Part + 

I + 

I + 

When you came in the space was desultory, rectangular, warm after the drip of the winter night, and transfused with a brown-orange dust that was light. It was shaped like the house a child draws. Three groups of brown limbs spotted with brass took dim highlights from shafts that came from a bucket pierced with holes, filled with incandescent coke, and covered in with a sheet of iron in the shape of a tunnel. Two men, as if hierarchically smaller, crouched on the floor beside the brazier; four, two at each end of the hut, drooped over tables in attitudes of extreme indifference. From the eaves above the parallelogram of black that was the doorway fell intermittent drippings of collected moisture, persistent, with glass-like intervals of musical sound. The two men squatting on their heels over the brazier⁠—they had been miners⁠—began to talk in a low singsong of dialect, hardly audible. It went on and on, monotonously, without animation. It was as if one told the other long, long stories to which his companion manifested his comprehension or sympathy with animal grunts⁠ ⁠… + 

An immense tea-tray, august, its voice filling the black circle of the horizon, thundered to the ground. Numerous pieces of sheet-iron said, “Pack. Pack. Pack.” In a minute the clay floor of the hut shook, the drums of ears were pressed inwards, solid noise showered about the universe, enormous echoes pushed these men⁠—to the right, to the left, or down towards the tables, and crackling like that of flames among vast underwood became the settled condition of the night. Catching the light from the brazier as the head leaned over, the lips of one of the two men on the floor were incredibly red and full and went on talking and talking⁠ ⁠… + 

The two men on the floor were Welsh miners, of whom the one came from the Rhondda Valley and was unmarried; the other, from Pontardulais, had a wife who kept a laundry, he having given up going underground just before the war. The two men at the table to the right of the door were sergeants-major; the one came from Suffolk and was a timeserving man of sixteen years’ seniority as a sergeant in a line regiment. The other was Canadian of English origin. The two officers at the other end of the hut were captains, the one a young regular officer born in Scotland but educated at Oxford; the other, nearly middle-aged and heavy, came from Yorkshire, and was in a militia battalion. The one runner on the floor was filled with a passionate rage because the elder officer had refused him leave to go home and see why his wife, who had sold their laundry, had not yet received the purchase money from the buyer; the other was thinking about a cow. His girl, who worked on a mountainy farm above Caerphilly, had written to him about a queer cow: a black-and-white Holstein⁠—surely to goodness a queer cow. The English sergeant-major was almost tearfully worried about the enforced lateness of the draft. It would be twelve midnight before they could march them off. It was not right to keep men hanging about like that. The men did not like to be kept waiting, hanging about. It made them discontented. They did not like it. He could not see why the depot quartermaster could not keep up his stock of candles for the hooded lamps. The men had no call to be kept waiting, hanging about. Soon they would have to be having some supper. Quarter would not like that. He would grumble fair. Having to indent for suppers. Put his account out, fair, it would. Two thousand nine hundred and ninety-four suppers at a penny halfpenny. But it was not right to keep the men hanging about till midnight and no suppers. It made them discontented and them going up the line for the first time, poor devils. + 

The Canadian sergeant-major was worried about a pigskin leather pocketbook. He had bought it at the ordnance depot in the town. He imagined himself bringing it out on parade, to read out some return or other to the adjutant. Very smart it would look on parade, himself standing up straight and tall. But he could not remember whether he had put it in his kit-bag. On himself it was not. He felt in his right and left breast pockets, his right and left skirt pockets, in all the pockets of his overcoat that hung from a nail within reach of his chair. He did not feel at all certain that the man who acted as his batman had packed that pocketbook with his kit, though he declared he had. It was very annoying. His present wallet, bought in Ontario, was bulging and split. He did not like to bring it out when Imperial officers asked for something out of a return. It gave them a false idea of Canadian troops. Very annoying. He was an auctioneer. He agreed that at this rate it would be half-past one before they had the draft down to the station and entrained. But it was very annoying to be uncertain whether that pocketbook was packed or not. He had imagined himself making a good impression on parade, standing up straight and tall, taking out that pocketbook when the adjutant asked for a figure from one return or the other. He understood their adjutants were to be Imperial officers now they were in France. It was very annoying. + 

An enormous crashing sound said things of an intolerable intimacy to each of those men, and to all of them as a body. After its mortal vomiting all the other sounds appeared a rushing silence, painful to ears in which the blood audibly coursed. The young officer stood violently up on his feet and caught at the complications of his belt hung from a nail. The elder, across the table, lounging sideways, stretched out one hand with a downward movement. He was aware that the younger man, who was the senior officer, was just upon out of his mind. The younger man, intolerably fatigued, spoke sharp, injurious, inaudible words to his companion. The elder spoke sharp, short words, inaudible too, and continued to motion downwards with his hand over the table. The old English sergeant-major said to his junior that Captain Mackenzie had one of his mad fits again, but what he said was inaudible and he knew it. He felt arising in his motherly heart that yearned at the moment over his two thousand nine hundred and thirty-four nurslings a necessity, like a fatigue, to extend the motherliness of his functions to the orfcer. He said to the Canadian that Captain Mackenzie there going temporary off his nut was the best orfcer in His Majesty’s army. And going to make a bleedin’ fool of hisself. The best orfcer in His Majesty’s army. Not a better. Careful, smart, brave as a ’ero. And considerate of his men in the line. You wouldn’t believe⁠ ⁠… He felt vaguely that it was a fatigue to have to mother an officer. To a lance-corporal, or a young sergeant, beginning to go wrong you could mutter wheezy suggestions through your moustache. But to an officer you had to say things slantways. Difficult it was. Thank God they had a trustworthy cool hand in the other captain. Old and good, the proverb said. + 

Dead silence fell. + 

“Lost the ⸻, they ’ave,” the runner from the Rhondda made his voice startlingly heard. Brilliant illuminations flickered on hut-gables visible through the doorway. + 

“No reason,” his mate from Pontardulais rather whined in his native singsong, “why the bleedin’ searchlights, surely to goodness, should light us up for all the ⸻ ’Un planes to see. I want to see my bleedin’ little ’ut on the bleedin’ Mumbles again, if they don’t.” + 

“Not so much swear words, O Nine Morgan,” the sergeant-major said. + 

“Now, Dai Morgan, I’m telling you,” 09 Morgan’s mate continued. “A queer cow it must have been whatever. Black-and-white Holstein it wass⁠ ⁠…” + 

It was as if the younger captain gave up listening to the conversation. He leant both hands on the blanket that covered the table. He exclaimed: + 

“Who the hell are you to give me orders? I’m your senior. Who the hell⁠ ⁠… Oh, by God, who the hell⁠ ⁠… Nobody gives me orders⁠ ⁠…” His voice collapsed weakly in his chest. He felt his nostrils to be inordinately dilated so that the air pouring into them was cold. He felt that there was an entangled conspiracy against him, and all round him. He exclaimed: “You and your ⸻ pimp of a general⁠ ⁠… !” He desired to cut certain throats with a sharp trench-knife that he had. That would take the weight off his chest. The “Sit down” of the heavy figure lumping opposite him paralysed his limbs. He felt an unbelievable hatred. If he could move his hand to get at his trench-knife⁠ ⁠… + 

09 Morgan said: “The ⸻’s name who’s bought my bleedin’ laundry is Williams⁠ ⁠… If I thought it was Evans Williams of Castell Goch, I’d desert.” + 

“Took a hatred for it cawve,” the Rhondda man said. “And look you, before you could say⁠ ⁠…” The conversation of orfcers was a thing to which they neither listened. Officers talked of things that had no interest. Whatever could possess a cow to take a hatred of its calf? Up behind Caerphilly on the mountains? On an autumny morning the whole hillside was covered with spiderwebs. They shone down the sun like spun glass. Overlooked the cow must be. + 

The young captain leaning over the table began a long argument as to relative seniority. He argued with himself, taking both sides in an extraordinarily rapid gabble. He himself had been gazetted after Gheluvelt. The other not till a year later. It was true the other was in permanent command of that depot, and he himself attached to the unit only for rations and discipline. But that did not include orders to sit down. What the hell, he wanted to know, did the other mean by it? He began to talk, faster than ever, about a circle. When its circumference came whole by the disintegration of the atom the world would come to an end. In the millennium there would be no giving or taking orders. Of course he obeyed orders till then. + 

To the elder officer, burdened with the command of a unit of unreasonable size, with a scratch headquarters of useless subalterns who were continually being changed, with N.C.O.s all unwilling to work, with rank and file nearly all colonials and unused to doing without things, and with a depot to draw on that, being old established, felt that it belonged exclusively to a regular British unit and resented his drawing anything at all, the practical difficulties of his everyday life were already sufficient, and he had troublesome private affairs. He was lately out of hospital; the sackcloth hut in which he lived, borrowed from the Depot medical officer who had gone to England on leave, was suffocatingly hot with the paraffin heater going, and intolerably cold and damp without it; the batman whom the M.O. had left in charge of the hut appeared to be half-witted. These German air-raids had lately become continuous. The Base was packed with men, tighter than sardines. Down in the town you could not move in the streets. Draft-finding units were commanded to keep their men out of sight as much as possible. Drafts were to be sent off only at night. But how could you send off a draft at night when every ten minutes you had two hours of lights out for an air-raid? Every man had nine sets of papers and tags that had to be signed by an officer. It was quite proper that the poor devils should be properly documented. But how was it to be done? He had two thousand nine hundred and ninety-four men to send off that night and nine times two thousand nine hundred and ninety-four is twenty-six thousand nine hundred and forty-six. They would not or could not let him have a disc-punching machine of his own, but how was the Depot armourer to be expected to punch five thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight extra identity discs in addition to his regular jobs? + 

The other captain rambled on in front of him. Tietjens did not like his talk of the circle and the millennium. You get alarmed, if you have any sense, when you hear that. It may prove the beginnings of definite, dangerous lunacy⁠ ⁠… But he knew nothing about the fellow. He was too dark and good-looking, too passionate, probably, to be a good regular officer on the face of him. But he must be a good officer: he had the D.S.O. with a clasp, the M.C., and some foreign ribbon up. And the general said he was: with the additional odd piece of information that he was a Vice-Chancellor’s Latin Prize man⁠ ⁠… He wondered if General Campion knew what a Vice-Chancellor’s Latin Prize man was. Probably he did not, but had just stuck the piece of information into his note as a barbaric ornament is used by a savage chief. Wanted to show that he, General Lord Edward Campion, was a man of culture. There was no knowing where vanity would not break out. + 

So this fellow was too dark and good-looking to be a good officer: yet he was a good officer. That explained it. The repressions of the passionate drive them mad. He must have been being sober, disciplined, patient, absolutely repressed ever since 1914⁠—against a background of hellfire, row, blood, mud, old tins⁠ ⁠… And indeed the elder officer had a vision of the younger as if in a design for a full-length portrait⁠—for some reason with his legs astride, against a background of tapestry scarlet with fire and more scarlet with blood⁠ ⁠… He sighed a little; that was the life of all those several millions⁠ ⁠… + 

He seemed to see his draft: two thousand nine hundred and ninety-four men he had had command of for over a couple of months⁠—a long space of time as that life went⁠—men he and Sergeant-Major Cowley had looked after with a great deal of tenderness, superintending their morale; their morals, their feet, their digestions, their impatiences, their desires for women⁠ ⁠… He seemed to see them winding away over a great stretch of country, the head slowly settling down, as in the Zoo you will see an enormous serpent slowly sliding into its water-tank⁠ ⁠… Settling down out there, a long way away, up against that impassable barrier that stretched from the depths of the ground to the peak of heaven⁠ ⁠… + 

Intense dejection: endless muddles: endless follies: endless villainies. All these men given into the hands of the most cynically carefree intriguers in long corridors who made plots that harrowed the hearts of the world. All these men toys: all these agonies mere occasions for picturesque phrases to be put into politicians’ speeches without heart or even intelligence. Hundreds of thousands of men tossed here and there in that sordid and gigantic mud-brownness of midwinter⁠ ⁠… By God, exactly as if they were nuts wilfully picked up and thrown over the shoulder by magpies⁠ ⁠… But men. Not just populations. Men you worried over there. Each man a man with a backbone, knees, breeches, braces, a rifle, a home, passions, fornications, drunks, pals, some scheme of the universe, corns, inherited diseases, a greengrocer’s business, a milk walk, a paper stall, brats, a slut of a wife⁠ ⁠… The Men: the Other Ranks! And the poor ⸻ little officers. God help them. Vice-Chancellor’s Latin Prize men⁠ ⁠… + 

This particular poor ⸻ Prize man seemed to object to noise. They ought to keep the place quiet for him⁠ ⁠… + 

By God, he was perfectly right. That place was meant for the quiet and orderly preparation of meat for the shambles. Drafts! A Base is a place where you meditate: perhaps you should pray: a place where in peace the Tommies should write their last letters home and describe ’ow the guns are ’owling ’orribly. + 

But to pack a million and a half of men into and round that small town was like baiting a trap for rats with a great chunk of rotten meat. The Hun planes could smell them from a hundred miles away. They could do more harm there than if they bombed a quarter of London to pieces. And the air defences there were a joke: a mad joke. They popped off, thousands of rounds, from any sort of pieces of ordnance, like schoolboys bombarding swimming rats with stones. Obviously your best-trained air-defence men would be round your metropolis. But this was no joke for the sufferers. + 

Heavy depression settled down more heavily upon him. The distrust of the home Cabinet, felt by then by the greater part of that army, became like physical pain. These immense sacrifices, this ocean of mental sufferings, were all undergone to further the private vanities of men who amidst these hugenesses of landscapes and forces appeared pygmies! It was the worries of all these wet millions in mud-brown that worried him. They could die, they could be massacred, by the quarter million, in shambles. But that they should be massacred without jauntiness, without confidence, with depressed brows: without parade⁠ ⁠… + 

He knew really nothing about the officer in front of him. Apparently the fellow had stopped for an answer to some question. What question? Tietjens had no idea. He had not been listening. Heavy silence settled down on the hut. They just waited. The fellow said with an intonation of hatred: + 

“Well, what about it? That’s what I want to know!” + 

Tietjens went on reflecting⁠ ⁠… There were a great many kinds of madness. What kind was this? The fellow was not drunk. He talked like a drunkard, but he was not drunk. In ordering him to sit down Tietjens had just chanced it. There are madmen whose momentarily subconscious selves will respond to a military command as if it were magic. Tietjens remembered having barked: “About⁠ ⁠… turn,” to a poor little lunatic fellow in some camp at home and the fellow who had been galloping hotfoot past his tent, waving a naked bayonet with his pursuers fifty yards behind, had stopped dead and faced about with a military stamp like a guardsman. He had tried it on this lunatic for want of any better expedient. It had apparently functioned intermittently. He risked saying: + 

“What about what?” + 

The man said as if ironically: + 

“It seems as if I were not worth listening to by your high and mightiness. I said: ‘What about my foul squit of an uncle?’ Your filthy, best friend.” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“The general’s your uncle? General Campion? What’s he done to you?” + 

The general had sent this fellow down to him with a note asking him, Tietjens, to keep an eye in his unit on a very good fellow and an admirable officer. The chit was in the general’s own writing, and contained the additional information as to Captain Mackenzie’s scholastic prowess⁠ ⁠… It had struck Tietjens as queer that the general should take so much trouble about a casual infantry company commander. How could the fellow have been brought markedly to his notice? Of course, Campion was good-natured, like another man. If a fellow, half dotty, whose record showed that he was a very good man, was brought to his notice Campion would do what he could for him. And Tietjens knew that the general regarded himself, Tietjens, as a heavy, bookish fellow, able reliably to look after one of his protégés⁠ ⁠… Probably Campion imagined that they had no work to do in that unit: they might become an acting lunatic ward. But if Mackenzie was Campion’s nephew the thing was explained. + 

The lunatic exclaimed: + 

“Campion, my uncle? Why, he’s yours!” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“Oh no, he isn’t.” The general was not even a connection of his, but he did happen to be Tietjens’ godfather and his father’s oldest friend. + 

The other fellow answered: + 

“Then it’s damn funny. Damn suspicious⁠ ⁠… Why should he be so interested in you if he’s not your filthy uncle? You’re no soldier⁠ ⁠… You’re no sort of a soldier⁠ ⁠… A meal sack, that’s what you look like⁠ ⁠…” He paused and then went on very quickly: “They say up at H.Q. that your wife has got hold of the disgusting general. I didn’t believe it was true. I didn’t believe you were that sort of fellow. I’ve heard a lot about you!” + 

Tietjens laughed at this madness. Then, in the dark brownness, an intolerable pang went all through his heavy frame⁠—the intolerable pang of home news to these desperately occupied men, the pain caused by disasters happening in the darkness and at a distance. You could do nothing to mitigate them!⁠ ⁠… The extraordinary beauty of the wife from whom he was separated⁠—for she was extraordinarily beautiful!⁠—might well have caused scandals about her to have penetrated to the general’s headquarters, which was a sort of family party! Hitherto there had, by the grace of God, been no scandals. Sylvia Tietjens had been excruciatingly unfaithful, in the most painful manner. He could not be certain that the child he adored was his own⁠ ⁠… That was not unusual with extraordinarily beautiful⁠—and cruel!⁠—women. But she had been haughtily circumspect. + 

Nevertheless, three months ago, they had parted⁠ ⁠… Or he thought they had parted. Almost complete blankness had descended upon his home life. She appeared before him so extraordinarily bright and clear in the brown darkness that he shuddered: very tall, very fair, extraordinarily fit and clean even. Thoroughbred! In a sheath gown of gold tissue, all illuminated, and her mass of hair, like gold tissue too, coiled round and round in plaits over her ears. The features very clean-cut and thinnish; the teeth white and small; the breasts small; the arms thin, long and at attention at her sides⁠ ⁠… His eyes, when they were tired, had that trick of reproducing images on their retinas with that extreme clearness, images sometimes of things he thought of, sometimes of things merely at the back of the mind. Well, tonight his eyes were very tired! She was looking straight before her, with a little inimical disturbance of the corners of her lips. She had just thought of a way to hurt terribly his silent personality⁠ ⁠… The semi-clearness became a luminous blue, like a tiny gothic arch, and passed out of his vision to the right⁠ ⁠… + 

He knew nothing of where Sylvia was. He had given up looking at the illustrated papers. She had said she was going into a convent at Birkenhead⁠—but twice he had seen photographs of her. The first showed her merely with Lady Fiona Grant, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Ulleswater⁠—and a Lord Swindon, talked of as next minister for International Finance⁠—a new Business Peer⁠ ⁠… All three walking straight into the camera in the courtyard of Lord Swindon’s castle⁠ ⁠… all three smiling!⁠ ⁠… It announced Mrs. Christopher Tietjens as having a husband at the front. + 

The sting had, however, been in the second picture⁠—in the description of it supplied by the journal! It showed Sylvia standing in front of a bench in the park. On the bench in profile there extended himself in a guffaw of laughter, a young man in a top hat jammed well on to his head, which was thrown back, his prognathous jaw pointing upwards. The description stated that the picture showed Mrs. Christopher Tietjens, whose husband was in hospital at the Front, telling a good story to the son and heir of Lord Birgham! Another of these pestilential, crooked newspaper-owning financial peers⁠ ⁠… + 

It had struck him for a painful moment whilst looking at the picture in a dilapidated mess anteroom after he had come out of hospital⁠—that, considering the description, the journal had got its knife into Sylvia⁠ ⁠… But the illustrated papers do not get their knives into society beauties. They are too precious to the photographers⁠ ⁠… Then Sylvia must have supplied the information; she desired to cause comment by the contrast of her hilarious companions and the statement that her husband was in hospital at the Front⁠ ⁠… It had occurred to him that she was on the warpath. But he had put it out of his mind⁠ ⁠… Nevertheless, brilliant mixture as she was, of the perfectly straight, perfectly fearless, perfectly reckless, of the generous, the kind even⁠—and the atrociously cruel, nothing might suit her better than positively to show contempt⁠—no, not contempt! cynical hatred⁠—for her husband, for the war, for public opinion⁠ ⁠… even for the interest of their child! Yet, it came to him, the image of her that he had just seen had been the image of Sylvia, standing at attention, her mouth working a little, whilst she read out the figures beside the bright filament of mercury in a thermometer⁠ ⁠… The child had had, with measles, a temperature that, even then, he did not dare think of. And⁠—it was at his sister’s in Yorkshire, and the local doctor hadn’t cared to take the responsibility⁠—he could still feel the warmth of the little mummy-like body; he had covered the head and face with a flannel, for he didn’t care for the sight, and lowered the warm, terrible, fragile weight into a shining surface of crushed ice in water⁠ ⁠… She had stood at attention, the corners of her mouth moving a little: the thermometer going down as you watched it⁠ ⁠… So that she mightn’t want, in damaging the father, atrociously to damage the child⁠ ⁠… For there could not be anything worse for a child than to have a mother known as a whore⁠ ⁠… + 

Sergeant-Major Cowley was standing beside the table. He said: + 

“Wouldn’t it be a good thing, sir, to send a runner to the depot sergeant cook and tell him we’re going to indent for suppers for the draft? We could send the other with the 128’s to Quarter. They’re neither wanted here for the moment.” + 

The other captain went on incessantly talking⁠—but about his fabulous uncle, not about Sylvia. It was difficult for Tietjens to get what he wanted said. He wanted the second runner sent to the depot quartermaster with a message to the effect that if G.S. candles for hooded lamps were not provided for the use of his orderly room by return of bearer he, Captain Tietjens, commanding Number XVI Casual Battalion, would bring the whole matter of supplies for his battalion that same night before Base Headquarters. They were all three talking at once: heavy fatalism overwhelmed Tietjens at the thought of the stubbornness showed by the depot quartermaster. The big unit beside his camp was a weary obstinacy of obstruction. You would have thought they would have displayed some eagerness to get his men up into the line. Let alone that the men were urgently needed, the more of his men went the more of them stayed behind. Yet they tried to stop his meat, his groceries, his braces, his identification discs, his soldiers’ small books⁠ ⁠… Every imaginable hindrance, and not even self-interested common sense!⁠ ⁠… He managed also to convey to Sergeant-Major Cowley that, as everything seemed to have quieted down, the Canadian sergeant-major had better go and see if everything was ready for falling his draft in⁠ ⁠… If things remained quiet for another ten minutes, the “All Clear” might then be expected⁠ ⁠… He knew that Sergeant-Major Cowley wanted to get the Other Ranks out of the hut with that captain carrying on like that, and he did not see why the old N.C.O. should not have what he wanted. + 

It was as if a tender and masculine butler withdrew himself. Cowley’s grey walrus moustache and scarlet cheeks showed for a moment beside the brazier, whispering at the ears of the runners, a hand kindly on each of their shoulders. The runners went; the Canadian went. Sergeant-Major Cowley, his form blocking the doorway, surveyed the stars. He found it difficult to realize that the same pinpricks of light through black manifolding paper as he looked at, looked down also on his villa and his elderly wife at Isleworth beside the Thames above London. He knew it to be the fact, yet it was difficult to realize. He imagined the trams going along the High Street, his missus in one of them with her supper in a string bag on her stout knees. The trams lit up and shining. He imagined her having kippers for supper: ten to one it would be kippers. Her favourites. His daughter was in the W.A.A.C.s by now. She had been cashier to Parks’s, the big butchers in Brentford, and pretty she had used to look in the glass case. Like as if it might have been the British Museum where they had Pharaohs and others in glass cases⁠ ⁠… There were threshing machines droning away all over the night. He always said they were like threshing machines⁠ ⁠… Crikey, if only they were!⁠ ⁠… But they might be our own planes, of course. A good Welsh rarebit he had had for tea. + 

In the hut, the light from the brazier having fewer limbs on which to fall, a sort of intimacy seemed to descend, and Tietjens felt himself gain in ability to deal with his mad friend. Captain Mackenzie⁠—Tietjens was not sure that the name was Mackenzie: it had looked something like it in the general’s hand⁠—Captain Mackenzie was going on about the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of some fabulous uncle. Apparently at some important juncture the uncle had refused to acknowledge acquaintanceship with the nephew. From that all the misfortunes of the nephew had arisen⁠ ⁠… Suddenly Tietjens said: + 

“Look here, pull yourself together. Are you mad? Stark, staring?⁠ ⁠… Or only just playacting?” + 

The man suddenly sank down on to the bully-beef case that served for a chair. He stammered a question as to what⁠—what⁠—what Tietjens meant. + 

“If you let yourself go,” Tietjens said, “you may let yourself go a tidy sight farther than you want to.” + 

“You’re not a mad doctor,” the other said. “It’s no good your trying to come it over me. I know all about you. I’ve got an uncle who’s done the dirty on me⁠—the dirtiest dirty ever was done on a man. If it hadn’t been for him I shouldn’t be here now.” + 

“You talk as if the fellow had sold you into slavery,” Tietjens said. + 

“He’s your closest friend,” Mackenzie seemed to advance as a motive for revenge on Tietjens. “He’s a friend of the general’s, too. Of your wife’s as well. He’s in with everyone.” + 

A few desultory, pleasurable pop-op-ops sounded from far overhead to the left. + 

“They imagine they’ve found the Hun again,” Tietjens said. “That’s all right; you concentrate on your uncle. Only don’t exaggerate his importance to the world. I assure you you are mistaken if you call him a friend of mine. I have not got a friend in the world.” He added: “Are you going to mind the noise? If it is going to get on your nerves you can walk in a dignified manner to a dugout, now, before it gets bad⁠ ⁠…” He called out to Cowley to go and tell the Canadian sergeant-major to get his men back into their shelters if they had come out. Until the “All Clear” went. + 

Captain Mackenzie sat himself gloomily down at table. + 

“Damn it all,” he said, “don’t think I’m afraid of a little shrapnel. I’ve had two periods solid of fourteen and nine months in the line. I could have got out on to the rotten staff⁠ ⁠… It’s damn it: it’s the beastly row⁠ ⁠… Why isn’t one a beastly girl and privileged to shriek? By God, I’ll get even with some of them one of these days⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Why not shriek?” Tietjens asked. “You can, for me. No one’s going to doubt your courage here.” + 

Loud drops of rain spattered down all round the hut; there was a familiar thud on the ground a yard or so away, a sharp tearing sound above, a sharper knock on the table between them. Mackenzie took the shrapnel bullet that had fallen and turned it round and round between finger and thumb. + 

“You think you caught me on the hop just now,” he said injuriously. “You’re damn clever.” + 

Two stories down below someone let two hundred-pound dumbbells drop on the drawing-room carpet; all the windows of the house slammed in a race to get it over; the pop-op-ops of the shrapnel went in wafts all over the air. There was again sudden silence that was painful, after you had braced yourself up to bear noise. The runner from the Rhondda came in with a light step bearing two fat candles. He took the hooded lamps from Tietjens and began to press the candles up against the inner springs, snorting sedulously through his nostrils⁠ ⁠… + 

“Nearly got me, one of those candlesticks did,” he said. “Touched my foot as it fell, it did. I did run. Surely to goodness I did run, cahptn.” + 

Inside the shrapnel shell was an iron bar with a flattened, broad nose. When the shell burst in the air this iron object fell to the ground and, since it came often from a great height, its fall was dangerous. The men called these candlesticks, which they much resembled. + 

A little ring of light now existed on the puce colour of the blanket-covered table. Tietjens showed, silver-headed, fresh-coloured, and bulky; Mackenzie, dark, revengeful eyes above a prognathous jaw. A very thin man, thirtyish. + 

“You can go into the shelter with the Colonial troops, if you like,” Tietjens said to the runner. The man answered after a pause, being very slow thinking, that he preferred to wait for his mate, 09 Morgan whatever. + 

“They ought to let my orderly room have tin hats,” Tietjens said to Mackenzie. “I’m damned if they didn’t take these fellows’ tin hats into store again when they attached to me for service, and I’m equally damned if they did not tell me that, if I wanted tin hats for my own headquarters, I had to write to H.Q. Canadians, Aldershot, or some such place in order to get the issue sanctioned.” + 

“Our headquarters are full of Huns doing the Huns’ work,” Mackenzie said hatefully. “I’d like to get among them one of these days.” + 

Tietjens looked with some attention at that young man with the Rembrandt shadows over his dark face. He said: + 

“Do you believe that tripe?” + 

The young man said: + 

“No⁠ ⁠… I don’t know that I do⁠ ⁠… I don’t know what to think⁠ ⁠… The world’s rotten⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Oh, the world’s pretty rotten, all right,” Tietjens answered. And, in his fatigue of mind caused by having to attend to innumerable concrete facts like the providing of households for a thousand men every few days, arranging parade states for an extraordinarily mixed set of troops of all arms with very mixed drills, and fighting the Assistant Provost Marshal to keep his own men out of the clutches of the beastly Garrison Military Police who had got a down on all Canadians, he felt he had not any curiosity at all left⁠ ⁠… Yet he felt vaguely that, at the back of his mind, there was some reason for trying to cure this young member of the lower middle classes. + 

He repeated: + 

“Yes, the world’s certainly pretty rotten. But that’s not its particular line of rottenness as far as we are concerned⁠ ⁠… We’re tangled up, not because we’ve got Huns in our orderly rooms, but just because we’ve got English. That’s the bat in our belfry⁠ ⁠… That Hun plane is presumably coming back. Half a dozen of them⁠ ⁠…” + 

The young man, his mind eased by having got off his chest a confounded lot of semi-nonsensical ravings, considered the return of the Hun planes with gloomy indifference. His problem really was: could he stand the ⸻ noise that would probably accompany their return? He had to get really into his head that this was an open space to all intents and purposes. There would not be splinters of stone flying about. He was ready to be hit by iron, steel, lead, copper, or brass shell rims, but not by beastly splinters of stone knocked off house fronts. That consideration had come to him during his beastly, his beastly, his infernal, damnable leave in London, when just such a filthy row had been going on⁠ ⁠… Divorce leave!⁠ ⁠… Captain McKechnie second attached ninth Glamorganshires is granted leave from the 14/11 to the 29/11 for the purpose of obtaining a divorce⁠ ⁠… The memory seemed to burst inside him with the noise of one of those beastly enormous tinpot crashes⁠—and it always came when guns made that particular kind of tinpot crash: the two came together, the internal one and the crash outside. He felt that chimney-pots were going to crash on to his head. You protected yourself by shouting at damned infernal idiots; if you could outshout the row you were safe⁠ ⁠… That was not sensible but you got ease that way!⁠ ⁠… + 

“In matters of Information they’re not a patch on us.” Tietjens tried the speech on cautiously and concluded: “We know what the Enemy rulers read in the sealed envelopes beside their breakfast bacon-and-egg plates.” + 

It had occurred to him that it was a military duty to bother himself about the mental equilibrium of this member of the lower classes. So he talked⁠ ⁠… any old talk, wearisomely, to keep his mind employed! Captain Mackenzie was an officer of His Majesty the King: the property, body and soul, of His Majesty and His Majesty’s War Office. It was Tietjens’ duty to preserve this fellow as it was his duty to prevent deterioration in any other piece of the King’s property. That was implicit in the oath of allegiance. He went on talking: + 

The curse of the army, as far as the organization is concerned, was our imbecile national belief that the game is more than the player. That was our ruin, mentally, as a nation. We were taught that cricket is more than clearness of mind, so the blasted quartermaster, O.C. Depot Ordnance Stores next door, thought he had taken a wicket if he refused to serve out tin hats to their crowd. That’s the Game! And if any of his, Tietjens’, men were killed, he grinned and said the game was more than the players of the game⁠ ⁠… And of course if he got his bowling average down low enough he got promotion. There was a quartermaster in a west country cathedral city who’d got more D.S.O.s and combatant medals than anyone on active service in France, from the sea to Peronne, or wherever our lines ended. His achievement was to have robbed almost every wretched Tommie in the Western Command of several weeks’ separation allowance⁠ ⁠… for the good of the taxpayer, of course. The poor ⸻ Tommies’ kids went without proper food and clothing, and the Tommies themselves had been in a state of exasperation and resentment. And nothing in the world was worse for discipline and the army as a fighting machine. But there that quartermaster sat in his office, playing the romantic game over his A.F.B.s till the broad buff sheets fairly glowed in the light of the incandescent gas. “And,” Tietjens concluded, “for every quarter of a million sterling for which he bowls out the wretched fighting men he gets a new clasp on his fourth D.S.O. ribbon⁠ ⁠… The game, in short, is more than the players of the game.” + 

“Oh, damn it!” Captain Mackenzie said. “That’s what’s made us what we are, isn’t it?” + 

“It is,” Tietjens answered. “It’s got us into the hole and it keeps us there.” + 

Mackenzie remained dispiritedly looking down at his fingers. + 

“You may be wrong or you may be right,” he said. “It’s contrary to everything that I ever heard. But I see what you mean.” + 

“At the beginning of the war,” Tietjens said, “I had to look in on the War Office, and in a room I found a fellow⁠ ⁠… What do you think he was doing⁠ ⁠… what the hell do you think he was doing? He was devising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion. You can’t say we were not prepared in one matter at least⁠ ⁠… Well, the end of the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease: the band would play ‘Land of Hope and Glory,’ and then the adjutant would say: ‘There will be no more parades’⁠ ⁠… Don’t you see how symbolical it was: the band playing ‘Land of Hope and Glory,’ and then the adjutant saying ‘There will be no more parades?’⁠ ⁠… For there won’t. There won’t, there damn well won’t⁠ ⁠… No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country⁠ ⁠… Nor for the world, I dare say⁠ ⁠… None⁠ ⁠… Gone⁠ ⁠… Na poo, finny! No⁠ ⁠… more⁠ ⁠… parades!” + 

“I dare say you’re right,” the other said slowly. “But, all the same, what am I doing in this show? I hate soldiering. I hate this whole beastly business⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Then why didn’t you go on the gaudy Staff?” Tietjens asked. “The gaudy Staff apparently was yearning to have you. I bet God intended you for Intelligence: not for the footslogging department.” + 

The other said wearily: + 

“I don’t know. I was with the battalion. I wanted to stop with the battalion. I was intended for the Foreign Office. My miserable uncle got me hoofed out of that. I was with the battalion. The C.O. wasn’t up to much. Someone had to stay with the battalion. I was not going to do the dirty on it, taking any soft job⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I suppose you speak seven languages and all?” Tietjens asked. + 

“Five,” the other said patiently, “and read two more. And Latin and Greek, of course.” + 

A man, brown, stiff, with a haughty parade step, burst into the light. He said with a high wooden voice: + 

“ ’Ere’s another bloomin’ casualty.” In the shadow he appeared to have draped half his face and the right side of his breast with crape. He gave a high, rattling laugh. He bent, as if in a stiff bow, woodenly at his thighs. He pitched, still bent, on to the iron sheet that covered the brazier, rolled off that and lay on his back across the legs of the other runner, who had been crouched beside the brazier. In the bright light it was as if a whole pail of scarlet paint had been dashed across the man’s face on the left and his chest. It glistened in the firelight⁠—just like fresh paint, moving! The runner from the Rhondda, pinned down by the body across his knees, sat with his jaw fallen, resembling one girl that should be combing the hair of another recumbent before her. The red viscousness welled across the floor; you sometimes so see fresh water bubbling up in sand. It astonished Tietjens to see that a human body could be so lavish of blood. He was thinking it was a queer mania that that fellow should have, that his uncle was a friend of his, Tietjens. He had no friend in trade, uncle of a fellow who in ordinary times would probably bring you pairs of boots on approval⁠ ⁠… He felt as he did when you patch up a horse that has been badly hurt. He remembered a horse from a cut on whose chest the blood had streamed down over the off foreleg like a stocking. A girl had lent him her petticoat to bandage it. Nevertheless his legs moved slowly and heavily across the floor. + 

The heat from the brazier was overpowering on his bent face. He hoped he would not get his hands all over blood, because blood is very sticky. It makes your fingers stick together impotently. But there might not be any blood in the darkness under the fellow’s back where he was putting his hand. There was, however: it was very wet. + 

The voice of Sergeant-Major Cowley said from outside: + 

“Bugler, call two sanitary lance-corporals and four men. Two sanitary corporals and four men.” A prolonged wailing with interruptions transfused the night, mournful, resigned, and prolonged. + 

Tietjens thought that, thank God, someone would come and relieve him of that job. It was a breathless affair holding up the corpse with the fire burning his face. He said to the other runner: + 

“Get out from under him, damn you! Are you hurt?” Mackenzie could not get at the body from the other side because of the brazier. The runner from under the corpse moved with short sitting shuffles as if he were getting his legs out from under a sofa. He was saying: + 

“Poor ⸻ O Nine Morgan! Surely to goodness I did not recognice the pore ⸻⁠ ⁠… Surely to goodness I did not recognice the pore ⸻.” + 

Tietjens let the trunk of the body sink slowly to the floor. He was more gentle than if the man had been alive. All hell in the way of noise burst about the world. Tietjens’ thoughts seemed to have to shout to him between earthquake shocks. He was thinking it was absurd of that fellow Mackenzie to imagine that he could know any uncle of his. He saw very vividly also the face of his girl who was a pacifist. It worried him not to know what expression her face would have if she heard of his occupation, now. Disgust?⁠ ⁠… He was standing with his greasy, sticky hands held out from the flaps of his tunic⁠ ⁠… Perhaps disgust!⁠ ⁠… It was impossible to think in this row⁠ ⁠… His very thick soles moved gluily and came up after suction⁠ ⁠… He remembered he had not sent a runner along to I.B.D. Orderly Room to see how many of his crowd would be wanted for garrison fatigue next day, and this annoyed him acutely. He would have no end of a job warning the officers he detailed. They would all be in brothels down in the town by now⁠ ⁠… He could not work out what the girl’s expression would be. He was never to see her again, so what the hell did it matter?⁠ ⁠… Disgust, probably!⁠ ⁠… He remembered that he had not looked to see how Mackenzie was getting on in the noise. He did not want to see Mackenzie. He was a bore⁠ ⁠… How would her face express disgust? He had never seen her express disgust. She had a perfectly undistinguished face. Fair⁠ ⁠… O God, how suddenly his bowels turned over!⁠ ⁠… Thinking of the girl⁠ ⁠… The face below him grinned at the roof⁠—the half face! The nose was there, half the mouth with the teeth showing in the firelight⁠ ⁠… It was extraordinary how defined the peaked nose and the serrated teeth were in that mess⁠ ⁠… The eye looked jauntily at the peak of the canvas hut-roof⁠ ⁠… Gone with a grin. Singular the fellow should have spoken! After he was dead. He must have been dead when he spoke. It had been done with the last air automatically going out of the lungs. A reflex action, probably, in the dead⁠ ⁠… If he, Tietjens, had given the fellow the leave he wanted he would be alive now! + 

Well, he was quite right not to have given the poor devil his leave. He was, anyhow, better where he was. And so was he, Tietjens. He had not had a single letter from home since he had been out this time! Not a single letter. Not even gossip. Not a bill. Some circulars of old furniture dealers. They never neglected him! They had got beyond the sentimental stage at home. Obviously so⁠ ⁠… He wondered if his bowels would turn over again if he thought of the girl. He was gratified that they had. It showed that he had strong feelings⁠ ⁠… He thought about her deliberately. Hard. Nothing happened. He thought of her fair, undistinguished, fresh face that made your heart miss a beat when you thought about it. His heart missed a beat. Obedient heart! Like the first primrose. Not any primrose. The first primrose. Under a bank with the hounds breaking through the underwood⁠ ⁠… It was sentimental to say Du bist wie eine Blume ⁠… Damn the German language! But that fellow was a Jew⁠ ⁠… One should not say that one’s young woman was like a flower, any flower. Not even to oneself. That was sentimental. But one might say one special flower. A man could say that. A man’s job. She smelt like a primrose when you kissed her. But, damn it, he had never kissed her. So how did he know how she smelt! She was a little tranquil, golden spot. He himself must be a ⸻ eunuch. By temperament. That dead fellow down there must be one, physically. It was probably indecent to think of a corpse as impotent. But he was, very likely. That would be why his wife had taken up with the prizefighter Red Evans Williams of Castell Goch. If he had given the fellow leave the prizefighter would have smashed him to bits. The police of Pontardulais had asked that he should not be let come home⁠—because of the prizefighter. So he was better dead. Or perhaps not. Is death better than discovering that your wife is a whore and being done in by her cully? Gwell angau na gwillth, their own regimental badge bore the words. “Death is better than dishonour”⁠ ⁠… No, not death, angau means pain. Anguish! Anguish is better than dishonour. The devil it is! Well, that fellow would have got both. Anguish and dishonour. Dishonour from his wife and anguish when the prizefighter hit him⁠ ⁠… That was no doubt why his half-face grinned at the roof. The gory side of it had turned brown. Already! Like a mummy of a Pharaoh, that half looked⁠ ⁠… He was born to be a blooming casualty. Either by shellfire or by the fist of the prizefighter⁠ ⁠… Pontardulais! Somewhere in Mid-Wales. He had been through it once in a car, on duty. A long, dull village. Why should anyone want to go back to it?⁠ ⁠… + 

A tender butler’s voice said beside him: “This isn’t your job, sir. Sorry you had to do it⁠ ⁠… Lucky it wasn’t you, sir⁠ ⁠… This was what done it, I should say.” + 

Sergeant-Major Cowley was standing beside him holding a bit of metal that was heavy in his hand and like a candlestick. He was aware that a moment before he had seen the fellow, Mackenzie, bending over the brazier, putting the sheet of iron back. Careful officer, Mackenzie. The Huns must not be allowed to see the light from the brazier. The edge of the sheet had gone down on the dead man’s tunic, nipping a bit by the shoulder. The face had disappeared in shadow. There were several men’s faces in the doorway. + 

Tietjens said: “No: I don’t believe that did it. Something bigger⁠ ⁠… Say a prizefighter’s fist⁠ ⁠…” + 

Sergeant-Major Cowley said: + 

“No, no prizefighter’s fist would have done that, sir⁠ ⁠…” And then he added, “Oh, I take your meaning, sir⁠ ⁠… O Nine Morgan’s wife, sir⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens moved, his feet sticking, towards the sergeant-major’s table. The other runner had placed a tin basin with water in it. There was a hooded candle there now, alight; the water shone innocently, a half-moon of translucence wavering over the white bottom of the basin. The runner from Pontardulais said: + 

“Wash your hands first, sir!” + 

He said: + 

“Move a little out of it, cahptn.” He had a rag in his black hands. Tietjens moved out of the blood that had run in a thin stream under the table. The man was on his knees, his hands rubbing Tietjens’ boot welts heavily, with the rags. Tietjens placed his hands in the innocent water and watched light purple-scarlet mist diffuse itself over the pale half-moon. The man below him breathed heavily, sniffing. Tietjens said: + 

“Thomas, O Nine Morgan was your mate?” + 

The man’s face, wrinkled, dark and apelike, looked up. “He was a good pal, pore old ⸻,” he said. “You would not like, surely to goodness, to go to mess with your shoes all bloody.” + 

“If I had given him leave,” Tietjens said, “he would not be dead now.” + 

“No, surely not,” One Seven Thomas answered. “But it is all one. Evans of Castell Goch would surely to goodness have killed him.” + 

“So you knew, too, about his wife!” Tietjens said. + 

“We thocht it wass that,” One Seven Thomas answered, “or you would have given him leave, cahptn. You are a good cahptn.” + 

A sudden sense of the publicity that that life was came over Tietjens. + 

“You knew that,” he said. “I wonder what the hell you fellows don’t know and all!” he thought. “If anything went wrong with one it would be all over the command in two days. Thank God, Sylvia can’t get here!” + 

The man had risen to his feet. He fetched a towel of the sergeant-major’s, very white with a red border. + 

“We know,” he said, “that your honour is a very goot cahptn. And Captain McKechnie is a fery goot cahptn, and Captain Prentiss, and Le’tennat Jonce of Merthyr⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“That’ll do. Tell the sergeant-major to give you a pass to go with your mate to the hospital. Get someone to wash this floor.” + 

Two men were carrying the remains of O Nine Morgan, the trunk wrapped in a ground sheet. They carried him in a bandy chair out of the hut. His arms over his shoulders waved a jocular farewell. There would be an ambulance stretcher on bicycle wheels outside. + 

II + 

The “All Clear” went at once after that. Its suddenness was something surprising, the mournful-cheerful, long notes dying regretfully on a night that had only just gone quiet after the perfectly astonishing row. The moon had taken it into its head to rise; begumboiled, jocular and grotesque, it came from behind the shoulder of one of the hut-covered hills and sent down the lines of Tietjens’ huts long, sentimental rays that converted the place into a slumbering, pastoral settlement. There was no sound that did not contribute to the silence, little dim lights shone through the celluloid casements. Of Sergeant-Major Cowley, his numerals gilded by the moon in the lines of A Company, Tietjens, who was easing his lungs of coke vapours for a minute, asked in a voice that hushed itself in tribute to the moonlight and the now keen frost: + 

“Where the deuce is the draft?” + 

The sergeant-major looked poetically down a ribbon of whitewashed stones that descended the black down-side. Over the next shoulder of hill was the blur of a hidden conflagration. + 

“There’s a Hun plane burning down there. In Twenty-Seven’s parade ground. The draft’s round that, sir,” he said. Tietjens said: + 

“Good God!” in a voice of caustic tolerance. He added, “I did think we had drilled some discipline into these blighters in the seven weeks we have had them⁠ ⁠… You remember the first time when we had them on parade and that acting lance-corporal left the ranks to heave a rock at a seagull⁠ ⁠… And called you Ol’ Hunkey!⁠ ⁠… Conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline? Where’s that Canadian sergeant-major? Where’s the officer in charge of the draft?” + 

Sergeant-Major Cowley said: + 

“Sergeant-Major Ledoux said it was like a cattle-stampede on the⁠ ⁠… some river where they come from. You couldn’t stop them, sir. It was their first German plane⁠ ⁠… And they going up the line tonight, sir.” + 

“Tonight!” Tietjens exclaimed. “Next Christmas!” The sergeant-major said: + 

“Poor boys!” and continued to gaze into the distance. “I heard another good one, sir,” he said. “The answer to the one about the King saluting a private soldier and he not taking any notice is: when he’s dead⁠ ⁠… But if you marched a company into a field through a gateway and you wanted to get it out again but you did not know any command in the drill book for change of direction, what would you do, sir?⁠ ⁠… You have to get that company out, but you must not use About Turn, or Right or Left Wheel⁠ ⁠… There’s another one, too, about saluting⁠ ⁠… The officer in charge of draft is Second-Lieutenant Hotchkiss⁠ ⁠… But he’s an A.S.C. officer and turned of sixty. A farrier he is, sir in civil life. An A.S.C. major was asking me, sir, very civil, if you could not detail someone else. He says he doubts if Second Lieutenant Hitchcock⁠ ⁠… Hotchkiss could walk as far as the station, let alone march the men, him not knowing anything but cavalry words of command, if he knows them. He’s only been in the army a fortnight⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens turned from the idyllic scene with the words: + 

“I suppose the Canadian sergeant-major and Lieutenant Hotchkiss are doing what they can to get their men come back.” + 

He reentered the hut. + 

Captain Mackenzie in the light of a fantastically brilliant hurricane lamp appeared to be bathing dejectedly in a surf of coiling papers spread on the table before him. + 

“There’s all this bumph,” he said, “just come from all the headquarters in the bally world.” + 

Tietjens said cheerfully: + 

“What’s it all about?” There were, the other answered, Garrison Headquarter orders, Divisional orders, Lines of Communication orders, half a dozen A.F.W.B. two four twos. A terrific strafe from First Army forwarded from Garrison H.Q. about the draft’s not having reached Hazebrouck the day before yesterday. Tietjens said: + 

“Answer them politely to the effect that we had orders not to send off the draft without its complement of four hundred Canadian Railway Service men⁠—the fellows in furred hoods. They only reached us from Etaples at five this afternoon without blankets or ring papers. Or any other papers for the matter of that.” + 

Mackenzie was studying with increased gloom a small buff memorandum slip: + 

“This appears to be meant for you privately,” he said. “I can’t make head or tail of it otherwise. It isn’t marked private.” + 

He tossed the buff slip across the table. + 

Tietjens sank down bulkily on to his bully-beef case. He read on the buff at first the initials of the signature, “E. C. Genl.”, and then: “For God’s sake keep your wife off me. I will not have skirts round my H.Q. You are more trouble to me than all the rest of my command put together.” + 

Tietjens groaned and sank more deeply on to his beef case. It was as if an unseen and unsuspected wild beast had jumped on his neck from an overhanging branch. The sergeant-major at his side said in his most admirable butler manner: + 

“Colour-Sergeant Morgan and Lance-Corporal Trench are obliging us by coming from depot orderly room to help with the draft’s papers. Why don’t you and the other officer go and get a bit of dinner, sir? The colonel and the padre have only just come in to mess, and I’ve warned the mess orderlies to keep your food ’ot⁠ ⁠… Both good men with papers, Morgan and Trench. We can send the soldiers’ small books to you at table to sign⁠ ⁠…” + 

His feminine solicitude enraged and overwhelmed Tietjens with blackness. He told the sergeant-major that he was to go to hell, for he himself was not going to leave that hut till the draft was moved off. Captain Mackenzie could do as he pleased. The sergeant-major told Captain Mackenzie that Captain Tietjens took as much trouble with his ragtime detachments as if he had been the Coldstream adjutant at Chelsea sending off a draft of Guards. Captain Mackenzie said that that was why they damn well got their details off four days faster than any other I.B.D. in that camp. He would say that much, he added grudgingly and dropped his head over his papers again. The hut was moving slowly up and down before the eyes of Tietjens. He might have just been kicked in the stomach. That was how shocks took him. He said to himself that by God he must take himself in hand. He grabbed with his heavy hands at a piece of buff paper and wrote on it a column of fat, wet letters + 

a + 

b + 

b + 

a + 

a + 

b + 

b + 

a + 

and so on. + 

He said opprobriously to Captain Mackenzie: + 

“Do you know what a sonnet is? Give me the rhymes for a sonnet. That’s the plan of it.” + 

Mackenzie grumbled: + 

“Of course I know what a sonnet is. What’s your game?” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“Give me the fourteen end-rhymes of a sonnet and I’ll write the lines. In under two minutes and a half.” + 

Mackenzie said injuriously: + 

“If you do I’ll turn it into Latin hexameters in three. In under three minutes.” + 

They were like men uttering deadly insults the one to the other. To Tietjens it was as if an immense cat were parading, fascinated and fatal, round that hut. He had imagined himself parted from his wife. He had not heard from his wife since her four-in-the-morning departure from their flat, months and eternities ago, with the dawn just showing up the chimney-pots of the Georgian rooftrees opposite. In the complete stillness of dawn he had heard her voice say very clearly “Paddington” to the chauffeur, and then all the sparrows in the inn waking up in chorus⁠ ⁠… Suddenly and appallingly it came into his head that it might not have been his wife’s voice that had said “Paddington,” but her maid’s⁠ ⁠… He was a man who lived very much by rules of conduct. He had a rule: Never think on the subject of a shock at a moment of shock. The mind was then too sensitized. Subjects of shock require to be thought all round. If your mind thinks when it is too sensitized its then conclusions will be too strong. So he exclaimed to Mackenzie: + 

“Haven’t you got your rhymes yet? Damn it all!” + 

Mackenzie grumbled offensively: + 

“No, I haven’t. It’s more difficult to get rhymes than to write sonnets⁠ ⁠… death, moil, coil, breath⁠ ⁠…” He paused. + 

“Heath, soil, toil, staggereth,” Tietjens said contemptuously. “That’s your sort of Oxford young woman’s rhyme⁠ ⁠… Go on⁠ ⁠… What is it?” + 

An extremely age-faded and unmilitary officer was beside the blanketed table. Tietjens regretted having spoken to him with ferocity. He had a grotesquely thin white beard. Positively, white whiskers! He must have gone through as much of the army as he had gone through with those whiskers, because no superior officer⁠—not even a fieldmarshal⁠—would have the heart to tell him to take them off! It was the measure of his pathos. This ghostlike object was apologizing for not having been able to keep the draft in hand: he was requesting his superior to observe that these Colonial troops were without any instincts of discipline. None at all. Tietjens observed that he had a blue cross on his right arm where the vaccination marks are as a rule. He imagined the Canadians talking to this hero⁠ ⁠… The hero began to talk of Major Cornwallis of the R.A.S.C. + 

Tietjens said apropos of nothing: + 

“Is there a Major Cornwallis in the A.S.C.? Good God!” + 

The hero protested faintly: + 

“The R.A.S.C.” + 

Tietjens said kindly: + 

“Yes. Yes. The Royal Army Service Corps.” + 

Obviously his mind until now had regarded his wife’s “Paddington” as the definite farewell between his life and hers⁠ ⁠… He had imagined her, like Eurydice, tall, but faint and pale, sinking back into the shades⁠ ⁠… “Che faro senz’ Eurydice?⁠ ⁠…” he hummed. Absurd! And of course it might have been only the maid that had spoken⁠ ⁠… She too had a remarkably clear voice. So that the mystic word “Paddington” might perfectly well be no symbol at all, and Mrs. Sylvia Tietjens, far from being faint and pale, might perfectly well be playing the very devil with half the general officers commanding in chief from Whitehall to Alaska. + 

Mackenzie⁠—he was like a damned clerk⁠—was transferring the rhymes that he had no doubt at last found, on to another sheet of paper. Probably he had a round, copybook hand. Positively, his tongue followed his pen round, inside his lips. These were what His Majesty’s regular officers of today were. Good God! A damned intelligent, dark-looking fellow. Of the type that is starved in its youth and takes all the scholarships that the board schools have to offer. Eyes too big and black. Like a Malay’s⁠ ⁠… Any blasted member of any subject race. + 

The A.S.C. fellow had been talking positively about horses. He had offered his services in order to study the variation of pinkeye that was decimating all the service horses in the lines. He had been a professor⁠—positively a professor⁠—in some farriery college or other. Tietjens said that, in that case, he ought to be in the A.V.C.⁠—the Royal Army Veterinary Corps perhaps it was. The old man said he didn’t know. He imagined that the R.A.S.C. had wanted his service for their own horses⁠ ⁠… + 

Tietjens said: + 

“I’ll tell you what to do, Lieutenant Hitchcock⁠ ⁠… For, damn it, you’re a stout fellow⁠ ⁠…” The poor old fellow, pushing out at that age from the cloisters of some provincial university⁠ ⁠… He certainly did not look a horsy sportsman⁠ ⁠… + 

The old lietutenant said: + 

“Hotchkiss⁠ ⁠…” And Tietjens exclaimed: + 

“Of course it’s Hotchkiss⁠ ⁠… I’ve seen your name signing a testimonial to Pigg’s Horse Embrocation⁠ ⁠… Then if you don’t want to take this draft up the line⁠ ⁠… Though I’d advise you to⁠ ⁠… It’s merely a Cook’s Tour to Hazebrouck⁠ ⁠… No, Bailleul⁠ ⁠… And the sergeant-major will march the men for you⁠ ⁠… And you will have been in the First Army Lines and able to tell all your friends you’ve been on active service at the real front⁠ ⁠…” + 

His mind said to himself while his words went on⁠ ⁠… + 

“Then, good God, if Sylvia is actively paying attention to my career I shall be the laughingstock of the whole army. I was thinking that ten minutes ago!⁠ ⁠… What’s to be done? What in God’s name is to be done?” A black crape veil seemed to drop across his vision⁠ ⁠… Liver⁠ ⁠… + 

Lieutenant Hotchkiss said with dignity: + 

“I’m going to the front. I’m going to the real front. I was passed A1 this morning. I am going to study the blood reactions of the service horse under fire.” + 

“Well, you’re a damn good chap,” Tietjens said. There was nothing to be done. The amazing activities of which Sylvia would be capable were just the thing to send laughter raging like fire through a cachinnating army. She could not thank God, get into France: to that place. But she could make scandals in the papers that every Tommie read. There was no game of which she was not capable. That sort of pursuit was called “pulling the strings of shower-baths” in her circle of friends. Nothing. Nothing to be done⁠ ⁠… The beastly hurricane lamp was smoking. + 

“I’ll tell you what to do,” he said to Lieutenant Hotchkiss. + 

Mackenzie had tossed his sheet of rhymes under his nose. Tietjens read: Death, moil, coil, breath⁠ ⁠… Saith⁠—“The dirty Cockney!” Oil, soil, wraith⁠ ⁠… + 

“I’d be blowed,” Mackenzie said with a vicious grin, “if I was going to give you rhymes you had suggested yourself⁠ ⁠…” + 

The officer said: + 

“I don’t of course want to be a nuisance if you’re busy.” + 

“It’s no nuisance,” Tietjens said. “It’s what we’re for. But I’d suggest that now and then you say ‘sir’ to the officer commanding your unit. It sounds well before the men⁠ ⁠… Now you go to No. XVI I.B.D. Mess anteroom⁠ ⁠… The place where they’ve got the broken bagatelle-table⁠ ⁠…” + 

The voice of Sergeant-Major Cowley exclaimed tranquilly from outside: + 

“Fall in now. Men who’ve got their ring papers and identity disks⁠—three of them⁠—on the left. Men who haven’t, on the right. Any man who has not been able to draw his blankets tell Colour-Sergeant Morgan. Don’t forget. You won’t get any where you’re going. Any man who hasn’t made his will in his Soldier’s Small Book or elsewhere and wants to, to consult Captain Tietjens. Any man who wants to draw money, ask Captain Mackenzie. Any R.C. who wants to go to confession after he has got his papers signed can find the R.C. padre in the fourth hut from the left in the Main Line from here⁠ ⁠… And damn kind it is of his reverence to put himself out for a set of damn blinking mustard-faced red herrings like you who can’t keep from running away to the first baby’s bonfire you sees. You’ll be running the other way before you’re a week older, though what good they as asks for you thinks you’ll be out there God knows. You look like a squad of infants’ companions from a Wesleyan Sunday school. That’s what you look like and, thank God, we’ve got a Navy.” + 

Under cover of his voice Tietjens had been writing: + 

“Now we affront the grinning chops of Death,” and saying to Lieutenant Hotchkiss: “In the I.B.D. anteroom you’ll find any number of dirty little squits of Glamorganshires drinking themselves blind over La Vie Parisienne⁠ ⁠… Ask any one of them you like⁠ ⁠…” He wrote: + 

“And in between the carcases and the moil + 

Of marts and cities, toil and moil and coil⁠ ⁠…” + 

“You think this difficult!” he said to Mackenzie. “Why, you’ve written a whole undertaker’s mortuary ode in the rhymes alone,” and went on to Hotchkiss: “Ask anyone you like as long as he’s a P.B. officer⁠ ⁠… Do you know what P.B. means? No, not Poor B⁠⸺⁠y, Permanent Base. Unfit⁠ ⁠… If he’d like to take a draft to Bailleul.” + 

The hut was filling with devious, slow, ungainly men in yellow-brown. Their feet shuffled desultorily; they lumped dull canvas bags along the floor and held in unliterary hands small open books that they dropped from time to time. From outside came a continuing, swelling and descending chant of voices; at times it would seem to be all one laugh, at times one menace, then the motives mingled fugally, like the sea on a beach of large stones. It seemed to Tietjens suddenly extraordinary how shut in on oneself one was in this life⁠ ⁠… He sat scribbling fast: “Old Spectre blows a cold protecting breath⁠ ⁠… Vanity of vanities, the preacher saith⁠ ⁠… No more parades, not any more, no oil⁠ ⁠…” He was telling Hotchkiss, who was obviously shy of approaching the Glamorganshires in their anteroom⁠ ⁠… “Unambergris’d our limbs in the naked soil⁠ ⁠…” that he did not suppose any P.B. officer would object. They would go on a beanfeast up into the giddy line in a first-class carriage and get draft leave and command pay too probably⁠ ⁠… “No funeral struments cast before our wraiths⁠ ⁠…” If any fellow does object, you just send his name to me and I will damn well shove it into extra orders⁠ ⁠… + 

The advanced wave of the brown tide of men was already at his feet. The extraordinary complications of even the simplest lives⁠ ⁠… A fellow was beside him ⁠… Private Logan, formerly, of all queer things for a Canadian private, a trooper of the Inniskillings: owner, of all queer things, of a milk-walk or a dairy farm, outside Sydney, which is in Australia⁠ ⁠… A man of sentimental complications, jauntiness as became an Inniskilling, a Cockney accent such as ornaments the inhabitants of Sydney, and a complete distrust of lawyers. On the other hand, with the completest trust in Tietjens. Over his shoulder⁠—he was blond, upright, with his numerals shining like gold, looked a lumpish, café-au-lait, eagle-nosed countenance: a half-caste member of one of the Six Nations, who had been a doctor’s errand boy in Quebec⁠ ⁠… He had his troubles, but was difficult to understand. Behind him, very black-avised with a high colour, truculent eyes and an Irish accent, was a graduate of McGill University who had been a teacher of languages in Tokyo and had some sort of claim against the Japanese Government⁠ ⁠… And faces, two and two, in a coil round the hut⁠ ⁠… Like dust: like a cloud of dust that would approach and overwhelm a landscape: everyone with preposterous troubles and anxieties, even if they did not overwhelm you personally with them⁠ ⁠… Brown dust⁠ ⁠… + 

He kept the Inniskilling waiting while he scribbled the rapid sestet to his sonnet which ought to make a little plainer what it all meant. Of course the general idea was that, when you got into the line or near it, there was no room for swank: typified by expensive funerals. As you might say: No flowers by compulsion⁠ ⁠… No more parades!⁠ ⁠… He had also to explain, while he did it, to the heroic veterinary sexagenarian that he need not feel shy about going into the Glamorganshire Mess on a man-catching expedition. The Glamorganshires were bound to lend him, Tietjens, P.B. officers if they had not got other jobs. Lieutenant Hotchkiss could speak to Colonel Johnson, whom he would find in the mess and quite good natured over his dinner. A pleasant and sympathetic old gentleman who would appreciate Hotchkiss’s desire not to go superfluously into the line. Hotchkiss could offer to take a look at the colonel’s charger: a Hun horse, captured on the Marne and called Schomburg, that was off its feed⁠ ⁠… He added: “But don’t do anything professional to Schomburg. I ride him myself!” + 

He threw his sonnet across to Mackenzie, who with a background of huddled khaki limbs and anxious faces was himself anxiously counting out French currency notes and dubious-looking tokens⁠ ⁠… What the deuce did men want to draw money⁠—sometimes quite large sums of money, the Canadians being paid in dollars converted into local coins⁠—when in an hour or so they would be going up? But they always did and their accounts were always in an incredibly entangled state. Mackenzie might well look worried. As like as not he might find himself a fiver or more down at the end of the evening for unauthorized payments. If he had only his pay and an extravagant wife to keep, that might well put the wind up him. But that was his funeral. He told Lieutenant Hotchkiss to come and have a chat with him in his hut, the one next the mess. About horses. He knew a little about horse-illness himself. Only empirically, of course. + 

Mackenzie was looking at his watch. + 

“You took two minutes and eleven seconds,” he said. “I’ll take it for granted it’s a sonnet⁠ ⁠… I have not read it because I can’t turn it into Latin here⁠ ⁠… I haven’t got your knack of doing eleven things at once⁠ ⁠…” + 

A man with a worried face, encumbered by a bundle and a small book, was studying figures at Mackenzie’s elbow. He interrupted Mackenzie in a high American voice to say that he had never drawn fourteen dollars seventy-five cents in Thrasna Barracks, Aldershot. + 

Mackenzie said to Tietjens: + 

“You understand. I have not read your sonnet. I shall turn it into Latin in the mess: in the time stipulated. I don’t want you to think I’ve read it and taken time to think about it.” + 

The man besides him said: + 

“When I went to the Canadian Agent, Strand, London, his office was shut up⁠ ⁠…” + 

Mackenzie said with white fury: + 

“How much service have you got? Don’t you know better than to interrupt an officer when he is talking? You must settle your own figures with your own confounded Colonial paymaster: I’ve sixteen dollars thirty cents here for you. Will you take them or leave them?” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“I know that man’s case. Turn him over to me. It isn’t complicated. He’s got his paymaster’s cheque, but doesn’t know how to cash it and of course they won’t give him another⁠ ⁠…” + 

The man with slow, broad, brown features looked from one to the other officer’s face and back again with a keen black-eyed scrutiny as if he were looking into a wind and dazed by the light. He began a long story of how he owed Fat-Eared Bill fifty dollars lost at House. He was perhaps half Chinese, half Finn. He continued to talk, being in a state of great anxiety about his money. Tietjens addressed himself to the cases of the Sydney Inniskilling ex-trooper and the McGill graduate who had suffered at the hands of the Japanese Educational Ministry. It made altogether a complicated effect. “You would say,” Tietjens said to himself, “that, all together, it ought to be enough to take my mind up.” + 

The upright trooper had a very complicated sentimental history. It was difficult to advise him before his fellows. He, however, felt no diffidence. He discussed the points of the girl called Rosie whom he had followed from Sydney to British Columbia, of the girl called Gwen with whom he had taken up in Aberystwyth, of the woman called Mrs. Hosier with whom he had lived maritally, on a sleeping-out pass, at Berwick St. James, near Salisbury Plain. Through the continuing voice of the half-caste Chinaman he discussed them with a large tolerance, explaining that he wanted them all to have a bit, as a souvenir, if he happened to stop one out there. Tietjens handed him the draft of a will he had written out for him, asked him to read it attentively and copy it with his own hand into his soldier’s small book. Then Tietjens would witness it for him. He said: + 

“Do you think this will make my old woman in Sydney part? I guess it won’t. She’s a sticker, sir. A regular July bur, God bless her.” The McGill graduate was beginning already to introduce a further complication into his story of complications with the Japanese Government. It appeared that in addition to his scholastic performances he had invested a little money in a mineral water spring near Kobe, the water, bottled, being exported to San Francisco. Apparently his company had been indulging in irregularities according to Japanese law, but a pure French Canadian, who had experienced some difficulties in obtaining his baptismal certificate from a mission somewhere in the direction of the Klondike, was allowed by Tietjens to interrupt the story of the graduate; and several men without complications, but anxious to get their papers signed so as to write last letters home before the draft moved, overflowed across Tietjens’ table⁠ ⁠… + 

The tobacco smoke from the pipes of the N.C.O.s at the other end of the room hung, opalescent, beneath the wire cages of the brilliant hurricane lamps hung over each table; buttons and numerals gleamed in the air that the universal khaki tinge of the limbs seemed to turn brown, as if into a gas of dust. Nasal voices, throat voices, drawling voices, melted into a rustle so that the occasional high, singsong profanity of a Welsh N.C.O.: Why the hell haffn’t you got your 124? Why the ⸻ hell haffn’t you got your 124? Don’t you know you haff to haff your bleedin’ 124’s? seemed to wail tragically through a silence⁠ ⁠… The evening wore on and on. It astounded Tietjens, looking at one time at his watch, to discover that it was only 21 hrs. 19. He seemed to have been thinking drowsily of his own affairs for ten hours⁠ ⁠… For, in the end, these were his own affairs⁠ ⁠… Money, women, testamentary bothers. Each of these complications from over the Atlantic and round the world were his own troubles: a world in labour: an army being moved off in the night. Shoved off. Anyhow. And over the top. A lateral section of the world⁠ ⁠… + 

He had happened to glance at the medical history of a man beside him and noticed that he had been described as C1⁠ ⁠… It was obviously a slip of the pen on the part of the Medical Board, or one of their orderlies. He had written C instead of A. The man was Pte. 197394 Thomas Johnson, a shining-faced lump of beef, an agricultural odd-jobman from British Columbia where he had worked on the immense estates of Sylvia Tietjens’ portentous ducal second cousin Rugeley. It was a double annoyance. Tietjens had not wanted to be reminded of his wife’s second cousin, because he had not wanted to be reminded of his wife. He had determined to give his thoughts a field day on that subject when he got warm into his fleabag in his hut that smelt of paraffin whilst the canvas walls crackled with frost and the moon shone⁠ ⁠… He would think of Sylvia beneath the moon. He was determined not to now! But 197394 Pte. Johnson, Thomas, was otherwise a nuisance and Tietjens cursed himself for having glanced at the man’s medical history. If this preposterous yokel was C3 he could not go on a draft⁠ ⁠… C1 rather! It was all the same. That would mean finding another man to make up the strength and that would drive Sergeant-Major Cowley out of his mind. He looked up towards the ingenuous, protruding, shining, liquid, bottle-blue eyes of Thomas Johnson⁠ ⁠… The fellow had never had an illness. He could not have had an illness⁠—except from a surfeit of cold, fat, boiled pork⁠—and for that you would give him a horse’s blue ball and drench which, ten to one, would not remove the cause of the bellyache⁠ ⁠… + 

His eyes met the noncommittal glance of a dark, gentlemanly thin fellow with a strikingly scarlet hatband, a lot of gilt about his khaki and little strips of steel chain-armour on his shoulders⁠ ⁠… Levin⁠ ⁠… Colonel Levin, G.S.O. II, or something, attached to General Lord Edward Campion⁠ ⁠… How the hell did fellows get into these intimacies of commanders of units and their men? Swimming in like fishes into the brown air of a tank and there at your elbow⁠ ⁠… ⸻ spies!⁠ ⁠… The men had all been called to attention and stood like gasping codfish. The ever-watchful Sergeant-Major Cowley had drifted to his, Tietjens’, elbow. You protect your orfcers from the gawdy Staff as you protect your infant daughters in lambswool from draughts. The dark, bright, cheerful staffwallah said with a slight lisp: + 

“Busy, I see.” He might have been standing there for a century and have a century of the battalion headquarters’ time to waste like that. “What draft is this?” + 

Sergeant-Major Cowley, always ready in case his orfcer should not know the name of his unit or his own name, said: + 

“No. 16 I.B.D. Canadian First Division Casual Number Four Draft, sir.” + 

Colony Levin let air lispingly out between his teeth. + 

“No. 16 Draft not off yet⁠ ⁠… Dear, dear! Dear, dear!⁠ ⁠… We shall be strafed to hell by First Army⁠ ⁠…” He used the word “hell” as if he had first wrapped it in eau-de-cologned cotton-wadding. + 

Tietjens, on his feet, knew this fellow very well: a fellow who had been a very bad Society watercolour painter of good family on the mother’s side: hence the cavalry gadgets on his shoulders. Would it then be good⁠ ⁠… say good taste to explode? He let the sergeant-major do it. Sergeant-Major Cowley was of the type of N.C.O. who carried weight because he knew ten times as much about his job as any Staff officer. The sergeant-major explained that it had been impossible to get off the draft earlier. The colonel said: + 

“But surely, sergeant-majah⁠ ⁠…” + 

The sergeant-major, now a deferential shopwalker in a lady’s store, pointed out that they had had urgent instructions not to send up the draft without the four hundred Canadian Railway Service men who were to come from Etaples. These men had only arrived that evening at 5:30⁠ ⁠… at the railway station. Marching them up had taken three-quarters of an hour. The colonel said: + 

“But surely, sergeant-majah⁠ ⁠…” + 

Old Cowley might as well have said “madam” as “sir” to the red hatband⁠ ⁠… The four-hundred had come with only what they stood up in. The unit had had to wangle everything: boots, blankets, toothbrushes, braces, rifles, iron-rations, identity disks out of the depot store. And it was now only twenty-one twenty⁠ ⁠… Cowley permitted his commanding officer at this point to say: + 

“You must understand that we work in circumstances of extreme difficulty, sir⁠ ⁠…” + 

The graceful colonel was lost in an absent contemplation of his perfectly elegant knees. + 

“I know, of course⁠ ⁠…” he lisped. “Very difficult⁠ ⁠…” He brightened up to add: “But you must admit you’re unfortunate⁠ ⁠… You must admit that⁠ ⁠…” The weight settled, however, again on his mind. + 

Tietjens said: + 

“Not, I suppose, sir, any more unfortunate than any other unit working under a dual control for supplies⁠ ⁠…” + 

The colonel said: + 

“What’s that? Dual⁠ ⁠… Ah, I see you’re there, Mackenzie⁠ ⁠… Feeling well⁠ ⁠… feeling fit, eh?” + 

The whole hut stood silent. His anger at the waste of time made Tietjens say: + 

“If you understand, sir, we are a unit whose principal purpose is drawing things to equip drafts with⁠ ⁠…” This fellow was delaying them atrociously. He was brushing his knees with a handkerchief! + 

“I’ve had,” Tietjens said, “a man killed on my hands this afternoon because we have to draw tin-hats for my orderly room from Dublin on an A.F.B. Canadian from Aldershot⁠ ⁠… Killed here⁠ ⁠… We’ve only just mopped up the blood from where you’re standing⁠ ⁠…” + 

The cavalry colonel exclaimed: + 

“Oh, good gracious me!⁠ ⁠…” jumped a little and examined his beautiful shining knee-high aircraft boots. “Killed!⁠ ⁠… Here!⁠ ⁠… But there’ll have to be a court of inquiry⁠ ⁠… You certainly are most unfortunate, Captain Tietjens⁠ ⁠… Always these mysterious⁠ ⁠… Why wasn’t your man in a dugout?⁠ ⁠… Most unfortunate⁠ ⁠… We cannot have casualties among the Colonial troops⁠ ⁠… Troops from the Dominions, I mean⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens said grimly: + 

“The man was from Pontardulias⁠ ⁠… not from any Dominion⁠ ⁠… One of my orderly room⁠ ⁠… We are forbidden on pain of court martial to let any but Dominion Expeditionary Force men go into the dugouts⁠ ⁠… My Canadians were all there⁠ ⁠… It’s an A.C.I. local of the eleventh of November⁠ ⁠…” + 

The Staff Offcer said: + 

“It makes of course, a difference!⁠ ⁠… Only a Glamorganshire? You say⁠ ⁠… Oh well⁠ ⁠… But these mysterious⁠ ⁠…” + 

He exclaimed, with the force of an explosion, and the relief: + 

“Look here⁠ ⁠… can you spare, possibly, ten⁠ ⁠… twenty⁠ ⁠… eh⁠ ⁠… minutes?⁠ ⁠… It’s not exactly a service matter⁠ ⁠… so per⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens exclaimed: + 

“You see how we’re situated, colonel⁠ ⁠…” and like one sowing grass seed on a lawn, extended both hands over his papers and towards his men⁠ ⁠… He was choking with rage. Colonel Levin had, under the chaperonage of an English dowager, who ran a chocolate store down on the quays in Rouen, a little French piece to whom he was quite seriously engaged. In the most naive manner. And the young woman, fantastically jealous, managed to make endless insults to herself out of her almost too handsome colonel’s barbaric French. It was an idyll, but it drove the colonel frantic. At such times Levin would consult Tietjens, who passed for a man of brains and a French scholar as to really nicely turned compliments in a difficult language⁠ ⁠… And as to how you explained that it was necessary for a G.S.O. II, or whatever the colonel was, to be seen quite frequently in the company of very handsome V.A.D.s and female organizers of all arms⁠ ⁠… It was the sort of silliness as to which no gentleman ought to be consulted⁠ ⁠… And here was Levin with the familiar feminine-agonized wrinkle on his bronzed-alabaster brow⁠ ⁠… Like a beastly soldier-man out of a revue. Why didn’t the ass burst into gesture and a throaty tenor⁠ ⁠… + 

Sergeant-Major Cowley naturally saved the situation. Just as Tietjens was as near saying Go to hell as you can be to your remarkably senior officer on parade, the sergeant-major, now a very important solicitor’s most confidential clerk, began whispering to the colonel⁠ ⁠… + 

“The captain might as well take a spell as not⁠ ⁠… We’re through with all the men except the Canadian Railway batch, and they can’t be issued with blankets not for half an hour⁠ ⁠… not for three-quarters. If then! It depends if our runner can find where Quarter’s lance-corporal is having his supper, to issue them⁠ ⁠… !” The sergeant-major had inserted that last speech deftly. The Staff officer, with a vague reminiscence of his regimental days, exclaimed: + 

“Damn it!⁠ ⁠… I wonder you don’t break into the depot blanket store and take what you want⁠ ⁠…” + 

The sergeant-major, becoming Simon Pure, exclaimed: + 

“Oh, no, sir, we could never do that, sir⁠ ⁠…” + 

“But the confounded men are urgently needed in the line,” Colonel Levin said. “Damn it, it’s touch and go!⁠ ⁠… We’re rushing⁠ ⁠…” He appreciated the fact again that he was on the gawdy Staff, and that the sergeant-major and Tietjens, playing like left backs into each other’s hands, had trickily let him in. + 

“We can only pray, sir,” the sergeant-major said, “that these ’ere bloomin’ ’Uns has got quartermasters and depots and issuing departments, same as ourselves.” He lowered his voice into a husky whisper. “Besides, sir, there’s a rumour⁠ ⁠… round the telephone in depot orderly room⁠ ⁠… that there’s a W.O. order at ’Edquarters⁠ ⁠… countermanding this and other drafts⁠ ⁠…” + 

Colonel Levin said: “Oh, my God!” and consternation rushed upon both him and Tietjens. The frozen ditches, in the night, out there; the agonized waiting for men; the weight upon the mind like a weight upon the brows; the imminent sense of approaching unthinkableness on the right or the left, according as you looked up or down the trench; the solid protecting earth of the parapet then turns into pierced mist⁠ ⁠… and no reliefs coming from here⁠ ⁠… The men up there thinking naively that they were coming, and they not coming. Why not? Good God, why not? Mackenzie said: + 

“Poor ⸻ old Bird⁠ ⁠… His crowd had been in eleven weeks last Wednesday⁠ ⁠… About all they could stick⁠ ⁠…” + 

“They’ll have to stick a damn lot more,” Colonel Levin said. “I’d like to get at some of the brutes⁠ ⁠…” It was at that date the settled conviction of His Majesty’s Expeditionary Force that the army in the field was the tool of politicians and civilians. In moments of routine that cloud dissipated itself lightly: when news of ill omen arrived it settled down again heavily like a cloud of black gas. You hung your head impotently⁠ ⁠… + 

“So that,” the sergeant-major said cheerfully, “the captain could very well spare half an hour to get his dinner. Or for anything else⁠ ⁠…” Apart from the domestic desire that Tietjens’ digestion should not suffer from irregular meals he had the professional conviction that for his captain to be in intimate private converse with a member of the gawdy Staff was good for the unit⁠ ⁠… “I suppose, sir,” he added valedictorily to Tietjens, “I’d better arrange to put this draft, and the nine hundred men that came in this afternoon to replace them, twenty in a tent⁠ ⁠… It’s lucky we didn’t strike them⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens and the colonel began to push men out of their way, going towards the door. The Inniskilling-Canadian, a small open brown book extended deprecatingly, stood, modestly obtrusive, just beside the doorpost. Catching avidly at Tietjens’ “Eh?” he said: + 

“You’d got the names of the girls wrong in your copy, sir. It was Gwen Lewis I had a child by in Aberystwyth that I wanted to have the lease of the cottage and the ten bob a week. Mrs. Hosier that I lived with in Berwick St. James, she was only to have five guineas for a soovneer⁠ ⁠… I’ve took the liberty of changing the names back again.” + 

Tietjens grabbed the book from him, and bending down at the sergeant-major’s table scrawled his signature on the bluish page. He thrust the book back at the man and said: + 

“There⁠ ⁠… fall out.” The man’s face shone. He exclaimed: + 

“Thank you, sir. Thank you kindly, captain⁠ ⁠… I wanted to get off and go to confession. I did bad⁠ ⁠…” The McGill graduate with his arrogant black moustache put himself in the way as Tietjens struggled into his British warm. + 

“You won’t forget, sir⁠ ⁠…” he began. + 

Tietjens said: + 

“Damn you, I’ve told you I won’t forget. I never forget. You instructed the ignorant Jap in Asaki, but the educational authority is in Tokyo. And your flagitious mineral-water company had their headquarters at the Tan Sen spring near Kobe⁠ ⁠… Is that right? Well, I’ll do my best for you.” + 

They walked in silence through the groups of men that hung around the orderly room door and gleamed in the moonlight. In the broad country street of the main line of the camp Colonel Levin began to mutter between his teeth: + 

“You take enough trouble with your beastly crowd⁠ ⁠… a whole lot of trouble⁠ ⁠… Yet⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Well, what’s the matter with us?” Tietjens said. “We get our drafts ready in thirty-six hours less than any other unit in this command.” + 

“I know you do,” the other conceded. “It’s only all these mysterious rows. Now⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens said quickly: + 

“Do you mind my asking: Are we still on parade? Is this a strafe from General Campion as to the way I command my unit?” + 

The other conceded quite as quickly and much more worriedly: + 

“God forbid.” He added more quickly still: “Old bean!” and prepared to tuck his wrist under Tietjens’ elbow. Tietjens, however, continued to face the fellow. He was really in a temper. + 

“Then tell me,” he said, “how the deuce you can manage to do without an overcoat in this weather?” If only he could get the chap off the topics of his mysterious rows they might drift to the matter that had brought him up there on that bitter night when he should be sitting over a good wood fire philandering with Mlle. Nanette de Bailly. He sank his neck deeper into the sheepskin collar of his British warm. The other, slim, was with all his badges, ribands and mail, shining darkly in a cold that set all Tietjens’ teeth chattering like porcelain. Levin became momentarily animated: + 

“You should do as I do⁠ ⁠… Regular hours⁠ ⁠… lots of exercise⁠ ⁠… horse exercise⁠ ⁠… I do P.T. every morning at the open window of my room⁠ ⁠… hardening⁠ ⁠…” + 

“It must be very gratifying for the ladies in the rooms facing yours,” Tietjens said grimly. “Is that what’s the matter with Mlle. Nanette, now?⁠ ⁠… I haven’t got time for proper exercise⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Good gracious, no,” the colonel, said. He now tucked his hand firmly under Tietjens’ arm and began to work him towards the left hand of the road: in the direction leading out of camp. Tietjens worked their steps as firmly towards the right and they leant one against the other. “In fact, old bean,” the colonel said, “Campy is working so hard to get the command of a fighting army⁠—though he’s indispensable here⁠—that we might pack up bag and baggage any day⁠ ⁠… That is what has made Nanette see reason⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Then what am I doing in this show?” Tietjens asked. But Colonel Levin continued blissfully: + 

“In fact I’ve got her almost practically for certain to promise that next week⁠ ⁠… or the week after next at latest⁠ ⁠… she’ll⁠ ⁠… damn it, she’ll name the happy day.” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“Good hunting!⁠ ⁠… How splendidly Victorian!” + 

“That’s, damn it,” the colonel exclaimed manfully, “what I say myself⁠ ⁠… Victorian is what it is⁠ ⁠… All these marriage settlements⁠ ⁠… And what is it⁠ ⁠… Droits du Seigneur?⁠ ⁠… And notaires⁠ ⁠… And the Count, having his say⁠ ⁠… And the Marchioness⁠ ⁠… And two old grand aunts⁠ ⁠… But⁠ ⁠… Hoopla!⁠ ⁠…” He executed with his gloved right thumb in the moonlight a rapid pirouette⁠ ⁠… “Next week⁠ ⁠… or at least the week after⁠ ⁠…” His voice suddenly dropped. + 

“At least,” he wavered, “that was what it was at lunchtime⁠ ⁠… Since then⁠ ⁠… something happened⁠ ⁠…” + 

“You’ve not been caught in bed with a V.A.D.?” Tietjens asked. + 

The colonel mumbled: + 

“No⁠ ⁠… not in bed⁠ ⁠… Not with a V.A.D.⁠ ⁠… Oh, damn it, at the railway station⁠ ⁠… With⁠ ⁠… The general sent me down to meet her⁠ ⁠… and Nanny of course was seeing off her grandmother, the Duchesse⁠ ⁠… The giddy cut she handed me out⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens became coldly furious. + 

“Then it was over one of your beastly imbecile rows with Miss de Bailly that you got me out here,” he exclaimed. “Do you mind going down with me towards the I.B.D. headquarters? Your final orders may have come in there. The sappers won’t let me have a telephone, so I have to look in there the last thing⁠ ⁠…” He felt a yearning towards rooms in huts, warmed by coke-stoves and electrically lit, with acting lance-corporals bending over A.F.B.s on a background of deal pigeonholes filled with returns on buff and blue paper. You got quiet and engrossment there. It was a queer thing: the only place where he, Christopher Tietjens of Groby, could be absently satisfied was in some orderly room or other. The only place in the world⁠ ⁠… And why? It was a queer thing⁠ ⁠… + 

But not queer, really. It was a matter of inevitable selection if you came to think it out. An acting orderly-room lance-corporal was selected for his penmanship, his power of elementary figuring, his trustworthiness amongst innumerable figures and messages, his dependability. For this he differed a hair’s breadth in rank from the rank and file. A hairbreadth that was to him the difference between life and death. For, if he proved not to be dependable, back he went⁠—returned to duty! As long as he was dependable he slept under a table in a warm room, his toilette arrangements and washing in a bully-beef case near his head, a billy full of tea always stewing for him on an always burning stove⁠ ⁠… A paradise!⁠ ⁠… No! Not a paradise: the paradise of the Other Ranks!⁠ ⁠… He might be awakened at one in the morning. Miles away the enemy might be beginning a strafe⁠ ⁠… He would roll out from among the blankets under the table amongst the legs of hurrying N.C.O.s and officers, the telephone going like hell⁠ ⁠… He would have to manifold innumerable short orders on buff slips on a typewriter⁠ ⁠… A bore to be awakened at one in the morning, but not unexciting: the enemy putting up a tremendous barrage in front of the village of Dranoutre: the whole nineteenth division to be moved into support along the Bailleul-Nieppe road. In case⁠ ⁠… + 

Tietjens considered the sleeping army⁠ ⁠… That country village under the white moon, all of sackcloth sides, celluloid windows, forty men to a hut⁠ ⁠… That slumbering Arcadia was one of⁠ ⁠… how many? Thirty-seven thousand five hundred, say for a million and a half of men⁠ ⁠… But there were probably more than a million and a half in that base⁠ ⁠… Well, round the slumbering Arcadias were the fringes of virginly glimmering tents⁠ ⁠… Fourteen men to a tent⁠ ⁠… For a million⁠ ⁠… Seventy-one thousand four hundred and twenty-one tents round, say, one hundred and fifty I.B.D.s, C.B.D.s, R.E.B.D.s⁠ ⁠… Base depots for infantry, cavalry, sappers, gunners, airmen, anti-airmen, telephone-men, vets, chiropodists, Royal Army Service Corps men, Pigeon Service men, Sanitary Service men, Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps women, V.A.D. women⁠—what in the world did V.A.D. stand for?⁠—canteens, rest-tent attendants, barrack damage superintendents, parsons, priests, rabbis, Mormon bishops, Brahmins, Lamas, Imams, Fanti men, no doubt, for African troops. And all really dependent on the acting orderly-room lance-corporals for their temporal and spiritual salvation⁠ ⁠… For, if by a slip of the pen a lance-corporal sent a Papist priest to an Ulster regiment, the Ulster men would lynch him, and all go to hell. Or, if by a slip of the tongue at the telephone, or a slip of the typewriter, he sent a division to Westoutre instead of to Dranoutre at one in the morning, the six or seven thousand poor devils in front of Dranoutre might all be massacred and nothing but His Majesty’s Navy could save us⁠ ⁠… + 

Yet, in the end, all this tangle was satisfactorily unravelled; the drafts moved off, unknotting themselves like snakes, coiling out of inextricable bunches, sliding vertebrately over the mud to dip into their bowls⁠—the rabbis found Jews dying to whom to administer; the vets, spavined mules; the V.A.D.s, men without jaws and shoulders in C.C.S.s; the camp-cookers, frozen beef; the chiropodists, ingrowing toenails; the dentists, decayed molars; the naval howitzers, camouflaged emplacements in picturesquely wooded dingles⁠ ⁠… Somehow they got there⁠—even to the pots of strawberry jam by the ten dozen! + 

For if the acting lance-corporal, whose life hung by a hair, made a slip of the pen over a dozen pots of jam, back he went, Returned to duty⁠ ⁠… back to the frozen rifle, the groundsheet on the liquid mud, the desperate suction on the ankle as the foot was advanced, the landscapes silhouetted with broken church towers, the continual drone of the planes, the mazes of duckboards in vast plains of slime, the unending Cockney humour, the great shells labelled “Love to Little Willie”⁠ ⁠… Back to the Angel with the Flaming Sword. The wrong side of him!⁠ ⁠… So, on the whole, things moved satisfactorily⁠ ⁠… + 

He was walking Colonel Levin imperiously between the huts towards the mess quarters, their feet crunching on the freezing gravel, the colonel hanging back a little; but a mere lightweight and without nails in his elegant bootsoles, so he had no grip on the ground. He was remarkably silent. Whatever he wanted to get out he was reluctant to come to. He brought out, however: + 

“I wonder you don’t apply to be returned to duty⁠ ⁠… to your battalion. I jolly well should if I were you⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“Why? Because I’ve had a man killed on me?⁠ ⁠… There must have been a dozen killed tonight.” + 

“Oh, more, very likely,” the other answered. “It was one of our own planes that was brought down⁠ ⁠… But it isn’t that⁠ ⁠… Oh, damn it!⁠ ⁠… Would you mind walking the other way?⁠ ⁠… I’ve the greatest respect⁠ ⁠… oh, almost⁠ ⁠… for you personally⁠ ⁠… You’re a man of intellect⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens was reflecting on a nice point of military etiquette. + 

This lisping, ineffectual fellow⁠—he was a very careful Staff officer or Campion would not have had him about the place!⁠—was given to moulding himself exactly on his general. Physically, in costume as far as possible, in voice⁠—for his lisp was not his own so much as an adaptation of the general’s slight stutter⁠—and above all in his uncompleted sentences and point of view⁠ ⁠… + 

Now, if he said: + 

“Look here, colonel⁠ ⁠…” or “Look here, Colonel Levin⁠ ⁠…” or “Look here, Stanley, my boy⁠ ⁠…” For the one thing an officer may not say to a superior whatever their intimacy was: “Look here, Levin⁠ ⁠…” If he said then: + 

“Look here, Stanley, you’re a silly ass. It’s all very well for Campion to say that I am unsound because I’ve some brains. He’s my godfather and has been saying it to me since I was twelve, and had more brain in my left heel than he had in the whole of his beautifully barbered skull⁠ ⁠… But when you say it you are just a parrot. You did not think that out for yourself. You do not even think it. You know I’m heavy, short in the wind, and self-assertive⁠ ⁠… but you know perfectly well that I’m as good on detail as yourself. And a damned sight more. You’ve never caught me tripping over a return. Your sergeant in charge of returns may have. But not you⁠ ⁠…” + 

If Tietjens should say that to this popinjay, would that be going farther than an officer in charge of detachment should go with a member of the Staff set above him, though not on parade and in a conversation of intimacy? Off parade and in intimate conversation all His Majesty’s poor ⸻ officers are equals⁠ ⁠… gentlemen having his Majesty’s commission: there can be no higher rank and all that Bilge!⁠ ⁠… For how off parade could this descendant of an old-clo’ man from Frankfurt be the equal of him, Tietjens of Groby? He wasn’t his equal in any way⁠—let alone socially. If Tietjens hit him he would drop dead; if he addressed a little sneering remark to Levin, the fellow would melt so that you would see the old spluttering Jew swimming up through his carefully arranged Gentile features. He couldn’t shoot as well as Tietjens, or ride, or play a hand at auction. Why, damn it, he, Tietjens, hadn’t the least doubt that he could paint better watercolour-pictures⁠ ⁠… And, as for returns⁠ ⁠… he would undertake to tear the guts out of half a dozen new and contradictory A.C.I.s⁠—Army Council Instructions⁠—and write twelve correct Command Orders founded on them, before Levin had lisped out the date and serial number of the first one⁠ ⁠… He had done it several times up in the room, arranged like a French bluestocking’s salon, where Levin worked at Garrison headquarters⁠ ⁠… He had written Levin’s blessed command order while Levin fussed and fumed about their being delayed for tea with Mlle. de Bailly⁠ ⁠… and curled his delicate moustache⁠ ⁠… Mlle. de Badly, chaperoned by old Lady Sachse, had tea by a clear wood fire in an eighteenth-century octagonal room, with blue-grey tapestried walls and powdering closets, out of priceless porcelain cups without handles. Pale tea that tasted faintly of cinnamon! + 

Mlle. de Bailly was a long, dark high-coloured Provençale. Not heavy, but precisely long, slow, and cruel; coiled in a deep armchair, saying the most wounding, slow things to Levin, she resembled a white Persian cat luxuriating, sticking out a tentative pawful of expanding claws. With eyes slanting pronouncedly upwards and a very thin hooked nose⁠ ⁠… almost Japanese⁠ ⁠… And with a terrific cortege of relatives, swell in a French way. One brother a chauffeur to a Marshal of France⁠ ⁠… An aristocratic way of shirking! + 

With all that, obviously even off parade, you might well be the social equal of a Staff colonel: but you jolly well had to keep from showing that you were his superior. Especially intellectually. If you let yourself show a Staff officer that he was a silly ass⁠—you could say it as often as you liked as long as you didn’t prove it!⁠—you could be certain that you would be for it before long. And quite properly. It was not English to be intellectually adroit. Nay, it was positively un-English. And the duty of field officers is to keep messes as English as possible⁠ ⁠… So a Staff officer would take it out of such a regimental inferior. In a perfectly creditable way. You would never imagine the hash headquarters warrant officers would make of your returns. Until you were worried and badgered and in the end either you were ejected into, or prayed to be transferred to⁠ ⁠… any other command in the whole service⁠ ⁠… + 

And that was beastly. The process, not the effect. On the whole Tietjens did not care where he was or what he did as long as he kept out of England, the thought of that country, at night, slumbering across the Channel, being sentimentally unbearable to him⁠ ⁠… Still, he was fond of old Campion, and would rather be in his command than any other. He had attached to his staff a very decent set of fellows, as decent as you could be in contact with⁠ ⁠… if you had to be in contact with your kind⁠ ⁠… So he just said: + 

“Look here, Stanley, you are a silly ass,” and left it at that, without demonstrating the truth of the assertion. + 

The colonel said: + 

“Why, what have I been doing now?⁠ ⁠… I wish you would walk the other way⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“No, I can’t afford to go out of camp⁠ ⁠… I’ve got to come to witness your fantastic wedding-contract tomorrow afternoon, haven’t I?⁠ ⁠… I can’t leave camp twice in one week⁠ ⁠…” + 

“You’ve got to come down to the camp-guard,” Levin said. “I hate to keep a woman waiting in the cold⁠ ⁠… though she is in the general’s car⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens exclaimed: + 

“You’ve not been⁠ ⁠… oh, extraordinarily enough, to bring Miss de Bailly out here? To talk to me?” + 

Colonel Levin mumbled, so low Tietjens almost imagined that he was not meant to hear: + 

“It isn’t Miss de Bailly!” Then he exclaimed quite aloud: “Damn it all, Tietjens, haven’t you had hints enough?⁠ ⁠…” + 

For a lunatic moment it went through Tietjens’ mind that it must be Miss Wannop in the general’s car, at the gate, down the hill beside the camp guardroom. But he knew folly when it presented itself to his mind. He had nevertheless turned and they were going very slowly back along the broad way between the huts. Levin was certainly in no hurry. The broad way would come to an end of the hutments; about two acres of slope would descend blackly before them, white stones to mark a sort of coastguard track glimmering out of sight beneath a moon gone dark with the frost. And, down there in the dark forest, at the end of that track, in a terrific Rolls-Royce, was waiting something of which Levin was certainly deucedly afraid⁠ ⁠… + 

For a minute Tietjens’ backbone stiffened. He didn’t intend to interfere between Mlle. de Bailly and any married woman Levin had had as a mistress⁠ ⁠… Somehow he was convinced that what was in that car was a married woman⁠ ⁠… He did not dare to think otherwise. If it was not a married woman it might be Miss Wannop. If it was, it couldn’t be⁠ ⁠… An immense waft of calm, sentimental happiness had descended upon him. Merely because he had imagined her! He imagined her little, fair, rather pug-nosed face: under a fur cap, he did not know why. Leaning forward she would be, on the seat of the general’s illuminated car: glazed in: a regular raree show! Peering out, shortsightedly on account of the reflections on the inside of the glass⁠ ⁠… + 

He was saying to Levin: + 

“Look here, Stanley⁠ ⁠… why I said you are a silly ass is because Miss de Bailly has one chief luxury. It’s exhibiting jealousy. Not feeling it; exhibiting it.” + 

“Ought you,” Levin asked ironically, “to discuss my fiancée before me? As an English gentleman. Tietjens of Groby and all.” + 

“Why, of course,” Tietjens said. He continued feeling happy. “As a sort of swollen best man, it’s my duty to instruct you. Mothers tell their daughters things before marriage. Best men do it for the innocent Benedict⁠ ⁠… woman⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I’m not doing it now,” Levin grumbled direly. + 

“Then what, in God’s name, are you doing? You’ve got a cast mistress, haven’t you, down there in old Campion’s car?⁠ ⁠…” They were beside the alley that led down to his orderly room. Knots of men, dim and desultory, still half filled it, a little way down. + 

“I haven’t,” Levin exclaimed almost tearfully. “I never had a mistress⁠ ⁠…” + 

“And you’re not married?” Tietjens asked. He used on purpose the schoolboy’s ejaculation “Lummy!” to soften the jibe. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I must just go and take a look at my crowd. To see if your orders have come down.” + 

He found no orders in a hut as full as ever of the dull mists and odours of khaki, but he found in revenge a fine upstanding, blond, Canadian-born lance-corporal of old Colonial lineage, with a moving story as related by Sergeant-Major Cowley: + 

“This man, sir, of the Canadian Railway lot, ’is mother’s just turned up in the town, come on from Eetarpels. Come all the way from Toronto where she was bedridden.” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“Well, what about it? Get a move on.” + 

The man wanted leave to go to his mother who was waiting in a decent estaminet at the end of the tramline just outside the camp where the houses of the town began. + 

Tietjens said: “It’s impossible. It’s absolutely impossible. You know that.” + 

The man stood erect and expressionless; his blue eyes looked confoundedly honest to Tietjens who was cursing himself. He said to the man: + 

“You can see for yourself that it’s impossible, can’t you?” The man said slowly: + 

“Not knowing the regulations in these circumstances I can’t say, sir. But my mother’s is a very special case⁠ ⁠… She’s lost two sons already.” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“A great many people have⁠ ⁠… Do you understand, if you went absent off my pass I might⁠—I quite possibly might⁠—lose my commission? I’m responsible for you fellows getting up the line.” + 

The man looked down at his feet. Tietjens said to himself that it was Valentine Wannop doing this to him. He ought to turn the man down at once. He was pervaded by a sense of her being. It was imbecile. Yet it was so. He said to the man: + 

“You said goodbye to your mother, didn’t you, in Toronto, before you left?” + 

The man said: + 

“No, sir.” He had not seen his mother in seven years. He had been up in the Chilkoot when war broke out and had not heard of it for ten months. Then he had at once joined up in British Columbia, and had been sent straight through for railway work, on to Aldershot where the Canadians had a camp in building. He had not known that his brothers were killed till he got there and his mother, being bedridden at the news, had not been able to get to Toronto when his batch had passed through. She lived about sixty miles from Toronto. Now she had risen from her bed like a miracle and come all the way. A widow: sixty-two years of age. Very feeble. + 

It occurred to Tietjens as it occurred to him ten times a day that it was idiotic of him to figure Valentine Wannop to himself. He had not the slightest idea where she was: in what circumstances, or even in what house. He did not suppose she and her mother had stayed on in that dog-kennel of a place in Bedford Park. They would be fairly comfortable. His father had left them money. “It is preposterous,” he said to himself, “to persist in figuring a person to yourself when you have no idea of where they are.” He said to the man: + 

“Wouldn’t it do if you saw your mother at the camp gate, by the guardroom?” + 

“Not much of a leave-taking, sir,” the man said; “she not allowed in the camp and I not allowed out. Talking under a sentry’s nose very likely.” + 

Tietjens said to himself: + 

“What a monstrous absurdity this is of seeing and talking, for a minute or so! You meet and talk⁠ ⁠…” And next day at the same hour. Nothing⁠ ⁠… As well not to meet or talk⁠ ⁠… Yet the mere fantastic idea of seeing Valentine Wannop for a minute⁠ ⁠… She not allowed in the camp and he not going out. Talking under a sentry’s nose, very likely⁠ ⁠… It had made him smell primroses. Primroses, like Miss Wannop. He said to the sergeant-major: + 

“What sort of a fellow is this?” Cowley, in open-mouthed suspense, gasped like a fish. Tietjens said: + 

“I suppose your mother is fairly feeble to stand in the cold?” + 

“A very decent man, sir,” the sergeant-major got out, “one of the best. No trouble. A perfectly clean conduct sheet. Very good education. A railway engineer in civil life⁠ ⁠… Volunteered, of course, sir.” + 

“That’s the odd thing,” Tietjens said to the man, “that the percentages of absentees is as great amongst the volunteers as the Derby men or the compulsorily enlisted⁠ ⁠… Do you understand what will happen to you if you miss the draft?” + 

The man said soberly: + 

“Yes, sir. Perfectly well.” + 

“You understand that you will be shot? As certainly as that you stand there. And that you haven’t a chance of escape.” + 

He wondered what Valentine Wannop, hot pacifist, would think of him if she heard him. Yet it was his duty to talk like that: his human, not merely his military duty. As much his duty as that of a doctor to warn a man that if he drank of typhoid-contaminated water he would get typhoid. But people are unreasonable. Valentine too was unreasonable. She would consider it brutal to speak to a man of the possibility of his being shot by a firing party. A groan burst from him. At the thought that there was no sense in bothering about what Valentine Wannop would or would not think of him. No sense. No sense. No sense⁠ ⁠… + 

The man, fortunately, was assuring him that he knew, very soberly, all about the penalty for going absent off a draft. The sergeant-major, catching a sound from Tietjens, said with admirable fussiness to the man: + 

“There, there! Don’t you hear the officer’s speaking? Never interrupt an officer.” + 

“You’ll be shot,” Tietjens said, “at dawn⁠ ⁠… Literally at dawn.” Why did they shoot them at dawn? To rub it in that they were never going to see another sunrise. But they drugged the fellows so that they wouldn’t know the sun if they saw it: all roped in a chair⁠ ⁠… It was really the worse for the firing party. He added to the man: + 

“Don’t think I’m insulting you. You appear to be a very decent fellow. But very decent fellows have gone absent.” He said to the sergeant-major: + 

“Give this man a two-hours’ pass to go to the⁠ ⁠… whatever’s the name of the estaminet⁠ ⁠… The draft won’t move off for two hours, will it?” He added to the man: “If you see your draft passing the pub you run out and fall in. Like mad, you understand. You’d never get another chance.” + 

There was a mumble like applause and envy of a mate’s good luck from a packed audience that had hung on the lips of simple melodrama⁠ ⁠… an audience that seemed to be all enlarged eyes, the khaki was so colourless⁠ ⁠… They came as near applause as they dared, but there was no sense in worrying about whether Valentine Wannop would have applauded or not⁠ ⁠… And there was no knowing whether the fellow would not go absent, either. As likely as not there was no mother. A girl very likely. And very likely the man would desert⁠ ⁠… The man looked you straight in the eyes. But a strong passion, like that for escape⁠—or a girl⁠—will give you control over the muscles of the eyes. A little thing that, before strong passion! One would look God in the face on the day of judgement and lie, in that case. + 

Because what the devil did he want of Valentine Wannop? Why could he not stall off the thought of her? He could stall off the thought of his wife⁠ ⁠… or his not-wife. But Valentine Wannop came wriggling in. At all hours of the day and night. It was an obsession. A madness⁠ ⁠… What those fools called “a complex”!⁠ ⁠… Due, no doubt, to something your nurse had done, or your parents said to you. At birth⁠ ⁠… A strong passion⁠ ⁠… or no doubt not strong enough. Otherwise he, too, would have gone absent. At any rate, from Sylvia⁠ ⁠… Which he hadn’t done. Or hadn’t he? There was no saying⁠ ⁠… + 

It was undoubtedly colder in the alley between the huts. A man was saying: “Hoo⁠ ⁠… Hooo⁠ ⁠… Hoo⁠ ⁠…” A sound like that, and flapping his arms and hopping⁠ ⁠… “Hand and foot, mark time!” Somebody ought to fall these poor devils in and give them that to keep their circulations going. But they might not know the command⁠ ⁠… It was a Guards’ trick, really⁠ ⁠… What the devil were these fellows kept hanging about here for? he asked. + 

One or two voices said that they did not know. The majority said gutturally: + 

“Waiting for our mates, sir⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I should have thought you could have waited under cover,” Tietjens said caustically. “But never mind; it’s your funeral, if you like it⁠ ⁠…” This getting together⁠ ⁠… a strong passion. There was a warmed reception-hut for waiting drafts not fifty yards away⁠ ⁠… But they stood, teeth chattering and mumbling “Hoo⁠ ⁠… Hoo⁠ ⁠…” rather than miss thirty seconds of gabble⁠ ⁠… About what the English sergeant-major said and about what the officer said and how many dollars did they give you⁠ ⁠… And of course about what you answered back⁠ ⁠… Or perhaps not that. These Canadian troops were husky, serious fellows, without the swank of the Cockney or the Lincolnshire Moonrakers. They wanted, apparently, to learn the rules of war. They discussed anxiously information that they received in orderly rooms, and looked at you as if you were expounding the gospels⁠ ⁠… + 

But, damn it, he, he himself, would make a pact with Destiny, at that moment, willingly, to pass thirty months in the frozen circle of hell, for the chance of thirty seconds in which to tell Valentine Wannop what he had answered back⁠ ⁠… to Destiny!⁠ ⁠… What was the fellow in the Inferno who was buried to the neck in ice and begged Dante to clear the icicles out of his eyelids so that he could see out of them? And Dante kicked him in the face because he was a Ghibelline⁠ ⁠… Always a bit of a swine, Dante⁠ ⁠… Rather like⁠ ⁠… like whom?⁠ ⁠… Oh, Sylvia Tietjens⁠ ⁠… A good hater!⁠ ⁠… He imagined hatred coming to him in waves from the convent in which Sylvia had immured herself⁠ ⁠… Gone into retreat⁠ ⁠… He imagined she had gone into retreat. She had said she was going. For the rest of the war⁠ ⁠… For the duration of hostilities or life, whichever were the longer⁠ ⁠… He imagined Sylvia, coiled up on a convent bed⁠ ⁠… Hating⁠ ⁠… Her certainly glorious hair all round her⁠ ⁠… Hating⁠ ⁠… Slowly and coldly⁠ ⁠… Like the head of a snake when you examined it⁠ ⁠… Eyes motionless: mouth closed tight⁠ ⁠… Looking away into the distance and hating⁠ ⁠… She was presumably in Birkenhead⁠ ⁠… A long way to send your hatred⁠ ⁠… Across a country and a sea in an icy night⁠ ⁠… ! Over all that black land and water⁠ ⁠… with the lights out because of air-raids and U-boats⁠ ⁠… Well, he did not have to think of Sylvia at the moment. She was well out of it⁠ ⁠… + 

It was certainly getting no warmer as the night drew on⁠ ⁠… Even that ass Levin was pacing swiftly up and down in the dusky moon-shadow of the last hutments that looked over the slope and the vanishing trail of white stones⁠ ⁠… In spite of his boasting about not wearing an overcoat; to catch women’s eyes with his pretty Staff gadgets he was carrying on like a leopard at feeding time⁠ ⁠… + 

Tietjens said: + 

“Sorry to keep you waiting, old man⁠ ⁠… Or rather your lady⁠ ⁠… But there were some men to see to⁠ ⁠… And, you know⁠ ⁠… ‘The comfort and’⁠—what is it?⁠—‘of the men comes before every’⁠—is it ‘consideration’?⁠—‘except the exigencies of actual warfare’⁠ ⁠… My memory’s gone phut these days⁠ ⁠… And you want me to slide down this hill and wheeze back again⁠ ⁠… To see a woman!” + 

Levin screeched: “Damn you, you ass! It’s your wife who’s waiting for you at the bottom there.” + 

III + 

The one thing that stood out sharply in Tietjens’ mind when at last, with a stiff glass of rum punch, his officer’s pocketbook complete with pencil because he had to draft before eleven a report as to the desirability of giving his unit special lectures on the causes of the war, and a cheap French novel on a camp chair beside him, he sat in his fleabag with six army blankets over him⁠—the one thing that stood out as sharply as Staff tabs was that that ass Levin was rather pathetic. His unnailed bootsoles very much cramping his action on the frozen hillside, he had alternately hobbled a step or two, and, reduced to inaction, had grabbed at Tietjens’ elbow, while he brought out breathlessly puzzled sentences⁠ ⁠… + 

There resulted a singular mosaic of extraordinary, bright-coloured and melodramatic statements, for Levin, who first hobbled down the hill with Tietjens and then hobbled back up, clinging to his arm, brought out monstrosities of news about Sylvia’s activities, without any sequence, and indeed without any apparent aim except for the great affection he had for Tietjens himself⁠ ⁠… All sorts of singular things seemed to have been going on round him in the vague zone, outside all this engrossed and dust-coloured world⁠—in the vague zone that held⁠ ⁠… Oh, the civilian population, tea-parties short of butter!⁠ ⁠… + 

And as Tietjens, seated on his hams, his knees up, pulled the soft woolliness of his fleabag under his chin and damned the paraffin heater for letting out a new and singular stink, it seemed to him that this affair was like coming back after two months and trying to get the hang of battalion orders⁠ ⁠… You come back to the familiar, slightly battered mess anteroom. You tell the mess orderly to bring you the last two months’ orders, for it is as much as your life is worth not to know what is or is not in them⁠ ⁠… There might be an A.C.I. ordering you to wear your helmet back to the front, or a battalion order that Mills bombs must always be worn in the left breast pocket. Or there might be the detail for putting on a new gas helmet!⁠ ⁠… The orderly hands you a dishevelled mass of faintly typewritten matter, thumbed out of all chance of legibility, with the orders for November 26 fastened inextricably into the middle of those for the 1st of December, and those for the 10th, 25th and 29th missing altogether⁠ ⁠… And all that you gather is that headquarters has some exceedingly insulting things to say about A Company; that a fellow called Hartopp, whom you don’t know, has been deprived of his commission; that at a court of inquiry held to ascertain deficiencies in C Company Captain Wells⁠—poor Wells!⁠—has been assessed at £27 11s. 4d., which he is requested to pay forthwith to the adjutant⁠ ⁠… + 

So, on that black hillside, going and returning, what stuck out for Tietjens was that Levin had been taught by the general to consider that he, Tietjens, was an extraordinarily violent chap who would certainly knock Levin down when he told him that his wife was at the camp gates; that Levin considered himself to be the descendant of an ancient Quaker family⁠ ⁠… (Tietjens had said “Good God!” at that); that the mysterious “rows” to which in his fear Levin had been continually referring had been successive letters from Sylvia to the harried general⁠ ⁠… and that Sylvia had accused him, Tietjens, of stealing two pairs of her best sheets⁠ ⁠… There was a great deal more. But having faced what he considered to be the worst of the situation, Tietjens set himself coolly to recapitulate every aspect of his separation from his wife. He had meant to face every aspect, not that merely social one upon which, hitherto, he had automatically imagined their disunion to rest. For, as he saw it, English people of good position consider that the basis of all marital unions or disunions is the maxim: No scenes. Obviously for the sake of the servants⁠—who are the same thing as the public. No scenes, then, for the sake of the public. And indeed, with him, the instinct for privacy⁠—as to his relationships, his passions, or even as to his most unimportant motives⁠—was as strong as the instinct of life itself. He would, literally, rather be dead than an open book. + 

And, until that afternoon, he had imagined that his wife, too, would rather be dead than have her affairs canvassed by the other ranks⁠ ⁠… But that assumption had to be gone over. Revised⁠ ⁠… Of course he might say she had gone mad. But, if he said she had gone mad he would have to revise a great deal of their relationships, so it would be as broad as it was long⁠ ⁠… + 

The doctor’s batman, from the other end of the hut, said: + 

“Poor ⸻ O Nine Morgan⁠ ⁠…” in a singsong, mocking voice⁠ ⁠… + 

For though, hours before, Tietjens had appointed this moment of physical ease that usually followed on his splurging heavily down on to his creaking camp-bed in the doctor’s lent hut, for the cool consideration of his relations with his wife, it was not turning out a very easy matter. The hut was unreasonably warm: he had invited Mackenzie⁠—whose real name turned out to be McKechnie, James Grant McKechnie⁠—to occupy the other end of it. The other end of it was divided from him by a partition of canvas and a striped Indian curtain. And McKechnie, who was unable to sleep, had elected to carry on a long⁠—an interminable⁠—conversation with the doctor’s batman. + 

The doctor’s batman also could not sleep and, like McKechnie, was more than a little barmy on the crumpet⁠—an almost non-English-speaking Welshman from God knows what upcountry valley. He had shaggy hair like a Caribbean savage and two dark, resentful wall-eyes; being a miner he sat on his heels more comfortably than on a chair and his almost incomprehensible voice went on in a low sort of ululation, with an occasionally and startlingly comprehensible phrase sticking out now and then. + 

It was troublesome, but orthodox enough. The batman had been blown literally out of most of his senses and the VIth Battalion of the Glamorganshire Regiment by some German high explosive or other, more than a year ago. But before then, it appeared, he had been in McKechnie’s own company in that battalion. It was perfectly in order that an officer should gossip with a private formerly of his own platoon or company, especially on first meeting him after long separation caused by a casualty to one or the other. And McKechnie had first re-met this scoundrel Jonce, or Evanns, at eleven that night⁠—two and a half hours before. So there, in the light of a single candle stuck in a stout bottle they were tranquilly at it: the batman sitting on his heels by the officer’s head; the officer, in his pyjamas, sprawling half out of bed over his pillows, stretching his arms abroad, occasionally yawning, occasionally asking: “What became of Company-Sergeant-Major Hoyt?”⁠ ⁠… They might talk till half-past three. + 

But that was troublesome to a gentleman seeking to recapture what exactly were his relations with his wife. + 

Before the doctor’s batman had interrupted him by speaking startlingly of O Nine Morgan, Tietjens had got as far as what follows with his recapitulation: The lady, Mrs. Tietjens, was certainly without mitigation a whore; he himself equally certainly and without qualification had been physically faithful to the lady and their marriage tie. In law, then, he was absolutely in the right of it. But that fact had less weight than a cobweb. For after the last of her high-handed divagations from fidelity he had accorded to the lady the shelter of his roof and of his name. She had lived for years beside him, apparently on terms of hatred and miscomprehension. But certainly in conditions of chastity. Then, during the tenuous and lugubrious small hours, before his coming out there again to France, she had given evidence of a madly vindictive passion for his person. A physical passion at any rate. + 

Well, those were times of mad, fugitive emotions. But even in the calmest times a man could not expect to have a woman live with him as the mistress of his house and mother of his heir without establishing some sort of claim upon him. They hadn’t slept together. But was it not possible that a constant measuring together of your minds was as proper to give you a proprietary right as the measuring together of the limb? It was perfectly possible. Well then⁠ ⁠… + 

What, in the eyes of God, severed a union?⁠ ⁠… Certainly he had imagined⁠—until that very afternoon⁠—that their union had been cut, as the tendon of Achilles is cut in a hamstringing, by Sylvia’s clear voice, outside his house, saying in the dawn to a cabman, “Paddington!”⁠ ⁠… He tried to go with extreme care through every detail of their last interview in his still nearly dark drawing-room at the other end of which she had seemed a mere white phosphorescence⁠ ⁠… + 

They had, then, parted for good on that day. He was going out to France; she into retreat in a convent near Birkenhead⁠—to which place you go from Paddington. Well then, that was one parting. That, surely, set him free for the girl! + 

He took a sip from the glass of rum and water on the canvas chair beside him. It was tepid and therefore beastly. He had ordered the batman to bring it him hot, strong and sweet, because he had been certain of an incipient cold. He had refrained from drinking it because he had remembered that he was to think cold-bloodedly of Sylvia, and he made a practice of never touching alcohol when about to engage in protracted reflection. That had always been his theory: it had been immensely and empirically strengthened by his warlike experience. On the Somme, in the summer, when stand-to had been at four in the morning, you would come out of your dugout and survey, with a complete outfit of pessimistic thoughts, a dim, grey, repulsive landscape over a dull and much too thin parapet. There would be repellent posts, altogether too fragile entanglements of barbed wire, broken wheels, detritus, coils of mist over the positions of revolting Germans. Grey stillness; grey horrors, in front, and behind amongst the civilian populations! And clear, hard outlines to every thought⁠ ⁠… Then your batman brought you a cup of tea with a little⁠—quite a little⁠—rum in it. In three of four minutes the whole world changed beneath your eyes. The wire aprons became jolly efficient protections that your skill had devised and for which you might thank God; the broken wheels were convenient landmarks for raiding at night in No Man’s Land. You had to confess that, when you had re-erected that parapet, after it had last been jammed in, your company had made a pretty good job of it. And, even as far as the Germans were concerned, you were there to kill the swine; but you didn’t feel that the thought of them would make you sick beforehand⁠ ⁠… You were, in fact, a changed man. With a mind of a different specific gravity. You could not even tell that the roseate touches of dawn on the mists were not really the effects of rum⁠ ⁠… + 

Therefore he had determined not to touch his grog. But his throat had gone completely dry; so, mechanically, he had reached out for something to drink, checking himself when he had realized what he was doing. But why should his throat be dry? He hadn’t been on the drink. He had not even had any dinner. And why was he in this extraordinary state?⁠ ⁠… For he was in an extraordinary state. It was because the idea had suddenly occurred to him that his parting from his wife had set him free for his girl⁠ ⁠… The idea had till then never entered his head. + 

He said to himself: We must go methodically into this! Methodically into the history of his last day on earth⁠ ⁠… + 

Because he swore that when he had come out to France this time he had imagined that he was cutting loose from this earth. And during the months that he had been there he had seemed to have no connection with any earthly things. He had imagined Sylvia in her convent and done with; Miss Wannop he had not been able to imagine at all. But she had seemed to be done with. + 

It was difficult to get his mind back to that night. You cannot force your mind to a deliberate, consecutive recollection unless you are in the mood; then it will do whether you want it to or not⁠ ⁠… He had had then, three months or so ago, a very painful morning with his wife, the pain coming from a suddenly growing conviction that his wife was forcing herself into an attitude of caring for him. Only an attitude probably, because, in the end, Sylvia was a lady and would not allow herself really to care for the person in the world for whom it would be least decent of her to care⁠ ⁠… But she would be perfectly capable of forcing herself to take that attitude if she thought that it would enormously inconvenience himself⁠ ⁠… + 

But that wasn’t the way, wasn’t the way, wasn’t the way, his excited mind said to himself. He was excited because it was possible that Miss Wannop, too, might not have meant their parting to be a permanency. That opened up an immense perspective. Nevertheless, the contemplation of that immense perspective was not the way to set about a calm analysis of his relations with his wife. The facts of the story must be stated before the moral. He said to himself that he must put, in exact language, as if he were making a report for the use of garrison headquarters, the history of himself in his relationship to his wife⁠ ⁠… And to Miss Wannop, of course. “Better put it into writing,” he said. + 

Well then. He clutched at his pocketbook and wrote in large pencilled characters: + 

“When I married Miss Satterthwaite,”⁠—he was attempting exactly to imitate a report to General Headquarters⁠—“unknown to myself, she imagined herself to be with child by a fellow called Drake. I think she was not. The matter is debatable. I am passionately attached to the child who is my heir and the heir of a family of considerable position. The lady was subsequently, on several occasions, though I do not know how many, unfaithful to me. She left me with a fellow called Perowne, whom she had met constantly at the house of my godfather, General Lord Edward Campion, on whose staff Perowne was. That was long before the war. This intimacy was, of course, certainly unsuspected by the general. Perowne is again on the staff of General Campion, who has the quality of attachment to his old subordinates, but as Perowne is an inefficient officer, he is used only for more decorative jobs. Otherwise, obviously, as he is an old regular, his seniority should make him a general, and he is only a major. I make this diversion about Perowne because his presence in this garrison causes me natural personal annoyance. + 

“My wife, after an absence of several months with Perowne, wrote and told me that she wished to be taken back into my household. I allowed this. My principles prevent me from divorcing any woman, in particular any woman who is the mother of a child. As I had taken no steps to ensure publicity for the escapade of Mrs. Tietjens, no one, as far as I know, was aware of her absence. Mrs. Tietjens, being a Roman Catholic, is prevented from divorcing me. + 

“During this absence of Mrs. Tietjens with the man Perowne, I made the acquaintance of a young woman, Miss Wannop, the daughter of my father’s oldest friend, who was also an old friend of General Campion’s. Our station in Society naturally forms rather a close ring. I was immediately aware that I had formed a sympathetic but not violent attachment for Miss Wannop, and fairly confident that my feeling was returned. Neither Miss Wannop nor myself being persons to talk about the state of our feelings, we exchanged no confidences⁠ ⁠… A disadvantage of being English of a certain station. + 

“The position continued thus for several years. Six or seven. After her return from her excursion with Perowne, Mrs. Tietjens remained, I believe, perfectly chaste. I saw Miss Wannop sometimes frequently, for a period, in her mother’s house or on social occasions, sometimes not for long intervals. No expression of affection on the part of either of us ever passed. Not one. Ever. + 

“On the day before my second going out to France I had a very painful scene with my wife, during which, for the first time, we went into the question of the parentage of my child and other matters. In the afternoon I met Miss Wannop by appointment outside the War Office. The appointment had been made by my wife, not by me. I knew nothing about it. My wife must have been more aware of my feelings for Miss Wannop than I was myself. + 

“In St. James’s Park I invited Miss Wannop to become my mistress that evening. She consented and made an assignation. It is to be presumed that that was evidence of her affection for me. We have never exchanged words of affection. Presumably a young lady does not consent to go to bed with a married man without feeling affection for him. But I have no proof. It was, of course, only a few hours before my going out to France. Those are emotional sorts of moments for young women. No doubt they consent more easily. + 

“But we didn’t. We were together at one-thirty in the morning, leaning over her suburban garden gate. And nothing happened. We agreed that we were the sort of persons who didn’t. I do not know how we agreed. We never finished a sentence. Yet it was a passionate scene. So I touched the brim of my cap and said: So long!⁠ ⁠… Or perhaps I did not even say So long⁠ ⁠… Or she⁠ ⁠… I don’t remember. I remember the thoughts I thought and the thoughts I gave her credit for thinking. But perhaps she did not think them. There is no knowing. It is no good going into them⁠ ⁠… except that I gave her credit for thinking that we were parting for good. Perhaps she did not mean that. Perhaps I could write letters to her. And live⁠ ⁠…” + 

He exclaimed: + 

“God, what a sweat I am in!⁠ ⁠…” + 

The sweat, indeed, was pouring down his temples. He became instinct with a sort of passion to let his thoughts wander into epithets and go about where they would. But he stuck at it. He was determined to get it expressed. He wrote on again: + 

“I got home towards two in the morning and went into the dining-room in the dark. I did not need a light. I sat thinking for a long time. Then Sylvia spoke from the other end of the room. There was thus an abominable situation. I have never been spoken to with such hatred. She went, perhaps, mad. She had apparently been banking on the idea that if I had physical contact with Miss Wannop I might satisfy my affection for the girl⁠ ⁠… And feel physical desires for her⁠ ⁠… But she knew, without my speaking, that I had not had physical contact with the girl. She threatened to ruin me; to ruin me in the Army; to drag my name through the mud⁠ ⁠… I never spoke. I am damn good at not speaking. She struck me in the face. And went away. Afterwards she threw into the room, through the half-open doorway, a gold medallion of St. Michael, the R.C. patron of soldiers in action that she had worn between her breasts. I took it to mean the final act of parting. As if by no longer wearing it she abandoned all prayer for my safety⁠ ⁠… It might just as well mean that she wished me to wear it myself for my personal protection⁠ ⁠… I heard her go down the stairs with her maid. The dawn was just showing through the chimney-pots opposite. I heard her say: ‘Paddington.’ Clear, high syllables! And a motor drove off. + 

“I got my things together and went to Waterloo. Mrs. Satterthwaite, her mother, was waiting to see me off. She was very distressed that her daughter had not come, too. She was of opinion that it meant we had parted for good. I was astonished to find that Sylvia had told her mother about Miss Wannop because Sylvia had always been extremely reticent, even to her mother⁠ ⁠… Mrs. Satterthwaite, who was very distressed⁠—she likes me!⁠—expressed the most gloomy forebodings as to what Sylvia might not be up to. I laughed at her. She began to tell me a long anecdote about what a Father Consett, Sylvia’s confessor, had said about Sylvia years before. He had said that if I ever came to care for another woman Sylvia would tear the world to pieces to get at me⁠ ⁠… Meaning, to disturb my equanimity!⁠ ⁠… It was difficult to follow Mrs. Satterthwaite. The side of an officer’s train, going off, is not a good place for confidences. So the interview ended rather untidily.” + 

At this point Tietjens groaned so audibly that McKechnie, from the other end of the hut, asked if he had not said anything. Tietjens saved himself with: + 

“That candle looks from here to be too near the side of the hut. Perhaps it isn’t. These buildings are very inflammable.” + 

It was no good going on writing. He was no writer, and this writing gave no sort of psychological pointers. He wasn’t himself ever much the man for psychology, but one ought to be as efficient at it as at anything else⁠ ⁠… Well then⁠ ⁠… What was at the bottom of all the madness and cruelty that had distinguished both himself and Sylvia on his last day and night in his native country?⁠ ⁠… For, mark! It was Sylvia who had made, unknown to him, the appointment through which the girl had met him. Sylvia had wanted to force him and Miss Wannop into each other’s arms. Quite definitely. She had said as much. But she had only said that afterwards. When the game had not come off. She had had too much knowledge of amatory manoeuvres to show her hand before⁠ ⁠… + 

Why then had she done it? Partly, undoubtedly, out of pity for him. She had given him a rotten time; she had undoubtedly, at one moment, wanted to give him the consolation of his girl’s arms⁠ ⁠… Why, damn it, she, Sylvia, and no one else, had forced out of him the invitation to the girl to become his mistress. Nothing but the infernal cruelty of their interview of the morning could have forced him to the pitch of sexual excitement that would make him make a proposal of illicit intercourse to a young lady to whom hitherto he had spoken not even one word of affection. It was an effect of a Sadic kind. That was the only way to look at it scientifically. And without doubt Sylvia had known what she was doing. The whole morning; at intervals, like a person directing the whiplash to a cruel spot of pain, reiteratedly, she had gone on and on. She had accused him of having Valentine Wannop for his mistress. She had accused him of having Valentine Wannop for his mistress. She had accused him of having Valentine Wannop for his mistress⁠ ⁠… With maddening reiteration, like that. They had disposed of an estate; they had settled up a number of business matters; they had decided that his heir was to be brought up as a Papist⁠—the mother’s religion! They had gone, agonizedly enough, into their own relationships and past history. Into the very paternity of his child⁠ ⁠… But always, at moments when his mind was like a blind octopus, squirming in an agony of knife-cuts, she would drop in that accusation. She had accused him of having Valentine Wannop for his mistress⁠ ⁠… + 

He swore by the living God⁠ ⁠… He had never realized that he had a passion for the girl till that morning; that he had a passion deep and boundless like the sea, shaking like a tremor of the whole world, an unquenchable thirst, a thing the thought of which made your bowels turn over⁠ ⁠… But he had not been the sort of fellow who goes into his emotions⁠ ⁠… Why, damn it, even at that moment when he thought of the girl, there, in that beastly camp, in that Rembrandt beshadowed hut, when he thought of the girl he named her to himself Miss Wannop. + 

It wasn’t in that way that a man thought of a young woman whom he was aware of passionately loving. He wasn’t aware. He hadn’t been aware. Until that morning⁠ ⁠… + 

Then⁠ ⁠… that let him out⁠ ⁠… Undoubtedly that let him out⁠ ⁠… A woman cannot throw her man, her official husband, into the arms of the first girl that comes along and consider herself as having any further claims upon him. Especially if, on the same day, you part with him, he going out to France! Did it let him out? Obviously it did. + 

He caught with such rapidity at his glass of rum and water that a little of it ran over on to his thumb. He swallowed the lot, being instantly warmed⁠ ⁠… + 

What in the world was he doing? Now? With all this introspection?⁠ ⁠… Hang it all, he was not justifying himself⁠ ⁠… He had acted perfectly correctly as far as Sylvia was concerned. Not perhaps to Miss Wannop⁠ ⁠… Why, if he, Christopher Tietjens of Groby, had the need to justify himself, what did it stand for to be Christopher Tietjens of Groby? That was the unthinkable thought. + 

Obviously he was not immune from the seven deadly sins. In the way of a man. One might lie, yet not bear false witness against a neighbour; one might kill, yet not without fitting provocation or for self-interest; one might conceive of theft as receiving cattle from the false Scots which was the Yorkshireman’s duty; one might fornicate, obviously, as long as you did not fuss about it unhealthily. That was the right of the Seigneur in a world of Other Ranks. He hadn’t personally committed any of these sins to any great extent. One reserved the right so to do and to take the consequences⁠ ⁠… + 

But what in the world had gone wrong with Sylvia? She was giving away her own game, and that he had never known her do. But she could not have made more certain, if she had wanted to, of returning him to his allegiance to Miss Wannop than by forcing herself there into his private life, and doing it with such blatant vulgarity. For what she had done had been to make scenes before the servants! All the while he had been in France she had been working up to it. Now she had done it. Before the Tommies of his own unit. But Sylvia did not make mistakes like that. It was a game. What game? He didn’t even attempt to conjecture! She could not expect that he would in the future even extend to her the shelter of his roof⁠ ⁠… What then was the game? He could not believe that she could be capable of vulgarity except with a purpose⁠ ⁠… + 

She was a thoroughbred. He had always credited her with being that. And now she was behaving as if she had every mean vice that a mare could have. Or it looked like it. Was that, then, because she had been in his stable? But how in the world otherwise could he have run their lives? She had been unfaithful to him. She had never been anything but unfaithful to him, before or after marriage. In a high-handed way so that he could not condemn her, though it was disagreeable enough to himself. He took her back into his house after she had been off with the fellow Perowne. What more could she ask?⁠ ⁠… He could find no answer. And it was not his business! + 

But even if he did not bother about the motives of the poor beast of a woman, she was the mother of his heir. And now she was running about the world declaiming about her wrongs. What sort of a thing was that for a boy to have happen to him? A mother who made scenes before the servants! That was enough to ruin any boy’s life⁠ ⁠… + 

There was no getting away from it that that was what Sylvia had been doing. She had deluged the general with letters for the last two months or so, at first merely contenting herself with asking where he, Tietjens, was and in what state of health, conditions of danger, and the like. Very decently, for some time, the old fellow had said nothing about the matter to him. He had probably taken the letters to be the naturally anxious inquiries of a wife with a husband at the front; he had considered that Tietjens’ letters to her must have been insufficiently communicative, or concealed what she imagined to be wounds or a position of desperate danger. That would not have been very pleasant in any case; women should not worry superior officers about the vicissitudes of their menfolk. It was not done. Still, Sylvia was very intimate with Campion and his family⁠—more intimate than he himself was, though Campion was his godfather. But quite obviously her letters had got worse and worse. + 

It was difficult for Tietjens to make out exactly what she had said. His channel of information had been Levin, who was too gentlemanly ever to say anything direct at all. Too gentlemanly, too implicitly trustful of Tietjens’ honour⁠ ⁠… and too bewildered by the charms of Sylvia, who had obviously laid herself out to bewilder the poor Staff-wallah⁠ ⁠… But she had gone pretty far, either in her letters or in her conversation since she had been in that city, to which⁠—it was characteristic⁠—she had come without any sort of passports or papers, just walking past gentlemen in their wooden boxes at pierheads and the like, in conversation with⁠—of all people in the world!⁠—with Perowne, who had been returning from leave with King’s dispatches, or something glorified of the Staff sort! In a special train very likely. That was Sylvia all over. + 

Levin said that Campion had given Perowne the most frightful dressing down he had ever heard mortal man receive. And it really was damn hard on the poor general, who, after happenings to one of his predecessors, had been perfectly rabid to keep skirts out of his headquarters. Indeed it was one of the crosses of Levin’s worried life that the general had absolutely refused him, Levin, leave to marry Miss de Bailly if he would not undertake that that young woman should leave France by the first boat after the ceremony. Levin, of course, was to go with her, but the young woman was not to return to France for the duration of hostilities. And a fine row all her noble relatives had raised over that. It had cost Levin another hundred and fifty thousand francs in the marriage settlements. The married wives of officers in any case were not allowed in France, though you could not keep out their unmarried ones⁠ ⁠… + 

Campion, anyhow, had dispatched his furious note to Tietjens after receiving, firstly, in the early morning, a letter from Sylvia in which she said that her ducal second-cousin, the lugubrious Rugeley, highly disapproved of the fact that Tietjens was in France at all, and after later receiving, towards four in the afternoon, a telegram, dispatched by Sylvia herself from Havre, to say that she would be arriving by a noon train. The general had been almost as much upset at the thought that his car would not be there to meet Sylvia as by the thought that she was coming at all. But a strike of French railway civilians had delayed Sylvia’s arrival. Campion had dispatched, within five minutes, his snorter to Tietjens, who he was convinced knew all about Sylvia’s coming, and his car to Rouen Station with Levin in it. + 

The general, in fact, was in a fine confusion. He was convinced that Tietjens, as Man of Intellect, had treated Sylvia badly, even to the extent of stealing two pair of her best sheets, and he was also convinced that Tietjens was in close collusion with Sylvia. As Man of Intellect, Campion was convinced, Tietjens was dissatisfied with his lowly job of draft-forwarding officer, and wanted a place of an extravagantly cushy kind in the general’s own entourage⁠ ⁠… And Levin had said that it made it all the worse that Campion in his bothered heart thought that Tietjens really ought to have more exalted employment. He had said to Levin: + 

“Damn it all, the fellow ought to be in command of my Intelligence instead of you. But he’s unsound. That’s what he is: unsound. He’s too brilliant⁠ ⁠… And he’d talk both the hind legs off Sweedlepumpkins.” Sweedlepumpkins was the general’s favourite charger. The general was afraid of talk. He practically never talked with anyone except about his job⁠—certainly never to Tietjens⁠—without being proved to be in the wrong, and that undermined his belief in himself. + 

So that altogether he was in a fine fume. And confusion. He was almost ready to believe that Tietjens was at the bottom of every trouble that occurred in his immense command. + 

But, when all that was gathered, Tietjens was not much farther forward in knowing what his wife’s errand in France was. + 

“She complains,” Levin had bleated painfully at some point on the slippery coastguard path, “about your taking her sheets. And about a Miss⁠ ⁠… a Miss Wanostrocht, is it?⁠ ⁠… The general is not inclined to attach much importance to the sheets⁠ ⁠…” + 

It appeared that a sort of conference on Tietjens’ case had taken place in the immense tapestried salon in which Campion lived with the more intimate members of his headquarters, and which was, for the moment, presided over by Sylvia, who had exposed various wrongs to the general and Levin. Major Perowne had excused himself on the ground that he was hardly competent to express an opinion. Really, Levin said, he was sulking, because Campion had accused him of running the risk of getting himself and Mrs. Tietjens “talked about.” Levin thought it was a bit thick of the general. Were none of the members of his staff ever to escort a lady anywhere? As if they were sixth-form schoolboys⁠ ⁠… + 

“But you⁠ ⁠… you⁠ ⁠… you⁠ ⁠…” he stuttered and shivered together, “certainly do seem to have been remiss in not writing to Mrs. Tietjens. The poor lady⁠—excuse me!⁠—really appears to have been out of her mind with anxiety⁠ ⁠…” That was why she had been waiting in the general’s car at the bottom of the hill. To get a glimpse of Tietjens’ living body. For they had been utterly unable, up at H.Q., to convince her that Tietjens was even alive, much less in that town. + 

She hadn’t in fact waited even so long. Having apparently convinced herself by conversation with the sentries outside the guardroom that Tietjens actually still existed, she had told the chauffeur-orderly to drive her back to the Hotel de la Poste, leaving the wretched Levin to make his way back into the town by tram, or as best he might. They had seen the lights of the car below them, turning, with its gaily lit interior, and disappearing among the trees along the road farther down⁠ ⁠… The sentry, rather monosyllabically and gruffly⁠—you can tell all right when a Tommie has something at the back of his mind!⁠—informed them that the sergeant had turned out the guard so that all his men together could assure the lady that the captain was alive and well. The obliging sergeant said that he had adopted that manoeuvre which generally should attend only the visits of general officers and, once a day, for the C.O., because the lady had seemed so distressed at having received no letters from the captain. The guardroom itself, which was unprovided with cells, was decorated by the presence of two drunks who, having taken it into their heads to destroy their clothing, were in a state of complete nudity. The sergeant hoped, therefore, that he had done no wrong. Rightly the Garrison Military Police ought to take drunks picked up outside camp to the A.P.M.’s guardroom, but seeing the state of undress and the violent behaviour of these two, the sergeant had thought right to oblige the Red Caps. The voices of the drunks, singing the martial anthem of the “Men of Harlech,” could be heard corroborating the sergeant’s opinion as to their states. He added that he would not have turned out the guard if it had not been for its being the captain’s lady. + 

“A damn smart fellow, that sergeant,” Colonel Levin had said. “There couldn’t have been any better way of convincing Mrs. Tietjens.” + 

Tietjens had said⁠—and even whilst he was saying it he tremendously wished he hadn’t: + 

“Oh, a damned smart fellow,” for the bitter irony of his tone had given Levin the chance to remonstrate with him as to his attitude towards Sylvia. Not at all as to his actions⁠—for Levin conscientiously stuck to his thesis that Tietjens was the soul of honour⁠—but just as to his tone of voice in talking of the sergeant who had been kind to Sylvia, and, just precisely, because Tietjens’ not writing to his wife had given rise to the incident. Tietjens had thought of saying that, considering the terms on which they had parted, he would have considered himself as molesting the lady if he had addressed to her any letter at all. But he said nothing and, for a quarter of an hour, the incident resolved itself into soliloquy on the slippery hillside, delivered by Levin on the subject of matrimony. It was a matter which, naturally, at that moment very much occupied his thoughts. He considered that a man should so live with his wife that she should be able to open all his letters. That was his idea of the idyllic. And when Tietjens remarked with irony that he had never in his life either written or received a letter that his wife might not have read, Levin exclaimed with such enthusiasm as almost to lose his balance in the mist: + 

“I was sure of it, old fellow. But it enormously cheers me up to hear you say so.” He added that he desired as far as possible to model his ideas of life and his behaviour on those of this his friend. For, naturally, about as he was to unite his fortunes with those of Miss de Bailly, that could be considered a turning point of his career. + 

IV + 

They had gone back up the hill so that Levin might telephone to headquarters for his own car in case the general’s chauffeur should not have the sense to return for him. But that was as far as Tietjens got in uninterrupted reminiscences of that scene⁠ ⁠… He was sitting in his fleabag, digging idly with his pencil into the squared page of his notebook which had remained open on his knees, his eyes going over and over again over the words with which his report on his own case had concluded⁠—the words: So the interview ended rather untidily. Over the words went the image of the dark hillside with the lights of the town, now that the air-raid was finished, spreading high up into the sky below them⁠ ⁠… + 

But at that point the doctor’s batman had uttered, as if with a jocular, hoarse irony, the name: + 

“Poor ⸻ O Nine Morgan!⁠ ⁠…” and over the whitish sheet of paper on a level with his nose Tietjens perceived thin films of reddish purple to be wavering, then a glutinous surface of gummy scarlet pigment. Moving! It was once more an effect of fatigue, operating on the retina, that was perfectly familiar to Tietjens. But it filled him with indignation against his own weakness. He said to himself: Wasn’t the name of the wretched O Nine Morgan to be mentioned in his hearing without his retina presenting him with the glowing image of the fellow’s blood? He watched the phenomenon, growing fainter, moving to the right-hand top corner of the paper and turning a faintly luminous green. He watched it with a grim irony. + 

Was he, he said to himself, to regard himself as responsible for the fellow’s death? Was his inner mentality going to present that claim upon him? That would be absurd. The end of the earth! The absurd end of the earth⁠ ⁠… Yet that insignificant ass Levin had that evening asserted the claim to go into his, Tietjens of Groby’s, relations with his wife. That was an end of the earth as absurd! It was the unthinkable thing, as unthinkable as the theory that the officer can be responsible for the death of the man⁠ ⁠… But the idea had certainly presented itself to him. How could he be responsible for the death? In fact⁠—in literalness⁠—he was. It had depended absolutely upon his discretion whether the man should go home or not. The man’s life or death had been in his hands. He had followed the perfectly correct course. He had written to the police of the man’s home town, and the police had urged him not to let the man come home⁠ ⁠… Extraordinary morality on the part of a police force! The man, they begged, should not be sent home because a prizefighter was occupying his bed and laundry⁠ ⁠… Extraordinary common sense, very likely⁠ ⁠… They probably did not want to get drawn into a scrap with Red Evans of the Red Castle⁠ ⁠… + 

For a moment he seemed to see⁠ ⁠… he actually saw⁠ ⁠… O Nine Morgan’s eyes, looking at him with a sort of wonder, as they had looked when he had refused the fellow his leave⁠ ⁠… A sort of wonder! Without resentment, but with incredulity. As you might look at God, you being very small and ten feet or so below His throne when He pronounced some inscrutable judgment!⁠ ⁠… The Lord giveth home-leave, and the Lord refuseth⁠ ⁠… Probably not blessed, but queer, be the name of God-Tietjens! + 

And at the thought of the man as he was alive and of him now, dead, an immense blackness descended all over Tietjens. He said to himself: I am very tired. Yet he was not ashamed⁠ ⁠… It was the blackness that descends on you when you think of your dead⁠ ⁠… It comes, at any time, over the brightness of sunlight, in the grey of evening, in the grey of the dawn, at mess, on parade: it comes at the thought of one man or at the thought of half a battalion that you have seen, stretched out, under sheeting, the noses making little pimples: or not stretched out, lying face downwards, half buried. Or at the thought of dead that you have never seen dead at all⁠ ⁠… Suddenly the light goes out⁠ ⁠… In this case it was because of one fellow, a dirty enough man, not even very willing, not in the least endearing, certainly contemplating desertion⁠ ⁠… But your dead⁠ ⁠… Yours⁠ ⁠… Your own. As if joined to your own identity by a black cord⁠ ⁠… + 

In the darkness outside, the brushing, swift, rhythmic pacing of an immense number of men went past, as if they had been phantoms. A great number of men in fours, carried forward, irresistibly, by the overwhelming will of mankind in ruled motion. The sides of the hut were so thin that it was peopled by an innumerable throng. A sodden voice, just at Tietjens’ head, chuckled: “For God’s sake, sergeant-major, stop these ⸻. I’m too ⸻ drunk to halt them⁠ ⁠…” + 

It made for the moment no impression on Tietjens’ conscious mind. Men were going past. Cries went up in the camp. Not orders, the men were still marching. Cries. + 

Tietjens’ lips⁠—his mind was still with the dead⁠—said: + 

“That obscene Pitkins! I’ll have him cashiered for this⁠ ⁠…” He saw an obscene subaltern, small, with one eyelid that drooped. + 

He came awake at that. Pitkins was the subaltern he had detailed to march the draft to the station and go on to Bailleul under a boozy field officer of sorts. + 

McKechnie said from the other bed: + 

“That’s the draft back.” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“Good God!⁠ ⁠…” + 

McKechnie said to the batman: + 

“For God’s sake go and see if it is. Come back at once⁠ ⁠…” + 

The intolerable vision of the line, starving beneath the moon, of grey crowds murderously elbowing back a thin crowd in brown, zigzagged across the bronze light in the hut. The intolerable depression that, in those days, we felt⁠—that all those millions were the playthings of ants busy in the miles of corridors beneath the domes and spires that rise up over the central heart of our comity, that intolerable weight upon the brain and the limbs, descended once more on those two men lying upon their elbows. As they listened their jaws fell open. The long, polyphonic babble, rushing in from an extended line of men stood easy, alone rewarded their ears. + 

Tietjens said: + 

“That fellow won’t come back⁠ ⁠… He can never do an errand and come back⁠ ⁠…” He thrust one of his legs cumbrously out of the top of his fleabag. He said: + 

“By God, the Germans will be all over here in a week’s time!” + 

He said to himself: + 

“If they so betray us from Whitehall that fellow Levin has no right to pry into my matrimonial affairs. It is proper that one’s individual feelings should be sacrificed to the necessities of a collective entity. But not if that entity is to be betrayed from above. Not if it hasn’t the ten-millionth of a chance⁠ ⁠…” He regarded Levin’s late incursion on his privacy as inquiries set afoot by the general⁠ ⁠… Incredibly painful to him⁠ ⁠… like a medical examination into nudities, but perfectly proper. Old Campion had to assure himself that the other ranks were not demoralized by the spectacle of officers’ matrimonial “infidelities”⁠ ⁠… But such inquiries were not to be submitted to if the whole show were one gigantic demoralization! + 

McKechnie said, in reference to Tietjens’ protruded foot: + 

“There’s no good your going out⁠ ⁠… Cowley will get the men into their lines. He was prepared.” He added: “If the fellows in Whitehall are determined to do old Puffles in, why don’t they recall him?” + 

The legend was that an eminent personage in the Government had a great personal dislike for the general in command of one army⁠—the general being nicknamed Puffles. The Government, therefore, were said to be starving his command of men so that disaster should fall upon his command. + 

“They can recall generals easy enough,” McKechnie went on, “or anyone else!” + 

A heavy dislike that this member of the lower middle classes should have opinions on public affairs overcame Tietjens. He exclaimed: “Oh, that’s all tripe!” + 

He was himself outside all contact with affairs by now. But the other rumour in that troubled host had it that, as a political manoeuvre, the heads round Whitehall⁠—the civilian heads⁠—were starving the army of troops in order to hold over the allies of Great Britain the threat of abandoning altogether the Western Front. They were credited with threatening a strategic manoeuvre on an immense scale in the Near East, perhaps really intending it, or perhaps to force the hands of their allies over some political intrigue. These atrocious rumours reverberated backwards and forwards in the ears of all those millions under the black vault of heaven. All their comrades in the line were to be sacrificed as a rearguard to their departing host. That whole land was to be annihilated as a sacrifice to one vanity. Now the draft had been called back. That seemed proof that the Government meant to starve the line! McKechnie groaned: + 

“Poor ⸻ old Bird!⁠ ⁠… He’s booked. Eleven months in the front line, he’s been⁠ ⁠… Eleven months!⁠ ⁠… I was nine, this stretch. With him.” + 

He added: + 

“Get back into bed, old bean⁠ ⁠… I’ll go and look after the men if it’s necessary⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“You don’t so much as know where their lines are⁠ ⁠…” And sat listening. Nothing but the long roll of tongues came to him. He said: + 

“Damn it! The men ought not to be kept standing in the cold like that⁠ ⁠…” Fury filled him beneath despair. His eyes filled with tears. “God,” he said to himself, “the fellow Levin presumes to interfere in my private affair⁠ ⁠… Damn it,” he said again, “it’s like doing a little impertinence in a world that’s foundering⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I’d go out,” he said, “but I don’t want to have to put that filthy little Pitkins under arrest. He only drinks because he’s shellshocked. He’s not man enough else, the unclean little Nonconformist⁠ ⁠…” + 

McKechnie said: + 

“Hold on!⁠ ⁠… I’m a Presbyterian myself⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens answered: + 

“You would be!⁠ ⁠…” He said: “I beg your pardon⁠ ⁠… There will be no more parades⁠ ⁠… The British Army is dishonoured forever⁠ ⁠…” + 

McKechnie said: + 

“That’s all right, old bean⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens exclaimed with sudden violence: + 

“What the hell are you doing in the officers’ lines?⁠ ⁠… Don’t you know it’s a court-martial offence?” + 

He was confronted with the broad, mealy face of his regimental quartermaster-sergeant, the sort of fellow who wore an officer’s cap against the regulations, with a Tommie’s silver-plated badge. A man determined to get Sergeant-Major Cowley’s job. The man had come in unheard under the roll of voices outside. He said: + 

“Excuse me, sir, I took the liberty of knocking⁠ ⁠… The sergeant-major is in an epileptic fit⁠ ⁠… I wanted your directions before putting the draft into the tents with the other men⁠ ⁠…” Having said that tentatively he hazarded cautiously: “The sergeant-major throws these fits, sir, if he is suddenly woke up⁠ ⁠… And Second-Lieutenant Pitkins woke him very suddenly⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“So you took on you the job of a beastly informer against both of them⁠ ⁠… I shan’t forget it.” He said to himself: + 

“I’ll get this fellow one day⁠ ⁠…” and he seemed to hear with pleasure the clicking and tearing of the scissors as, inside three parts of a hollow square, they cut off his stripes and badges. + 

McKechnie exclaimed: + 

“Good God, man, you aren’t going out in nothing but your pyjamas. Put your slacks on under your British warm⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“Send the Canadian sergeant-major to me at the double⁠ ⁠…” to the quarter. “My slacks are at the tailor’s, being pressed.” His slacks were being pressed for the ceremony of the signing of the marriage contract of Levin, the fellow who had interfered in his private affairs. He continued into the mealy broad face and vague eyes of the quartermaster: “You know as well as I do that it was the Canadian sergeant-major’s job to report to me⁠ ⁠… I’ll let you off this time, but, by God, if I catch you spying round the officers’ lines again you are for a D.C.M.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He wrapped a coarse, Red Cross, grey-wool muffler under the turned-up collar of his British warm. + 

“That swine,” he said to McKechnie, “spies on the officers’ lines in the hope of getting a commission by catching out ⸻ little squits like Pitkins, when they’re drunk⁠ ⁠… I’m seven hundred braces down. Morgan does not know that I know that I’m that much down. But you can bet he knows where they have gone⁠ ⁠…” + 

McKechnie said: + 

“I wish you would not go out like that⁠ ⁠… I’ll make you some cocoa⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“I can’t keep the men waiting while I dress⁠ ⁠… I’m as strong as a horse⁠ ⁠…” + 

He was out amongst the bitterness, the mist, and the moongleams on three thousand rifle barrels, and the voices⁠ ⁠… He was seeing the Germans pour through a thin line, and his heart was leaden⁠ ⁠… A tall, graceful man swam up against him and said, through his nose, like an American: “There has been a railway accident, due to the French strikers. The draft is put back till three pip emma the day after tomorrow, sir.” + 

Tietjens exclaimed: + 

“It isn’t countermanded?” breathlessly. + 

The Canadian sergeant-major said: + 

“No, sir⁠ ⁠… A railway accident⁠ ⁠… Sabotage by the French, they say⁠ ⁠… Four Glamorganshire sergeants, all nineteen-fourteen men, killed, sir, going home on leave. But the draft is not cancelled⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“Thank God!” + 

The slim Canadian with his educated voice said: + 

“You’re thanking God, sir, for what’s very much to our detriment. Our draft was ordered for Salonika till this morning. The sergeant in charge of draft returns showed me the name Salonika scored off in his draft roster. Sergeant-Major Cowley had got hold of the wrong story. Now it’s going up the line. The other would have been a full two months’ more life for us.” + 

The man’s rather slow voice seemed to continue for a long time. As it went on Tietjens felt the sunlight dwelling on his nearly coverless limbs, and the tide of youth returning to his veins. It was like champagne. He said: + 

“You sergeants get a great deal too much information. The sergeant in charge of returns had no business to show you his roster. It’s not your fault, of course. But you are an intelligent man. You can see how useful that news might be to certain people: people that it’s not to your own interest should know these things⁠ ⁠…” He said to himself: “A landmark in history⁠ ⁠…” And then: “Where the devil did my mind get hold of that expression at this moment?” + 

They were walking in mist, down an immense lane, one hedge of which was topped by the serrated heads and irregularly held rifles that showed here and there. He said to the sergeant-major: “Call ’em to attention. Never mind their dressing, we’ve got to get ’em into bed. Roll-call will be at nine tomorrow.” + 

His mind said: + 

“If this means the single command⁠ ⁠… And it’s bound to mean the single command, it’s the turning point⁠ ⁠… Why the hell am I so extraordinarily glad? What’s it to me?” + 

He was shouting in a round voice: + 

“Now then, men, you’ve got to go six extra in a tent. See if you can fall out six at a time at each tent. It’s not in the drill book, but see if you can do it for yourselves. You’re smart men: use your intelligences. The sooner you get to bed the sooner you will be warm. I wish I was. Don’t disturb the men who’re already in the tents. They’ve got to be up for fatigues tomorrow at five, poor devils. You can lie soft till three hours after that⁠ ⁠… The draft will move to the left in fours⁠ ⁠… Form fours⁠ ⁠… Left⁠ ⁠…” Whilst the voices of the sergeants in charge of companies yelped varyingly to a distance in the quick march order he said to himself: + 

“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?” + 

The whole organization of his confounded battalion fell to pieces. It appeared that a circular had come round three months before⁠—before Tietjens had been given command of that unit⁠—asking for experienced first-class warrant officers capable of serving as instructors in Officers’ Training Corps, with commissions. Sergeant-Major Cowley had been recommended by the colonel of the depot, Sergeant-Major Ledoux by his own colonel. Tietjens felt as if he had been let down⁠—but of course he had not been. It was just the way of the army, all the time. You got a platoon, or a battalion, or, for the matter of that, a dugout or a tent, by herculean labours into good fettle. It ran all right for a day or two, then it all fell to pieces, the personnel scattered to the four winds by what appeared merely wanton orders, coming from the most unexpected headquarters, or the premises were smashed up by a chance shell that might just as well have fallen somewhere else⁠ ⁠… The finger of Fate!⁠ ⁠… + 

But it put a confounded lot more work on him⁠ ⁠… He said to Sergeant-Major Cowley, whom he found in the next hut where all the paper work of the unit was done: + 

“I should have thought you would have been enormously better off as regimental sergeant-major than with a commission. I know I would rather have the job.” Cowley answered⁠—he was very pallid and shaken⁠—that with his unfortunate infirmity, coming on at any moment of shock, he would be better in a job where he could slack off, like an O.T.C. He had always been subject to small fits, over in a minute, or couple of seconds even⁠ ⁠… But getting too near a H.E. shell⁠—after Noircourt, which had knocked out Tietjens himself⁠—had brought them on, violent. There was also, he finished, the gentility to be considered. Tietjens said: + 

“Oh, the gentility!⁠ ⁠… That’s not worth a flea’s jump⁠ ⁠… There won’t be any more parades after this war. There aren’t any now. Look at who your companions will be in an officer’s quarters; you’d be in a great deal better society in any self-respecting sergeants’ mess.” Cowley answered that he knew the service had gone to the dogs. All the same his missis liked it. And there was his daughter Winnie to be considered. She had always been a bit wild, and his missis wrote that she had gone wilder than ever, all due to the war. Cowley thought that the bad boys would be a little more careful how they monkeyed with her if she was an officer’s daughter⁠ ⁠… There was probably something in that! + 

Coming out into the open, confidentially with Tietjens, Cowley dropped his voice huskily to say: + 

“Take Quartermaster-Sergeant Morgan for R.S.M., sir.” Tietjens said explosively: + 

“I’m damned if I will.” Then he asked: “Why?” The wisdom of an old N.C.O.s is a thing no prudent officer neglects. + 

“He can do the work, sir,” Cowley said. “He’s out for a commission, and he’ll do his best⁠ ⁠…” He dropped his husky voice to a still greater depth of mystery: + 

“You’re over two hundred⁠—I should say nearer three hundred⁠—pounds down in your battalion stores. I don’t suppose you want to lose a sum of money like that?” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“I’m damned if I do⁠ ⁠… But I don’t see⁠ ⁠… Oh, yes, I do⁠ ⁠… If I make him sergeant-major he has to hand over the stores all complete⁠ ⁠… Today⁠ ⁠… Can he do it?” + 

Cowley said that Morgan could have till the day after tomorrow. He would look after things till then. + 

“But you’ll want to have a flutter before you go,” Tietjens said. “Don’t stop for me.” + 

Cowley said that he would stop and see the job through. He had thought of going down into the town and having a flutter. But the girls down there were a common sort, and it was bad for his complaint⁠ ⁠… He would stop and see what could be done with Morgan. Of course it was possible that Morgan might decide to face things out. He might prefer to stick to the money he’d got by disposing of Tietjens’ stores to other battalions that were down, or to civilian contractors. And stand a court martial! But it wasn’t likely. He was a Nonconformist deacon, or pew-opener, or even a minister possibly, at home in Wales⁠ ⁠… From near Denbigh! And Cowley had got a very good man, a first-class man, an Oxford professor, now a lance-corporal at the depot, for Morgan’s place. The colonel would lend him to Tietjens and would get him rated acting quartermaster-sergeant unpaid⁠ ⁠… Cowley had it all arranged⁠ ⁠… Lance-Corporal Caldicott was a first-class man, only he could not tell his right hand from his left on parade. Literally could not tell them⁠ ⁠… + 

So the battalion settled itself down⁠ ⁠… Whilst Cowley and he were at the colonel’s orderly room arranging for the transfer of the professor⁠—he was really only a fellow of his college⁠—who did not know his right hand from his left, Tietjens was engaged in the remains of the colonel’s furious argument as to the union of the Anglican and Eastern rites. The colonel⁠—he was a full colonel⁠—sat in his lovely private office, a light, gay compartment of a tin-hutment, the walls being papered in scarlet, with, on the purplish, thick, soft baize of his table-cover, a tall glass vase from which sprayed out pale Riviera roses, the gift of young lady admirers amongst the V.A.D.s in the town because he was a darling, and an open, very gilt and leather-bound volume of a biblical encyclopaedia beneath his delicate septuagenarian features. He was confirming his opinion that a union between the Church of England and the Greek Orthodox Church was the only thing that could save civilization. The whole war turned on that. The Central Empires represented Roman Catholicism, the Allies Protestantism and Orthodoxy. Let them unite. The papacy was a traitor to the cause of civilization. Why had the Vatican not protested with no uncertain voice about the abominations practised on the Belgian Catholics?⁠ ⁠… + 

Tietjens pointed out languidly objections to this theory. The first thing our ambassador to the Vatican had found out on arriving in Rome and protesting about massacres of Catholic laymen in Belgium was that the Russians before they had been a day in Austrian Poland had hanged twelve Roman Catholic bishops in front of their palaces. + 

Cowley was engaged with the adjutant at another table. The colonel ended his theologico-political tirade by saying: + 

“I shall be very sorry to lose you, Tietjens. I don’t know what we shall do without you. I never had a moment’s peace with your unit until you came.” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“Well, you aren’t losing me, sir, as far as I know.” + 

The colonel said: + 

“Oh, yes, we are. You are going up the line next week⁠ ⁠…” He added: “Now, don’t get angry with me⁠ ⁠… I’ve protested very strongly to old Campion⁠—General Campion⁠—that I cannot do without you.” And he made, with his delicate, thin, hairy-backed, white hands a motion as of washing. + 

The ground moved under Tietjens’ feet. He felt himself clambering over slopes of mud with his heavy legs and labouring chest. He said: + 

“Damn it all!⁠ ⁠… I’m not fit⁠ ⁠… I’m C3⁠ ⁠… I was ordered to live in an hotel in the town⁠ ⁠… I only mess here to be near the battalion.” + 

The colonel said with some eagerness: + 

“Then you can protest to Garrison⁠ ⁠… I hope you will⁠ ⁠… But I suppose you are the sort of fellow that won’t.” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“No, sir⁠ ⁠… Of course I cannot protest⁠ ⁠… Though it’s probably a mistake of some clerk⁠ ⁠… I could not stand a week in the line⁠ ⁠…” The profound misery of brooding apprehension in the line was less on his mind than, precisely, the appalling labour of the lower limbs when you live in mud to the neck⁠ ⁠… Besides, whilst he had been in hospital, practically the whole of his equipment had disappeared from his kit-bag⁠—including Sylvia’s two pairs of sheets!⁠—and he had no money with which to get more. He had not even any trench-boots. Fantastic financial troubles settled on his mind. + 

The colonel said to the adjutant at the other purple baize-covered table: + 

“Show Captain Tietjens those marching orders of his⁠ ⁠… They’re from Whitehall, aren’t they?⁠ ⁠… You never know where these things come from nowadays. I call them the arrow that flieth by night!” + 

The adjutant, a diminutive, a positively miniature gentleman with Coldstream badges up and a dreadfully worried brow, drifted a quarto sheet of paper out of a pile, across his tablecloth towards Tietjens. His tiny hands seemed about to fall off at the wrists; his temples shuddered with neuralgia. He said: + 

“For God’s sake do protest to Garrison if you feel you can⁠ ⁠… We can’t have more work shoved on us⁠ ⁠… Major Lawrence and Major Halkett left the whole of the work of your unit to us⁠ ⁠…” + 

The sumptuous paper, with the royal arms embossed at the top, informed Tietjens that he would report to his VIth battalion on the Wednesday of next week in preparation for taking up the duties of divisional transport officer to the XIXth division. The order came from Room G 14 R, at the War Office. He asked what the deuce G 14 R was, of the adjutant, who in an access of neuralgic agony, shook his head miserably, between his two hands, his elbows on the tablecloth. + 

Sergeant-Major Cowley, with his air of a solicitor’s clerk, said the room G 14 R was the department that dealt with civilian requests for the services of officers. To the adjutant who asked what the devil a civilian request for the employment of officers could have to do with sending Captain Tietjens to the XIXth division, Sergeant-Major Cowley presumed that it was because of the activities of the Earl of Beichan. The Earl of Beichan, a Levantine financier and racehorse owner, was interesting himself in army horses, after a short visit to the lines of communication. He also owned several newspapers. So they had been waking up the army transport-animals’ department to please him. The adjutant would no doubt have observed a Veterinary-Lieutenant Hotchkiss or Hitchcock. He had come to them through G 14 R. At the request of Lord Beichan, who was personally interested in Lieutenant Hotchkiss’s theories, he was to make experiments on the horses of the Fourth Army⁠—in which the XIXth division was then to be found⁠ ⁠… “So,” Cowley said, “you’ll be under him as far as your horse lines go. If you go up.” Perhaps Lord Beichan was a friend of Captain Tietjens and had asked for him, too: Captain Tietjens was known to be wonderful with horses. + 

Tietjens, his breath rushing through his nostrils, swore he would not go up the line at the bidding of a hog like Beichan, whose real name was Stavropolides, formerly Nathan. + 

He said the army was reeling to its base because of the continual interference of civilians. He said it was absolutely impossible to get through his programme of parades because of the perpetual extra drills that were forced on them at the biddings of civilians. Any fool who owned a newspaper, nay, any fool who could write to a newspaper, or any beastly little squit of a novelist could frighten the Government and the War Office into taking up one more hour of the men’s parade time for patent manoeuvres with jampots or fancy underclothing. Now he was asked if his men wanted lecturing on the causes of the war and whether he⁠—he, good God!⁠—would not like to give the men cosy chats on the nature of the Enemy nations⁠ ⁠… + 

The colonel said: + 

“There, there, Tietjens!⁠ ⁠… There, there!⁠ ⁠… We all suffer alike. We’ve got to lecture our men on the uses of a new patent sawdust stove. If you don’t want that job, you can easily get the general to take you off it. They say you can turn him round your little finger⁠ ⁠…” + 

“He’s my godfather,” Tietjens thought it wise to say. “I never asked him for a job, but I’m damned if it isn’t his duty as a Christian to keep me out of the clutches of this Greek-’Ebrew pagan peer⁠ ⁠… He’s not even Orthodox, colonel.⁠ ⁠…” + 

The adjutant here said that Colour-Sergeant Morgan of their orderly room wanted a word with Tietjens. Tietjens said he hoped to goodness that Morgan had some money for him! The adjutant said he understood that Morgan had unearthed quite a little money that ought to have been paid to Tietjens by his agents and hadn’t. + 

Colour-Sergeant Morgan was the regimental magician with figures. Inordinately tall and thin, his body, whilst his eyes peered into distant columns of ciphers, appeared to be always parallel with the surface of his table and, as he always answered the several officers whom he benefited without raising his head, his face was very little known to his superiors. He was, however, in appearance a very ordinary, thin N.C.O. whose spidery legs, when very rarely he appeared on parade, had the air of running away with him as a racehorse might do. He told Tietjens that, pursuant to his instructions and the A.C.P. i 96 b that Tietjens had signed, he had ascertained that command pay at the rate of two guineas a day and supplementary fuel and light allowance at the rate of 6s. 8d. was being paid weekly by the Paymaster-General’s Department to his, Tietjens’, account at his agents’. He suggested that Tietjens should write to his agents that if they did not immediately pay to his account the sum of £194 13s. 4d., by them received from the Paymaster’s Department, he would proceed against the Crown by Petition of Right. And he strongly recommended Tietjens to draw a cheque on his own bank for the whole of the money because, if by any chance the agents had not paid the money in, he could sue them for damages and get them cast in several thousand pounds. And serve the devils right. They must have a million or so in hand in unpaid command and detention allowances due to officers. He only wished he could advertise in the papers offering to recover unpaid sums due by agents. He added that he had a nice little computation as to variations in the course of Gunter’s Second Comet that he would like to ask Tietjens’ advice about one of these days. The colour-sergeant was an impassioned amateur astronomer. + 

So Tietjens’ morning went up and down⁠ ⁠… The money at the moment, Sylvia being in that town, was of tremendous importance to him and came like an answer to prayer. It was not so agreeable, however, even in a world in which, never, never, never for ten minutes did you know whether you stood on your head or your heels, for Tietjens, on going back to the colonel’s private office, to find Sergeant-Major Cowley coming out of the next room in which, on account of the adjutant’s neuralgia, the telephone was kept. Cowley announced to the three of them that the general had the day before ordered his correspondence-corporal to send a very emphatic note to Colonel Gillum to the effect that he was informing the competent authority that he had no intention whatever of parting with Captain Tietjens, who was invaluable in his command. The correspondence-corporal had informed Cowley that neither he nor the general knew who was the competent authority for telling Room G 14 R at the War Office to go to hell, but the matter would be looked up and put all right before the chit was sent off⁠ ⁠… + 

That was good as far as it went. Tietjens was really interested in his present job, and although he would have liked well enough to have the job of looking after the horses of a division, or even an army, he felt he would rather it was put off till the spring, given the weather they were having and the state of his chest. And the complication of possible troubles with Lieutenant Hotchkiss who, being a professor, had never really seen a horse⁠—or not for ten years!⁠—was something to be thought about very seriously. But all this appeared quite another matter when Cowley announced that the civilian authority who had asked for Tietjens’ transfer was the permanent secretary to the Ministry of Transport⁠ ⁠… + 

Colonel Gillum said: + 

“That’s your brother, Mark⁠ ⁠…” And indeed the permanent secretary to the Ministry of Transport was Tietjens’ brother Mark, known as the Indispensable Official. Tietjens felt a real instant of dismay. He considered that his violent protest against the job would appear rather a smack in the face for poor old wooden-featured Mark who had probably taken a good deal of trouble to get him the job. Even if Mark should never hear of it, a man should not slap his brother in the face! Moreover, when he came to think of his last day in London, he remembered that Valentine Wannop, who had exaggerated ideas as to the safety of First Line Transport, had begged Mark to get him a job as divisional officer⁠ ⁠… And he imagined Valentine’s despair if she heard that he⁠—Tietjens⁠—had moved heaven and earth to get out of it. He saw her lower lip quivering and the tears in her eyes⁠ ⁠… But he probably had got that from some novel, because he had never seen her lower lip quiver. He had seen tears in her eyes! + 

He hurried back to his lines to take his orderly room. In the long hut McKechnie was taking that miniature court of drunks and defaulters for him and, just as Tietjens reached it, he was taking the case of Girtin and two other Canadian privates⁠ ⁠… The case of Girtin interested him, and when McKechnie slid out of his seat Tietjens occupied it. The prisoners were only just being marched in by a Sergeant Davis, an admirable N.C.O. whose rifle appeared to be part of his rigid body and who executed an amazing number of stamps in seriously turning in front of the C.O.’s table. It gave the impression of an Indian war dance⁠ ⁠… + 

Tietjens glanced at the charge sheet, which was marked as coming from the Provost-Marshal’s Office. Instead of the charge of absence from draft he read that of conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline in that⁠ ⁠… The charge was written in a very illiterate hand; an immense beery lance-corporal of Garrison Military Police, with a red hatband, attended to give evidence⁠ ⁠… It was a tenuous and disagreeable affair. Girtin had not gone absent, so Tietjens had to revise his views of the respectable. At any rate of the respectable Colonial private soldier with mother complete. For there really had been a mother, and Girtin had been seeing her into the last tram down into the town. A frail old lady. Apparently, trying to annoy the Canadian, the beery lance-corporal of the Garrison Military Police had hustled the mother. Girtin had remonstrated; very moderately, he said. The lance-corporal had shouted at him. Two other Canadians returning to camp had intervened and two more police. The police had called the Canadians ⸻ conscripts, which was almost more than the Canadians could stand, they being voluntarily enlisted 1914 or 1915 men. The police⁠—it was an old trick⁠—had kept the men talking until two minutes after the last post had sounded and then had run them in for being absent off pass⁠—and for disrespect to their red hatbands. + 

Tietjens, with a carefully measured fury, first cross-examined and then damned the police witness to hell. Then he marked the charge sheets with the words, “Case explained,” and told the Canadians to go and get ready for his parade. It meant he was in for a frightful row with the provost-marshal, who was a port-winey old general called O’Hara and loved his police as if they had been ewe-lambs. + 

He took his parade, the Canadian troops looking like real soldiers in the sunlight, went round his lines with the new Canadian sergeant-major, who had his appointment, thank goodness, from his own authorities; wrote a report on the extreme undesirability of lecturing his men on the causes of the war, since his men were either graduates of one or other Canadian university and thus knew twice as much about the causes of the war as any lecturer the civilian authorities could provide, or else they were half-breed Micamuc Indians, Eskimo, Japanese, or Alaskan Russians, none of whom could understand any English lecturer⁠ ⁠… He was aware that he would have to rewrite his report so as to make it more respectful to the newspaper proprietor peer who, at that time, was urging on the home Government the necessity of lecturing all the subjects of His Majesty on the causes of the war. But he wanted to get that grouse off his chest and its disrespect would pain Levin, who would have to deal with these reports if he did not get married first. Then he lunched off army sausage-meat and potatoes, mashed with their skins complete, watered with an admirable 1906 brut champagne which they bought themselves, and an appalling Canadian cheese⁠—at the headquarters table to which the colonel had invited all the subalterns who that day were going up the line for the first time. They had some h’s in their compositions, but in revenge they must have boasted of a pint of adenoid growths between them. There was, however, a charming young half-caste Goa second-lieutenant, who afterwards proved of an heroic bravery. He gave Tietjens a lot of amusing information as to the working of the purdah in Portuguese India. + 

So, at half-past one Tietjens sat on Schomburg, the coffin-headed, bright chestnut from the Prussian horse-raising establishment near Celle. Almost a pure thoroughbred, this animal had usually the paces of a dining-room table, its legs being fully as stiff. But today its legs might have been made of cotton-wool, it lumbered over frosty ground breathing stertorously and, at the jumping ground of the Deccan Horse, a mile above and behind Rouen, it did not so much refuse a very moderate jump as come together in a lugubrious crumple. It was, in the light of a red, jocular sun, like being mounted on a brokenhearted camel. In addition, the fatigues of the morning beginning to tell, Tietjens was troubled by an obsession of O Nine Morgan which he found tiresome to have to stall off. + 

“What the hell,” he asked of the orderly, a very silent private on a roan beside him, “what the hell is the matter with this horse?⁠ ⁠… Have you been keeping him warm?” He imagined that the clumsy paces of the animal beneath him added to his gloomy obsessions. + 

The orderly looked straight in front of him over a valley full of hutments. He said: + 

“No, sir. The ’oss ’ad been put in the ’oss-standings of G depot. By the orders of Lieutenant ’Itchcock. ’Osses, Lieutenant ’Itchcock said, ’ad to be ’ardened.” + 

Tietjens said: + 

“Did you tell him that it was my orders that Schomburg was to be kept warm? In the stables of the farm behind No. XVI I.B.D.” + 

“The lieutenant,” the orderly explained woodenly, “said as ’ow henny departure f’m ’is orders would be visited by the extreme displeasure of Lord Breech’em, K.C.V.O., K.C.B., etcetera.” The orderly was quivering with rage. + 

“You,” Tietjens said very carefully, “when you fall out with the horses at the Hotel de la Poste, take Schomburg and the roan to the stables of La Volonté Farm, behind No. XVI I.B.D.” The orderly was to close all the windows of the stable, stopping up any chinks with wadding. He would procure, if possible, a sawdust stove, new pattern, from Colonel Gillum’s store and light it in the stables. He was also to give Schomburg and the roan oatmeal and water warmed as hot as the horses would take it⁠ ⁠… And Tietjens finished sharply, “If Lieutenant Hotchkiss makes any comments, you will refer him to me. As his C.O.” + 

The orderly seeking information as to horse-ailments, Tietjens said: + 

“The school of horse-copers, to which Lord Beichan belongs, believes in the hardening of all horseflesh other than racing cattle.” They bred racing-cattle. Under six blankets apiece! Personally Tietjens did not believe in the hardening process and would not permit any animal over which he had control to be submitted to it⁠ ⁠… It had been observed that if any animal was kept at a lower temperature than that of its normal climatic condition it would contract diseases to which ordinarily it was not susceptible⁠ ⁠… If you keep a chicken for two days in a pail of water it will contract human scarlet-fever or mumps if injected with either bacillus. If you remove the chicken from the water, dry it, and restore it to its normal conditions, the scarlet-fever or the mumps will die out of the animal⁠ ⁠… He said to the orderly: “You are an intelligent man. What deduction do you draw?” + 

The orderly looked away over the valley of the Seine. + 

“I suppose, sir,” he said, “that our ’osses, being kept alwise cold in their standings, ’as hillnesses they wouldn’t otherwise ’ave.” + 

“Well, then,” Tietjens said, “keep the poor animals warm.” + 

He considered that here was the makings of a very nasty row for himself if, by any means, his sayings came round to the ears of Lord Beichan. But that he had to chance. He coud not let a horse for which he was responsible be martyred⁠ ⁠… There was too much to think about⁠ ⁠… so that nothing at all stood out to be thought of. The sun was glowing. The valley of the Seine was blue-grey, like a Gobelin tapestry. Over it all hung the shadow of a deceased Welsh soldier. An odd skylark was declaiming over an empty field behind the incinerators’ headquarters⁠ ⁠… An odd lark. For as a rule larks do not sing in December. Larks sing only when courting, or over the nest⁠ ⁠… The bird must be oversexed. O Nine Morgan was the other thing, that accounting for the prizefighter! + 

They dropped down a mud lane between brick walls into the town⁠ ⁠… + 