Parade's End

thinkable….

He was saying to McKechnie:

“You ought not to be here without a tin hat. You will have to put a tin hat on if you mean to stop here. I can give you four minutes if that is not the strafe beginning. Who’s been saying what?”

McKechnie said.

“I’m not stopping here. I’m going back, after I’ve given you a piece of my mind, to the beastly job you have got me defiled with.”

Tietjens said:

“Well, you’ll put on a tin hat to go there, please. And don’t ride your horse, if you’ve got it here, till after you’re a hundred yards, at least, down a communication trench.”

McKechnie asked how Tietjens dared give him orders and Tietjens said: Fine he would look with Divisional Transport dead in his lines at five in the morning in a parade hat. McKechnie with objurgations said that the Transport Officer had the right to consult the C.O. of a battalion he supplied. Tietjens said:

“I’m commanding here. You’ve not consulted me.”

It appeared to him queer that they should be behaving like that when you could hear… oh, say, the wings of the angel of death…. You can “almost hear the very rustling of his wings” was the quotation. Good enough rhetoric. But of course that was how armed men would behave…. At all times!

He had been trying the old trick of the military, clipped voice on the half-dotty subject. It had before then reduced McKechnie to some sort of military behaviour.

It reduced him in this case to a maudlin state. He exclaimed with a sort of lachrymose agony:

“This is what it has come to with the old battalion… the b—y; b—w, b—y old battalion of z—rs!” Each imprecation was a sob. “How we worked at it…. And now… you’ve got it!”

Tietjens said:

“Well, you were Vice-Chancellor’s Latin Prize-man once. It’s what we get reduced to.” He added: “Vos mellificatis apes!”

McKechnie said with gloomy contempt:

“You…. You’re no Latinist!”

By now Tietjens had counted two hundred and eighty since the big cannon had said “Phooooh.” Perhaps then it was not the signal for the barrage to begin… Had it been it would have begun before now; it would have come thumping along on the heels of the “Phoooh.” His hands and the nape of his neck were preparing to become normal.

Perhaps the strafe would not come at all that day.

There was the wind. If anything it was strengthening. Yesterday he had suspected that the Germans hadn’t got any tanks handy. Perhaps the ugly, senseless armadillos — and incapable at that! under-engined! — had all got stuck in the marshes in front of G section. Perhaps the heavy artillery fire of ours that had gone on most of yesterday had been meant to pound the beastly things to pieces. Moving, they looked like slow rats, their noses to the ground, snouting crumbs of garbage. When they were still they looked merely pensive!

Perhaps the strafe would not come. He hoped it would not. He did not want a strafe with himself in command of the battalion. He did not know what to do, what he ought to do by the book. He knew what he would do. He would stroll about along those deep trenches. Stroll. With his hands in his pockets. Like General Gordon in pictures. He would say contemplative things as the time dragged on…. A rather abominable sort of Time, really…. But that would introduce into the Battalion a spirit of calm that it had lately lacked…. The night before last the C.O. with a bottle in each hand had hurled them both at Huns who did not materalise for an hour and a half. Even the Pals had omitted to laugh. After that he, Tietjens, had taken command. With lots of the Orderly Room papers under both arms. They had had to be in a hurry, at night; with men suggesting pale grey Canadian trappers coming out of holes!

He did not want to command in a strafe, or at any other time! He hoped the unfortunate C.O. would get over his trouble by the evening…. But he supposed that he, Tietjens, would get through it all right if he had to. Like the man who had never tried playing the violin!

McKechnie had suddenly become lachrymosely feminine, like a woman pleading, large-eyed, for her lover, his eyes explored Tietjens’ face for signs of treachery, for signs that what he said was not what he meant in his heart. He said:

“What are you going to do about Bill? Poor old Bill that has sweated for his Battalion as you never…” He began again:

“Think of poor old Bill! You can’t be thinking of doing the dirty on him…. No man could be such a swine!”

It was curious how those circumstances brought out the feminine that was in man. What was that ass of a German Professor’s theory… formula? M^y plus W^x equals Man?… Well, if God hadn’t invented woman men would have had to do so. In that sort of place. You grew sentimental. He, Tietjens, was growing sentimental. He said:

“What does Terence say about him this morning?”

The nice thing to have said would have been:

“Of course, old man, I’ll do all I can to keep it dark!” Terence was the M.O. — the man who had chucked his cap at the Hun orderly.

McKechnie said:

“That’s the damnable thing! Terence is ratty with him. He won’t take a pill!”

Tietjens said:

“What’s that? What’s that?”

McKechnie wavered; his desire for comfort became overpowering.

He said:

“Look here! Do the decent thing! You know how poor Bill has worked for us! Get Terence not to report him to Brigade!”

This was wearisome, but it had to be faced.

A very minute subaltern — Aranjuez — in a perfectly impossible tin hat peered round the side of the bank. Tietjens sent him away for a moment…. These tin hats were probably all right, but they were the curse of the army. They bred distrust! How could you trust a man whose incapable hat tumbled forward on his nose? Or another, with his hat on the back of his head, giving him the air of a ruined gambler? Or a fellow who had put on a soap-dish, to amuse the children — not a serious proceeding…. The Germans’ things were better — coming down over the nape of the neck and rising over the brows. When you saw a Hun sideways he looked something: a serious proposition. Full of ferocity. A Hun up against a Tommie looked like a Holbein lansknecht fighting a music-hall turn. It made you feel that you were indeed a rag-time army. Rubbed it in!

McKechnie was reporting that the C.O. had refused to take a pill ordered him by the M.O. Unfortunately the M.O. was ratty that morning — too much hooch overnight! So he said he should report the C.O. to Brigade. Not as being unfit for further service, for he wasn’t. But for refusing to take the pill. It was damnable. Because if Bill wouldn’t take a pill he wouldn’t…. The M.O. said that if he took a pill, and stayed in bed that day — without hooch of course! — he would be perfectly fit on the morrow. He had been like that often enough before. The C.O. had always been given the dose before as a drench. He swore he would not take it as a ball. Sheer contrariety!

Tietjens was accustomed to think of the C.O. as a lad — a good lad, but young. They were, all the same, much of an age, and, for the matter of that, because of his deeply-lined forehead the Colonel looked the older often enough. But when he was fit he was fine. He had a hooked nose, a forcible, grey moustache, like two badger-haired paintbrushes joined beneath the nose, pink skin as polished as the surface of a billiard ball, a noticeably narrow but high forehead, an extremely piercing glance from rather colourless eyes; his hair was black and most polished in slight waves. He was a soldier.

He was, that is to say, the ranker. Of soldiering in the English sense — the real soldiering of peace-time, parades, social events, spit and polish, hard-worked summers, leisurely winters, India, the Bahamas, Cairo seasons, and the rest he only knew the outside, having looked at it from the barrack windows, the parade ground and, luckily for him, from his Colonel’s house. He had been a most admirable batman to that Colonel, had — in Simla — married the Colonel’s memsahib’s lady’s maid, had been promoted to the orderly-room, to the corporals’ and sergeants’ messes, had become a Musketry-colour sergeant and, two months before the war had been given a commission. He