There it was then: the natural catastrophe! As when, under thunder, a dam breaks. His mind was battling with the waters. What would it pick out as the main terror? The mud: the noise: dread always at the back of the mind? Or the worry! The worry! Your eyebrows always had a slight tension on them … Like eyestrain!
The general had begun, soberly:
“You will recognize that there is nothing else that I can do.”
His answering:
“I recognize, naturally, sir, that there is nothing else that you can do …” seemed rather to irritate the general. He wanted opposition: he wanted Tietjens to argue the matter. He was the Roman father counselling suicide to his son: but he wanted Tietjens to expostulate. So that he, General Campion, might absolutely prove that he, Tietjens, was a disgraceful individual … It could not be done. The general said:
“You will understand that I can’t—no commander could!—have such things happening in my command …”
“I must accept that, if you say it, sir.”
The general looked at him under his eyebrows. He said:
“I have already told you that this is promotion. I have been much impressed by the way you have handled this command. You are, of course, no soldier, but you will make an admirable officer for the militia, that is all that our troops now are …” He said: “I will emphasize what I am saying … No officer could—without being militarily in the wrong—have a private life that is as incomprehensible and embarrassing as yours …”
Tietjens said:
“He’s hit it! …”
The general said:
“An officer’s private life and his life on parade are as strategy to tactics … I don’t want, if I can avoid it, to go into your private affairs. It’s extremely embarrassing … But let me put it to you that … I wish to be delicate. But you are a man of the world! … Your wife is an extremely beautiful woman … There has been a scandal … I admit not of your making … But if, on the top of that, I appeared to show favouritism to you …”
Tietjens said:
“You need not go on, sir … I understand …” He tried to remember what the brooding and odious McKechnie had said … only two nights ago … He couldn’t remember … It was certainly a suggestion that Sylvia was the general’s mistress. It had then, he remembered, seemed fantastic … Well, what else could they think? He said to himself: “It absolutely blocks out my staying here!” He said aloud: “Of course, it’s my own fault. If a man so handles his womenfolk that they get out of hand, he has only himself to blame.”
The general was going on. He pointed out that one of his predecessors had lost that very command on account of scandals about women. He had turned the place into a damned harem! …
He burst out, looking at Tietjens with a peculiar goggle-eyed intentness:
“If you think I’d care about losing my command over Sylvia or any other damned Society woman …” He said: “I beg your pardon …” and continued reasoningly:
“It’s the men that have to be considered. They think—and they’ve every right to think it if they wish to—that a man who’s a wrong ’un over women isn’t the man they can trust their lives in the hands of …” He added: “And they’re probably right … A man who’s a real wrong ’un … I don’t mean who sets up a gal in a teashop … But one who sells his wife, or … At any rate, in our army … The French may be different! … Well, a man like that usually has a yellow streak when it comes to fighting … Mind, I’m not saying always … Usually … There was a fellow called …”
He went off into an anecdote …
Tietjens recognized the pathos of his trying to get away from the agonizing present moment, back to an India where it was all real soldiering and good leather and parades that had been parades. But he did not feel called upon to follow. He could not follow. He was going up the line …
He occupied himself with his mind. What was it going to do? He cast back along his military history: what had his mind done in similar moments before? … But there had never been a similar moment! There had been the sinister or repulsive business of going up, getting over, standing to—even of the casualty clearing-station! … But he had always been physically keener, he had never been so depressed or overwhelmed.
He said to the general:
“I recognize that I cannot stop in this command. I regret it, for I have enjoyed having this unit … But does it necessarily mean the VIth Battalion?”
He wondered what was his own motive at the moment. Why had he asked the general that? … The thing presented itself as pictures: getting down bulkily from a high French train, at dawn. The light picked out for you the white of large hunks of bread—half-loaves—being handed out to troops themselves invisible … The ovals of light on the hats of English troops: they were mostly West Countrymen. They did not seem to want the bread much … A long ridge of light above a wooded bank: then suddenly, pervasively, a sound! … For all the world as, sheltering from rain in a cottager’s washhouse on the moors, you hear the cottager’s clothes boiling in a copper … Bubble … bubble … bubbubbub … bubble … Not terribly loud—but terribly demanding attention! … The Great Strafe! …
The general had said:
“If I could think of anything else to do with you, I’d do it … But all the extraordinary rows you’ve got into … They block me everywhere … Do you realize that I have requested General O’Hara to suspend his functions until now? …”
It was amazing to Tietjens how the general mistrusted his subordinates—as well as how he trusted them! … It was probably that that made him so successful an officer. Be worked for by men that you trust: but distrust them all the time—along certain lines of frailty: liquor, women, money! … Well, he had a long knowledge of men!
He said:
“I admit, sir, that I misjudged General O’Hara. I have said as much to Colonel Levin and explained
