It was remarkably quiet in that thick darkness. Down below, the picks continued their sinister confidences in each other’s ears. … It was really like that. Like children in the corner of a schoolroom whispering nasty comments about their masters, one to the other. … Girls, for choice. … Chop, chop, chop, a pick whispered. Chop? another asked in an undertone. The first said Chopchopchop. Then Chup. … And a silence of irregular duration. … Like what happens when you listen to typewriting and the young woman has to stop to put in another page. …
Nice young women with typewriters in Whitehall had very likely taken from dictation, on hot-pressed, square sheets with embossed royal arms, the plan for that very strafe. … Because, obviously it might have been dictated from Whitehall almost as directly as from Unter den Linden. We might have been making a demonstration in force on the Dwolologda in order to get the Huns to make a counter-demonstration in Flanders. Hoping poor old Puffles would get it in the neck. For they were trying still to smash poor old General Puffles and stop the single command. … They might very well be hoping that our losses through the counter-demonstration would be so heavy that the Country would cry out for the evacuation of the Western Front. … If they could get half-a-million of us killed perhaps the Country might. … They, no doubt, thought it worth trying. But it was wearisome: those fellows in Whitehall never learned. Any more than Brother Boshe. …
Nice to be in poor old Puffles’ army. Nice but wearisome. … Nice girls with typewriters in well-ventilated offices. Did they still put paper cuffs on to keep their sleeves from ink? He would ask Valen … Valen. … It was warm and still. … On such a night. …
“Bringt dem Hauptmann eine Kerze!” A voice from under his camp bed! He imagined that the Hauptmann spook must be myopic: short-sightedly examining a tamping fuse. … If they used tamping fuses or if that was what they called them in the army!
He could not see the face or the spectacles of the Hauptmann any more than he could see the faces of his men. Not through his flea-bag and shins! They were packed in the tunnel; whitish-grey, tubular agglomerations. … Large! Like the maggots that are eaten by Australian natives. … Fear possessed him!
He sat up in his flea-bag, dripping with icy sweat.
“By Jove, I’m for it!” he said. He imagined that his brain was going: he was mad and seeing himself go mad. He cast about in his mind for some subject about which to think so that he could prove to himself that he had not gone mad.
II
The key-bugle remarked with singular distinctness to the dawn:
A sudden waft of pleasure at the seventeenth century air that the tones gave to the landscape went all over Tietjens. … Herrick and Purcell! … Or it was perhaps a modern imitation. Good enough. He asked:
“What the devil’s that row, Sergeant?”
The Sergeant disappeared behind the muddied sacking curtain. There was a guardroom in there. The key-bugle said:
It might be two hundred yards off along the trenches. Astonishing pleasure came to him from that seventeenth century air and the remembrance of those exact, quiet words. … Or perhaps he had not got them right. Nevertheless, they were exact and quiet. As efficient working beneath the soul as the picks of miners in the dark.
The Sergeant returned with the obvious information that it was 09 Griffiths practising on the cornet. Captain Mckechnie ’ad promised to ’ear ’im after breakfast ’n’ recommend ’im to the Divisional Follies to play at the concert tonight, if ’e likes ’im.
Tietjens said:
“Well, I hope Captain Mckechnie likes him!”
He hoped Mckechnie, with his mad eyes and his pestilential accent, would like that fellow. That fellow spread seventeenth century atmosphere across the landscape over which the sun’s rays were beginning to flood a yellow wash. Then, might the seventeenth century save the fellow’s life, for his good taste! For his life would probably be saved. He, Tietjens, would give him a pass back to Division to get ready for the concert. So he would be out of the strafe. … Probably none of them would be alive after the strafe that Brigade reported to be coming in. … Twenty-seven minutes, by now! Three hundred and twenty-eight fighting men against. … Say a Division. Any preposterous number. … Well, the seventeenth century might as well save one man!
What had become of the seventeenth century? And Herbert and Donne and Crashaw and Vaughan, the silurist? … Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky! … By Jove, it was that! … Old Campion, flashing like a popinjay in the scarlet and gilt of the Major-General, had quoted that in the base camp, years ago. Or was it months? Or wasn’t it: “But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariots hurrying near,” that he had quoted?
Anyhow, not bad for an old General!
He wondered what had become of that elegant collection of light yellow, scarlet and gilt. … Somehow he always thought of Campion as in light yellow, rather than khaki, so much did he radiate light. … Campion and his, Tietjen’s, wife, radiating light together—she in a golden gown!
Campion was about due in these latitudes. It was astonishing that he had not turned up before. But poor old Puffles with his abominably weakened Army had done too jolly well to be replaced. Even at the request of the Minister who hated him. Good for him!
It occurred to him that if he … call it “stopped one” that day, Campion
