Yes, it was friendly, the trench face. And singularly unbellicose. When you looked at it you hardly believed that it was part of this affair. … Friendly! You felt at peace looking at its flints and pebbles. Like being in the butts up above Groby on the moor, waiting for the grouse to come over. The soil was not of course like those butts which were built of turfs. …
He asked, not so much for information, as to get the note of this fellow:
Why? What difference did it make whether there were senior officers or not? Anyone above eighteen would do, wouldn’t they? They would keep on going on. It was a young man’s war!
“It hasn’t got that comfortable feeling, sir!” the Sergeant expressed it. The young officers were very well for keeping you going through wire and barrages. But when you looked at them you didn’t feel they knew so well what you were doing it for, if he might put it that way.
Tietjens said:
“Why? What are you doing it for?”
It wanted thirty-two minutes to the crucial moment. He said:
“Where are those bloody bombs?”
A trench cut in gravel wasn’t, for all its friendly reddish-orange coloration, the ideal trench. Particularly against rifle-fire. There were rifts, presumably alongside flakes of flint that a rifle-bullet would get along. Still, the chances against a hit by a rifle-bullet were eighty thousand to one in a deep gravel trench like that. And he had had poor Jimmy Johns killed beside him by a bullet like that. So that gave him, say, 140,000 chances to one against. He wished his mind would not go on and on figuring. It did it whilst you weren’t looking. As a well-trained dog will do when you tell it to stay in one part of a room and it prefers another. It prefers to do figuring. Creeps from the rug by the door to the hearthrug, its eyes on your unconscious face. … That was what your mind was like. Like a dog!
The Sergeant said:
“They do say the first consignment of bombs was it not smashed. Hin a gully; well behind the line. Another was coming down.”
“Then you’d better whistle,” Tietjens said, “Whistle for all you’re worth.”
The Sergeant said:
“Fer a wind, sir? Keep the ’Uns’ beck, sir?”
Looking up at the whitewash cockscomb Tietjens lectured the sergeant on gas. He always had said, and he said now, that the Germans had ruined themselves with their gas. …
He went on lecturing that Sergeant on gas. …
He considered his mind: it was alarming him. All through the war he had had one dread—that a wound, the physical shock of a wound, would cause his mind to fail. He was going to be hit behind the collarbone. He could feel the spot; not itching but the blood pulsing just a little warmer. Just as you can become conscious of the end of your nose if you think about it!
The Sergeant said that ’e wished ’e could feel the Germans ’ad ruined theirselves: they seemed to be drivin’ us into the Channel. Tietjens gave his reasons. They were driving us. But not fast enough. Not fast enough. It was a race between our disappearance and their endurance. They had been hung up yesterday by the wind: they were as like as not going to be held up today. … They were not going fast enough. They could not keep it up.
The Sergeant said ’e wished, sir, you’d tell the men that. That was what the men ought to be told: not the stuff that was hin Divisional Comic Cuts and the ’ome pipers. …
A key-bugle of singular sweetness—at least Tietjens supposed it to be a key-bugle, for he knew the identities of practically no wind-instruments; it was certainly not a cavalry bugle, for there were no cavalry and even no Army Service Corps at all near—a bugle, then, of astounding sweetness made some remarks to the cool, wet dawn. It induced an astonishingly melting mood. He remarked:
“Do you mean to say, then, that your men, Sergeant, are really damned heroes? I suppose they are!”
He said “your men,” instead of “our” or even “the” men, because he had been till the day before yesterday merely the second-in-command—and was likely to be tomorrow again merely the perfectly inactive second-in-command of what was called a ragtime collection that was astonishingly a clique and mutely combined to regard him as an outsider. So he really regarded himself as rather a spectator; as if a railway passenger had taken charge of a locomotive whilst the engine-driver had gone to have a drink.
The Sergeant flushed with pleasure. “Hit was,” he said, “good to ’ave prise from Regular officers.” Tietjens said that he was not a Regular. The Sergeant stammered:
“Hain’t you, sir, a Ranker. The men all thinks you are a promoted Ranker.”
No, Tietjens said, he was not a promoted Ranker. He added, after consideration, that he was a militiaman. The men would have, by the will of chance, to put up with his leadership for at least that day. They might as well feel as good about it as they could—as settled in their stomachs! It certainly made a difference that the men should feel assured about their officers: what exact difference there was no knowing. This crowd was not going to get any satisfaction out of being led by a “gentleman.” They did not know what a gentleman was: a quite un-feudal crowd. Mostly Derby men. Small drapers, rate-collectors’ clerks; gas-inspectors. There were even three music-hall performers, two scene shifters and several milkmen.
It was another tradition that was gone. Still, they desired the companionship of elder, heavier men who had certain knowledges. A militiaman probably filled the bill! Well, he was that, officially!
He glanced aside and upwards at the whitewash cockscomb. He regarded it
