July bur, God bless her.” The McGill graduate was beginning already to introduce a further complication into his story of complications with the Japanese Government. It appeared that in addition to his scholastic performances he had invested a little money in a mineral water spring near Kobe, the water, bottled, being exported to San Francisco. Apparently his company had been indulging in irregularities according to Japanese law, but a pure French Canadian, who had experienced some difficulties in obtaining his baptismal certificate from a mission somewhere in the direction of the Klondike, was allowed by Tietjens to interrupt the story of the graduate; and several men without complications, but anxious to get their papers signed so as to write last letters home before the draft moved, overflowed across Tietjens’s table.
The tobacco smoke from the pipes of the N.C.O.s at the other end of the room hung, opalescent, beneath the wire cages of the brilliant hurricane lamps hung over each table; buttons and minerals gleamed in the air that the universal khaki tinge of the limbs seemed to turn brown, as if into a gas of dust. Nasal voices, throat voices, drawling voices, melted into a rustle so that the occasional high, sing-song profanity of a Welsh N.C.O.: Why the
He had happened to glance at the medical history of a man beside him and noticed that he had been described as C1…. It was obviously a slip of the pen on the part of the Medical Board, or one of their orderlies. He had written C instead of A. The man was Pte. 197394 Thomas Johnson, a shining-faced lump of beef, an agricultural odd jobman from British Columbia where he had worked on the immense estates of Sylvia Tietjens’ portentous ducal second cousin Rugeley. It was a double annoyance. Tietjens had not wanted to be reminded of his wife’s second cousin, because he had not wanted to be reminded of his wife. He had determined to give his thoughts a field day on that subject when he got warm into his flea-bag in his hut that smelt of paraffin whilst the canvas walls crackled with frost and the moon shone…. He would think of Sylvia beneath the moon. He was determined not to now! But 197394 Pte. Johnson, Thomas, was otherwise a nuisance and Tietjens cursed himself for having glanced at the man’s medical history. If this preposterous yokel was C3 he could not go on a draft… C1 rather! It was all the same. That would mean finding another man to make up the strength and that would drive Sergeant-Major Cowley out of his mind. He looked up towards the ingenuous, protruding, shining, liquid, bottle-blue eyes of Thomas Johnson…. The fellow had never had an illness. He could not have had an illness — except from a surfeit of cold, fat, boiled pork — and for that you would give him a horse’s blue ball and drench which, ten to one, would not remove the cause of the belly-ache….
His eyes met the non-committal glance of a dark, gentlemanly thin fellow with a strikingly scarlet hat-band, a lot of gilt about his khaki and little strips of steel chain-armour on his shoulders…. Levin… Colonel Levin, G.S.O. II, or something, attached to General Lord Edward Campion…. How the hell did fellows get into these intimacies of commanders of units and their men? Swimming in like fishes into the brown air of a tank and there at your elbow — spies!… The men had all been called to attention and stood like gasping codfish. The ever-watchful Sergeant-Major Cowley had drifted to his, Tietjens’, elbow. You protect your orfcers from the gawdy Staff as you protect your infant daughters in lambswool from draughts. The dark, bright, cheerful staffwallah said with a slight lisp:
“Busy, I see.” He might have been standing there for a century and have a century of the battalion headquarters’ time to waste like that. “What draft is this?”
Sergeant-Major Cowley, always ready in case his orfcer should not know the name of his unit or his own name, said:
“No. 16 I.B.D. Canadian First Division Casual Number Four Draft, sir.”
Colonel Levin let air lispingly out between his teeth.
“No. 16 Draft not off yet… Dear, dear! Dear, dear!… We shall be strafed to hell by First Army….” He used the word hell as if he had first wrapped it in eau-de-cologned cotton-wadding.
Tietjens, on his feet, knew this fellow very well: a fellow who had been a very bad Society water-colour painter of good family on the mother’s side, hence the cavalry gadgets on his shoulders. Would it then be good… say good taste to explode? He let the sergeant-major do it. Sergeant-Major Cowley was of the type of N.C.O. who carried weight because he knew ten times as much about his job as any Staff officer. The sergeant-major explained that it had been impossible to get off the draft earlier. The colonel said:
“But surely, sergeant-majah…”
The sergeant-major, now a deferential shopwalker in a lady’s store, pointed out that they had had urgent instructions not to send up the draft without the four hundred Canadian Railway Service men who were to come from Etaples. These men had only arrived that evening at 5.30… at the railway station. Marching them up had taken three-quarters of an hour. The colonel said:
“But surely, sergeant-majah…”
Old Cowley might as well have said “madam” as “sir” to the red hat-band… The four hundred had come with only what they stood up in. The unit had had to wangle everything: boots, blankets, tooth-brushes, braces, rifles, iron-rations, identity discs out of the depot store. And it was now only twenty-one twenty…. Cowley permitted his commanding officer at this point to say:
“You must understand that we work in circumstances of extreme difficulty, sir….”
The graceful colonel was lost in an absent contemplation of his perfectly elegant knees.
“I know, of course….” he lisped. “Very difficult…” He brightened up to add: “But you must admit you’re unfortunate…. You must admit that….” The weight settled, however, again on his mind.
Tietjens said:
“Not, I suppose, sir, any more unfortunate than any other unit working under a dual control for supplies….”
The colonel said:
“What’s that? Dual… Ah, I see you’re there, Mackenzie…. Feeling well… feeling fit, ch?”
The whole hut stood silent. His anger at the waste of time made Tietjens say:
“If you understand, sir, we are a unit whose principal purpose is drawing things to equip drafts with….” This fellow was delaying them atrociously. He was brushing his knees with a handkerchief! “I’ve had,” Tietjens said, “a man killed on my hands this afternoon because we have to draw tin-hats for my orderly room from Dublin on an A.F.B. Canadian from Aldershot…. Killed here…. We’ve only just mopped up the blood from where you’re standing.”
The cavalry colonel exclaimed:
“Oh, good gracious me!…” jumped a little and examined his beautiful, shining, knee-high aircraft boots. “Killed!… here!… But there’ll have to be a court of inquiry…. You certainly are
Tietjens said grimly:
“The man was from Pontardulais… not from any Dominion…. One of my orderly room…. We are forbidden on pain of court martial to let any but Dominion Expeditionary Force men go into the dug-outs…. My Canadians were all there…. It’s an A.C.I. local of the eleventh of November….”
The Staff officer said:
“It makes, of course, a difference!… Only a Glamorganshire? You say… Oh, well…. But these mysterious…”
He exclaimed, with the force of an explosion, and the relief:
“Look here… can you spare, possibly ten… twenty… ch… minutes?… It’s not exactly a service matter… so per…”
Tietjens exclaimed:
“You see how we’re situated, colonel…” and, like one sowing grass seed on a lawn, extended both hands over his papers and towards his men…. He was choking with rage. Colonel Levin had, under the chaperonage of an English dowager, who ran a chocolate store down on the quays in Rouen, a little French piece to whom he was quite seriously engaged. In the most naive manner. And the young woman, fantastically jealous, managed to make
