A Man Could Stand Up— · Part II · Chapter 2 5 (2/3)

A crash of the sort that you couldn’t ignore, as is the case with certain claps in thunderstorms, sent a good deal of gravel down their cellar steps. It crashed against their shaky door. They heard Notting come out of his cellar and tell someone to shovel the beastly stuff back again where it had come from.

The Colonel looked up at the roof. He said that had knocked their parapet about a bit. Then he resumed his fixed gaze at Tietjens.

Tietjens said to himself:

“I’m losing my nerve.⁠ ⁠… It’s the damned news that Campion is coming⁠ ⁠… I’m becoming a wretched, irresolute Johnny.”

The Colonel said:

“I’m not a beastly sponger. I never borrowed before!” His chest heaved.⁠ ⁠… It really expanded and then got smaller again, the orifice in the khaki at his throat contracting.⁠ ⁠… Perhaps he never had borrowed before.⁠ ⁠…

After all, it didn’t matter what kind of man this was, it was a question of what sort of a man Tietjens was becoming. He said:

“I can’t lend you the money. I’ll guarantee an overdraft to your agents. For two hundred and fifty.”

Well, then, he remained the sort of man who automatically lent money. He was glad.

The Colonel’s face fell. His martially erect shoulders indeed collapsed. He exclaimed ruefully:

“Oh, I say, I thought you were the sort one could go to.”

Tietjens said:

“It’s the same thing. You can draw a cheque on your bank exactly as if I paid the money in.”

The Colonel said:

“I can? It’s the same thing? You’re sure?” His questions were like the pleas of a young woman asking you not to murder her.

… He obviously was not a sponger. He was a financial virgin. There could not be a subaltern of eighteen in the whole army who did not know what it meant to have an overdraft guaranteed after a fortnight’s leave.⁠ ⁠… Tietjens only wished they didn’t. He said:

“You’ve practically got the money in your hand as you sit there. I’ve only to write the letter. It’s impossible your agents should refuse my guarantee. If they do, I’ll raise the money and send it you.”

He wondered why he didn’t do that last in any case. A year or so ago he would have had no hesitation about overdrawing his account to any extent. Now he had an insupportable objection. Like a hatred!

He said:

“You’d better let me have your address.” He added, for his mind was really wandering a little. There was too much talk! “I suppose you’ll go to No. IX Red Cross at Rouen for a bit.”

The Colonel sprang to his feet:

“My God, what’s that?” he cried out. “Me⁠ ⁠… to No. IX.”

Tietjens exclaimed:

“I don’t know the procedure. You said you had.⁠ ⁠…”

The other cried out:

“I’ve got cancer. A big swelling under the armpit.” He passed his hand over his bare flesh through the opening of his shirt, the long arm disappearing to the elbow. “Good God⁠ ⁠… I suppose when I said my pals had gone back on me you thought I’d asked them for help and been refused. I haven’t.⁠ ⁠… They’re all killed. That’s the worst way you can go back on a pal, isn’t it? Don’t you understand men’s language?”

He sat heavily down on his bed again.

He said:

“By jove: if you hadn’t promised to let me have the money there would have been nothing for me but to make a hole in the water.”

Tietjens said:

“Well, don’t contemplate it now. Get yourself well looked after. What does Derry say?”

The Colonel again started violently:

“Derry! The M.O.⁠ ⁠… Do you think I’d tell him! Or little squits of subalterns? Or any man! You understand now why I wouldn’t take Derry’s beastly pill. How do I know what it mightn’t do to.⁠ ⁠…”

Again he passed his hand under his armpit, his eyes taking on a yearning and calculating expression. He added:

“I thought it a duty to tell you as I was asking you for a loan. You might not get repaid. I suppose your offer still holds good?”

Drops of moisture had hitherto made beads on his forehead; it now shone, uniformly wet.

“If you haven’t consulted anybody,” Tietjens said, “you mayn’t have got it. I should have yourself seen to right away. My offer still holds good!”

“Oh, I’ve got it, all right,” the Colonel answered with an air of infinite sapience. “My old man⁠—my governor⁠—had it. Just like that. And he never told a soul till three days before his death. Neither shall I.”

“I should get it seen to,” Tietjens maintained. “It’s a duty to your children. And the King. You’re too damn good a soldier for the Army to lose.”

“Nice of you to say so,” the Colonel said. “But I’ve stood too much. I couldn’t face waiting for the verdict.”

… It was no good saying he had faced worse things. He very likely hadn’t, being the man he was.

The Colonel said:

“Now if I could be any good!”

Tietjens said:

“I suppose I may go along the trenches now. There’s a wet place.⁠ ⁠…”

He was determined to go along the trenches. He had to⁠ ⁠… what was it⁠ ⁠… “find a place to be alone with Heaven.” He maintained also his conviction that he must show the men his meal-sack of a body, mooning along; but attentive.

A problem worried him. He did not like putting it since it might seem to question the Colonel’s military efficiency. He wrapped it up: Had the Colonel any special advice as to keeping in touch with units on the right and left? And as to passing messages.

… That was a mania with Tietjens. If he had had his way he would keep the battalion day and night at communication drill. He had not been able to discover that any precautions of that sort were taken in that unit at all. Or in the others alongside.⁠ ⁠…

He had hit on the Colonel’s heel of Achilles.

In the open it became evident: more and more and more and always more evident! The news that General Campion was taking over that command had changed Tietjens’ whole view of the world.

The trenches were much as he had expected. They conformed indeed exactly to the image he had had in the cellar. They resembled heaps of reddish gravel laid out ready to distribute over the roads of parks. Getting out of the dugout had been like climbing into a trolley that had just been inverted for the purpose of discharging its load. It was a nasty job for the men, cleaving a passage and keeping under cover. Naturally the German sharpshooters were on the lookout. Our problem was to get as much of the trench as you could set up by daylight. The German problem was to get as many of our men as possible. Tietjens would see that our men stayed under cover until nightfall; the commander of the unit opposite would attend to the sniping of as many men as he could. Tietjens himself had three first-class snipers left: they would attempt to get as many of the German snipers as they could. That was self-defence.

In addition a great many Enemy attentions would direct themselves to Tietjen’s stretch of the line. The artillery would continue to plunk in a shell or so from time to time. They would not do this very often because it would invite the attention of our artillery and that might prove too costly. More or less heavy masses of High Explosives would be thrown on to the line: what the Germans called Minenwerfer might project what our people called sausages. These being visible coming through the air you posted lookouts who gave you warning in time to get under cover. So the Germans had rather abandoned the use of these, probably as being costly in explosives and not so very effective. They made, that is to say, good holes but accounted for few men.

Airplanes with their beastly bullet-distributing hoppers⁠—that is what they seemed like⁠—would now and then duck along the trench, but not very often. The proceeding was, again, too costly: they would limit themselves as a rule to circling leisurely overhead and dropping things whilst the shrapnel burst round them⁠—and spattered bullets over the trench. Flying pigs, aerial torpedoes, and other floating missiles, pretty, shining, silvery things with fins, would come through the air and would explode on striking the ground or after burying themselves. There was practically no end to their devices and the Huns had a new one every other week or so. They perhaps wasted themselves on new devices. A good many of them turned out to be duds. And a good many of their usually successful missiles turned out to be duds. They were undoubtedly beginning to feel the strain⁠—mental and in their materials. So that if you had to be in these beastly places it was probably better to be in our trenches than theirs. Our war material was pretty good!

This was the war of attrition.⁠ ⁠… A mug’s game! A mug’s game as far as killing men was concerned, but not an uninteresting occupation if you considered it as a struggle of various minds spread all over the broad landscape in the sunlight. They did not kill many men and they expended an infinite number of missiles and a vast amount of thought. If you took six million men armed with loaded canes and stockings containing bricks or knives and set them against another six million men similarly armed, at the end of three hours four million on the one side and the entire six million on the other would be dead. So, as far as killing went, it really was a mug’s game. That was what happened if you let yourself get into the hands of the applied scientist. For all these things were the products not of the soldier but of hirsute, bespectacled creatures who peered through magnifying glasses. Or of course, on our side, they would be shaven-cheeked and less abstracted. They were efficient as slaughterers in that they enabled the millions of men to be moved. When you had only knives you could not move very fast. On the other hand, your knife killed at every stroke: you would set a million men firing at each other with rifles from eighteen hundred yards. But few rifles ever registered a hit. So the invention was relatively inefficient. And it dragged things out!

And suddenly it had become boring.

They were probably going to spend a whole day during which the Germans would strain themselves, their intelligences flickering across the world, to kill a couple of Tietjens’ men, and Tietjens would exercise all his care in the effort not to have even one casualty. And at the end of the day they would all be very tired and the poor b⁠⸺⁠y men would have to set to work to repair the trenches in earnest. That was the ordinary day’s work.

He was going about it.⁠ ⁠… He had got A Company Commander to come up and talk to him about his fatigues. To the right of Headquarters the trenches appeared to have suffered less than to the left and it was possible to move quite a number of men without risk. A Company Commander was an astonishingly thin, bald man of fifty. He was so bald that his tin hat slid about all over his skull. He had been a small shipowner and must have married very late in life, for he spoke of having two children one of five, one of seven. A pigeon pair. His business was now making fifty thousand a year for him. It pleased Tietjens to think that his children would be well provided for if he were killed. A nice, silent, capable man who usually looked into the distance rather abstractedly when he talked. He was killed two months’ later, cleanly, by a bullet.

He was impatient that things had not got a move on. What had become of the big Hun strafe?

Tietjens said:

“You remember the Hun company-sergeant-major that surrendered to your crowd the night before last? The fellow who said he was going to open a little sweet-stuff shop in the Tottenham Court Road with the company money he had stolen?⁠ ⁠… Or perhaps you did not hear?”

The remembrance of that shifty looking N.C.O. in blue-grey that was rather smart for a man coming in during a big fight stirred up intensely disagreeable feelings from the bottom of Tietjens’ mind. It was detestable to him to be in control of the person of another human being⁠—as detestable as it would have been to be himself a prisoner⁠ ⁠… that thing that he dreaded most in the world. It was indeed almost more detestable, since to be taken prisoner was at least a thing outside your own volition, whereas to control a prisoner, even under the compulsion of discipline on yourself, implies a certain freewill of your own. And this had been an especially loathsome affair. Even normally, though it was irrational enough, prisoners affected him with the sense that they were unclean. As if they were maggots. It was not sensible; but he knew that if he had had to touch a prisoner he would have felt nausea. It was no doubt the product of his passionate Tory sense of freedom. What distinguished man from the brutes was his freedom. When then a man was deprived of freedom he became like a brute. To exist in his society was to live with brutes: like Gulliver amongst the Houynhms!

And this unclean fellow had been a deserter in addition!

He had been brought in to the H.Q. dugout at three in the morning after the strafe had completely died out. It appeared that he had come over, ostensibly in the ordinary course of the attack. But he had lain all night in a shell hole, creeping in to our lines only when things were quiet. Previously to starting he had crammed his pockets with all the company money and even the papers that he could lay his hands on. He had been brought to H.Q. at that disagreeable hour because of the money and the papers, A Company judging that such things ought to be put in the hands at least of the Adjutant as quickly as possible.

The C.O., Mckechnie, the Intelligence Officer and the doctor had all, in addition to Tietjens himself, just settled in there, and the air of the smallish place was already fetid and reeking with service rum and whiskey. The appearance of the German had caused Tietjens almost to vomit, and he was already in a state of enervation from having had to bring the battalion in. His temples were racked with a sort of neuralgia that he believed to be caused by eyestrain.

Normally, the questioning of prisoners before they reached Division was strongly discountenanced, but a deserter excites more interest than an ordinary prisoner, and the C.O. who was by then in a state of hilarious mutiny absolutely ordered Tietjens to get all he could out of the prisoner. Tietjens knew a little German: the Intelligence Officer who knew that language well had been killed. Dunne, replacing him, had no German.

The shifty, upright, thin, dark fellow with even unusually uneasy eyes, had answered questions readily enough: Yes, the Huns were fed-up with the war; discipline had become so difficult to maintain that one of his reasons for deserting had been sheer weariness over the effort to keep the men under him in order. They had no food. It was impossible to get the men, in an advance, past any kind of food dumps. He was continually being unjustly reprimanded for his want of success, and standing there he cursed his late officers! Nevertheless, when the C.O. made Tietjens ask him some questions about an Austrian gun that the Germans had lately introduced to that front and that threw a self-burying shell containing an incredible quantity of H.E., the fellow had clicked his heels together and had answered: