O Nine Griffiths, the fellow with the cornet — three hundred and forty-three lonely souls against… say two Divisions! Against about eighteen thousand, very likely. And they were to stick it till they burst. Reinforced!
Reinforced. Good God!… Sixteen Worcesters!
What was at the bottom of it all?
Campion was going to command that Army. That meant that real reinforcements had been promised from the millions of men that filled the base camps. And it meant the Single Command! Campion would not have consented to take the command of that Army if he had not had those very definite promises.
But it would take time. Months! Anything like adequate reinforcements would take months.
And at that moment, in the most crucial point of the line of the Army, of the Expeditionary Force, the Allied Forces, the Empire, the Universe, the Solar System, they had three hundred and sixty-six men commanded by the last surviving Tory. To face wave on wave of the Enemy.
In one minute the German barrage was due.
Aranjuez said to him:
“You can write a sonnet in two and a half minutes, sir…. And your siphon works like anything in that damp trench…. It took my mother’s great-uncle, the canon of Oporto, fifteen weeks to finish his celebrated sonnet. I know because my mother told me…. But you oughtn’t to be here, sir.”
Aranjuez then was the nephew of the author of the
And, having got hold of a battalion with a stretch of damp trench, Tietjens had had the opportunity of trying a thing he had often thought of — of drying out vertically cut, damp soil by means of a siphon of soil-pipes put in, not horizontally, but vertically. Fortunately Hackett, the commander of B Company, that had the wet trench, had been an engineer in civil life. Aranjuez had been along, out of sheer hero-worship, to B trenches to see how his hero’s siphons had worked. He reported that they worked like a dream.
Little Aranjuez said:
“These trenches are like Pompeii, sir.”
Tietjens had never seen Pompeii, but he understood that Aranjuez was referring to the empty square-cut excavations in the earth. Particularly to their emptiness. And to the deadly stillness in the sunlight…. Admirable trenches. Made to hold an establishment of several thousand men. To bustle with Cockney life. Now dead empty. They passed three sentries in the pinkish gravel passage and two men, one with a pick, the other with a shovel. They were exactly squaring the juncture of the wall and the path, as they might have done in Pompeii. Or in Hyde Park! A perfect devil for tidiness, “A” Company Commander. But the men seemed to like it. They were sniggering, though they stopped that, of course, when Tietjens passed….
A nice, dark, tiny boy, Aranjuez; his adoration was charming. From the very first – and naturally, frightened out of his little life, he had clung to Tietjens as a child clings to an omnipotent father. Tietjens, all-wise, could direct the awful courses of war and decree safety for the frightened! Tietjens needed that sort of worship. The boy said it would be awful to have anything happen to your eyes. Your girl naturally would not look at you. Not more than three miles away, Nancy Truefitt was now. Unless they had evacuated her. Nancy was his flame. In a tea-shop at Baillevl.
A man was sitting outside the mouth of “A” dug-out, just after they passed the mouth of the communication trench…. Comforting that channel in the soil looked, running uphill. You could saunter away up there, out of all this…. But you couldn’t! There was no turning here either to the right or to the left!
The man writing in a copy-book had his tin hat right over his eyes. Engrossed, he sat on a gravel-step, his copy-book on his knees. His name was Slocombe and he was a dramatist. Like Shakespeare. He made fifty pounds a time writing music-hall sketches, for the outer halls. The outer halls were the cheap music-halls that go in a ring round the suburbs of London. Slocombe never missed a second, writing in his copy-books. If you fell the men out for a rest when marching, Slocombe would sit by the roadside — and out would come his copy-book and his pencil. His wife would type out what he sent home. And write him grumbling letters if the supply of copy failed. How was she to keep up the Sunday best of George and Flossie if he did not keep on writing one-act sketches? Tietjens had this information through censoring one of the man’s letters containing manuscript…. Slocombe was slovenly as a soldier, but he kept the other men in a good humour, his mind being a perfect repertoire of Cockney jests at the expense of Big and Little Willy and Brother Fritz. Slocombe wrote on, wetting his pencil with his tongue.
The sergeant in the mouth of “A” Company headquarters dug-out started to turn out some sort of a guard, but Tietjens stopped him. “A” Company ran itself on the lines of regulars in the depot. The O.C. had a conduct sheet-book as neat as a ledger! The old, bald, grim fellow. Tietjens asked the sergeant questions. Had they their Mills bombs all right? They weren’t short of rifles — first-class order?… But how could they be! Were there any sick?… Two!… Well, it was a healthy life!… Keep the men under cover until the Hun barrage began. It was due now.
It was due now. The second hand of Tietjens’ watch, like an animated pointer of hair, kicked a little on the stroke of the minute…. “Crumb!” said the punctual, distant sound.
Tietjens said to Aranjuez:
“It’s presumably coming now!” Aranjuez pulled at the chin strap of his tin hat.
Tietjen’s mouth filled itself with a dreadful salty flavour, the back of his tongue being dry. His chest and heart laboured heavily. Aranjuez said:
“If I stop one, sir, you’ll tell Nancy Truefitt that…”
Tietjens said:
“Little nippers like you don’t stop things…. Besides, feel the wind!”
They were at the highest point of the trenches that ran along a hillside. So they were exposed. The wind had undoubtedly freshened, coming down the hill. In front and behind, along the trench, they could see views. Land, some green; greyish trees.
Aranjuez said:
“You think the wind will stop them, sir,” appealingly.
Tietjens exclaimed with gruffness:
“Of course it will stop them. They won’t work without gas. Yet their men hate to have to face the gas- screens. It’s our great advantage. It saps their
Aranjuez said:
“I know you think their gas has ruined them, sir…. It was wicked of them to use it. You can’t do a wicked thing without suffering for it, can you, sir?”
It remained indecently quiet. Like Sunday in a village with the people in church. But it was not pleasurable.
Tietjens wondered how long physical irregularities would inconvenience his mind. You cannot think well with a parched back to your tongue. This was practically his first day in the open during a strafe. His first whole day for quite a time. Since Noircourt!… How long ago?… Two years?… Maybe!… Then he had nothing to go on to tell him how long he would be inconvenienced!
It remained indecently quiet! Running footsteps, at first on duckboards, then on the dry path of trench! They made Tietjens start violently, inside himself. The house must be on fire!
He said to Aranjuez:
“Some one is in a hurry!”
The lad’s teeth chattered. They must have made him feel bad, too, the footsteps. The knocking on the gate in
They began. It had come. Pam… Pamperi… Pam! Pam!… Pa… Pamperi… Pam! Pam!… Pampamperipampampam… Pam… They were the ones that sound like drums. They continued incessantly. Immensely big drums, the ones that go at it with real zest… You know how it is, looking at an opera orchestra when the fellow with the big drum-sticks really begins. Your own heart beats like hell. Tietjens’ heart did. The drummer appears to go mad.
Tietjens was never much good at identifying artillery by the sound. He would have said that these were anti- aircraft guns. And he remembered that, for some minutes, the drone of plane engines had pervaded the indecent silence…. But that drone was so normal it was part of the silence. Like your own thoughts. A filtered and engrossed sound, drifting down from overhead. More like fine dust than noise.
