Parade's End

place where they’ve got the broken bagatelle-table….”

The voice of Sergeant-Major Cowley exclaimed tranquilly from outside:

“Fall in now. Men who’ve got their ring papers and identity discs — three of them — on the left. Men who haven’t, on the right. Any man who has not been able to draw his blankets tell Colour-Sergeant Morgan. Don’t forget. You won’t get any, where you’re going. Any man who hasn’t made his will in his Soldier’s Small Book or elsewhere and wants to, to consult Captain Tietjens. Any man who wants to draw money, ask Captain Mackenzie. Any R.C. who wants to go to confession after he has got his papers signed can find the R.C. padre in the fourth hut from the left in the Main Line from here…. And damn kind it is of his reverence to put himself out for a set of damn blinking mustard-faced red herrings like you who can’t keep from running away to the first baby’s bonfire you sees. You’ll be running the other way before you’re a week older, though what good they as asks for you thinks you’ll be out there God knows. You look like a squad of infants’ companions from a Wesleyan Sunday school. That’s what you look like and, thank God, we’ve got a Navy.”

Under cover of his voice Tietjens had been writing:

“Now we affront the grinning chops of Death,” and saying to Lieutenant Hotchkiss: “In the I.B.D. ante-room you’ll find any number of dirty little squits of Glamorganshires drinking themselves blind over La Vie Parisienne…. Ask any one of them you like….” He wrote:

“And in between our carcass and the moil

Of marts and cities, toil and moil and coil…”

“You think this difficult!” he said to Mackenzie. “Why, you’ve written a whole undertaker’s mortuary ode in the rhymes alone,” and went on to Hotchkiss: “Ask anyone you like as long as he’s a P.B. officer…. Do you know what P.B. means? No, not Poor B—y, Permanent Base. Unfit… If he’d like to take a draft to Bailleul.”

The hut was filling with devious, slow, ungainly men in yellow-brown. Their feet shuffled desultorily; they lumped dull canvas bags along the floor and held in unliterary hands small open books that they dropped from time to time. From outside came a continuing, swelling and descending chant of voices; at times it would seem to be all one laugh, at times one menace, then the motives mingled fugally like the sea on a beach of large stones. It seemed to Tietjens suddenly extraordinary how shut in on oneself one was in this life…. He sat scribbling fast: “Old Spectre blows a cold protecting breath… Vanity of vanities, the preacher saith… No more parades, Not any more, no oil…” He was telling Hotchkiss, who was obviously shy of approaching the Glamorganshires in their ante-room… “Unam-bergris’d our limbs in the naked soil…” that he did not suppose any P.B. officer would object. They would go on a beanfeast up into the giddy line in a first-class carriage and get draft leave and command pay too, probably… “No funeral struments cast before our wraiths…” If any fellow does object, you just send his name to me and I will damn well shove it into extra orders….

The advanced wave of the brown tide of men was already at his feet. The extraordinary complications of even the simplest lives… A fellow was beside him… Private Logan, formerly, of all queer things for a Canadian private, a trooper of the Inniskillings; owner, of all queer things, of a milk-walk or a dairy farm, outside Sydney, which is in Australia. A man of sentimental complications, jauntiness as became an Inniskilling, a Cockney accent such as ornaments the inhabitants of Sydney, and a complete distrust of lawyers. On the other hand, with the completest trust in Tietjens. Over his shoulder — he was blond, upright, with his numerals shining like gold, looked a lumpish, cafe-au-lait, eagle-nosed countenance: a half-caste member of one of the Six Nations, who had been a doctor’s errand boy in Quebec…. He had his troubles, but was difficult to understand. Behind him, very black-avised with a high colour, truculent eyes, and an Irish accent, was a graduate of McGill University who had been a teacher of languages in Tokyo and had some sort of claim against the Japanese Government…. And faces, two and two, in a coil round the hut… like dust, like a cloud of dust that would approach and overwhelm a landscape; every one with preposterous troubles and anxieties, even if they did not overwhelm you personally with them… Brown dust….

He kept the Inniskilling waiting while he scribbled the rapid sestet to his sonnet which ought to make a little plainer what it all meant. Of course the general idea was that, when you got into the line or near it, there was no room for swank, typified by expensive funerals. As you might say: No flowers by compulsion… No more parades!… He had also to explain, while he did it, to the heroic veterinary sexagenarian that he need not feel shy about going into the Glamorganshire Mess on a man-catching expedition. The Glamorganshires were bound to lend him, Tietjens, P.B. officers if they had not got other jobs. Lieutenant Hotchkiss could speak to Colonel Johnson, whom he would find in the mess and quite good-natured over his dinner. A pleasant and sympathetic old gentleman who would appreciate Hotchkiss’s desire not to go superfluously into the line. Hotchkiss could offer to take a look at the colonel’s charger: a Hun horse, captured on the Marne and called Schomburg, that was off its feed…. He added: “But don’t do anything professional to Schomburg. I ride him myself!”

He threw his sonnet across to Mackenzie, who with a background of huddled khaki limbs and anxious faces was himself anxiously counting out French currency notes and dubious-looking tokens…. What the deuce did men want to draw money — sometimes quite large sums of money, the Canadians being paid in dollars converted into local coins — when in an hour or so they would be going up? But they always did and their accounts were always in an incredibly entangled state. Mackenzie might well look worried. As like as not he might find himself a fiver or more down at the end of the evening for unauthorised payments. If he had only his pay and an extravagant wife to keep, that might well put the wind up him. But that was his funeral. He told Lieutenant Hotchkiss to come and have a chat with him in his hut, the one next the mess. About horses. He knew a little about horse-illnesses himself. Only empirically, of course.

Mackenzie was looking at his watch.

“You took two minutes and eleven seconds,” he said. “I’ll take it for granted it’s a sonnet… I have not read it because I can’t turn it into Latin here… I haven’t got your knack of doing eleven things at once….”

A man with a worried face, encumbered by a bundle and a small book, was studying figures at Mackenzie’s elbow. He interrupted Mackenzie in a high American voice to say that he had never drawn fourteen dollars seventy- five cents in Thrasna Barracks, Aldershot.

Mackenzie said to Tietjens:

“You understand. I have not read your sonnet. I shall turn it into Latin in the mess, in the time stipulated. I don’t want you to think I’ve read it and taken time to think about it.”

The man beside him said:

“When I went to the Canadian Agent, Strand, London, his office was shut up…”

Mackenzie said with white fury:

“How much service have you got? Don’t you know better than to interrupt an officer when he is talking. You must settle your own figures with your own confounded Colonial paymaster. I’ve sixteen dollars thirty cents here for you. Will you take them or leave them?”

Tietjens said:

“I know that man’s case. Turn him over to me. It isn’t complicated. He’s got his paymaster’s cheque, but doesn’t know how to cash it and of course they won’t give him another….”

The man with slow, broad, brown features looked from one to the other officer’s face and back again with a keen black-eyed scrutiny as if he were looking into a wind and dazed by the light. He began a long story of how he owed Fat-Eared Bill fifty dollars lost at House. He was perhaps half-Chinese, half-Finn. He continued to talk, being in a state of great anxiety about his money. Tietjens addressed himself to the cases of the Sydney Inniskilling ex- trooper and the McGill graduate who had suffered at the hands of the Japanese Educational Ministry. It made altogether a complicated effect. “You would say,” Tietjens said to himself, “that, all together, it ought to be enough to take my mind up.”

The upright trooper had a very complicated sentimental history. It was difficult to advise him before his fellows. He, however, felt no diffidence. He discussed the points of the girl called Rosie whom he had followed from Sydney to British Columbia, of the girl called Gwen with whom he had taken up in Aberystwyth, of the woman called Mrs. Hosier with whom he had lived maritally, on a sleeping-out pass, at Berwick St. James, near Salisbury Plain. Through the continuing voice of the half-caste Chinaman he discussed them with a large tolerance, explaining that he wanted them all to have a bit, as a souvenir, if he happened to stop one out there. Tietjens handed him the draft of a will he had had written out for him, asked him to read it attentively and copy it with his own hand into his soldier’s small book. Then Tietjens would witness it for him. He said:

“Do you think this will make my old woman in Sydney part? I , guess it won’t. She’s a sticker, sir. A regular