Parade's End (90 page)

Well, in that case Providence seemed to have decreed a waiting just long enough to allow Tietjens to persuade the unhappy mortal called Perowne that death was not a very dreadful affair… . He had enough intellectual authority to persuade the fellow with his glued-down black hair that Death supplied His own anæsthetics. That was the argument. On the approach of Death all the faculties are so numbed that you feel neither pain nor apprehension… . He could still hear the heavy, authoritative words that, on that occasion, he had used.

The Providence of Perowne! For, when he was dug out after, next night having been buried in going up into the trenches, they said, he had a smile like a young baby’s on his face. He didn’t have long to wait and died with a smile on his face … nothing having so much become him during the life as … well, a becoming smile! During life he had seemed a worried, fussing sort of chap.

Bully for Perowne… . But what about him, Tietjens? Was that the sort of thing that Providence ought to do to one? … That’s Tempting God!

The sergeant beside him said:

‘Then a man could stand hup on an ’ill… . You really mean to say, sir, that you think a man will be able to stand up on a bleedin’ ’ill… .’

Presumably Tietjens had been putting heart into that acting temporary sergeant-major. He could not remember what he had been saying to the N.C.O. because his mind had been so deeply occupied with the image of Perowne… . He said:

‘You’re a Lincolnshire man, aren’t you? You come from a Fen country. What do you want to stand up on a hill for?’

The man said:

‘Ah, but you
do
, sir!’

He added:

‘You want to stand up! Take a look around …’ He struggled for expression: ‘Like as if you wanted to breathe deep after bein’ in a stoopin’ posture for a long time!’

Tietjens said:

‘Well, you can do that here. With discretion. I did it just now… .’

The man said:

‘You, sir … You’re a law hunto yourself!’

It was the most considerable shock that Tietjens received in the course of his military career. And the most considerable reward.

There were all these inscrutable beings: the Other Ranks, a brownish mass, spreading underground, like clay strata in the gravel, beneath all this waving country that the sun would soon be warming; they were in holes, in tunnels, behind sack-cloth curtains, carrying on … carrying on some sort of life, conversing, breathing, desiring. But completely mysterious, in the mass. Now and then you got a glimpse of a passionate desire: ‘A man could stand up on a bleedin’ ’ill’; now and then you got – though you knew that they watched you eternally and knew the minutest gestures of your sleep – you got some sort of indication as to how they regarded you: ‘You are a law unto yourself!’

That must be hero-worship: an acting temporary regimental sergeant-major, without any real knowledge of
his
job, extemporising, not so long ago a carrier in an eastern county of remarkable flatness does not tell his Acting Commanding Officer that he is a law unto himself without meaning it to be a flattering testimony: a certificate, as far as it went, of trustworthiness… .

They were now crawling out into the light of day; from behind the sacking, six files that he had last night transferred from ‘C’ to ‘D’ Coy., ‘D’ having been reduced to forty-three rank and file. They shuffled out, an extraordinary Falstaff’s battalion of muddy odd-come shorts, fell into some sort of alignment in the trench, shuffled an inch further this way, an inch further that; pushed up their chin-straps and pulled them down; humped up their packs by hunching their shoulders and jerking; adjusted their water bottles and fell into some sort of immobility, their rifles, more or less aligned, poked out before them. In that small company they were men of all sorts of sizes, of all sorts of disparities and grotesquenesses of physique. Two of them were music-hall comedians and the whole lot looked as if they made up a knock-about turn… . The Rag-Time Army at its vocation, living and breathing.

The sergeant called them to attention and they wavered back and forward. The sergeant said:

‘The Commandin’ Officer’s lookin’ at you. FIX … B’ts!’

And, positively, a dwarf concealed under a pudding basin shuffled a foot-length and a half forward in the mud, protruded his rifle-muzzle between his bent knees, jerked his head swiftly to strain his sight along the minute line… . It was like a blurred fairy-tale! Why did that dwarf behave in a smart and soldierly manner? Through despair? It wasn’t likely!

The men wavered like the edge of a field of tall grass with the wind running along it; they felt round themselves for their bayonet-handles, like women attempting difficult feats with their skirts… . The dwarf cut his hand smartly away to his side, as the saying is, the men pulled their rifles up into line. Tietjens exclaimed:

‘Stand at ease, stand easy,’ negligently enough, then he burst out in uncontrollable irritation: ‘For
God’s
sake, put your beastly hats straight!’ The men shuffled uneasily, this being no order known to them, and Tietjens explained: ‘No, this isn’t drill. It’s only that your hats all
at
sixes and sevens give me the pip!’ And the whispers of the men went down the little line:

‘You ’eer the orfcer… . Gives ’im the pip, we do! … Goin’ for a wawk in the pawk wiv our gels, we are… .’ They glanced nevertheless aside and upwards at each other’s tin-hat rims and said: ‘Shove ’im a shade forward, ’Orace… . You tighten your martingale, ’Erb!’ They were gaily rueful and impenitently profane; they had let thirty-six hours of let-off. A fellow louder-than-hummed:

‘As I wawk erlong ther Bor dee Berlong

Wiv an indipendent air …

W’ere’s me swegger-kine, you fellers!’

Tietjens addressed him:

‘Did you ever hear Coborn sing that, Runt?’ and Runt replied:

‘Yes, sir. I was the hind legs of the elephant when he sung it in the Old Drury panto!’ A little, dark, beady-eyed Cockney, his enormous mouth moved lip on lip as if he were chewing a pebble in pride at the reminiscence. The men’s voices went on: ‘’Ind legs ’f the elephink! … good ol’ Helefink… . I’ll go ’n see ’n elephink first thing I do in Blighty!’

Tietjens said:

‘I’ll give every man of you a ticket for Drury Lane next Boxing Day. We’ll all be in London for the next Boxing Day. Or Berlin!’

They exclaimed polyphonically and low:

‘Oo-er! Djee ’eer ’im? Di’djee ’eer the orfcer? The noo C.O.?’

A hidden man said:

‘Mike it the old Shoreditch Empire, sir, ’n we’ll thenk you!’

Another:

‘I never keered fer the Lane meself! Give me the old Balliam for Boxing Day.’ The sergeant made the sounds for them to move off.

They shuffled off up the trench. An unseen man said:

‘Better’n a bleedin’ dipso!’ Lips said ‘Shhh!’

The sergeant shouted – with an astonishing, brutal panic:

‘You shut your bleedin’ mouth, you man, or I’ll shove you in the b—y clink!’ He looked nevertheless at Tietjens with calm satisfaction a second later.

‘A good lot of chaps, sir,’ he said. ‘The best!’ He was anxious to wipe out the remembrance of the last spoken word. ‘Give ’em the right sort of officers ’n they’ll beat the world!’

‘Do you think it makes any difference to them what officers they have?’ Tietjens asked. ‘Wouldn’t it be all the same if they had just anyone?’

The sergeant said:

‘No, sir. They bin frightened these last few days. Now they’re better.’

This was just exactly what Tietjens did not want to hear. He hardly knew why. Or he did… . He said:

‘I should have thought these men knew their job so well – for this sort of thing – that they hardly needed orders. It cannot make much difference whether they receive orders or not.’

The sergeant said:

‘It
does
make a difference, sir,’ in a tone as near that of cold obstinacy as he dare attain to; the feeling of the approaching
strafe
was growing on them. It hung over them.

McKechnie stuck his head out from behind the sacking. The sacking had the lettering PXL in red and the word
Minn
in black. McKechnie’s eyes were blazing maniacally, jumping maniacally in his head. They always were jumping maniacally in his head. He was a tiring fellow. He was wearing not a tin hat, but an officer’s helmet. The gilt dragon on it glittered. The sun was practically up, somewhere. As soon as its disc cleared the horizon, the Huns, according to Brigade, were to begin sending over their wearisome stuff. In thirteen and a half minutes.

McKechnie gripped Tietjens by the arm, a familiarity that Tietjens detested. He hissed – he really hissed because he was trying to speak under his breath:

‘Come past the next traverse. I want to speak to you.’

In correctly prepared trenches, made according to order as these had been to receive them in retreat, by a regular battalion acting under the orders of the Royal Engineers, you go along a straight ditch of trench for some yards, then you find a square block of earth protruding inwards from the parapet round which you must walk; then you come to another straight piece, then to another traverse, and so on to the end of the line, the
lengths
and dimensions varying to suit the nature of the terrain or the character of the soil. These outjuttings were designed to prevent the lateral spreading of fragments of shell bursting in the trench which would otherwise serve as a funnel, like the barrel of a gun to direct those parts of missiles into men’s bodies. It was also exciting – as Tietjens expected to be doing before the setting of the not quite risen sun – to crouch rapidly along past one of them, the heart moving very disagreeably, the revolver protruded well in advance, with half a dozen careless fellows with grenades of sorts just behind you. And you not knowing whether, crouching against the side that was just round the corner you would or would not find a whitish, pallid, dangerous object that you would have no time to scrutinise closely.

Past the nearest of these McKechnie led Tietjens. He was portentous and agitated.

At the end of the next stretch of trench, leaning, as it were, against a buttress in an attitude of intense fatigue was a mud-coloured, very thin, tall fellow; squatting dozing on his heels in the mud just beside that one’s foot was another, a proper Glamorganshire man of whom not many more than ten were left in the battalion. The standing man was leaning like that to look through a loophole that had been placed very close to the buttress of raw earth. He grunted something to his companion and continued looking intently. The other man grunted too.

McKechnie withdrew precipitately into the recessed pathway. The column of earth in their faces gave a sense of oppression. He said:

‘Did you put that fellow up to saying that damnable thing? …’ He repeated: ‘That perfectly damnable thing! Damnable!’ Besides hating Tietjens he was shocked, pained, femininely lachrymose. He gazed into Tietjens’ eyes like a forsaken mistress fit to do a murder, with a sort of wistful incredulity of despair.

To that Tietjens was accustomed. For the last two months McKechnie whispering in the ear of the C.O. wherever Battalion Headquarters might happen to be – McKechnie, with his arms spread abroad on the table and his chin nearly on the cloth that they had always managed to retain in spite of three precipitate moves, McKechnie, with his mad eyes every now and then moving in the
direction
of Tietjens, had been almost the most familiar object of Tietjens’ night landscapes. They wanted him gone so that McKechnie might once again become Second-in-Command of that body of pals… . That indeed was what they were … with the addition of a great deal too much of what they called ’Ooch.

Tietjens obviously could not go. There was no way of managing it: he had been put there by old Campion and there he must remain. So that by the agreeable irony of Providence there was Tietjens who had wanted above all McKechnie’s present relatively bucolic job hated to hell by half a dozen quite decent if trying young squits – the pals – because Tietjens was in his, McKechnie’s, desired position. It seemed to make it all the worse that they were all, with the exception of the Commanding Officer himself, of the little, dark, Cockney type and had the Cockney’s voice, gesture, and intonation, so that Tietjens felt himself like a blond Gulliver with hair very silver in patches, rising up amongst a lot of Lilliputian brown creatures… . Portentous and unreasonably noticeable.

A large cannon, nearer than the one that had lately spoken, but as it were with a larger but softer voice, remarked: ‘Phohhhhhhhhh’, the sound wandering round the landscape for a long while. After a time about four coupled railway-trains hurtled jovially amongst the clouds and went a long way away – four in one. They were probably trying to impress the North Sea.

It might of course be the signal for the German barrage to begin. Tietjens’ heart stopped; his skin on the nape of the neck began to prickle; his hands were cold. That was fear: the Battle Fear, experienced in
strafes
. He might not again be able to hear himself think. Not ever. What did he want of life? … Well, just not to lose his reason. One would pray. Not that… . Otherwise, perhaps a nice parsonage might do. It was just thinkable. A place in which for ever to work at the theory of waves… . But of course it was not thinkable… .

He was saying to McKechnie:

‘You ought not to be here without a tin hat. You will have to put a tin hat on if you mean to stop here. I can give you four minutes if that is not the
strafe
beginning. Who’s been saying what?’

McKechnie said:

‘I’m not stopping here. I’m going back, after I’ve given you a piece of my mind, to the beastly job you have got me defiled with.’

Tietjens said:

‘Well, you’ll put on a tin hat to go there, please. And don’t ride your horse, if you’ve got it here, till after you’re a hundred yards, at least, down a communication trench.’

McKechnie asked how Tietjens dared give him orders and Tietjens said: Fine he would look with Divisional Transport dead in his lines at five in the morning in a parade hat. McKechnie with objurgations said that the Transport Officer had the right to consult the C.O. of a battalion he supplied. Tietjens said: