …

Might be to impress anybody… . But, who was going to be impressed? Of course, our legislators with the stewed-pear brains running about the ignoble corridors with coke-brise floors and mahogany doors … might be impressed… . You must not rhyme! … Or, of course, our own legislators might have been trying a nice little demonstration in force, equally idiotic somewhere else, to impress someone just as unlikely to be impressed… . This, then, would be the answer! But no one ever would be impressed again. We all had each other’s measures. So it was just wearisome… .

It was remarkably quiet in that thick darkness. Down below, the picks continued their sinister confidences in each other’s ears… . It was really like that. Like children in the corner of a schoolroom whispering nasty comments about their masters, one to the other… . Girls, for choice… . Chop, chop, chop, a pick whispered. Chop? another asked in an undertone. The first said Chopchopchop.
Then
Chup
… . And a silence of irregular duration… . Like what happens when you listen to typewriting and the young woman has to stop to put in another page… .

Nice young women with typewriters in Whitehall had very likely taken from dictation, on hot-pressed, square sheets with embossed royal arms, the plan for that very
strafe
… . Because, obviously it might have been dictated from Whitehall almost as directly as from Unter den Linden. We might have been making a demonstration in force on the Dwolologda in order to get the Huns to make a counter-demonstration in Flanders. Hoping poor old Puffles would get it in the neck. For they were trying still to smash poor old General Puffles and stop the single command… . They might very well be hoping that our losses through the counter-demonstration would be so heavy that the country would cry out for the evacuation of the Western Front… . If they could get half a million of us killed perhaps the country might … They, no doubt, thought it worth trying. But it was wearisome: those fellows in Whitehall never learned. Any more than Brother Boche… .

Nice to be in poor old Puffles’ army. Nice but wearisome… . Nice girls with typewriters in well-ventilated offices. Did they still put paper cuffs on to keep their sleeves from ink? He would ask Valen … Valen … It was warm and still… . On such a night …

‘
Bringt dem Hauptmann eine Kerze!
’ A voice from under his camp bed! He imagined that the Hauptmann spark must be myopic; short-sightedly examining a tamping fuse… . If they used tamping fuses or if that was what they called them in the army!

He could not see the face or the spectacles of the Hauptmann any more than he could see the faces of his men. Not through his flea-bag and shins! They were packed in the tunnel; whitish-grey, tubular agglomerations… . Large! Like the maggots that are eaten by Australian natives… . Fear possessed him!

He sat up in his flea-bag, dripping with icy sweat.

‘By Jove, I’m for it!’ he said. He imagined that his brain was going; he was mad and seeing himself go mad. He cast about in his mind for some subject about which to think so that he could prove to himself that he had not gone mad.