The general said:
“Good God! …”
Tietjens said:
“No, sir, I’ve not gone off my chump. That’s my problem! … But I’m a fool to talk so much … It’s because I don’t know what to say.”
The general sat staring at the tablecloth: his face was suffused with blood. He had the appearance of a man in monstrous ill-humour. He said:
“You had better say what you want to say. What the devil do you mean? … What’s this all about? …”
Tietjens said:
“I’m enormously sorry, sir. It’s difficult to make myself plain.”
The general said:
“Neither of us do. What is language for? What the hell is language for? We go round and round. I suppose I’m an old fool who cannot understand your modern ways … But you’re not modern. I’ll do you that justice … That beastly little McKechnie is modern … I shall ram him into your divisional-transport job, so that he won’t incommode you in your battalion … Do you understand what the little beast did? He got leave to go and get a divorce. And then did not get a divorce. That’s modernism. He said he had scruples. I understand that he and his wife and … some dirty other fellow … slept three in a bed. That’s modern scruples …”
Tietjens said:
“No sir, it’s not really … But what is a man to do if his wife is unfaithful to him?”
The general said as if it were an insult:
“Divorce the harlot! Or live with her! …” Only a beast he went on, would expect a woman to live all her life alone in a cockloft! She’s bound to die. Or go on the streets … What sort of a fellow wouldn’t see that? Was there any sort of beast who’d expect a woman to live … with a man beside her … Why, she’d … she’d be bound to … He’d have to take the consequences of whatever happened. The general repeated: “Whatever happened! If she pulled all the strings of all the shower-baths in the world!”
Tietjens said:
“Still, sir … there are … there used to be … in families of … position … a certain …” He stopped.
The general said:
“Well …”
Tietjens said:
“On the part of the man … a certain … Call it … parade!”
The general said:
“Then there had better be no more parades …” He said: “Damn it! … Besides us, all women are saints … Think of what childbearing is. I know the world … Who would stand that? … You? … I … I’d rather be the last poor devil in Perry’s lines!”
He looked at Tietjens with a sort of injurious cunning:
“Why don’t you divorce?” he asked.
Panic came over Tietjens. He knew it would be his last panic of that interview. No brain could stand more. Fragments of scenes of fighting, voices, names, went before his eyes and ears. Elaborate problems … The whole map of the embattled world ran out in front of him—as large as a field. An embossed map in greenish papier-mâché—a ten-acre field of embossed papier-mâché: with the blood of O Nine Morgan blurring luminously over it. Years before … How many months? … Nineteen, to be exact, he had sat on some tobacco plants on the Mont de Kats … No, the Montagne Noire. In Belgium … What had he been doing? … Trying to get the lie of the land … No … Waiting to point out positions to some fat home general who had never come. The Belgian proprietor of the tobacco plants had arrived, and had screamed his head off over the damaged plants …
But, up there you saw the whole war … Infinite miles away, over the sullied land that the enemy forces held: into Germany proper. Presumably you could breathe in Germany proper … Over your right shoulder you could see a stump of a tooth. The Cloth Hall at Ypres: at an angle of 50° below … Dark lines behind it … The German trenches before Wytschaete!
That was before the great mines had blown Wytschaete to hell …
But—every half-minute by his wristwatch—white puffs of cotton-wool existed on the dark lines—the German trenches before Wytschaete. Our artillery practice … Good shooting. Jolly good shooting!
Miles and miles away to the left … beneath the haze of light that, on a clouded day, the sea threw off, a shaft of sunlight fell, and was reflected in a grey blue … It was the glass roofs of a great airplane shelter!
A great plane, the largest he had then seen, was moving over, behind his back, with four little planes as an escort … Over the vast slagheaps by Bethune … High, purplish-blue heaps, like the steam domes of engines or the breasts of women … Bluish purple. More blue than purple … Like all Franco-Belgian Gobelins tapestry … And all quiet … Under the vast pall of quiet cloud! …
There were shells dropping in Poperinghe … Five miles out, under his nose … The shells dropped. White vapour rose and ran away in plumes … What sort of shells? … There were twenty different kinds of shells …
The Huns were shelling Poperinghe! A senseless cruelty. It was five miles behind the lines! Prussian brutality … There were two girls who kept a teashop in Poperinghe … High coloured … General Plumer had liked them … a fine old general … The shells had killed them both … Any man might have slept with either of them with pleasure and profit … Six thousand of H.M. officers must have thought the same about those high-coloured girls. Good girls! … But the Hun shells got them … What sort of fate was that? … To be desired by six thousand men and smashed into little gobbets of flesh by Hun shells?
It appeared to be mere Prussianism—the senseless cruelty of the Hun!—to shell Poperinghe. An innocent town with a teashop five miles behind Ypres … Little noiseless plumes of smoke rising under the quiet blanketing of the pale maroon skies, with the haze from the aeroplane shelters, and the great aeroplanes over the Bethune slagheaps … What a dreadful name—Bethune …
Probably, however, the Germans had heard that we were massing
