It had struck him for a painful moment whilst looking at the picture in a dilapidated mess ante-room 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 128s 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 realise 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 realise. 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 Waacs 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 play-acting?’
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 storeys down below someone let two hundred-pound dumb-bells 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 w
as 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, O Nine 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 tin-pot crashes – and it always came when guns made that particular kind of tin-pot 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 out-shout 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 organisation 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 Tommy 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 … Napoo 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 viscous-ness 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.