Complete works of ford m.., p.579
Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 579
He had happened to glance at the medical history of a man beside him and noticed that he had been described as CI...It was obviously a slip of the pen on the part of the Medical Board, or one of their orderlies. He had written C instead of A. The man was Pte. 197394 Thomas Johnson, a shining-faced lump of beef, an agricultural odd jobman from British Columbia where he had worked on the immense estates of Sylvia Tietjens’ portentous ducal second cousin Rugeley. It was a double annoyance. Tietjens had not wanted to be reminded of his wife’s second cousin, because he had not wanted to be reminded of his wife. He had determined to give his thoughts a field day on that subject when he got warm into his flea-bag in his hut that smelt of paraffin whilst the canvas walls crackled with frost and the moon shone...He would think of Sylvia beneath the moon. He was determined not to now! But 197394 Pte. Johnson, Thomas, was otherwise a nuisance and Tietjens cursed himself for having glanced at the man’s medical history. If this preposterous yokel was C3 he could not go on a draft...C1 rather! It was all the same. That would mean finding another man to make up the strength and that would drive Sergeant-Major Cowley out of his mind. He looked up towards the ingenuous, protruding, shining, liquid, bottle-blue eyes of Thomas Johnson...The fellow had never had an illness. He could not have had an illness — except from a surfeit of cold, fat, boiled pork — and for that you would give him a horse’s blue ball and drench which, ten to one, would not remove the cause of the belly-ache...
His eyes met the non-committal glance of a dark, gentlemanly thin fellow with a strikingly scarlet hatband, a lot of gilt about his khaki and little strips of steel chain-armour on his shoulders...Levin...Colonel Levin, G.S.O. II, or something, attached to General Lord Edward Campion...How the hell did fellows get into these intimacies of commanders of units and their men? Swimming in like fishes into the brown air of a tank and there at your elbow... —— spies!...The men had all been called to attention and stood like gasping codfish. The ever-watchful Sergeant-Major Cowley had drifted to his, Tietjens’, elbow. You protect your orfcers from the gawdy Staff as you protect your infant daughters in lambswool from draughts. The dark, bright, cheerful staffwallah said with a slight lisp:
‘Busy, I see.’ He might have been standing there for a century and have a century of the battalion headquarters’ time to waste like that. ‘What draft is this?’
Sergeant-Major Cowley, always ready in case his orfcer should not know the name of his unit or his own name, said:
‘No. 16 I.B.D. Canadian First Division Casual Number Four Draft, sir.’
Colony Levin let air lispingly out between his teeth.
‘No. 16 Draft not off yet...Dear, dear! Dear, dear!...We shall be strafed to hell by First Army...’ He used the word hell as if he had first wrapped it in eau-de-cologned cotton-wadding.
Tietjens, on his feet, knew this fellow very well: a fellow who had been a very bad Society water-colour painter of good family on the mother’s side: hence the cavalry gadgets on his shoulders. Would it then be good...say good taste to explode? He let the sergeant-major do it. Sergeant-Major Cowley was of the type of N.C.O. who carried weight because he knew ten times as much about his job as any Staff officer. The sergeant-major explained that it had been impossible to get off the draft earlier. The colonel said:
‘But surely, sergeant-majah...’
The sergeant-major, now a deferential shopwalker in a lady’s store, pointed out that they had had urgent instructions not to send up the draft without the four hundred Canadian Railway Service men who were to come from Etaples. These men had only arrived that evening at 5.30...at the railway station. Marching them up had taken three-quarters of an hour. The colonel said:
‘But surely, sergeant-majah...’
Old Cowley might as well have said ‘madam’ as ‘sir’ to the red hat-band...The four-hundred had come with only what they stood up in. The unit had had to wangle everything: boots, blankets, tooth-brushes, braces, rifles, iron-rations, identity disks out of the depot store. And it was now only twenty-one twenty...Cowley permitted his commanding officer at this point to say:
‘You must understand that we work in circumstances of extreme difficulty, sir...’
The graceful colonel was lost in an absent contemplation of his perfectly elegant knees.
‘I know, of course...’ he lisped. ‘Very difficult...He brightened up to add: ‘But you must admit you’re unfortunate...You must admit that...’ The weight settled, however, again on his mind.
Tietjens said:
‘Not, I suppose, sir, any more unfortunate than any other unit working under a dual control for supplies...’
The colonel said:
‘What’s that? Dual...Ah, I see you’re there, Mackenzie...Feeling well...feeling fit, eh?’
The whole hut stood silent. His anger at the waste of time made Tietjens say:
‘If you understand, sir, we are a unit whose principal purpose is drawing things to equip drafts with...’ This fellow was delaying them atrociously. He was brushing his knees with a handkerchief!’I’ve had,’ Tietjens said, ‘a man killed on my hands this afternoon because we have to draw tin-hats for my orderly room from Dublin on an A.F.B. Canadian from Aldershot...Killed here...We’ve only just mopped up the blood from where you’re standing...’
The cavalry colonel exclaimed:
‘Oh, good gracious me!...’ jumped a little and examined his beautiful shining knee-high aircraft boots. ‘Killed!...Here!...But there’ll have to be a court of inquiry...You certainly are most unfortunate, Captain Tietjens...Always these mysterious...Why wasn’t your man in a dug-out?...Most unfortunate...We cannot have casualties among the Colonial troops...Troops from the Dominions, I mean...’
Tietjens said grimly:
The man was from Pontardulias...not from any Dominion...One of my orderly room...We are forbidden on pain of court martial to let any but Dominion Expeditionary Force men go into the dug-outs...My Canadians were all there...It’s an A.C.I. local of the eleventh of November...’
The Staff Offcer said:
‘It makes of course, a difference!...Only a Glamorgan-shire? You say...Oh well...But these mysterious...’
He exclaimed, with the force of an explosion, and the relief:
‘Look here...can you spare possible ten...twenty...eh...minutes?...It’s not exactly a service matter...so per...’
Tietjens exclaimed:
‘You see how we’re situated, colonel...’ and like one sowing grass seed on a lawn, extended both hands over his papers and towards his men...He was choking with rage. Colonel Levin had, under the chaperonage of an English dowager, who ran a chocolate store down on the quays in Rouen, a little French piece to whom he was quite seriously engaged. In the most naïve manner. And the young woman, fantastically jealous, managed to make endless insults to herself out of her almost too handsome colonel’s barbaric French. It was an idyll, but it drove the colonel frantic. At such times Levin would consult Tietjens, who passed for a man of brains and a French scholar as to really nicely turned compliments in a difficult language...And as to how you explained that is was necessary for a G.S.O. II, or whatever the colonel was, to be seen quite frequently in the company of very handsome V.A.D.’s and female organizers of all arms...It was the sort of silliness as to which no gentleman ought to be consulted...And here was Levin with the familiar feminine-agonized wrinkle on his bronzed-alabaster brow...Like a beastly soldier-man out of a revue. Why didn’t the ass burst into gesture and a throaty tenor...
Sergeant-Major Cowley naturally saved the situation. Just as Tietjens was as near saying Go to hell as you can be to your remarkably senior officer on parade, the sergeant-major, now a very important solicitor’s most confidential clerk, began whispering to the colonel...
‘The captain might as well take a spell as not...We’re through with all the men except the Canadian Railway batch, and they can’t be issued with blankets not for half an hour...not for three-quarters. If then! It depends if our runner can find where Quarter’s lance-corporal is having his supper, to issue them...! The sergeant-major had inserted that last speech deftly. The Staff officer, with a vague reminiscence of his regimental days, exclaimed:
‘Damn it!...I wonder you don’t break into the depot blanket store and take what you want...’
The sergeant-major, becoming Simon Pure, exclaimed:
‘Oh, no, sir, we could never do that, sir...’
‘But the confounded men are urgently needed in the line,’ Colonel Levin said. ‘Damn it, it’s touch and go!...We’re rushing...’ He appreciated the fact again that he was on the gawdy Staff, and that the sergeant-major and Tietjens, playing like left backs into each other’s hands, had trickily let him in.
‘We can only pray, sir,’ the sergeant-major said, ‘that these ‘ere bloomin’ ‘Uns has got quartermasters and depots and issuing departments, same as ourselves.’ He lowered his voice into a husky whisper. ‘Besides, sir, there’s a rumour...round the telephone in depot orderly room...that there’s a W.O. order at ‘Edquarters...countermanding this and other drafts...’
Colonel Levin said: ‘Oh, my God!’ and consternation rushed upon both him and Tietjens. The frozen ditches, in the night, out there; the agonized waiting for men; the weight upon the mind like a weight upon the brows; the imminent sense of approaching unthinkableness on the right or the left, according as you looked up or down the trench; the solid protecting earth of the parapet then turns into pierced mist...and no reliefs coming from here...The men up there thinking naïvely that they were coming, and they not coming. Why not? Good God, why not? Mackenzie said:
‘Poor —— old Bird...His crowd had been in eleven weeks last Wednesday...About all they could stick...’
‘They’ll have to stick a damn lot more,’ Colonel Levin said. ‘I’d like to get at some of the brutes...’ It was at that date the settled conviction of His Majesty’s Expeditionary Force that the army in the field was the tool of politicians and civilians. In moments of routine that cloud dissipated itself lightly: when news of ill omen arrived it settled down again heavily like a cloud of black gas. You hung your head impotently...
‘So that,’ the sergeant-major said cheerfully, ‘the captain could very well spare half an hour to get his dinner. Or for anything else...’ Apart from the domestic desire that Tietjens’ digestion should not suffer from irregular meals he had the professional conviction that for his captain to be in intimate private converse with a member of the gawdy Staff was good for the unit...’I suppose, sir,’ he added valedictorily to Tietjens, ‘I’d better arrange to put this draft, and the nine hundred men that came in this afternoon to replace them, twenty in a tent...It’s lucky we didn’t strike them...
Tietjens and the colonel began to push men out of their way, going towards the door. The Inniskilling-Canadian, a small open brown book extended deprecatingly, stood, modestly obtrusive, just beside the door-post. Catching avidly at Tietjens’ ‘Eh?’ he said:
‘You’d got the names of the girls wrong in your copy, sir. It was Gwen Lewis I had a child by in Aberystwyth that I wanted to have the lease of the cottage and the ten bob a week. Mrs Hosier that I lived with in Berwick St. James, she was only to have five guineas for a soovneer...I’ve took the liberty of changing the names back again.’
Tietjens grabbed the book from him, and bending down at the sergeant-major’s table scrawled his signature on the bluish page. He thrust the book back at the man and said:
‘There...fall out.’ The man’s face shone. He exclaimed:
‘Thank you, sir. Thank you kindly, captain...I wanted to get off and go to confession. I did bad...’ The McGill graduate with his arrogant black moustache put himself in the way as Tietjens struggled into his British warm.
‘You won’t forget, sir,...’ he began.
Tietjens said:
‘Damn you, I’ve told you I won’t forget. I never forget. You instructed the ignorant Jap in Asaki, but the educational authority is in Tokyo. And your flagitious mineral-water company had their headquarters at the Tan Sen spring near Kobe...Is that right? Well, I’ll do my best for you.’
They walked in silence through the groups of men that hung around the orderly room door and gleamed in the moonlight. In the broad country street of the main line of the camp Colonel Levin began to mutter between his teeth:
‘You take enough trouble with your beastly crowd...a whole lot of trouble...Yet...’
‘Well, what’s the matter with us?’ Tietjens said. ‘We get our drafts ready in thirty-six hours less than any other unit in this command.’
‘I know you do,’ the other conceded. ‘It’s only all these mysterious rows. Now...’
Tietjens said quickly:
‘Do you mind my asking: Are we still on parade? Is this a strafe from General Campion as to the way I command my unit?’
The other conceded quite as quickly and much more worriedly:
‘God forbid.’ He added more quickly still: ‘Old bean!’, and prepared to tuck his wrist under Tietjens’ elbow. Tietjens, however, continued to face the fellow. He was really in a temper.
‘Then tell me,’ he said, ‘how the deuce you can manage to do without an overcoat in this weather?’ If only he could get the chap off the topics of his mysterious rows they might drift to the matter that had brought him up there on that bitter night when he should be sitting over a good wood fire philandering with Mlle Nanette de Bailly. He sank his neck deeper into the sheepskin collar of his British warm. The other, slim, was with all his badges, ribands and mail, shining darkly in a cold that set all Tietjens’ teeth chattering like porcelain. Levin became momentarily animated:
‘You should do as I do...Regular hours...lots of exercise...horse exercise...I do P.T. every morning at the open window of my room...hardening...’
‘It must be very gratifying for the ladies in the rooms facing yours,’ Tietjens said grimly. ‘Is that what’s the matter with Mlle Nanette, now?...I haven’t got time for proper exercise...
‘Good gracious, no,’ the colonel, said. He now tucked his hand firmly under Tietjens’ arm and began to work him towards the left hand of the road: in the direction leading out of camp. Tietjens worked their steps as firmly towards the right and they leant one against the other. ‘In fact, old bean,’ the colonel said, ‘Campy is working so hard to get the command of a fighting army — though he’s indispensable here — that we might pack up bag and baggage any day...That is what has made Nanette see reason...’
‘Then what am I doing in this show?’ Tietjens asked. But Colonel Levin continued blissfully:
‘In fact I’ve got her almost practically for certain to promise that next week...or the week after next at latest...she’ll...damn it, she’ll name the happy day.’
Tietjens said:
‘Good hunting!...How splendidly Victorian!’
‘That’s, damn it,’ the colonel exclaimed manfully, ‘what I say myself...Victorian is what it is...All these marriage settlements...And what is it...Droits du Seigneur?...And notaires...And the Count, having his say...And the Marchioness...And two old grand aunts...But...Hoopla!...’ He executed with his gloved right thumb in the moonlight a rapid pirouette...’Next week...or at least the week after...’ His voice suddenly dropped.
‘At least,’ he wavered, ‘that was what it was at lunchtime...Since then...something happened...’
‘You’ve not been caught in bed with a V.A.D.?’ Tietjens asked.
The colonel mumbled:
‘No...not in bed...Not with a V.A.D...Oh, damn it, at the railway station...With...The general sent me down to meet her...and Nanny of course was seeing off her grandmother, the Duchesse...The giddy cut she handed me out...
Tietjens became coldly furious.
‘Then it was over one of your beastly imbecile rows with Miss de Bailly that you got me out here,’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you mind going down with me towards the I.B.D. headquarters? Your final orders may have come in there. The sappers won’t let me have a telephone, so I have to look in there the last thing...’ He felt a yearning towards rooms in huts, warmed by coke-stoves and electrically lit, with acting lance-corporals bending over A.F.B.’s on a background of deal pigeon-holes filled with returns on buff and blue paper. You got quiet and engrossment there. It was a queer thing: the only place where he, Christopher Tietjens of Groby, could be absently satisfied was in some orderly room or other. The only place in the world...And why? It was a queer thing...
But not queer, really. It was a matter of inevitable selection if you came to think it out. An acting orderly-room lance-corporal was selected for his penmanship, his power of elementary figuring, his trustworthiness amongst innumerable figures and messages, his dependability. For this he differed a hair’s breadth in rank from the rank and file. A hairbreadth that was to him the difference between life and death. For, if he proved not to be dependable, back he went — returned to duty! As long as he was dependable he slept under a table in a warm room, his toilette arrangements and washing in a bully-beef case near his head, a billy full of tea always stewing for him on an always burning stove...A paradise!...No! Not a paradise: the paradise of the Other Ranks!...He might be awakened at one in the morning. Miles away the enemy might be beginning a strafe...He would roll out from among the blankets under the table amongst the legs of hurrying N.C.O.’s and officers, the telephone going like hell...He would have to manifold innumerable short orders on buff slips on a typewriter...A bore to be awakened at one in the morning, but not unexciting: the enemy putting up a tremendous barrage in front of the village of Dranoutre: the whole nineteenth division to be moved into support along the Bailleul-Nieppe road. In case...
Tietjens considered the sleeping army...That country village under the white moon, all of sackcloth sides, celluloid windows, forty men to a hut...That slumbering Arcadia was one of...how many? Thirty-seven thousand five hundred, say for a million and a half of men...But there were probably more than a million and a half in that base...Well, round the slumbering Arcadias were the fringes of virginly glimmering tents...Fourteen men to a tent...For a million...Seventy-one thousand four hundred and twenty-one tents round, say, one hundred and fifty I.B.D.’s, C.B.D.’s, R.E.B.D.’s...Base depots for infantry, cavalry, sappers, gunners, airmen, anti-airmen, telephone-men, vets, chiropodists, Royal Army Service Corps men, Pigeon Service men, Sanitary Service men, Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps women, V.A.D. women — what in the world did V.A.D. stand for? — canteens, rest-tent attendants, barrack damage superintendents, parsons, priests, rabbis, Mormon bishops, Brahmins, Lamas, Imams, Fanti men, no doubt, for African troops. And all ready dependent on the acting orderly-room lance-corporals for their temporal and spiritual salvation...For, if by a slip of the pen a lance-corporal sent a Papist priest to an Ulster regiment, the Ulster men would lynch him, and all go to hell. Or, if by a slip of the tongue at the telephone, or a slip of the typewriter, he sent a division to Westoutre instead of to Dranoutre at one in the morning, the six or seven thousand poor devils in front of Dranoutre might all be massacred and nothing but His Majesty’s Navy could save us...
