Parade's End (94 page)

McKechnie plunged at once into the story of the sonnet. The lance-corporal had, of course, a large number of papers for Tietjens to sign. An untidy, buff and white sheaf, so McKechnie had time to talk. He wished to establish himself as on a level with the temporary C.O. At least intellectually.

He didn’t. Aranjuez kept on exclaiming:

‘The Major wrote a sonnet in two and a half minutes! The Major! Who would have thought it!’ Ingenuous boy!

Tietjens looked at the papers with some attention. He had been so kept out of contact with the affairs of the battalion, that he wanted to know. As he had suspected, the paper business of the unit was in a shocking state. Brigade, Division, even Army and, positively, Whitehall were
strafing
for information about everything imaginable from jam, toothbrushes and braces, to religions, vaccination, and barrack damages… . This was interesting matter. A relief to contemplate… . You would almost think all-wise Authority snowed under and broke the backs of Commanding Officers with papers in order to relieve their minds of affording alternative interests … alternative to the exigencies of active hostilities! It was
certainly
a relief whilst waiting for a
strafe
to come to the right stage – to have to read a violent enquiry about P.R.I. funds, whilst the battalion had been resting near a place called Béhencourt… .

It appeared that Tietjens might well be thankful that he had not been allowed to handle the P.R.I. funds.

The second-in-command is the titular administrator of the Regimental Institute: he is the President, supposed to attend to the men’s billiard tables, almanacks, backgammon boards, football boots. But the C.O. had preferred to keep these books in his own hands. Tietjens regarded that as a slight. Perhaps it had not been!

It went quickly through his head that the C.O. perhaps had financial difficulties – though that was no real affair of his… . The House Guards was pressingly interested in the pre-enlistment affairs of a private called 64 Smith. They asked violently and for the third time for particulars of his religion, previous address and real name. That was no doubt the espionage branch at work… . But Whitehall was also more violently interested in answers to queries about the disposal of regimental funds of a training camp in January, 1915… . As long ago as that! The mills of God grind slowly… . That query was covered by a private note from the Brigadier saying that he wished for goodness’ sake the C.O. would answer these queries or there would have to be a Court of Enquiry.

These particular two papers ought not to have been brought to Tietjens. He held them between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and the query upon 64 Smith – which seemed rather urgent – between his first and second, and so handed them to Lance-Corporal Duckett. That nice, clean, fair boy was, at the moment, talking in intimate undertones to Second-Lieutenant Aranjuez about the resemblances between the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean sonnet form… .

This was what His Majesty’s Expeditionary Force had come to. You had four of its warriors, four minutes before the zero of a complete advance of the whole German line, all interested in sonnets… . Drake and his game of bowls – in fact repeated itself! Differently, of course! But times change.

He handed the two selected papers to Duckett.

‘Give this one to the Commanding Officer,’ he said, ‘and tell the Sergeant-Major to find what Company 64 Smith is in and have him brought to me, wherever I am… . I’m going right along the trenches now. Come after me when you’ve been to the C.O. and the Sergeant-Major. Aranjuez will make notes of what I want done about revetting, you can put down anything about the personnel of the companies… . Get a move on!’

He told McKechnie amiably to be out of those lines forthwith. He didn’t want him killed on his hands.

The sun was now shining into the trench.

He looked again through Brigade’s morning communication concerning dispositions the unit was to make in the event of the expected German attack… . Due to begin – the preparatory artillery at least – in three minutes’ time.

Don’t we say prayers before battle? … He could not imagine himself doing it… . He just hoped that nothing would happen that would make him lose control of his mind… . Otherwise he found that he was meditating on how to get the paper affair of the unit into a better state… . ‘
Who sweeps a room as for Thy cause
…’ It was the equivalent of prayer probably.

He noted that Brigade’s injunctions about the coming fight were not only endorsed with earnestness by Division but also by very serious exhortations from Army. The chit from Brigade was in handwriting, that from Division in fairly clear typescript, that from Army in very pale type characters… . It amounted to this: that they were that day to stick it till they burst… . That meant that there was nothing behind their backs – from there to the North Sea! … The French were hurrying along probably… . He imagined a lot of little blue fellows in red breeches trotting along pink, sunlit plains.

(You cannot control your imagination’s pictures. Of course the French no longer wore red trousers.) He saw the line breaking just where the blue section came to; the rest, swept back into the sea. He saw the whole of the terrain behind them. On the horizon was a glistening haze. That was where they were going to be swept to. Or of course they would not be swept. They would be lying on their faces, exposing the seats of their breeches. Too negligible for the large dust-pan and broom… . What was
death
like – the immediate process of dissolution? He stuffed the papers into his tunic pocket.

He remembered with grim amusement that one chit promised him reinforcements. Sixteen men! Sixteen! Worcesters! From a Worcester training camp… . Why the deuce weren’t they sent to the Worcester battalion just next door? Good fellows, no doubt. But they hadn’t got the drill quiffs of our lot; they were not pals with our men; they did not know the officers by name. There would be no welcome to cheer them… . It was a queer idea, the deliberate destruction of regimental esprit de corps that the Home Authorities now insisted on. It was said to be imitated at the suggestion of a civilian of advanced social views from the French who in turn had imitated it from the Germans. It is of course lawful to learn of the Enemy; but is it sensible?

Perhaps it is. The Feudal Spirit was broken. Perhaps it would therefore be harmful to Trench-Warfare. It used to be comfortable and cosy. You fought beside men from your own hamlet under the leadership of the parson’s son. Perhaps that was not good for you?

At any rate, as at present arranged, dying was a lonely affair.

He, Tietjens, and little Aranjuez there, if something hit them would die – a Yorkshire territorial magnate’s son and the son of, positively, an Oporto Protestant minister, if you can imagine such a thing! – the dissimilar souls winging their way to heaven side by side. You’d think God would find it more appropriate if Yorkshiremen went with other North Country fellows, and Dagoes with other Papists. For Aranjuez, though the son of a Nonconformist of sorts, had reverted to the faith of his fathers.

He said:

‘Come along, Aranjuez… . I want to see that wet bit of trench before the Hun shells hit it.’

Well… . They were getting reinforcements. The Home Authorities had awakened to their prayers. They sent them sixteen Worcesters. They would be three hundred and forty-four – no, forty-three, because he had sent back O Nine Griffiths, the fellow with the cornet – three hundred and forty-three lonely souls against … say two Divisions! Against about eighteen thousand, very likely. And they were to stick it till they burst. Reinforced!

Reinforced. Good God! … Sixteen Worcesters!

What was at the bottom of it all?

Campion was going to command that Army. That meant that real reinforcements had been promised from the millions of men that filled the base camps. And it meant the Single Command! Campion would not have consented to take the command of that Army if he had not had those very definite promises.

But it would take time. Months! Anything like adequate reinforcements would take months.

And at that moment, in the most crucial point of the line of the Army, of the Expeditionary Force, the Allied Forces, the Empire, the Universe, the Solar System, they had three hundred and sixty-six men commanded by the last surviving Tory. To face wave on wave of the Enemy.

In one minute the German barrage was due.

Aranjuez said to him:

‘You can write a sonnet in two and a half minutes, sir… . And your siphon works like anything in that damp trench… . It took my mother’s great-uncle, the canon of Oporto, fifteen weeks to finish his celebrated sonnet. I know because my mother told me… . But you oughtn’t to be here, sir.’

Aranjuez then was the nephew of the author of the
Sonnet to Night
. He could be. You had to have that sort of oddity to make up this world. So naturally he was interested in sonnets.

And, having got hold of a battalion with a stretch of damp trench, Tietjens had had the opportunity of trying a thing he had often thought of – of drying out vertically cut, damp soil by means of a siphon of soil-pipes put in, not horizontally, but vertically. Fortunately Hackett, the commander of ‘B’ Company, that had the wet trench, had been an engineer in civil life. Aranjuez had been along, out of sheer hero-worship, to ‘B’ trenches to see how his hero’s siphons had worked. He reported that they worked like a dream.

Little Aranjuez said:

‘These trenches are like Pompeii, sir.’

Tietjens had never seen Pompeii, but he understood that Aranjuez was referring to the empty square-cut excavations in the earth. Particularly to their emptiness. And to the deadly stillness in the sunlight… . Admirable
trenches.
Made to hold an establishment of several thousand men. To bustle with Cockney life. Now dead empty. They passed three sentries in the pinkish gravel passage and two men, one with a pick, the other with a shovel. They were exactly squaring the juncture of the wall and the path, as they might have done in Pompeii. Or in Hyde Park! A perfect devil for tidiness, ‘A’ Company Commander. But the men seemed to like it. They were sniggering, though they stopped that, of course, when Tietjens passed… .

A nice, dark, tiny boy, Aranjuez; his adoration was charming. From the very first – and naturally, frightened out of his little life, he had clung to Tietjens as a child clings to an omnipotent father. Tietjens, all-wise, could direct the awful courses of war and decree safety for the frightened! Tietjens needed that sort of worship. The boy said it would be awful to have anything happen to your eyes. Your girl naturally would not look at you. Not more than three miles away, Nancy Truefitt was now. Unless they had evacuated her. Nancy was his flame. In a tea-shop at Bailleul.

A man was sitting outside the mouth of ‘A’ dug-out, just after they passed the mouth of the communication trench… . Comforting that channel in the soil looked, running uphill. You could saunter away up there, out of all this… . But you couldn’t! There was no turning here either to the right or to the left!

The man writing in a copy-book had his tin hat right over his eyes. Engrossed, he sat on a gravel-step, his copybook on his knees. His name was Slocombe and he was a dramatist. Like Shakespeare. He made fifty pounds a time writing music-hall sketches, for the outer halls. The outer halls were the cheap music-halls that go in a ring round the suburbs of London. Slocombe never missed a second, writing in his copy-books. If you fell the men out for a rest when marching, Slocombe would sit by the roadside – and out would come his copy-book and his pencil. His wife would type out what he sent home. And write him grumbling letters if the supply of copy failed. How was she to keep up the Sunday best of George and Flossie if he did not keep on writing one-act sketches? Tietjens had this information through censoring one of the man’s letters containing manuscript …
Slocombe
was slovenly as a soldier, but he kept the other men in a good humour, his mind being a perfect repertoire of Cockney jests at the expense of Big and Little Willy and Brother Fritz. Slocombe wrote on, wetting his pencil with his tongue.

The sergeant in the mouth of ‘A’ Company headquarters’ dug-out started to turn out some sort of a guard, but Tietjens stopped him. ‘A’ Company ran itself on the lines of regulars in the depot. The O.C. had a conduct sheet-book as neat as a ledger! The old, bald, grim fellow. Tietjens asked the sergeant questions. Had they their Mills bombs all right? They weren’t short of rifles – first-class order? … But how could they be! Were there any sick? … Two! … Well, it was a healthy life! … Keep the men under cover until the Hun barrage began. It was due now.

It was due now. The second hand of Tietjens’ watch, like an animated pointer of hair, kicked a little on the stroke of the minute… . ‘Crumb!’ said the punctual, distant sound.

Tietjens said to Aranjuez:

‘It’s presumably coming now!’ Aranjuez pulled at the chin strap of his tin hat.

Tietjens’ mouth filled itself with a dreadful salty flavour, the back of his tongue being dry. His chest and heart laboured heavily. Aranjuez said:

‘If I stop one, sir, you’ll tell Nancy Truefitt that …’

Tietjens said:

‘Little nippers like you don’t stop things… . Besides, feel the wind!’

They were at the highest point of the trenches that ran along a hillside. So they were exposed. The wind had undoubtedly freshened, coming down the hill. In front and behind, along the trench, they could see views. Land, some green; greyish trees.

Aranjuez said:

‘You think the wind will stop them, sir,’ appealingly.

Tietjens exclaimed with gruffness:

‘Of course it will stop them. They won’t work without gas. Yet their men hate to have to face the gas-screens. It’s our great advantage. It saps their
morale
. Nothing else would. They can’t put up smoke-screens either.’

Aranjuez said:

‘I know you think their gas has ruined them, sir… . It was wicked of them to use it. You can’t do a wicked thing without suffering for it, can you, sir?’