No More Parades · Part I · Chapter 1 4 (2/4)

“Extraordinarily glad⁠ ⁠… A strong passion⁠ ⁠… How damn well these fellows move!⁠ ⁠… Cannon fodder⁠ ⁠… Cannon fodder⁠ ⁠… That’s what their steps say⁠ ⁠…” His whole body shook in the grip of the cold that beneath his loose overcoat gnawed his pyjamaed limbs. He could not leave the men, but cantered beside them with the sergeant-major till he came to the head of the column in the open in time to wheel the first double company into a line of ghosts that were tents, silent and austere in the moon’s very shadowy light⁠ ⁠… It appeared to him a magic spectacle. He said to the sergeant-major: “Move the second company to B line, and so on,” and stood at the side of the men as they wheeled, stamping, like a wall in motion. He thrust his stick halfway down between the second and third files. “Now then, a four and half a four to the right; remaining half-four and next four to the left. Fall out into first tents to right and left⁠ ⁠…” He continued saying: “First four and half, this four to the right⁠ ⁠… Damn you, by the left! How can you tell which beastly four you belong to if you don’t march by the left⁠ ⁠… Remember you’re soldiers, not new-chum lumbermen⁠ ⁠…”

It was sheer exhilaration to freeze there on the downside of the extraordinary pure air with the extraordinarily fine men. They came round, marking time with the stamp of guardsmen. He said, with tears in his voice:

“Damn it all, I gave them that extra bit of smartness⁠ ⁠… Damn it all, there’s something I’ve done⁠ ⁠…” Getting cattle into condition for the slaughterhouse⁠ ⁠… They were as eager as bullocks running down by Camden Town to Smithfield Market⁠ ⁠… Seventy percent of them would never come back⁠ ⁠… But it’s better to go to heaven with your skin shining and master of your limbs than as a hulking lout⁠ ⁠… The Almighty’s orderly room will welcome you better in all probability⁠ ⁠… He continued exclaiming monotonously⁠ ⁠… “Remaining half-four and next four to the left⁠ ⁠… Hold your beastly tongues when you fall out. I can’t hear myself give orders⁠ ⁠…” It lasted a long time. Then they were all swallowed up.

He staggered, his knees wooden-stiff with the cold, and the cold more intense now the wall of men no longer sheltered him from the wind, out along the brink of the plateau to the other lines. It gave him satisfaction to observe that he had got his men into their lines seventy-five percent quicker than the best of the N.C.O.s who had had charge of the other lines. Nevertheless, he swore bitingly at the sergeants: their men were in knots round the entrance to the alleys of ghost-pyramids⁠ ⁠… Then there were no more, and he drifted with regret across the plain towards his country street of huts. One of them had a coarse evergreen rose growing over it. He picked a leaf, pressed it to his lips and threw it up into the wind⁠ ⁠… “That’s for Valentine,” he said meditatively. “Why did I do that?⁠ ⁠… Or perhaps it’s for England⁠ ⁠…” He said: “Damn it all, this is patriotism?⁠ ⁠… This is patriotism⁠ ⁠…” It wasn’t what you took patriotism as a rule to be. There were supposed to be more parades, about that job!⁠ ⁠… But this was just a broke to the wide, wheezy, half-frozen Yorkshireman, who despised everyone in England not a Yorkshireman, or from more to the North, at two in the morning picking a leaf from a rose-tree and slobbering over it, without knowing what he was doing. And then discovering that it was half for a pug-nosed girl whom he presumed, but didn’t know, to smell like a primrose; and half for⁠ ⁠… England!⁠ ⁠… At two in the morning with the thermometer ten degrees below zero⁠ ⁠… Damn, it was cold!⁠ ⁠…

And why these emotions?⁠ ⁠… Because England, not before it was time, had been allowed to decide not to do the dirty on her associates!⁠ ⁠… He said to himself: “It is probably because a hundred thousand sentimentalists like myself commit similar excesses of the subconscious that we persevere in this glorious but atrocious undertaking. All the same, I didn’t know I had it in me!” A strong passion!⁠ ⁠… For his girl and his country!⁠ ⁠… Nevertheless, his girl was a pro-German⁠ ⁠… It was a queer mix-up⁠ ⁠… Not of course a pro-German, but disapproving of the preparation of men, like bullocks, with sleek healthy skins for the abattoirs in Smithfield⁠ ⁠… Agreeing presumably with the squits who had been hitherto starving the B.E.F. of men⁠ ⁠… A queer mix-up⁠ ⁠…

At half-past one the next day, in chastened winter sunlight, he mounted Schomburg, a coffin-headed, bright chestnut, captured from the Germans on the Marne by the second battalion of the Glamorganshires. He had not been on the back of the animal two minutes before he remembered that he had forgotten to look it over. It was the first time in his life that he had ever forgotten to look at an animal’s hoofs, fetlocks, knees, nostrils and eyes, and to take a pull at the girth before climbing into the saddle. But he had ordered the horse for a quarter to one and, even though he had bolted his cold lunch like a cannibal in haste, there he was three-quarters of an hour late, and with his head still full of teasing problems. He had meant to clear his head by a long canter over the be-hutted downs, dropping down into the city by a bypath.

But the ride did not clear his head⁠—rather, the sleeplessness of the night began for the first time then to tell on him after a morning of fatigues, during which he had managed to keep the thought of Sylvia at arm’s length. He had to wait to see Sylvia before he could see what Sylvia wanted. And morning had brought the commonsense idea that probably she wanted to do nothing more than pull the string of the showerbath⁠—which meant committing herself to the first extravagant action that came into her head⁠—and exulting in the consequences.

He had not managed to get to bed at all the night before. Captain McKechnie, who had had some cocoa⁠—a beverage Tietjens had never before tasted⁠—hot and ready for him on his return from the lines, had kept him till past half-past four, relating with a male fury his really very painful story. It appeared that he had obtained leave to go home and divorce his wife, who, during his absence in France, had been living with an Egyptologist in Government service. Then, acting under conscientious scruples of the younger school of the day, he had refrained from divorcing her. Campion had in consequence threatened to deprive him of his commission⁠ ⁠… The poor devil⁠—who had actually consented to contribute to the costs of the household of his wife and the Egyptologist⁠—had gone raving mad and had showered an extraordinary torrent of abuse at the decent old fellow that Campion was⁠ ⁠… A decent old fellow, really. For the interview, being delicate, had taken place in the general’s bedroom and the general had not felt it necessary, there being no orderlies or junior officers present, to take any official notice of McKechnie’s outburst. McKechnie was a fellow with an excellent military record; you could in fact hardly have found a regimental officer with a better record. So Campion had decided to deal with the man as suffering from a temporary brainstorm and had sent him to Tietjens’ unit for rest and recuperation. It was an irregularity, but the general was of a rank to risk what irregularities he considered to be of use to the service.

It had turned out that McKechnie was actually the nephew of Tietjens’ very old intimate, Sir Vincent Macmaster, of the Department of Statistics, being the son of his sister who had married the assistant to the elder Macmaster, a small grocer in the Port of Leith in Scotland⁠ ⁠… That indeed had been why Campion had been interested in him. Determined as he was to show his godson no unreasonable military favours, the general was perfectly ready to do a kindness that he thought would please Tietjens. All these pieces of information Tietjens had packed away in his mind for future consideration and, it being after four-thirty before McKechnie had calmed himself down, Tietjens had taken the opportunity to inspect the breakfasts of the various fatigues ordered for duty in the town, these being detailed for various hours from a quarter to five to seven. It was a matter of satisfaction to Tietjens to have seen to the breakfasts, and inspected his cookhouses, since he did not often manage to make the opportunity and he could by no means trust his orderly officers.

At breakfast in the depot mess-hut he was detained by the colonel in command of the depot, the Anglican padre and McKechnie; the colonel, very old, so frail that you would have thought that a shudder or a cough would have shaken his bones one from another, had yet a passionate belief that the Greek Church should exchange communicants with the Anglican: the padre, a stout, militant Churchman, had a gloomy contempt for Orthodox theology. McKechnie from time to time essayed to define the communion according to the Presbyterian rite. They all listened to Tietjens whilst he dilated on the historic aspects of the various schisms of Christianity and accepted his rough definition to the effect that, in transubstantiation, the host actually became the divine presence, whereas in consubstantiation the substance of the host, as if miraculously become porous, was suffused with the presence as a sponge is with water⁠ ⁠… They all agreed that the breakfast bacon supplied from store was uneatable and agreed to put up half a crown a week apiece to get better for their table.

Tietjens had walked in the sunlight down the lines, past the hut with the evergreen climbing rose, in the sunlight, thinking in an interval good humouredly about his official religion: about the Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible, but knowing all about the estate down to the last hind at the home farm and the last oak: Christ, an almost too benevolent Land-Steward, son of the Owner, knowing all about the estate down to the last child at the porter’s lodge, apt to be got round by the more detrimental tenants: the Third Person of the Trinity, the spirit of the estate, the Game as it were, as distinct from the players of the game: the atmosphere of the estate, that of the interior of Winchester Cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been finished, a perpetual Sunday, with, probably, a little cricket for the young men. Like Yorkshire of a Saturday afternoon; if you looked down on the whole broad county you would not see a single village green without its white flannels. That was why Yorkshire always leads the averages⁠ ⁠… Probably by the time you got to heaven you would be so worn out by work on this planet that you would accept the English Sunday, forever, with extreme relief!

With his belief that all that was good in English literature ended with the seventeenth century, his imaginations of heaven must be materialist⁠—like Bunyan’s. He laughed good-humouredly at his projection of a hereafter. It was probably done with. Along with cricket. There would be no more parades of that sort. Probably they would play some beastly yelping game⁠ ⁠… Like baseball or Association football⁠ ⁠… And heaven?⁠ ⁠… Oh, it would be a revival meeting on a Welsh hillside. Or Chautauqua, wherever that was⁠ ⁠… And God? A Real Estate Agent, with Marxist views⁠ ⁠… He hoped to be out of it before the cessation of hostilities, in which case he might be just in time for the last train to the old heaven⁠ ⁠…

In his orderly hut he found an immense number of papers. On the top an envelope marked Urgent. Private with a huge rubber stamp. From Levin. Levin, too, must have been up pretty late. It was not about Mrs. Tietjens, or even Miss de Bailly. It was a private warning that Tietjens would probably have his draft on his hands another week or ten days, and very likely another couple of thousand men extra as well. He warned Tietjens to draw all the tents he could get hold of as soon as possible⁠ ⁠… Tietjens called to a subaltern with pimples who was picking his teeth with a pen-nib at the other end of the hut: “Here, you!⁠ ⁠… Take two companies of the Canadians to the depot store and draw all the tents you can get up to two hundred and fifty⁠ ⁠… Have ’em put alongside my D lines⁠ ⁠… Do you know how to look after putting up tents?⁠ ⁠… Well then, get Thompson⁠ ⁠… no, Pitkins, to help you⁠ ⁠…” The subaltern drifted out sulkily. Levin said that the French railway strikers, for some political reason, had sabotaged a mile of railway, the accident of the night before had completely blocked up all the lines, and the French civilians would not let their own breakdown gangs make any repairs. German prisoners had been detailed for that fatigue, but probably Tietjens’ Canadian railway corps would be wanted. He had better hold them in readiness. The strike was said to be a manoeuvre for forcing our hands⁠—to get us to take over more of the line. In that case they had jolly well dished themselves, for how could we take over more of the line without more men, and how could we send up more men without the railway to send them by? We had half a dozen army corps all ready to go. Now they were all jammed. Fortunately the weather at the front was so beastly that the Germans could not move. He finished up “Four in the morning, old bean, à tantôt!” the last phrase having been learned from Mlle. de Bailly. Tietjens grumbled that if they went on piling up the work on him like this he would never get down to the signing of that marriage contract.

He called the Canadian sergeant-major to him.

“See,” he said, “that you keep the Railway Service Corps in camp with their arms ready, whatever their arms are. Tools, I suppose. Are their tools all complete? And their muster roll?”

“Girtin has gone absent, sir,” the slim dark fellow said, with an air of destiny. Girtin was the respectable man with the mother to whom Tietjens had given the two hours’ leave the night before.

Tietjens answered:

“He would have!” with a sour grin. It enhanced his views of strictly respectable humanity. They blackmailed you with lamentable and pathetic tales and then did the dirty on you. He said to the sergeant-major:

“You will be here for another week or ten days. See that you get your tents up all right and the men comfortable. I will inspect them as soon as I have taken my orderly room. Full marching order. Captain McKechnie will inspect their kits at two.”

The sergeant-major, stiff but graceful, had something at the back of his mind. It came out:

“I have my marching orders for two-thirty this afternoon. The notice for inserting my commission in depot orders is on your table. I leave for the O.T.C. by the three train⁠ ⁠…”

Tietjens said:

“Your commission!⁠ ⁠…” It was a confounded nuisance.

The sergeant-major said:

“Sergeant-Major Cowley and I applied for our commissions three months ago. The communications granting them are both on your table together⁠ ⁠…”

Tietjens said:

“Sergeant-Major Cowley⁠ ⁠… Good God! Who recommended you?”