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 wrist-watch – 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 blur… . It was the glass roofs of a great aeroplane 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 slag-heaps by Béthune… . 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 Gobelin 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 line! Prussian brutality … There were two girls who kept a tea-shop 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 tea-shop 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 Béthune slag-heaps… . What a dreadful name – Béthune… .
Probably, however, the Germans had heard that we were massing men in Poperinghe. It was reasonable to shell a town where men were being assembled… . Or we might have been shelling one of their towns with an Army H.Q. in it. So they shelled Poperinghe in the silent grey day… .
That was according to the rules of the service… . General Campion, accepting with equanimity what German aeroplanes did to the hospitals, camps, stables, brothels, theatres, boulevards, chocolate stalls, and hotels of his town would have been vastly outraged if Hun planes had dropped bombs on his private lodgings… . The rules of war! … You spare, mutually, each other’s headquarters and blow to pieces girls that are desired by six thousand men apiece… .
That had been nineteen months before! … Now, having lost so much emotion, he saw the embattled world as a map… . An embossed map of greenish papier mâché. The blood of O Nine Morgan was blurring luminously over it. At the extreme horizon was territory labelled White Ruthenians! Who the devil were those poor wretches?
He exclaimed to himself: ‘By heavens! Is this epilepsy?’ He prayed: ‘Blessed saints, get me spared that!’ He exclaimed: ‘No, it isn’t! … I’ve complete control of my mind. My uppermost mind.’ He said to the general:
‘I can’t divorce, sir. I’ve no grounds.’
The general said:
‘Don’t lie. You know what Thurston knows. Do you mean that you have been guilty of contributory misconduct… . Whatever it is? And can’t divorce! I don’t believe it.’
Tietjens said to himself:
‘Why the devil am I so anxious to shield that whore? It’s not reasonable. It is an obsession!’
White Ruthenians are miserable peoples to the south of Lithuania. You don’t know whether they incline to the Germans or to the Poles. The Germans don’t even know… . The Germans were beginning to take their people out of the line where we were weak; they were going to give them proper infantry training. That gave him, Tietjens, a chance. They would not come over strong for at least two months. It meant, though, a great offensive in the spring. Those fellows had sense. In the poor, beastly trenches the Tommies knew nothing but how to chuck bombs. Both sides did that. But the Germans were going to cure it! Stood chucking bombs at each other from forty yards. The rifle was obsolete! Ha! ha! Obsolete! … The civilian psychology!
The general said:
‘No I don’t believe it. I know you did not keep any girl in any tobacco-shop. I remember every word you said at Rye in 1912. I wasn’t sure then. I am now. You tried to let me think it. You had shut up your house because of your wife’s misbehaviour. You let me believe you had been sold up. You weren’t sold up at all.’
… Why should it be the civilian psychology to chuckle with delight, uproariously, when the imbecile idea was promulgated that the rifle was obsolete? Why should public opinion force on the War Office a training-camp course that completely cut out any thorough instruction in the rifle and communication drill? It was queer… . It was of course disastrous. Queer. Not altogether mean. Pathetic, too… .
‘Love of truth!’ the general said. ‘Doesn’t that include a hatred for white lies? No; I suppose it doesn’t, or your servants could not say you were not at home… .’
… Pathetic! Tietjens said to himself. Naturally the civilian population wanted soldiers to be made to look like fools, and to be done in. They wanted the war won by men who would at the end be either humiliated or dead. Or both. Except, naturally, their own cousins or fiancées’ relatives. That was what it came to. That was what it meant when important gentlemen said that they had rather the war were lost than that cavalry should gain any distinction in it! … But it was partly the simple, pathetic illusion of the day that great things could only be done by new inventions. You extinguished the Horse, invented something very simple and became God! That is the real pathetic fallacy. You fill a flower-pot with gun-powder and chuck it in the other fellow’s face, and heigh presto! the war is won. All the soldiers fall down dead! And You: you who forced the idea on the reluctant military, are the Man that Won the War. You deserve all the women in the world. And … you get them! Once the cavalry are out of the way! …
The general was using the words:
‘Head master!’ It brought Tietjens completely back.
He said collectedly:
‘Really, sir, why this strafe of yours is so terribly long is that it embraces the whole of life.’
The general said:
‘You’re not going to drag a red herring across the trail… . I say you regarded me as a head master in 1912. Now I am your commanding officer – which is the same thing. You must not peach to me. That’s what you call the Arnold of Rugby touch… . But who was it said: Magna est veritas et prev … Prev something?’
Tietjens said:
‘I don’t remember, sir.’
The general said:
‘What was the secret grief your mother had? In 1912? She died of it. She wrote to me just before her death and said she had great troubles. And begged me to look after you, very specially! Why did she do that?’ He paused and meditated. He asked: ‘How do you define Anglican sainthood? The other fellows have canonisations, all shipshape like Sandhurst examinations. But us Anglicans … I’ve heard fifty persons say your mother was a saint. She was. But why?’
Tietjens said:
‘It’s the quality of harmony, sir. The quality of being in harmony with your own soul. God having given you your own soul you are then in harmony with Heaven.’
The general said:
‘Ah, that’s beyond me… . I suppose you will refuse any money I leave you in my will?’
Tietjens said:
‘Why, no, sir.’
The general said:
‘But you refused your father’s money. Because he believed things against you. What’s the difference?’
Tietjens said:
‘One’s friends ought to believe that one is a gentleman. Automatically. That is what makes one and them in harmony. Probably your friends are your friends because they look at situations automatically as you look at them… . Mr. Ruggles knew that I was hard up. He envisaged the situation. If he were hard up, what would he do? Make a living out of the immoral earnings of women… . That translated into the Government circles in which he lives means selling your wife or mistress. Naturally he believed that I was the sort of fellow to sell my wife. So that’s what he told my father. The point is, my father should not have believed him.’
‘But I …’ the general said.
Tietjens said:
‘You never believed anything against me, sir.’
The general said:
‘I know I’ve damn well worried myself to death over you …’
Tietjens was sentimentally at rest, still with wet eyes. He was walking near Salisbury in a grove, regarding long pastures and plough-lands running to dark, high elms from which, embowered … Embowered was the word! – peeped the spire of George Herbert’s church. One ought to be a seventeenth-century parson at the time of the renaissance of Anglican saintliness … who wrote, perhaps, poems. No, not poems. Prose. The statelier vehicle!
That was home-sickness! … He himself was never to go home!
The general said:
‘Look here … Your father … I’m concerned about your father… . Didn’t Sylvia perhaps tell him some of the things that distressed him?’
Tietjens said distinctly:
‘No, sir. That responsibility cannot be put on to Sylvia. My father chose to believe things that were said against me by a perfect – or a nearly perfect – stranger… .’ He added: ‘As a matter of fact, Sylvia and my father were not on any sort of terms. I don’t believe they exchanged two words for the last five years of my father’s life.’
The general’s eyes were fixed with an extreme hardness on Tietjens’. He watched Tietjens’ face, beginning with the edges round the nostrils, go chalk white. He said: ‘He knows he’s given his wife away! … Good God!’ With his face colourless, Tietjens’ eyes of porcelain-blue stuck out extraordinarily. The general thought: ‘What an ugly fellow! His face is all crooked!’ They remained looking at each other.
In the silence the voices of men talking over the game of House came as a murmur to them. A rudimentary card game monstrously in favour of the dealer. When you heard voices going on like that you knew they were playing House… . So they had had their dinners.
The general said:
‘It isn’t Sunday, is it?’
Tietjens said:
‘No, sir; Thursday, the seventeenth, I think, of January… .’
The general said:
‘Stupid of me… .’
The men’s voices had reminded him of church bells on a Sunday. And of his youth… . He was sitting beside Mrs. Tietjens’ hammock under the great cedar at the corner of the stone house at Groby. The wind being from the east-north-east the bells of Middlesbrough came to them faintly. Mrs. Tietjens was thirty; he himself thirty; Tietjens – the father – thirty-five or so. A most powerful, quiet man; a wonderful landowner, like his predecessors for generations. It was not from him that this fellow got his … his … his what? … Was it mysticism? … Another word! He himself home on leave from India, his head full of polo. Talking for hours about points in ponies with Tietjens’ father, who was a wonderful hand with a horse… . But this fellow was much more wonderful! … Well, he got that from the sire, not the dam! … He and Tietjens continued to look at each other. It was as if they were hypnotised. The men’s voices went on in a mournful cadence. The general supposed that he too must be pale. He said to himself: ‘This fellow’s mother died of a broken heart in 1912. The father committed suicide five years after. He had not spoken to the son’s wife for four or five years! That takes us back to 1912… . Then, when I strafed him in Rye, the wife was in France with Perowne.’
He looked down at the blanket on the table. He intended again to look up at Tietjens’ eyes with ostentatious care. That was his technique with men. He was a successful general because he knew men. He knew that all men will go to hell over three things: alcohol, money … and sex. This fellow apparently hadn’t. Better for him if he had! He thought:
‘It’s all gone … mother! Father! Groby! This fellow’s down and out. It’s a bit thick.’
He thought:
‘But he’s right to do as he is doing.’
He prepared to look at Tietjens… . He stretched out a sudden, ineffectual hand. Sitting on his beef-case, his hands on his knees, Tietjens had lurched. A sudden lurch – as an old house lurches when it is hit by an H.E. shell. It stopped at that. Then he righted himself. He continued to stare direct at the general. The general looked carefully back. He said – very carefully too:
‘In case I decide to contest West Cleveland, it is your wish that I should make Groby my headquarters?’
Tietjens said:
‘I beg, sir, that you will!’
It was as if they both heaved an enormous sigh of relief. The general said:
‘Then I need not keep you… .’
Tietjens stood on his feet, wanly, but with his heels together.
The general also rose, settling his belt. He said:
‘… You can fall out.’
Tietjens said:
‘My cook-houses, sir… . Sergeant-Cook Case will be very disappointed… . He told me that you couldn’t find anything wrong if I gave him ten minutes to prepare… .’
The general said:
‘Case… . Case… . Case was in the drums when we were at Delhi. He ought to be at least Quartermaster by now… . But he had a woman he called his sister …’
Tietjens said:
‘He still sends money to his sister.’
The general said:
‘He went absent over her when he was colour-sergeant and was reduced to the ranks… . Twenty years ago that must be! … Yes, I’ll see your dinners!’
In the cook-houses, brilliantly accompanied by Colonel Levin, the cook-houses spotless with limed walls and mirrors that were the tops of camp-cookers, the general, Tietjens at his side, walked between goggle-eyed men in white who stood to attention holding ladles. Their eyes bulged, but the corners of their lips curved because they liked the general and his beautifully unconcerned companions. The cook-house was like a cathedral’s nave, aisles being divided off by the pipes of stoves. The floor was of coke-brise shining under french polish and turpentine.
The building paused, as when a godhead descends. In breathless focusing of eyes the godhead, frail and shining, walked with short steps up to a high priest who had a walrus moustache and, with seven medals on his Sunday tunic, gazed away into eternity. The general tapped the sergeant’s Good Conduct ribbon with the heel of his crop. All stretched ears heard him say:
‘How’s your sister, Case? …’
Gazing away, the sergeant said:
‘I’m thinking of making her Mrs. Case …’
Slightly leaving him, in the direction of high, varnished, pitch-pine panels, the general said:
‘I’ll recommend you for a Quartermaster’s commission any day you wish… . Do you remember Sir Garnet inspecting field kitchens at Quetta?’
All the white tubular beings with global eyes resembled the pierrots of a child’s Christmas nightmare. The general said: ‘Stand at ease, men… . Stand easy!’ They moved as white objects move in a childish dream. It was all childish. Their eyes rolled.
Sergeant Case gazed away into infinite distance.
‘My sister would not like it, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m better off as a first-class warrant officer!’
With his light step the shining general went swiftly to the varnis
hed panels in the eastern aisle of the cathedral. The white figure beside them became instantly tubular, motionless, and global-eyed. On the panels were painted:
TEA! SUGAR! SALT! CURRY PDR! FLOUR! PEPPER!
The general tapped with the heel of his crop on the locker-panel labelled PEPPER: the top, right-hand locker-panel. He said to the tubular, global-eyed white figure beside it: ‘Open that, will you, my man? …’
To Tietjens this was like the sudden bursting out of the regimental quick-step, as after a funeral with military honours the band and drums march away, back to barracks.
A MAN COULD STAND UP –
PART ONE
SLOWLY, AMIDST INTOLERABLE noises from, on the one hand the street and, on the other, from the large and voluminously echoing playground, the depths of the telephone began, for Valentine, to assume an aspect that, years ago it had used to have – of being a part of the supernatural paraphernalia of inscrutable Destiny.
The telephone, for some ingeniously torturing reason, was in a corner of the great schoolroom without any protection and, called imperatively, at a moment of considerable suspense, out of the asphalt playground where, under her command ranks of girls had stood electrically only just within the margin of control, Valentine with the receiver at her ear was plunged immediately into incomprehensible news uttered by a voice that she seemed half to remember. Right in the middle of a sentence it hit her:
‘… that he ought presumably to be under control, which you mightn’t like!’; after that the noise burst out again and rendered the voice inaudible.