“I wonder you don’t apply to be returned to duty … to your battalion. I jolly well should if I were you …”
Tietjens said:
“Why? Because I’ve had a man killed on me? … There must have been a dozen killed tonight.”
“Oh, more, very likely,” the other answered. “It was one of our own planes that was brought down … But it isn’t that … Oh, damn it! … Would you mind walking the other way? … I’ve the greatest respect … oh, almost … for you personally … You’re a man of intellect …”
Tietjens was reflecting on a nice point of military etiquette.
This lisping, ineffectual fellow—he was a very careful Staff officer or Campion would not have had him about the place!—was given to moulding himself exactly on his general. Physically, in costume as far as possible, in voice—for his lisp was not his own so much as an adaptation of the general’s slight stutter—and above all in his uncompleted sentences and point of view …
Now, if he said:
“Look here, colonel …” or “Look here, Colonel Levin …” or “Look here, Stanley, my boy …” For the one thing an officer may not say to a superior whatever their intimacy was: “Look here, Levin …” If he said then:
“Look here, Stanley, you’re a silly ass. It’s all very well for Campion to say that I am unsound because I’ve some brains. He’s my godfather and has been saying it to me since I was twelve, and had more brain in my left heel than he had in the whole of his beautifully barbered skull … But when you say it you are just a parrot. You did not think that out for yourself. You do not even think it. You know I’m heavy, short in the wind, and self-assertive … but you know perfectly well that I’m as good on detail as yourself. And a damned sight more. You’ve never caught me tripping over a return. Your sergeant in charge of returns may have. But not you …”
If Tietjens should say that to this popinjay, would that be going farther than an officer in charge of detachment should go with a member of the Staff set above him, though not on parade and in a conversation of intimacy? Off parade and in intimate conversation all His Majesty’s poor ⸻ officers are equals … gentlemen having his Majesty’s commission: there can be no higher rank and all that Bilge! … For how off parade could this descendant of an old-clo’ man from Frankfurt be the equal of him, Tietjens of Groby? He wasn’t his equal in any way—let alone socially. If Tietjens hit him he would drop dead; if he addressed a little sneering remark to Levin, the fellow would melt so that you would see the old spluttering Jew swimming up through his carefully arranged Gentile features. He couldn’t shoot as well as Tietjens, or ride, or play a hand at auction. Why, damn it, he, Tietjens, hadn’t the least doubt that he could paint better watercolour-pictures … And, as for returns … he would undertake to tear the guts out of half a dozen new and contradictory A.C.I.s—Army Council Instructions—and write twelve correct Command Orders founded on them, before Levin had lisped out the date and serial number of the first one … He had done it several times up in the room, arranged like a French bluestocking’s salon, where Levin worked at Garrison headquarters … He had written Levin’s blessed command order while Levin fussed and fumed about their being delayed for tea with Mlle. de Bailly … and curled his delicate moustache … Mlle. de Badly, chaperoned by old Lady Sachse, had tea by a clear wood fire in an eighteenth-century octagonal room, with blue-grey tapestried walls and powdering closets, out of priceless porcelain cups without handles. Pale tea that tasted faintly of cinnamon!
Mlle. de Bailly was a long, dark high-coloured Provençale. Not heavy, but precisely long, slow, and cruel; coiled in a deep armchair, saying the most wounding, slow things to Levin, she resembled a white Persian cat luxuriating, sticking out a tentative pawful of expanding claws. With eyes slanting pronouncedly upwards and a very thin hooked nose … almost Japanese … And with a terrific cortege of relatives, swell in a French way. One brother a chauffeur to a Marshal of France … An aristocratic way of shirking!
With all that, obviously even off parade, you might well be the social equal of a Staff colonel: but you jolly well had to keep from showing that you were his superior. Especially intellectually. If you let yourself show a Staff officer that he was a silly ass—you could say it as often as you liked as long as you didn’t prove it!—you could be certain that you would be for it before long. And quite properly. It was not English to be intellectually adroit. Nay, it was positively un-English. And the duty of field officers is to keep messes as English as possible … So a Staff officer would take it out of such a regimental inferior. In a perfectly creditable way. You would never imagine the hash headquarters warrant officers would make of your returns. Until you were worried and badgered and in the end either you were ejected into, or prayed to be transferred to … any other command in the whole service …
And that was beastly. The process, not the effect. On the whole Tietjens did not care where he was or what he did as long as he kept out of England, the thought of that country, at night, slumbering across the Channel, being sentimentally unbearable to him … Still, he was fond of old Campion, and would rather be in his command than any other. He had attached to his staff a very decent set of fellows, as decent
