Parade's End

“You didn’t bring ’em to a court martial?” Cowley asked. Tietjens said: No. He could not be quite certain. Though he was certain. But he had been worrying about a private matter. He had been worrying about it while he lay on the ground and that rather obscured his sense of what he saw. Besides, he said faintly, an officer must use his judgment. He had judged it better in this case not to have seen the… His voice had nearly faded away. It was clear to Sylvia that he was coming to a climax of some mental torture. Suddenly he exclaimed to Cowley:

“Supposing I let him off one life to get him killed two years after. My God! That would be too beastly!”

Cowley snuffled in Tietjens’ ear something that Sylvia did not catch — consolatory and affectionate. That intimacy was more than she could bear. She adopted her most negligent tone to ask:

“I suppose the one man had been trifling with the other’s girl. Or wife!”

Cowley exploded: “God bless you, no! They’d agreed upon it between them. To get one of them sent ’ome and the other, at any rate, out of that ’ell, leading him back to the dressing-station.” She said:

“You mean to say that a man would do that, to get out of it?…”

Cowley said:

“God bless you, ma’am, with the ’ell the Tommies ’as of it…. For it’s in the line that the difference between the Other Ranks’ life and the officers’ comes in…. I tell you, ma’am, old soldier as I am, and I’ve been in seven wars one with another… there were times in this war when I could have shrieked, holding my right hand down….”

He paused and said: “It was my idea…. And it’s been a good many others’, that if I ’eld my ’and up over the parapet with perhaps my hat on it, in two minutes there would be a German sharpshooter’s bullet through it. And then me for Blighty, as the soldiers say…. And if that could happen to me, a regimental sergeant-major, with twenty-three years in the service…”

The bright orderly came in, said he had found a taxi, and melted into the dimness.

“A man,” the sergeant-major said, “would take the risk of being shot for wounding his pal…. They get to love their pals, passing the love of women….” Sylvia exclaimed: “Oh!” as if at a pang of toothache. “They do, ma’am,” he said, “it’s downright touching….”

He was by now very unsteady as he stood, but his voice was quite clear. That was the way it took him. He said to Tietjens:

“It’s queer, what you say about home worries taking up your mind…. I remember in the Afghan campaign, when we were in the devil of a hot corner, I got a letter from my wife, Mrs. Cowley, to say that our Winnie had the measles…. And there was only one difference between me and Mrs. Cowley: I said that a child must have flannel next its skin, and she said flannelette was good enough. Wiltshire doesn’t hold by wool as Lincolnshire does. Long fleeces the Lincolnshire sheep have…. And dodging the Afghan bullets all day among the boulders as we was, all I could think of… For you know, ma’am, being a mother yourself, that the great thing with measles is to keep a child warm…. I kep’ saying to myself — ’arf crying I was — ‘If she only keeps wool next Winnie’s skin! If she only keeps wool next Winnie’s skin!’… But you know that, being a mother yourself. I’ve seen your son’s photo on the captain’s dressing-table. Michael, ‘is name is…. So you see, the captain doesn’t forget you and ’im.”

Sylvia said in a clear voice:

“Perhaps you would not go on!”

Distracted as she was by the anti-air-gun in the garden, though it was on the other side of the hotel and permitted you to get in a sentence or two before splitting your head with a couple of irregular explosions, she was still more distracted by a sudden vision — a remembrance of Christopher’s face when their boy had had a temperature of 105° with the measles, up at his sister’s house in Yorkshire. He had taken the responsibility, which the village doctor would not face, of himself placing the child in a bath full of split ice…. She saw him bending, expressionless in the strong lamp-light, with the child in his clumsy arms over the glittering, rubbled surface of the bath. He was just as expressionless then as now…. He reminded her now of how he had been then: some strain in the lines of the face perhaps that she could not analyse…. Rather as if he had a cold in the head — a little suffocating, with suppressing his emotions, of course; his eyes looking at nothing. You would not have said that he even saw the child — heir to Groby and all that!… Something had said to her, just in between two crashes of the gun “It’s his own child. He went as you might say down to hell to bring it back to life….” She knew it was Father Consett saying that. She knew it was true: Christopher had been down to hell to bring the child back…. Fancy facing its pain in that dreadful bath!… The thermometer had dropped, running down under their eyes…. Christopher had said: “A good heart, he’s got! A good plucked one!” and then held his breath, watching the thin filament of bright mercury drop to normal…. She said now, between her teeth: “The child is his property as much as the damned estate…. Well, I’ve got them both….”

But it wasn’t at this juncture that she wanted him tortured over that. So, when the second gun had done its crash, she had said to the bibulous old man:

“I wish you would not go on!” And Christopher had been prompt to the rescue of the convenances with:

“Mrs. Tietjens does not see eye to eye with us in some matters!”

She said to herself: “Eye to eye! My God!…” The whole of this affair, the more she saw of it, overwhelmed her with a sense of hatred…. And of depression! She saw Christopher buried in this welter of fools, playing a schoolboy’s game of make-believe. But of a make-believe that was infinitely formidable and infinitely sinister…. The crashings of the gun and of all the instruments for making noise seemed to her so atrocious and odious because they were, for her, the silly pomp of a schoolboy-man’s game…. Campion, or some similar schoolboy, said: “Hullo! Some German airplanes about… That lets us out on the air-gun! Let’s have some pops!”… As they fire guns in the park on the King’s birthday. It was sheer insolence to have a gun in the garden of an hotel where people of quality might be sleeping or wishing to converse!

At home she had been able to sustain the conviction that it was such a game…. Anywhere: at the house of a minister of the Crown, at dinner, she had only to say: “Do let us leave off talking of these odious things….” And immediately there would be ten or a dozen voices, the minister’s included, to agree with Mrs. Tietjens of Groby that they had altogether too much of it.

But here!… She seemed to be in the very belly of the ugly affair…. It moved and moved, under your eyes dissolving, yet always there. As if you should try to follow one diamond of pattern in the coil of an immense snake that was in irrevocable motion…. It gave her a sense of despair: the engrossment of Tietjens, in common with the engrossment of this disreputable toper. She had never seen Tietjens put his head together with any soul before; he was the lonely buffalo…. Now! Anyone, any fatuous staff-officer, whom at home he would never so much as have spoken to; any trustworthy beer-sodden sergeant, any street urchin dressed up as orderly…. They had only to appear and all his mind went into a close-headed conference over some ignoble point in the child’s game: the laundry, the chiropody, the religions, the bastards… of millions of the indistinguishable…. Or their deaths as well! But, in heaven’s name what hypocrisy, or what inconceivable chicken-heartedness was this? They promoted this beanfeast of carnage for their own ends; they caused the deaths of men in inconceivable holocausts of pain and terror. Then they had crises of agony over the death of one single man. For it was plain to her that Tietjens was in the middle of a full nervous breakdown. Over one man’s death! She had never seen him so suffer; she had never seen him so appeal for sympathy — him, a cold fiend of reticence! Yet he was now in an agony! Now! … And she began to have a sense of the infinitely spreading welter of pain, going away to an eternal horizon of night…. ’Ell for the Other Ranks! Apparently it was hell for the officers as well.

The real compassion in the voice of that snuffling, half-drunken old man had given her a sense of that enormous wickedness…. These horrors, these infinities of pain, this atrocious condition of the world had been brought about in order that men should indulge themselves in orgies of promiscuity. That in the end was at the bottom of male honour, of male virtue, observance of treaties, upholding of the flag…. An immense warlock’s carnival of appetites, lusts, ebrieties…. And once set in motion there was no stopping it. This state of things would never cease…. Because once they had tasted of the joy — the blood — of this game, who would let it end? These men talked of these things that occupied them there with the lust of men telling dirty stories in smoking-rooms…. That was the only parallel!

There was no stopping it, any more than there was any stopping the by now all but intoxicated ex- sergeant-major. He was off! With, as might be expected, advice to a young couple with differences of opinion! The wine had made him bold!