Parade's End

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 any American:

“There has been a railway accident, due to the French strikers. The draft is put back till three pip emma the day after to-morrow, 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 to-morrow.”

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’ll 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 to-morrow 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 half-way 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 in the extraordinarily 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 per cent 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 per cent 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