“Thomas, O Nine Morgan was your mate?”
The man’s face, wrinkled, dark and apelike, looked up. “He was a good pal, pore old ⸻,” he said. “You would not like, surely to goodness, to go to mess with your shoes all bloody.”
“If I had given him leave,” Tietjens said, “he would not be dead now.”
“No, surely not,” One Seven Thomas answered. “But it is all one. Evans of Castell Goch would surely to goodness have killed him.”
“So you knew, too, about his wife!” Tietjens said.
“We thocht it wass that,” One Seven Thomas answered, “or you would have given him leave, cahptn. You are a good cahptn.”
A sudden sense of the publicity that that life was came over Tietjens.
“You knew that,” he said. “I wonder what the hell you fellows don’t know and all!” he thought. “If anything went wrong with one it would be all over the command in two days. Thank God, Sylvia can’t get here!”
The man had risen to his feet. He fetched a towel of the sergeant-major’s, very white with a red border.
“We know,” he said, “that your honour is a very goot cahptn. And Captain McKechnie is a fery goot cahptn, and Captain Prentiss, and Le’tennat Jonce of Merthyr …”
Tietjens said:
“That’ll do. Tell the sergeant-major to give you a pass to go with your mate to the hospital. Get someone to wash this floor.”
Two men were carrying the remains of O Nine Morgan, the trunk wrapped in a ground sheet. They carried him in a bandy chair out of the hut. His arms over his shoulders waved a jocular farewell. There would be an ambulance stretcher on bicycle wheels outside.
II
The “All Clear” went at once after that. Its suddenness was something surprising, the mournful-cheerful, long notes dying regretfully on a night that had only just gone quiet after the perfectly astonishing row. The moon had taken it into its head to rise; begumboiled, jocular and grotesque, it came from behind the shoulder of one of the hut-covered hills and sent down the lines of Tietjens’ huts long, sentimental rays that converted the place into a slumbering, pastoral settlement. There was no sound that did not contribute to the silence, little dim lights shone through the celluloid casements. Of Sergeant-Major Cowley, his numerals gilded by the moon in the lines of A Company, Tietjens, who was easing his lungs of coke vapours for a minute, asked in a voice that hushed itself in tribute to the moonlight and the now keen frost:
“Where the deuce is the draft?”
The sergeant-major looked poetically down a ribbon of whitewashed stones that descended the black down-side. Over the next shoulder of hill was the blur of a hidden conflagration.
“There’s a Hun plane burning down there. In Twenty-Seven’s parade ground. The draft’s round that, sir,” he said. Tietjens said:
“Good God!” in a voice of caustic tolerance. He added, “I did think we had drilled some discipline into these blighters in the seven weeks we have had them … You remember the first time when we had them on parade and that acting lance-corporal left the ranks to heave a rock at a seagull … And called you Ol’ Hunkey! … Conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline? Where’s that Canadian sergeant-major? Where’s the officer in charge of the draft?”
Sergeant-Major Cowley said:
“Sergeant-Major Ledoux said it was like a cattle-stampede on the … some river where they come from. You couldn’t stop them, sir. It was their first German plane … And they going up the line tonight, sir.”
“Tonight!” Tietjens exclaimed. “Next Christmas!” The sergeant-major said:
“Poor boys!” and continued to gaze into the distance. “I heard another good one, sir,” he said. “The answer to the one about the King saluting a private soldier and he not taking any notice is: when he’s dead … But if you marched a company into a field through a gateway and you wanted to get it out again but you did not know any command in the drill book for change of direction, what would you do, sir? … You have to get that company out, but you must not use About Turn, or Right or Left Wheel … There’s another one, too, about saluting … The officer in charge of draft is Second-Lieutenant Hotchkiss … But he’s an A.S.C. officer and turned of sixty. A farrier he is, sir in civil life. An A.S.C. major was asking me, sir, very civil, if you could not detail someone else. He says he doubts if Second Lieutenant Hitchcock … Hotchkiss could walk as far as the station, let alone march the men, him not knowing anything but cavalry words of command, if he knows them. He’s only been in the army a fortnight …”
Tietjens turned from the idyllic scene with the words:
“I suppose the Canadian sergeant-major and Lieutenant Hotchkiss are doing what they can to get their men come back.”
He re-entered the hut.
Captain Mackenzie in the light of a fantastically brilliant hurricane lamp appeared to be bathing dejectedly in a surf of coiling papers spread on the table before him.
“There’s all this bumph,” he said, “just come from all the headquarters in the bally world.”
Tietjens said cheerfully:
“What’s it all about?” There were, the other answered, Garrison Headquarter orders, Divisional orders, Lines of Communication orders, half a dozen A.F.W.B. two four twos. A terrific strafe from First Army forwarded from Garrison H.Q. about the draft’s not having reached Hazebrouck the day before yesterday. Tietjens said:
“Answer them politely to the effect that we had orders not to send off the draft without its complement of four hundred Canadian Railway Service men—the fellows in furred hoods. They only reached us from Etaples at five this afternoon without blankets or ring papers. Or any other papers for the matter of that.”
Mackenzie was studying with increased gloom a small buff memorandum slip:
“This appears to be meant for
