Parade's End

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 pigeon-holes 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 hair’s breadth 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 sack-cloth 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 vertabrately 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, in-growing 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 ground-sheet 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 light-weight 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 to-night.”

“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 god-father 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 water-colour 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 blue stocking’s salon, where Levin worked at Garrison headquarters…. He had written Levin’s blessed command orders while Levin fussed and fumed about their being delayed for tea with Mlle de Bailly… and curled his delicate moustache…. Mlle de Bailly, 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 Provencale. Not heavy, but precisely long, slow, and cruel; coiled in a deep arm-chair, 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