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 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 prize-fighter Red Evans Williams of Castell Coch. If he had given the fellow leave the prize-fighter would have smashed him to bits. The police of Pontardulais had asked that he should not be let come home – because of the prize-fighter. 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 prize-fighter 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 shell-fire or by the fist of the prize-fighter… . 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 ain’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 prize-fighter’s fist… .’
Sergeant Cowley said:
‘No, no prize-fighter’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 on 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 ape-like, 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’tennant 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 white-washed stones that descended the black downside. 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 sea-gull… . And called you “Oi” 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 to-night, sir.’
‘To-night!’ 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 to come back.’
He re-entered 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 Headquarters orders, Divisional orders, Lines of Communication orders, half a dozen A.F.B.W. 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 blanket 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 rag-time 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 in a column of fat, wet letters
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 roof-trees 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 a shock. The mind was then too sensitised. Subjects of shock require to be thought all round. If your mind thinks when it is too sensitised 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 field-marshal – would have the heart to tell him to take them off! It was the measure of his pathos. This ghost-like object was apologising 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 to 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!’