endless insults to herself out of her almost too handsome colonel’s barbaric French. It was an idyll, but it drove the colonel frantic. At such times Levin would consult Tietjens, who passed for a man of brains and a French scholar as to really nicely turned compliments in a difficult language…. And as to how you explained that it was necessary for a G.S.O. II, or whatever the colonel was, to be seen quite frequently in the company of very handsome V.A.D.s and female organisers of all arms… It was the sort of silliness as to which no gentleman ought to be consulted…. And here was Levin with the familiar feminine-agonised wrinkle on his bronzed-alabaster brow…. Like a beastly soldier-man out of a revue. Why didn’t the ass burst into gesture and a throaty tenor….
Sergeant-Major Cowley naturally saved the situation. Just as Tietjens was as near saying Go to
“The captain might as well take a spell as not…. We’re through with all the men except the Canadian Railway batch, and they can’t be issued with blankets not for half an hour… not for three-quarters. If then! It depends if our runner can find where Quarter’s lance-corporal is having his supper, to issue them….” The sergeant-major had inserted that last speech deftly. The Staff officer, with a vague reminiscence of his regimental days, exclaimed:
“Damn it!… I wonder you don’t break into the depot blanket store and take what you want….”
The sergeant-major, becoming Simon Pure, exclaimed:
“Oh, no, sir, we could never do that, sir….”
“But the confounded men are urgently needed in the line,” Colonel Levin said. “Damn it, it’s touch and go! We’re rushing…” He appreciated the fact again that he was on the gawdy Staff, and that the sergeant-major and Tietjens, playing like left backs into each other’s hands, had trickily let him in.
“We can only pray, sir,” the sergeant-major said, “that these ’ere bloomin’ ’Uns has got quartermasters and depots and issuing departments, same as ourselves.” He lowered his voice into a husky whisper. “Besides, sir, there’s a rumour… round the telephone in depot orderly room… that there’s a W.O. order at ’Edquarters… countermanding this and other drafts….”
Colonel Levin said: “Oh, my God!” and consternation rushed upon both him and Tietjens. The frozen ditches, in the night, out there; the agonized waiting for men; the weight upon the mind like a weight upon the brows; the imminent sense of approaching unthinkableness on the right or the left, according as you looked up or down the trench; the solid protecting earth of the parapet then turns into pierced mist… and no reliefs coming from here…. The men up there thinking naively that they were coming, and they not coming. Why not? Good God, why not? Mackenzie said:
“Poor — old Bird…. His crowd had been in eleven weeks last Wednesday…. About all they could stick….”
“They’ll have to stick a damn lot more,” Colonel Levin said. “I’d like to get at some of the brutes….” It was at that date the settled conviction of His Majesty’s Expeditionary Force that the army in the field was the tool of politicians and civilians. In moments of routine that cloud dissipated itself lightly; when news of ill omen arrived it settled down again heavily like a cloud of black gas. You hung your head impotently….
“So that,” the sergeant-major said cheerfully, “the captain could very well spare half an hour to get his dinner. Or for anything else….” Apart from the domestic desire that Tietjens’ digestion should not suffer from irregular meals he had the professional conviction that for his captain to be in intimate private converse with a member of the gawdy Staff was good for the unit…. “I suppose, sir,” he added valedictorily to Tietjens, “I’d better arrange to put this draft, and the nine hundred men that came in this afternoon to replace them, twenty in a tent…. It’s lucky we didn’t strike them….”
Tietjens and the colonel began to push men out of their way, going towards the door. The Inniskilling- Canadian, a small open brown book, extended deprecatingly stood, modestly obtrusive, just beside the door-post. Catching avidly at Tietjens’ “Eh?” he said:
“You’d got the names of the girls wrong in your copy, sir. It was Gwen Lewis I had a child by in Aberystwyth that I wanted to have the lease of the cottage and the ten bob a week. Mrs. Hosier that I lived with in Berwick St. James, she was only to have five guineas for a soovneer…. I’ve took the liberty of changing the names back again….”
Tietjens grabbed the book from him, and bending down at the sergeant-major’s table scrawled his signature on the bluish page. He thrust the book back at the man and said:
“There… fall out.” The man’s face shone. He exclaimed:
“Thank you, sir. Thank you kindly, captain…. I wanted to get off and go to confession. I did bad….” The McGill graduate with his arrogant black moustache put himself in the way as Tietjens struggled into his British warm.
“You won’t forget, sir…” he began.
Tietjens said:
“Damn you, I’ve told you I won’t forget. I never forget. You instructed the ignorant Jap in Asaki, but the educational authority is in Tokyo. And your flagitious mineral-water company had their headquarters at the Tan Sen spring near Kobe…. Is that right? Well, I’ll do my best for you.”
They walked in silence through the groups of men that hung round the orderly room door and gleamed in the moonlight. In the broad country street of the main line of the camp Colonel Levin began to mutter between his teeth:
“You take enough trouble with your beastly crowd… a whole lot of trouble…. Yet…”
“Well, what’s the matter with us?” Tietjens said. “We get our drafts ready in thirty-six hours less than any other unit in this command.”
“I know you do,” the other conceded. “It’s only all these mysterious rows. Now…”
Tietjens said quickly:
“Do you mind my asking: Are we still on parade? Is this a strafe from General Campion as to the way I command my unit?”
The other conceded quite as quickly and much more worriedly:
“God forbid.” He added more quickly still: “Old bean!” and prepared to tuck his wrist under Tietjens’ elbow. Tietjens, however, continued to face the fellow. He was really in a temper.
“Then tell me,” he said, “how the deuce you can manage to do without an overcoat in this weather?” If only he could get the chap off the topics of his mysterious rows they might drift to the matter that had brought him up there on that bitter night when he should be sitting over a good wood fire philandering with Mile Nanette de Bailly. He sank his neck deeper into the sheepskin collar of his British warm. The other, slim, was with all his badges, ribands, and mail, shining darkly in a cold that set all Tietjens’ teeth chattering like porcelain. Levin became momentarily animated:
“You should do as I do…. Regular hours… lots of exercise… horse exercise…. I do P.T. every morning at the open window of my room… hardening….”
“It must be very gratifying for the ladies in the rooms facing yours,” Tietjens said grimly. “Is that what’s the matter with Mlle Nanette, now?… I haven’t got time for proper exercise….”
“Good gracious, no,” the colonel said. He now tucked his hand firmly under Tietjens’ arm and began to work him towards the left hand of the road, in the direction leading out of the camp. Tietjens worked their steps as firmly towards the right and they leant one against the other. “In fact, old bean,” the colonel said, “Campy is working so hard to get the command of a fighting army — though he’s indispensable here — that we might pack up bag and baggage any day…. That is what has made Nanette see reason….”
“Then what am I doing in this show?” Tietjens asked. But Colonel Levin continued blissfully:
“In fact I’ve got her almost practically for certain to promise that next week… or the week after next at latest… she’ll… damn it, she’ll name the happy day.”
Tietjens said:
“Good hunting!… How splendidly Victorian!”
“That’s, damn it,” the colonel exclaimed manfully, “what I say myself…. Victorian is what it is…. All these marriage settlements…. And what is it…
“At least,” he wavered, “that was what it was at lunch-time. Since then… something happened….”
“You’ve not been caught in bed with a V.A.D.?” Tietjens asked.
