The Canadian sergeant-major was worried about a pig-skin leather pocket-book. 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 pocket-book 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 pocket-book was packed or not. He had imagined himself making a good impression on parade, standing up straight and tall, taking out that pocket-book 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 downwards 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 an ’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 slant-ways. 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 sing-song, ‘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,’ O Nine 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 …
O Nine 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 its 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 spider-webs. 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 identitity 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. Prob
ably 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 hell-fire, 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 down 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 care-free 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 green-grocer’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 pooped 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 pigmies! 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 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. Thorough-b
red! 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, to-night 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 Brigham! … Another of these pestilential, crooked newspaper-owning financial peers …