He said:
“Move a little out of it, cahptn.” He had a rag in his black hands. Tietjens moved out of the blood that had run in a thin stream under the table. The man was on his knees, his hands rubbing Tietjens’ boot welts heavily, with the rags. Tietjens placed his hands in the innocent water and watched light purple-scarlet mist diffuse itself over the pale half-moon. The man below him breathed heavily, sniffing. Tietjens said:
“Thomas, O Nine Morgan was your mate?”
The man’s face, wrinkled, dark and ape-like, looked up.
“He was a good pal, pore old —,” he said. “You would not like, surely to goodness, to go to mess with your shoes all bloody.”
“If I had given him leave,” Tietjens said, “he would not be dead now.”
“No, surely not,” One Seven Thomas answered. “But it is all one. Evans of Castell Goch would surely to goodness have killed him.”
“So you knew, too, about his wife!” Tietjens said.
“We thocht it wass that,” One Seven Thomas answered, “or you would have given him leave, cahptn. You are a good cahptn.”
A sudden sense of the publicity that that life was came over Tietjens.
“You knew that,” he said. “I wonder what the hell you fellows don’t know and all!” he thought. “If anything went wrong with one it would be all over the command in two days. Thank God, Sylvia can’t get here!”
The man had risen to his feet. He fetched a towel of the sergeant-major’s, very white with a red border.
“We know,” he said, “that your honour is a very goot cahptn. And Captain McKechnie is a
Tietjens said:
“That’ll do. Tell the sergeant-major to give you a pass to go with your mate to the hospital. Get someone to wash this floor.”
Two men were carrying the remains of O Nine Morgan, the trunk wrapped in a ground sheet They carried him in a bandy chair out of the hut. His arms over his shoulders waved a jocular farewell. There would be an ambulance stretcher on bicycle wheels outside.
II
THE “ALL CLEAR” went at once after that. Its suddenness was something surprising, the mournful-cheerful, long notes dying regretfully on a night that had only just gone quiet after the perfectly astonishing row. The moon had taken it into its head to rise; begumboiled, jocular, and grotesque, it came from behind the shoulder of one of the hut-covered hills and sent down the lines of Tietjens’ huts, long, sentimental rays that converted the place into a slumbering, pastoral settlement. There was no sound that did not contribute to the silence, little dim lights shone through the celluloid casements. Of Sergeant-Major Cowley, his numerals gilded by the moon in the lines of A Company, Tietjens, who was easing his lungs of coke vapours for a-minute, asked in a voice that hushed itself in tribute to the moonlight and the now keen frost:
“Where the deuce is the draft?”
The sergeant-major looked poetically down a ribbon of whitewashed stones that descended the black downside. Over the next shoulder of hill was the blur of a hidden conflagration.
“There’s a Hun plane burning down there. In Twenty-Seven’s parade ground. The draft’s round that, sir,” he said.
Tietjens said:
“Good God!” in a voice of caustic tolerance. He added, “I did think we had drilled some discipline into these blighters in the seven weeks we have had them…. You remember the first time when we had them on parade and that acting lance-corporal left the ranks to heave a rock at a sea-gull…. And called you ‘O1’ Hunkey!… Conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline? Where’s that Canadian sergeant-major? Where’s the officer in charge of the draft?”
Sergeant-Major Cowley said:
“Sergeant-Major Ledoux said it was like a cattle-stampede on the… some river where they come from. You
“To-night!” Tietjens exclaimed. “Next Christmas!”
The sergeant-major said:
“Poor boys!” and continued to gaze into the distance. “I heard another good one, sir,” he said. “The answer to the one about the King saluting a private soldier and he not taking any notice is: when he’s dead…. But if you marched a company into a field through a gateway and you wanted to get it out again but you did not know any command in the drill book for change of direction, what would you do, sir?… You have to get that company out, but you must not use About Turn, or Right or Left Wheel…. There’s another one, too, about saluting…. The officer in charge of draft is Second-Lieutenant Hotchkiss…. But he’s an A.S.C. officer and turned of sixty. A farrier he is, sir, in civil life. An A.S.C. major was asking me, sir, very civil, if you could not detail someone else. He says he doubts if Second-Lieutenant Hitchcock… Hotchkiss could walk as far as the station, let alone march the men, him not knowing anything but cavalry words of command, if he knows them. He’s only been in the army a fortnight….”
Tietjens turned from the idyllic scene with the words:
“I suppose the Canadian sergeant-major and Lieutenant Hotchkiss are doing what they can to get their men to come back.”
He re-entered the hut.
Captain Mackenzie in the light of a fantastically brilliant hurricane lamp appeared to be bathing dejectedly in a surf of coiling papers spread on the table before him.
“There’s all this bumph,” he said, “just come from all the headquarters in the bally world.”
Tietjens said cheerfully:
“What’s it all about?” There were, the other answered, Garrison Headquarter orders, Divisional orders, Lines of Communication orders, half a dozen A.F.B.W. two four two’s. A terrific strafe from First Army forwarded from Garrison H.Q. about the draft’s not having reach Hazebrouck the day before yesterday. Tietjens said:
“Answer them politely to the effect that we had orders not to send off the draft without its complement of four hundred Canadian Railway Service men — the fellows in furred hoods. They only reached us from Etaples at five this afternoon without blanket or ring papers. Or any other papers for the matter of that.”
Mackenzie was studying with increased gloom a small buff memorandum slip:
“This appears to be meant for you privately,” he said. “I can’t make head or tail of it otherwise. It isn’t
He tossed the buff slip across the table.
Tietjens sank down bulkily on to his bully-beef case. He read on the buff at first the initials of the signature, “E.C. Genl.,” and then: “For God’s sake keep your wife off me. I
Tietjens groaned and sank more deeply on to his beef case. It was as if an unseen and unsuspected wild beast had jumped on his neck from an overhanging branch. The sergeant-major at his side said in his most admirable butler manner:
“Colour-Sergeant Morgan and Lance-Corporal Trench are obliging us by coming from depot orderly room to help with the draft’s papers. Why don’t you and the other officer go and get a bit of dinner, sir? The colonel and the padre have only just come in to mess, and I’ve warned the mess orderlies to keep your food ’ot…. Both good men with papers, Morgan and Trench. We can send the soldiers’ small books to you at table to sign….”
His feminine solicitude enraged and overwhelmed Tietjens with blackness. He told the sergeant-major that he was to go to hell, for he himself was not going to leave that hut till the draft was moved off. Captain Mackenzie could do as he pleased. The sergeant-major told Captain Mackenzie that Captain Tietjens took as much trouble with his rag-time detachments as if he had been the Coldstream adjutant at Chelsea sending off a draft of Guards. Captain Mackenzie said that that was why they damn well got their details off four days faster than any other I.B.D. in that camp. He
