A Man Could Stand Up— · Part II · Chapter 2 2 (2/3)

“Stand at ease: stand easy,” negligently enough, then he burst out in uncontrollable irritation: “For God’s sake, put your beastly hats straight!” The men shuffled uneasily, this being no order known to them, and Tietjens explained: “No, this isn’t drill. It’s only that your hats all at sixes and sevens give me the pip!” And the whispers of the men went down the little line:

“You ’eer the orfcer.⁠ ⁠… Gives ’im the pip, we do!⁠ ⁠… Goin’ for a wawk in the pawk wiv our gels, we are.⁠ ⁠…” They glanced nevertheless aside and upwards at each other’s tin-hat rims and said: “Shove ’im a shade forward, ’Orace.⁠ ⁠… You tighten your martingale, Erb!” They were gaily rueful and impenitently profane: they had had thirty-six hours of let-off. A fellow louder-than-hummed:

“ ‘As I wawk erlong ther Bor dee Berlong

Wiv an indipendent air⁠ ⁠… ⁠ ⁠…

W’ere’s me swegger-kine, you fellers!’ ”

Tietjens addressed him:

“Did you ever hear Coborn sing that, Runt?” and Runt replied:

“Yes, sir. I was the hind legs of the elephant when he sung it in the Old Drury panto!”⁠ ⁠… A little, dark, beady-eyed Cockney, his enormous mouth moved lip on lip as if he were chewing a pebble in pride at the reminiscence. The men’s voices went on: “ ’Ind legs ’f the elephink!⁠ ⁠… good ol’ Helefink.⁠ ⁠… I’ll go ’n’ see ’n elephink first thing I do in Blighty!”

Tietjens said:

“I’ll give every man of you a ticket for Drury Lane next Boxing Day. We’ll all be in London for the next Boxing Day. Or Berlin!”

They exclaimed polyphonically and low:

“Oo-er! Djee ’eer ’im? Di’djee ’eer the orfcer? The noo C.O.?”

A hidden man said:

“Mike it the old Shoreditch Empire, sir, ’n’ we’ll thenk you!”

Another:

“I never keered fer the Lane meself! Give me the old Balham for Boxing Day.” The Sergeant made the sounds for them to move off.

They shuffled off up the trench. An unseen man said:

“Better’n a bleedin’ dipso!” Lips said “S.h.h.h!”

The Sergeant shouted⁠—with an astonishing, brutal panic:

“You shut your bleedin’ mouth, you man, or I’ll shove you in the b⁠⸺⁠y clink!” He looked nevertheless at Tietjens with calm satisfaction a second later.

“A good lot of chaps, sir,” he said. “The best!” He was anxious to wipe out the remembrance of the last spoken word. “Give ’em the right sort of officers ’n’ they’ll beat the world!”

“Do you think it makes any difference to them what officers they have?” Tietjens asked. “Wouldn’t it be all the same if they had just anyone?”

The Sergeant said:

“No, sir. They bin frightened these last few days. Now they’re better.”

This was just exactly what Tietjens did not want to hear. He hardly knew why. Or he did.⁠ ⁠… He said:

“I should have thought these men knew their job so well⁠—for this sort of thing⁠—that they hardly needed orders. It cannot make much difference whether they receive orders or not.”

The Sergeant said:

“It does make a difference, sir,” in a tone as near that of cold obstinacy as he dare attain to; the feeling of the approaching strafe was growing on them. It hung over them.

Mckechnie stuck his head out from behind the sacking. The sacking had the lettering P X L in red and the word Minn in black. Mckechnie’s Minn eyes were blazing maniacally. Jumping maniacally in his head. They always were jumping maniacally in his head. He was a tiring fellow. He was wearing not a tin hat, but an officer’s helmet. The gilt dragon on it glittered. The sun was practically up, somewhere. As soon as its disc cleared the horizon, the Huns, according to Brigade, were to begin sending over their wearisome stuff. In thirteen and a half minutes.

Mckechnie gripped Tietjens by the arm, a familiarity that Tietjens detested. He hissed⁠—he really hissed because he was trying to speak under his breath:

“Come past the next traverse. I want to speak to you.”

In correctly prepared trenches, made according to order as these had been to receive them in retreat, by a regular battalion acting under the orders of the Royal Engineers, you go along a straight ditch of trench for some yards, then you find a square block of earth protruding inwards from the parapet round which you must walk; then you come to another straight piece, then to another traverse, and so on to the end of the line, the lengths and dimensions varying to suit the nature of the terrain or the character of the soil. These outjuttings were designed to prevent the lateral spreading of fragments of shell bursting in the trench which would otherwise serve as a funnel, like the barrel of a gun to direct those parts of missiles into men’s bodies. It was also exciting⁠—as Tietjens expected to be doing before the setting of the not quite risen sun⁠—to crouch rapidly along past one of them, the heart moving very disagreeably, the revolver protruded well in advance, with half a dozen careless fellows with grenades of sorts just behind you. And you not knowing whether, crouching against the side that was just round the corner you would or would not find a whitish, pallid, dangerous object that you would have no time to scrutinise closely.

Past the nearest of these Mckechnie led Tietjens. He was portentous and agitated.

At the end of the next stretch of trench, leaning as it were against a buttress in an attitude of intense fatigue was a mud-coloured, very thin, tall fellow; squatting dozing on his heels in the mud just beside that one’s foot was another, a proper Glamorganshire man of whom not many more than ten were left in the battalion. The standing man was leaning like that to look through a loophole that had been placed very close to the buttress of raw earth. He grunted something to his companion and continued looking intently. The other man grunted too.

Mckechnie withdrew precipitately into the recessed pathway. The column of earth in their faces gave a sense of oppression. He said:

“Did you put that fellow up to saying that damnable thing?⁠ ⁠…” He repeated: “That perfectly damnable thing! Damnable!” Besides hating Tietjens he was shocked, pained, femininely lachrymose. He gazed into Tietjens’ eyes like a forsaken mistress fit to do a murder, with a sort of wistful incredulity of despair.

To that Tietjens was accustomed. For the last two months Mckechnie whispering in the ear of the C.O. wherever Battalion Headquarters might happen to be⁠—Mckechnie, with his arms spread abroad on the table and his chin nearly on the cloth that they had always managed to retain in spite of three precipitate moves, Mckechnie, with his mad eyes every now and then moving in the direction of Tietjens, had been almost the most familiar object of Tietjens’ night landscapes. They wanted him gone so that Mckechnie might once again become Second in Command of that body of pals.⁠ ⁠… That indeed was what they were⁠ ⁠… with the addition of a great deal too much of what they called Ooch.

Tietjens obviously could not go. There was no way of managing it: he had been put there by old Campion and there he must remain. So that by the agreeable irony of Providence there was Tietjens who had wanted above all Mckechnie’s present relatively bucolic job hated to hell by half a dozen quite decent if trying young squits⁠—the pals⁠—because Tietjens was in his, Mckechnie’s, desired position. It seemed to make it all the worse that they were all, with the exception of the Commanding Officer himself, of the little, dark, Cockney type and had the Cockney’s voice, gesture and intonation, so that Tietjens felt himself like a blond Gulliver with hair very silver in patches, rising up amongst a lot of Lilliputian brown creatures.⁠ ⁠… Portentous and unreasonably noticeable.

A large cannon, nearer than the one that had lately spoken, but as it were with a larger but softer voice, remarked: “Phoh.h.h.h.h.h.h.h.h.,” the sound wandering round the landscape for a long while. After a time about four coupled railway-trains hurtled jovially amongst the clouds and went a long way away.⁠—Four in one. They were probably trying to impress the North Sea.

It might of course be the signal for the German barrage to begin. Tietjens’ heart stopped; his skin on the nape of the neck began to prickle: his hands were cold. That was fear: the battle fear, experienced in strafes. He might not again be able to hear himself think. Not ever. What did he want of life?⁠ ⁠… Well, just not to lose his reason. One would pray: Not that.⁠ ⁠… Otherwise, perhaps a nice parsonage might do. It was just thinkable. A place in which forever to work at the theory of waves.⁠ ⁠… But of course it was not thinkable.⁠ ⁠…

He was saying to Mckechnie:

“You ought not to be here without a tin hat. You will have to put a tin hat on if you mean to stop here. I can give your four minutes if that is not the strafe beginning. Who’s been saying what?”

Mckechnie said:

“I’m not stopping here. I’m going back, after I’ve given you a piece of my mind, to the beastly job you have got me defiled with.”

Tietjens said:

“Well, you’ll put on a tin hat to go there, please. And don’t ride your horse, if you’ve got it here, till after you’re a hundred yards at least down a communication trench.”

Mckechnie asked how Tietjens dared give him orders and Tietjens said: Fine he would look with Divisional Transport dead in his lines at five in the morning in a parade hat. Mckechnie with objurgations said that the Transport Officer had the right to consult the C.O. of a battalion he supplied. Tietjens said:

“I’m commanding here. You’ve not consulted me!”

It appeared to him queer that they should be behaving like that when you could hear⁠ ⁠… oh, say: the wings of the angel of death.⁠ ⁠… You can “almost hear the very rustling of his wings” was the quotation. Good enough rhetoric.⁠ ⁠… But of course that was how armed men would behave.⁠ ⁠… At all times!

He had been trying the old trick of the military, clipped voice on the half-dotty subject. It had before then reduced Mckechnie to some sort of military behaviour.

It reduced him in this case to a maudlin state. He exclaimed with a sort of lachrymose agony:

“This is what it has come to with the old battalion⁠ ⁠… the b⁠⸺⁠y; b⁠⸺⁠y, b⁠⸺⁠y old battalion of z⁠⸺⁠rs!” Each imprecation was a sob. “How we worked at it.⁠ ⁠… And now⁠ ⁠… you’ve got it!”

Tietjens said:

“Well, you were Vice-Chancellor’s Latin Prizeman once. It’s what we get reduced to.” He added: “Vos mellificatis apes!”

Mckechnie said with gloomy contempt:

“You.⁠ ⁠… You’re no Latinist!”

By now Tietjens had counted two hundred and eighty since the big cannon had said “Pho.o.o.o.h.” Perhaps then it was not the signal for the barrage to begin.⁠ ⁠… Had it been it would have begun before now; it would have come thumping along on the heels of the “Pho.o.o.h.” His hands and the nape of his neck were preparing to become normal.

Perhaps the strafe would not come at all that day. There was the wind. If anything it was strengthening. Yesterday he had suspected that the Germans hadn’t got any tanks handy. Perhaps the ugly, senseless armadillos⁠—and incapable at that! Under-engined!⁠—had all got stuck in the marshes in front of G section. Perhaps the heavy artillery fire of ours that had gone on most of yesterday had been meant to pound the beastly things to pieces. Moving, they looked like slow rats, their noses to the ground, snouting crumbs of garbage. When they were still they looked merely pensive!

Perhaps the strafe would not come. He hoped it would not. He did not want a strafe with himself in command of the battalion. He did not know what to do: what he ought to do by the book. He knew what he would do. He would stroll about along those deep trenches. Stroll. With his hands in his pockets. Like General Gordon in pictures. He would say contemplative things as the time dragged on.⁠ ⁠… A rather abominable sort of Time really.⁠ ⁠… But that would introduce into the Battalion a spirit of calm that it had lately lacked⁠ ⁠… The night before last the C.O., with a bottle in each hand had hurled them both at Huns who did not materialise for an hour and a half. Even the Pals had omitted to laugh. After that he, Tietjens, had taken command. With lots of the Orderly Room papers under both arms. They had had to be in a hurry. At night. With men suggesting pale grey Canadian trappers coming out of holes!

He did not want to command in a strafe: or at any other time! He hoped the unfortunate C.O. would get over his trouble by the evening.⁠ ⁠… But he supposed that he, Tietjens, would get through it all right if he had to. Like the man who had never tried playing the violin!

Mckechnie had suddenly become lachrymosely feminine: like a woman pleading, large-eyed, for her lover, his eyes explored Tietjens’ face for signs of treachery: for signs that what he said was not what he meant in his heart. He said:

“What are you going to do about Bill? Poor old Bill that has sweated for his Battalion as you never.⁠ ⁠…” He began again:

“Think of poor old Bill! You can’t be thinking of doing the dirty on him.⁠ ⁠… No man could be such a swine!”

It was curious how those circumstances brought out the feminine that was in man. What was that ass of a German Professor’s theory⁠ ⁠… formula? My plus Wx equals Man?⁠ ⁠… Well, if God hadn’t invented woman men would have had to do so. In that sort of place. You grew sentimental. He, Tietjens was growing sentimental. He said:

“What does Terence say about him this morning?”

The nice thing to have said would have been:

“Of course, old man, I’ll do all I can to keep it dark!” Terence was the M.O.⁠—the man who had chucked his cap at the Hun orderly.

Mckechnie said:

“That’s the damnable thing! Terence is ratty with him. He won’t take a pill!”

Tietjens said:

“What’s that? What’s that?”

Mckechnie wavered: his desire for comfort became overpowering.

He said:

“Look here! Do the decent thing! You know how poor Bill has worked for us! Get Terence not to report him to Brigade!”

This was wearisome: but it had to be faced.

A very minute subaltern⁠—Aranjuez⁠—in a perfectly impossible tin hat peered round the side of the bank. Tietjens sent him away for a moment.⁠ ⁠… These tin hats were probably all right: but they were the curse of the army. They bred distrust! How could you trust a man whose incapable hat tumbled forward on his nose? Or another, with his hat on the back of his head, giving him the air of a ruined gambler! Or a fellow who had put on a soap-dish. To amuse the children: not a serious proceeding.⁠ ⁠… The German things were better⁠—coming down over the nape of the neck and rising over the brows. When you saw a Hun sideways he looked something: a serious proposition. Full of ferocity. A Hun up against a Tommie looked like a Holbein lansknecht fighting a music-hall turn. It made you feel that you were indeed a ragtime army. Rubbed it in!

Mckechnie was reporting that the C.O. had refused to take a pill ordered him by the M.O. Unfortunately the M.O. was ratty that morning⁠—too much hooch overnight! So he said he should report the C.O. to Brigade. Not as being unfit for further service, for he wasn’t. But for refusing to take the pill. It was damnable. Because if Bill wouldn’t take a pill he wouldn’t⁠ ⁠… The M.O. said that if he took a pill, and stayed in bed that day⁠—without hooch of course!⁠—he would be perfectly fit on the morrow. He had been like that often enough before. The C.O. had always been given the dose before as a drench. He swore he would not take it as a ball. Sheer contrariety!