Well, the moment they had been cleared out at the Deputy Sub. R.T.O.’s tin shed by the railway bridge, the fellow Perowne with his well-padded presence and his dark babu-Hinduish aspect had bubbled out with questions as to the hereafter according to Tietjens and as to the nature of Death; the immediate process of dissolution: dying. … And in between Perowne’s questions Mckechnie, with his unspeakable intonation and his dark eyes as mad as a cat’s, had asked Tietjens how he dared get himself appointed second-in-command of his, Mckechnie’s, own battalion. … “You’re no soldier,” he would burst out, “Do you think you are a b⸺y infantryman? You’re a meal-sack, and what the devil’s to become of my battalion. … Mine. … My battalion! Our battalion of pals!”
That had been in, presumably, February, and, presumably, it was now April. The way the dawn came up looked like April. … What did it matter? … That damned truck had stayed under that bridge for two hours and a half … in the process of the eternal waiting that is War. You hung about and you hung about, and you kicked your heels and you kicked your heels: waiting for Mills bombs to come, or for jam, or for generals, or for the tanks, or transport, or the clearance of the road ahead. You waited in offices under the eyes of somnolent orderlies, under fire on the banks of canals, you waited in hotels, dugouts, tin sheds, ruined houses. There will be no man who survives of His Majesty’s Armed Forces that shall not remember those eternal hours when Time itself stayed still as the true image of bloody War! …
Well, in that case Providence seemed to have decreed a waiting just long enough to allow Tietjens to persuade the unhappy mortal called Perowne that death was not a very dreadful affair. … He had enough intellectual authority to persuade the fellow with his glued-down black hair that Death supplied His own anaesthetics. That was the argument. On the approach of Death all the faculties are so numbed that you feel neither pain nor apprehension. … He could still hear the heavy, authoritative words that, on that occasion, he had used.
The Providence of Perowne! For, when he was dug out after, next night having been buried in going up into the trenches, they said, he had a smile like a young baby’s on his face. He didn’t have long to wait and died with a smile on his face … nothing having so much become him during the life as … Well, a becoming smile! During life he had seemed a worried, fussing sort of chap.
Bully for Perowne. … But what about him, Tietjens? Was that the sort of thing that Providence ought to do to one? … That’s tempting God!
The Sergeant beside him said:
“Then a man could stand hup on an ill. … You really mean to say, sir, that you think a man will be able to stand up on a bleedin’ ill. …”
Presumably Tietjens had been putting heart into that acting temporary Sergeant-Major. He could not remember what he had been saying to the N.C.O. because his mind had been so deeply occupied with the image of Perowne. … He said:
“You’re a Lincolnshire man, aren’t you? You come from a Fen country. What do you want to stand up on a hill for?”
The man said:
“Ah, but you do, sir!”
He added:
“You want to stand up! Take a look around. …” He struggled for expression: “Like as if you wanted to breathe deep after bein’ in a stoopin’ posture for a long time!”
Tietjens said:
“Well, you can do that here. With discretion. I did it just now. …”
The man said:
“You, sir. … You’re a law hunto yourself!”
It was the most considerable shock that Tietjens received in the course of his military career. And the most considerable reward.
There were all these inscrutable beings: the Other Ranks, a brownish mass, spreading underground, like clay strata in the gravel, beneath all this waving country that the sun would soon be warming: they were in holes, in tunnels, behind sackcloth curtains, carrying on … carrying on some sort of life: conversing, breathing, desiring. But completely mysterious, in the mass. Now and then you got a glimpse of a passionate desire: “A man could stand up on a bleedin’ ill!”; now and then you got—though you knew that they watched you eternally and knew the minutest gestures of your sleep—you got some sort of indication as to how they regarded you: “You are a law unto yourself!”
That must be hero-worship: an acting temporary regimental Sergeant-Major, without any real knowledge of his job, extemporising, not so long ago a carrier in an eastern county of remarkable flatness does not tell his Acting Commanding Officer that he is a law unto himself without meaning it to be a flattering testimony: a certificate, as far as it went, of trustworthiness. …
They were now crawling out into the light of day; … from behind the sacking: six files that he had last night transferred from C to D Coy., D having been reduced to forty-three rank and file. They shuffled out, an extraordinary Falstaff’s battalion of muddy odd-come shorts; fell into some sort of alignment in the trench; shuffled an inch further this way, an inch further that; pushed up their chin-straps and pulled them down; humped up their packs by hunching their shoulders and jerking; adjusted their water bottles and fell into some sort of immobility, their rifles, more or less aligned, poked out before them. In that small company they were men of all sorts of sizes, of all sorts of disparities and grotesquenesses of physique. Two of them were music-hall comedians and the whole lot looked as if they made up a knockabout turn. … The Rag Time Army: at its vocation: living and breathing.
The Sergeant called them to attention and they wavered back and forward. The Sergeant said:
“The Commadin’ Officer’s lookin’ at you. Fix … B’ts!”
And, positively, a dwarf concealed under a pudding basin shuffled a foot-length and a half
