Colony Levin let air lispingly out between his teeth.
“No. 16 Draft not off yet … Dear, dear! Dear, dear! … We shall be strafed to hell by First Army …” He used the word “hell” as if he had first wrapped it in eau-de-cologned cotton-wadding.
Tietjens, on his feet, knew this fellow very well: a fellow who had been a very bad Society watercolour painter of good family on the mother’s side: hence the cavalry gadgets on his shoulders. Would it then be good … say good taste to explode? He let the sergeant-major do it. Sergeant-Major Cowley was of the type of N.C.O. who carried weight because he knew ten times as much about his job as any Staff officer. The sergeant-major explained that it had been impossible to get off the draft earlier. The colonel said:
“But surely, sergeant-majah …”
The sergeant-major, now a deferential shopwalker in a lady’s store, pointed out that they had had urgent instructions not to send up the draft without the four hundred Canadian Railway Service men who were to come from Etaples. These men had only arrived that evening at 5:30 … at the railway station. Marching them up had taken three-quarters of an hour. The colonel said:
“But surely, sergeant-majah …”
Old Cowley might as well have said “madam” as “sir” to the red hatband … The four-hundred had come with only what they stood up in. The unit had had to wangle everything: boots, blankets, toothbrushes, braces, rifles, iron-rations, identity disks out of the depot store. And it was now only twenty-one twenty … Cowley permitted his commanding officer at this point to say:
“You must understand that we work in circumstances of extreme difficulty, sir …”
The graceful colonel was lost in an absent contemplation of his perfectly elegant knees.
“I know, of course …” he lisped. “Very difficult …” He brightened up to add: “But you must admit you’re unfortunate … You must admit that …” The weight settled, however, again on his mind.
Tietjens said:
“Not, I suppose, sir, any more unfortunate than any other unit working under a dual control for supplies …”
The colonel said:
“What’s that? Dual … Ah, I see you’re there, Mackenzie … Feeling well … feeling fit, eh?”
The whole hut stood silent. His anger at the waste of time made Tietjens say:
“If you understand, sir, we are a unit whose principal purpose is drawing things to equip drafts with …” This fellow was delaying them atrociously. He was brushing his knees with a handkerchief!
“I’ve had,” Tietjens said, “a man killed on my hands this afternoon because we have to draw tin-hats for my orderly room from Dublin on an A.F.B. Canadian from Aldershot … Killed here … We’ve only just mopped up the blood from where you’re standing …”
The cavalry colonel exclaimed:
“Oh, good gracious me! …” jumped a little and examined his beautiful shining knee-high aircraft boots. “Killed! … Here! … But there’ll have to be a court of inquiry … You certainly are most unfortunate, Captain Tietjens … Always these mysterious … Why wasn’t your man in a dugout? … Most unfortunate … We cannot have casualties among the Colonial troops … Troops from the Dominions, I mean …”
Tietjens said grimly:
“The man was from Pontardulias … not from any Dominion … One of my orderly room … We are forbidden on pain of court martial to let any but Dominion Expeditionary Force men go into the dugouts … My Canadians were all there … It’s an A.C.I. local of the eleventh of November …”
The Staff Offcer said:
“It makes of course, a difference! … Only a Glamorganshire? You say … Oh well … But these mysterious …”
He exclaimed, with the force of an explosion, and the relief:
“Look here … can you spare possible ten … twenty … eh … minutes? … It’s not exactly a service matter … so per …”
Tietjens exclaimed:
“You see how we’re situated, colonel …” and like one sowing grass seed on a lawn, extended both hands over his papers and towards his men … He was choking with rage. Colonel Levin had, under the chaperonage of an English dowager, who ran a chocolate store down on the quays in Rouen, a little French piece to whom he was quite seriously engaged. In the most naive manner. And the young woman, fantastically jealous, managed to make 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 is 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 organizers 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-agonized 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 hell as you can be to your remarkably senior officer on parade, the sergeant-major, now a very important solicitor’s most confidential clerk, began whispering to the colonel …
“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
