Chapter Two
The "All Clear" went at once after that. Its suddenness was something surprising, the mournful-cheerful, long notes dying regretfully on a night that had only just gone quiet after the perfectly astonishing row. The moon had taken it into its head to rise; begumboiled, jocular and grotesque, it came from behind the shoulder of one of the hut-covered hills and sent down the lines of Tietjen's huts, long, sentimental rays that converted the place into a slumbering, pastoral settlement. There was no sound that did not contribute to the silence, little dim lights shone through the celluloid casements. Of Sergeant-Major Cowley, his numerals gilded by the moon in the lines of A Company, Tietjens, who was easing his lungs of coke vapours for a minute, asked in a voice that hushed itself in tribute to the moonlight and the now keen frost:
"Where, the deuce is the draft?"
The sergeant-major looked poetically down a ribbon of whitewashed stones that descended the black down-side. Over the next shoulder of hill was the blur of a hidden conflagration.
"There's a Hun plane burning down there. In Twenty-Seven's parade ground. The draft's round that, sir," he said.
Tietjens said:
"Good God!" in a voice of caustic tolerance. He added, "I did think we had drilled some discipline into these blighters in the seven weeks we have had them.... You remember the first time when we had them on parade and that acting lance-corporal left the ranks to heave a rock at a sea-gull.... And called you 'Ol' Hunkey!... Conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline? Where's that Canadian sergeant-major? Where's the officer in charge of the draft?"
Sergeant-Major Cowley said:
"Sergeant-Major Ledoux said it was like a cattle-stampede on the ... some river where they come from. You couldn't stop them, sir. It was their first German plane.... And they going up the line to-night, sir."
"To-night!" Tietjens exclaimed. "Next Christmas!"
The sergeant-major said:
"Poor boys!" and continued to gaze into the distance. "I heard another good one, sir," he said. "The answer to the one about the King saluting a private soldier and he not taking any notice is: when he's dead.... But if you marched a company into a field through a gateway and you wanted to get it out again but you did not know any command in the drill book for change of direction, what would you do, sir?... You have to get that company out, but you must not use About Turn, or Right or Left Wheel.... There's another one, too, about saluting.... The officer in charge of draft is Second-Lieutenant Hotchkiss.... But he's an A.S.C. officer and turned of sixty. A farrier he is, sir, in civil life. An A.S.C. major was asking me, sir, very civil, if you could not detail someone else. He says he doubts if Second-Lieutenant Hitchcock ... Hotchkiss could walk as far as the station, let alone march the men, him not knowing anything but cavalry words of command, if he knows them. He's only been in the army a fortnight...."
Tietjens turned from the idyllic scene with the words:
"I suppose the Canadian sergeant-major and Lieutenant Hotchkiss are doing what they can to get their men to come back."
He re-entered the hut.
Captain Mackenzie in the light of a fantastically brilliant hurricane lamp appeared to be bathing dejectedly in a surf of coiling papers spread on the table before him.
"There's all this bumph," he said, "just come from all the headquarters in the bally world."
Tietjens said cheerfully:
"What's it all about?" There were, the other answered, Garrison Headquarter orders, Divisional orders, Lines of Communication orders, half a dozen A.F.B.W. two four two's. A terrific strafe from First Army forwarded from Garrison H.Q. about the draft's not having reached Hazebrouck the day before yesterday. Tietjens said:
"Answer them politely to the effect that we had orders not to send off the draft without its complement of four hundred Canadian Railway Service men-the fellows in furred hoods. They only reached us from Etaples at five this afternoon without blankets or ring papers. Or any other papers for the matter of that."
Mackenzie was studying with increased gloom a small buff memorandum slip:
"This appears to be meant for you privately," he said. "I can't make head or tail of it otherwise. It isn't marked private."
He tossed the buff slip across the table.
Tietjens sank down bulkily on to his bully-beef case. He read on the buff at first the initials of the signature, "E.C. Genl.," and then: "For God's sake keep your wife off me. I will not have skirts round my H.Q. You are more trouble to me than all the rest of my command put together."
Tietjens groaned and sank more deeply on to his beef case. It was as if an unseen and unsuspected wild beast had jumped on his neck from an overhanging branch. The sergeant-major at his side said in his most admirable butler manner:
"Colour-Sergeant Morgan and Lance-Corporal Trench are obliging us by coming from depot orderly room to help with the draft's papers. Why don't you and the other officer go and get a bit of dinner, sir? The colonel and the padre have only just come in to mess, and I've warned the mess orderlies to keep your foods 'ot.... Both good men with papers, Morgan and Trench. We can send the soldiers' small books to you at table to sign...."
His feminine solicitude enraged and overwhelmed Tietjens with blackness. He told the sergeant-major that he was to go to hell, for he himself was not going to leave that hut till the draft was moved off. Captain Mackenzie could do as he pleased. The sergeant-major told Captain Mackenzie that Captain Tietjens took as much trouble with his rag-time detachments as if he had been the Coldstream adjutant at Chelsea sending off a draft of Guards. Captain Mackenzie said that that was why they damn well got their details off four days faster than any other I.B.D. in that camp. He would say that much, he added grudgingly and dropped his head over his papers again. The hut was moving slowly up and down before the eyes of Tietjens. He might have just been kicked in the stomach. That was how shocks took him. He said to himself that by God he must take himself in hand. He grabbed with his heavy hands at a piece of buff paper and wrote on it in a column of fat, wet letters
a
b
b
a
a
b
b
a and so on.
He said opprobriously to Captain Mackenzie:
"Do you know what a sonnet is? Give me the rhymes for a sonnet. That's the plan of it."
Mackenzie grumbled:
"Of course I know what a sonnet is. What's your game?"
Tietjens said:
"Give me the fourteen end-rhymes of a sonnet and I'll write the lines. In under two minutes and a half."
Mackenzie said injuriously:
"If you do I'll turn it into Latin hexameters in three. In under three minutes."
They were like men uttering deadly insults the one to the other. To Tietjens it was as if an immense cat were parading, fascinated and fatal, round that hut. He had imagined himself parted from his wife. He had not heard from his wife since her four-in-the-morning departure from their flat, months and eternities ago, with the dawn just showing up the chimney-pots of the Georgian roof-trees opposite. In the complete stillness of dawn he had heard her voice say very clearly "Paddington" to the chauffeur, and then all the sparrows in the inn waking up in chorus.... Suddenly and appallingly it came into his head that it might not have been his wife's voice that had said "Paddington," but her maid's ... He was a man who lived very much by rules of conduct. He had a rule: Never think on the subject of a shock at a moment of shock. The mind was then too sensitized. Subjects of shock require to be thought all round. If your mind thinks when it is too sensitized its then conclusions will be too strong. So he exclaimed to Mackenzie:
"Haven't you got your rhymes yet? Damn it all!"
Mackenzie grumbled offensively:
"No, I haven't. It's more difficult to get rhymes than to write sonnets.... death, moil, coil, breath ..." He paused.
"Heath, soil, toil, staggereth," Tietjens said contemptuously. "That's your sort of Oxford young woman's rhyme.... Go on ... What is it?"
An extremely age-faded and unmilitary officer was beside the blanketed table. Tietjens regretted having spoken to him with ferocity. He had a grotesquely thin white beard. Positively, white whiskers! He must have gone through as much of the army as he had gone through, with those whiskers, because no superior officer-not even a field-marshal-would have the heart to tell him to take them off! It was the measure of his pathos. This ghost-like object was apologizing for not having been able to keep the draft in hand: he was requesting his superior to observe that these Colonial troops were without any instincts of discipline. None at all. Tietjens observed that he had a blue cross on his right arm where the vaccination marks are as a rule. He imagined the Canadians talking to this hero.... The hero began to talk of Major Cornwallis of the R.A.S.C.
Tietjens said apropos of nothing:
"Is there a Major Cornwallis in the A.S.C.? Good God!"
The hero protested faintly:
"The R.A.S.C."
Tietjens said kindly:
"Yes. Yes. The Royal Army Service Corps."
Obviously his mind until now had regarded his wife's "Paddington" as the definite farewell between his life and hers.... He had imagined her, like Eurydice, tall, but faint and pale, sinking back into the shades.... "Che faro senz'...
