“They ought to let my orderly room have tin hats,” Tietjens said to Mackenzie. “I’m damned if they didn’t take these fellows’ tin hats into store again when they attached to me for service, and I’m equally damned if they did not tell me that, if I wanted tin hats for my own headquarters, I had to write to H.Q. Canadians, Aldershot, or some such place in order to get the issue sanctioned.”
“Our headquarters are full of Huns doing the Huns’ work,” Mackenzie said hatefully. “I’d like to get among them one of these days.”
Tietjens looked with some attention at that young man with the Rembrandt shadows over his dark face. He said:
“Do you believe that tripe?”
The young man said:
“No … I don’t know that I do … I don’t know what to think … The world’s rotten …”
“Oh, the world’s pretty rotten, all right,” Tietjens answered. And, in his fatigue of mind caused by having to attend to innumerable concrete facts like the providing of households for a thousand men every few days, arranging parades states for an extraordinarily mixed set of troops of all arms with very mixed drills, and fighting the Assistant Provost Marshal to keep his own men out of the clutches of the beastly Garrison Military Police who had got a down on all Canadians, he felt he had not any curiosity at all left … Yet he felt vaguely that, at the back of his mind, there was some reason for trying to cure this young member of the lower middle classes.
He repeated:
“Yes, the world’s certainly pretty rotten. But that’s not its particular line of rottenness as far as we are concerned … We’re tangled up, not because we’ve got Huns in our orderly rooms, but just because we’ve got English. That’s the bat in our belfry … That Hun plane is presumably coming back. Half a dozen of them …”
The young man, his mind eased by having got off his chest a confounded lot of semi-nonsensical ravings, considered the return of the Hun planes with gloomy indifference. His problem really was: could he stand the ⸻ noise that would probably accompany their return? He had to get really into his head that this was an open space to all intents and purposes. There would not be splinters of stone flying about. He was ready to be hit by iron, steel, lead, copper, or brass shell rims, but not by beastly splinters of stone knocked off house fronts. That consideration had come to him during his beastly, his beastly, his infernal, damnable leave in London, when just such a filthy row had been going on … Divorce leave! … Captain McKechnie second attached ninth Glamorganshires is granted leave from the 14/11 to the 29/11 for the purpose of obtaining a divorce … The memory seemed to burst inside him with the noise of one of those beastly enormous tinpot crashes—and it always came when guns made that particular kind of tinpot crash: the two came together, the internal one and the crash outside. He felt that chimney-pots were going to crash on to his head. You protected yourself by shouting at damned infernal idiots; if you could outshout the row you were safe … That was not sensible but you got ease that way! …
“In matters of Information they’re not a patch on us.” Tietjens tried the speech on cautiously and concluded: “We know what the Enemy rulers read in the sealed envelopes beside their breakfast bacon-and-egg plates.”
It had occurred to him that it was a military duty to bother himself about the mental equilibrium of this member of the lower classes. So he talked … any old talk, wearisomely, to keep his mind employed! Captain Mackenzie was an officer of His Majesty the King: the property, body and soul, of His Majesty and His Majesty’s War Office. It was Tietjens’ duty to preserve this fellow as it was his duty to prevent deterioration in any other piece of the King’s property. That was implicit in the oath of allegiance. He went on talking:
The curse of the army, as far as the organization is concerned, was our imbecile national belief that the game is more than the player. That was our ruin, mentally, as a nation. We were taught that cricket is more than clearness of mind, so the blasted quartermaster, O.C. Depot Ordnance Stores next door, thought he had taken a wicket if he refused to serve out tin hats to their crowd. That’s the Game! And if any of his, Tietjens’, men were killed, he grinned and said the game was more than the players of the game … And of course if he got his bowling average down low enough he got promotion. There was a quartermaster in a west country cathedral city who’d got more D.S.O.s and combatant medals than anyone on active service in France, from the sea to Peronne, or wherever our lines ended. His achievement was to have robbed almost every wretched Tommie in the Western Command of several weeks’ separation allowance … for the good of the taxpayer, of course. The poor ⸻ Tommies’ kids went without proper food and clothing, and the Tommies themselves had been in a state of exasperation and resentment. And nothing in the world was worse for discipline and the army as a fighting machine. But there that quartermaster sat in his office, playing the romantic game over his A.F.B.s till the broad buff sheets fairly glowed in the light of the incandescent gas. “And,” Tietjens concluded, “for every quarter of a million sterling for which he bowls out the wretched fighting men he gets a new clasp on his fourth D.S.O. ribbon … The game, in short, is more than the players of the game.”
“Oh, damn it!” Captain Mackenzie said. “That’s what’s made us what we
