Tietjens said:
“Good hunting! … How splendidly Victorian!”
“That’s, damn it,” the colonel exclaimed manfully, “what I say myself … Victorian is what it is … All these marriage settlements … And what is it … Droits du Seigneur? … And notaires … And the Count, having his say … And the Marchioness … And two old grand aunts … But … Hoopla! …” He executed with his gloved right thumb in the moonlight a rapid pirouette … “Next week … or at least the week after …” His voice suddenly dropped.
“At least,” he wavered, “that was what it was at lunchtime … Since then … something happened …”
“You’ve not been caught in bed with a V.A.D.?” Tietjens asked.
The colonel mumbled:
“No … not in bed … Not with a V.A.D. … Oh, damn it, at the railway station … With … The general sent me down to meet her … and Nanny of course was seeing off her grandmother, the Duchesse … The giddy cut she handed me out …”
Tietjens became coldly furious.
“Then it was over one of your beastly imbecile rows with Miss de Bailly that you got me out here,” he exclaimed. “Do you mind going down with me towards the I.B.D. headquarters? Your final orders may have come in there. The sappers won’t let me have a telephone, so I have to look in there the last thing …” He felt a yearning towards rooms in huts, warmed by coke-stoves and electrically lit, with acting lance-corporals bending over A.F.B.s on a background of deal pigeonholes filled with returns on buff and blue paper. You got quiet and engrossment there. It was a queer thing: the only place where he, Christopher Tietjens of Groby, could be absently satisfied was in some orderly room or other. The only place in the world … And why? It was a queer thing …
But not queer, really. It was a matter of inevitable selection if you came to think it out. An acting orderly-room lance-corporal was selected for his penmanship, his power of elementary figuring, his trustworthiness amongst innumerable figures and messages, his dependability. For this he differed a hair’s breadth in rank from the rank and file. A hairbreadth that was to him the difference between life and death. For, if he proved not to be dependable, back he went—returned to duty! As long as he was dependable he slept under a table in a warm room, his toilette arrangements and washing in a bully-beef case near his head, a billy full of tea always stewing for him on an always burning stove … A paradise! … No! Not a paradise: the paradise of the Other Ranks! … He might be awakened at one in the morning. Miles away the enemy might be beginning a strafe … He would roll out from among the blankets under the table amongst the legs of hurrying N.C.O.s and officers, the telephone going like hell … He would have to manifold innumerable short orders on buff slips on a typewriter … A bore to be awakened at one in the morning, but not unexciting: the enemy putting up a tremendous barrage in front of the village of Dranoutre: the whole nineteenth division to be moved into support along the Bailleul-Nieppe road. In case …
Tietjens considered the sleeping army … That country village under the white moon, all of sackcloth sides, celluloid windows, forty men to a hut … That slumbering Arcadia was one of … how many? Thirty-seven thousand five hundred, say for a million and a half of men … But there were probably more than a million and a half in that base … Well, round the slumbering Arcadias were the fringes of virginly glimmering tents … Fourteen men to a tent … For a million … Seventy-one thousand four hundred and twenty-one tents round, say, one hundred and fifty I.B.D.s, C.B.D.s, R.E.B.D.s … Base depots for infantry, cavalry, sappers, gunners, airmen, anti-airmen, telephone-men, vets, chiropodists, Royal Army Service Corps men, Pigeon Service men, Sanitary Service men, Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps women, V.A.D. women—what in the world did V.A.D. stand for?—canteens, rest-tent attendants, barrack damage superintendents, parsons, priests, rabbis, Mormon bishops, Brahmins, Lamas, Imams, Fanti men, no doubt, for African troops. And all ready dependent on the acting orderly-room lance-corporals for their temporal and spiritual salvation … For, if by a slip of the pen a lance-corporal sent a Papist priest to an Ulster regiment, the Ulster men would lynch him, and all go to hell. Or, if by a slip of the tongue at the telephone, or a slip of the typewriter, he sent a division to Westoutre instead of to Dranoutre at one in the morning, the six or seven thousand poor devils in front of Dranoutre might all be massacred and nothing but His Majesty’s Navy could save us …
Yet, in the end, all this tangle was satisfactorily unravelled; the drafts moved off, unknotting themselves like snakes, coiling out of inextricable bunches, sliding vertebrately over the mud to dip into their bowls—the rabbis found Jews dying to whom to administer; the vets, spavined mules; the V.A.D.s, men without jaws and shoulders in C.C.S.s; the camp-cookers, frozen beef; the chiropodists, ingrowing toenails; the dentists, decayed molars; the naval howitzers, camouflaged emplacements in picturesquely wooded dingles … Somehow they got there—even to the pots of strawberry jam by the ten dozen!
For if the acting lance-corporal, whose life hung by a hair, made a slip of the pen over a dozen pots of jam, back he went, Returned to duty … back to the frozen rifle, the groundsheet on the liquid mud, the desperate suction on the ankle as the foot was advanced, the landscapes silhouetted with broken church towers, the continual drone of the planes, the mazes of duckboards in vast plains of slime, the unending Cockney humour, the great shells labelled “Love to Little Willie” … Back to the Angel with the Flaming Sword. The wrong side of him! … So, on the whole, things moved satisfactorily …
He was walking Colonel Levin
