with civilian requests for the services of officers. To the adjutant who asked what the devil a civilian request for the employment of officers could have to do with sending Captain Tietjens to the XIXth division, Sergeant-Major Cowley presumed that it was because of the activities of the Earl of Beichan. The Earl of Beichan, a Levantine financier and race-horse owner, was interesting himself in army horses, after, a short visit to the lines of communication. He also owned several newspapers. So they had been waking up the army transport-animals’ department to please him. The adjutant would no doubt have observed a Veterinary-Lieutenant Hotchkiss or Hitchcock. He had come to them through G 14 R at the request of Lord Beichan, who was personally interested in Lieutenant Hotchkiss’s theories. He was to make experiments on the horses of the Fourth Army — in which the XIXth division was then to be found…. “So,” Cowley said, “you’ll be under him as far as your horse lines go. If you go up.” Perhaps Lord Beichan was a friend of Captain Tietjens and had asked for him, too: Captain Tietjens was known to be wonderful with horses.
Tietjens, his breath rushing through his nostrils, swore he would not go up the line at the bidding of a hog like Beichan, whose real name was Stavropolides, formerly Nathan.
He said the army was reeling to its base because of the continual interference of civilians. He said it was absolutely impossible to get through his programmes of parades because of the perpetual extra drills that were forced on them at the biddings of civilians. Any fool who owned a newspaper, nay, any fool who could write to a newspaper, or any beastly little squit of a novelist could frighten the Government and the War Office into taking up one more hour of the men’s parade time for patent manoeuvres with jampots or fancy underclothing. Now he was asked if his men wanted lecturing on the causes of the war and whether he — he, good God! — would not like to give the men cosy chats on the nature of the Enemy nations.
The colonel said:
“There, there, Tietjens!… There, there!… We all suffer alike. We’ve got to lecture our men on the uses of a new patent sawdust stove. If you don’t want that job, you can easily get the general to take you off it. They say you can turn him round your little finger….”
“He’s my godfather,” Tietjens thought it wise to say. “I never asked him for a job, but I’m damned if it isn’t his duty as a Christian to keep me out of the clutches of this Greek-’Ebrew pagan peer…. He’s not even Orthodox, colonel….”
The adjutant here said that Colour-Sergeant Morgan of their orderly room wanted a word with Tietjens. Tietjens said he hoped to goodness that Morgan had some money for him! The adjutant said he understood that Morgan had unearthed quite a little money that ought to have been paid to Tietjens by his agents and hadn’t.
Colour-Sergeant Morgan was the regimental magician with figures. Inordinately tall and thin, his body whilst his eyes peered into distant columns of cyphers, appeared to be always parallel with the surface of his table and, as he always answered the several officers whom he benefited without raising his head, his face was very little known to his superiors. He was, however, in appearance a very ordinary, thin, N.C.O. whose spidery legs, when very rarely he appeared on a parade, had the air of running away with him as a race-horse might do. He told Tietjens that, pursuant to his instructions and the A.C.P. i 96 b that Tietjens had signed, he had ascertained that command pay at the rate of two guineas a day and supplementary fuel and light allowance at the rate of 6
So Tietjens’ morning went up and down…. The money at the moment, Sylvia being in that town, was of tremendous importance to him and came like an answer to prayer. It was not so agreeable, however, even in a world in which, never, never, never for ten minutes did you know whether you stood on your head or your heels, for Tietjens, on going back to the colonel’s private office, to find Sergeant-Major Cowley coming out of the next room in which, on account of the adjutant’s neuralgia, the telephone was kept. Cowley announced to the three of them that the general had the day before ordered his correspondence-corporal to send a very emphatic note to Colonel Gillum to the effect that he was informing the competent authority that he had no intention whatever of parting with Captain Tietjens, who was invaluable in his command. The correspondence-corporal had informed Cowley that neither he nor the general knew who was the competent authority for telling Room G 14 R at the War Office to go to hell, but the matter would be looked up and put all right before the chit was sent off….
That was good as far as it went. Tietjens was really interested in his present job, and although he would have liked well enough to have the job of looking after the horses of a division, or even an army, he felt that he would rather it was put off till the spring, given the weather they were having and the state of his chest. And the complication of possible troubles with Lieutenant Hotchkiss who, being a professor, had never really seen a horse — or not for ten years! — was something to be thought about very seriously. But all this appeared quite another matter when Cowley announced that the civilian authority who had asked for Tietjens’ transfer was the permanent secretary to the Ministry of Transport….
Colonel Gillum said:
“That’s your brother, Mark….” And indeed the permanent secretary to the Ministry of Transport was Tietjens’ brother Mark, known as the Indispensable Official. Tietjens felt a real instant of dismay. He considered that his violent protest against the job would appear rather a smack in the face for poor old wooden-featured Mark who had probably taken a good deal of trouble to get him the job. Even if Mark should never hear of it, a man should not slap his brother in the face! Moreover, when he came to think of his last day in London, he remembered that Valentine Wannop, who had exaggerated ideas as to the safety of First Line Transport, had begged Mark to get him a job as divisional officer…. And he imagined Valentine’s despair if she heard that he — Tietjens — had moved heaven and earth to get out of it. He saw her lower lip quivering and the tears in her eyes. But he probably had got that from some novel, because he had never seen her lower lip quiver. He had seen tears in her eyes!
He hurried back to his lines to take his orderly room. In the long hut McKechnie was taking that miniature court of drunks and defaulters for him and, just as Tietjens reached it, he was taking the case of Girtin and two other Canadian privates…. The case of Girtin interested him, and when McKechnie slid out of his seat Tietjens occupied it. The prisoners were only just being marched in by a Sergeant Davis, an admirable N.C.O. whose rifle appeared to be part of his rigid body and who executed an amazing number of stamps in seriously turning in front of the C.O.’s table. It gave the impression of an Indian war dance….
Tietjens glanced at the charge sheet, which was marked as coming from the Provost-Marshal’s Office. Instead of the charge of absence from draft he read that of conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline in that…. The charge was written in a very illiterate hand; an immense beery lance-corporal of Garrison Military Police, with a red hat-band, attended to give evidence…. It was a tenuous and disagreeable affair. Girtin had not gone absent, so Tietjens had to revise his views of the respectable, at any rate of the respectable Colonial private soldier with mother complete. For there really had been a mother, and Girtin had been seeing her into the last tram down into the town. A frail old lady. Apparently, trying to annoy the Canadian, the beery lance-corporal of the Garrison Military Police had hustled the mother. Girtin had remonstrated; very moderately, he said. The lance- corporal had shouted at him. Two other Canadians returning to camp had intervened and two more police. The police had called the Canadians — conscripts, which was almost more than the Canadians could stand, they being voluntarily enlisted 1914 or 1915 men. The police — it was an old trick — had kept the men talking until two minutes after the last post had sounded and then had run them in for being absent off pass — and for disrespect to their red hat-bands.
Tietjens, with a carefully measured fury, first cross-examined and then damned the police witness to hell. Then he marked the charge sheets with the words “Case explained,” and told the Canadians to go and get ready for his parade. It meant he was aware of a frightful row with the provost-marshal, who was a port-winey old general called O’Hara and loved his police as if they had been ewe-lambs.
He took his parade, the Canadian troops looking like real soldiers in the sunlight, went round his lines with
