As a final salute to the on the whole not thrilling landscape, he wetted his forefinger by inserting it in his mouth and held it in the air. It was comfortingly chilly on the exterior, towards his back. Light airs were going right in the other fellows’ faces. It might be only the dawn wind. But if it stiffened a very little or even held, those blessed Württembergers would never that day get out of their trenches. They couldn’t come without gas. They were probably pretty well weakened, too… . You were not traditionally supposed to think much of Württembergers. Mild, dull creatures they were supposed to be. With funny hats. Good Lord! Traditions were going by the board!
He dropped down into the trench. The rather reddish soil with flakes of flint and little, pinkish nodules of pebbles was a friendly thing to face closely.
That sergeant was saying:
‘You hadn’t ought to do it, sir. Give me the creeps.’ He added rather lachrymosely that they couldn’t do without superior officers altogether. Odd creatures these Derby N.C.O.s! They tried to get the tone of the old, timeserving N.C.O. They couldn’t; all the same you couldn’t say they weren’t creditable achievements.
Yes, it was friendly, the trench face. And singularly unbellicose. When you looked at it you hardly believed that it was part of this affair… . Friendly! You felt at peace looking at its flints and pebbles. Like being in the butts up above Groby on the moor, waiting for the grouse to come over. The soil was not of course like those butts which were built of turfs… .
He asked, not so much for information, as to get the note of this fellow:
Why? What difference did it make whether there were senior officers or not? Anyone above eighteen would do, wouldn’t they? They would keep on going on. It was a young man’s war!
‘It hasn’t got that comfortable feeling, sir!’ the sergeant expressed it. The young officers were very well for keeping you going through wire and barrages. But when you looked at them you didn’t feel they knew so well what you were doing it for, if he might put it that way.
Tietjens said:
‘Why? What are you doing it for?’
It wanted thirty-two minutes to the crucial moment. He said:
‘Where are those bloody bombs?’
A trench cut in gravel wasn’t, for all its friendly reddish-orange coloration, the ideal trench. Particularly against rifle-fire. There were rifts, presumably alongside flakes of flint that a rifle-bullet would get along. Still, the chances against a hit by a rifle-bullet were eighty thousand-to-one in a deep gravel trench like that. And he had had poor Jimmy Johns killed beside him by a bullet like that. So that gave him, say 140,000 chances-to-one against. He wished his mind would not go on and on figuring. It did it whilst you weren’t looking. As a well-trained dog will do when you tell it to stay in one part of a room and it prefers another. It prefers to do figuring. Creeps from the rug by the door to the hearth-rug, its eyes on your unconscious face… . That was what your mind was like. Like a dog!
The sergeant said:
‘They do say the first consignment of bombs was ’it ’n smashed. Hin a gully; well behind the line.’ Another was coming down.
‘Then you’d better whistle,’ Tietjens said ‘Whistle for all you’re worth.’
The sergeant said:
‘Fer a wind, sir? Keep the ’Uns’ beck, sir?’
Looking up at the whitewash cockscomb Tietjens lectured the sergeant on Gas. He always had said, and he said now, that the Germans had ruined themselves with their gas.
He went on lecturing that sergeant on gas… . He considered his mind: it was alarming him. All through the war he had had one dread – that a wound, the physical shock of a wound, would cause his mind to fail. He was going to be hit behind the collar-bone. He could feel the spot; not itching, but the blood pulsing just a little warmer. Just as you can become conscious of the end of your nose if you think about it!
The sergeant said that ’e wished ’e could feel the Germans ’ad ruined theirselves: they seemed to be drivin’ us into the Channel. Tietjens gave his reasons. They were driving us. But not fast enough. Not fast enough. It was a race between our disappearance and their endurance. They had been hung up yesterday by the wind, they were as like as not going to be held up to-day… . They were not going fast enough. They could not keep it up.
The sergeant said ’e wished, sir, you’d tell the men that. That was what the men ought to be told; not the stuff that was hin Divisional Comic Cuts and the ’ome pipers… .
A key-bugle of singular sweetness – at least Tietjens supposed it to be a key-bugle, for he knew the identities of practically no wind-instruments; it was certainly not a cavalry bugle, for there were no cavalry and even no Army Service Corps at all near – a bugle, then, of astounding sweetness made some remarks to the cool, wet dawn. It induced an astonishingly melting mood. He remarked:
‘Do you mean to say, then, that your men, Sergeant, are really damned heroes? I suppose they are!’
He said ‘your men’, instead of ‘our’ or even ‘the’ men, because he had been till the day before yesterday merely the second-in-command – and was likely to be to-morrow again merely the perfectly inactive second-in-command of what was called a rag-time collection that was astonishingly a clique and mutely combined to regard him as an outsider. So he really regarded himself as rather a spectator; as if a railway passenger had taken charge of a locomotive whilst the engine-driver had gone to have a drink.
The sergeant flushed with pleasure. Hit was, he said, good to ’ave prise from Regular officers. Tietjens said that he was not a Regular.
The sergeant stammered:
‘Hain’t you, sir, a Ranker? The men all thinks you are a promoted ranker.’
No, Tietjens said, he was not a promoted Ranker. He added, after consideration, that he was a militiaman. The men would have, by the will of chance, to put up with his leadership for at least that day. They might as well feel as good about it as they could – as settled in their stomachs! It certainly made a difference that the men should feel assured about their officers; what exact difference there was no knowing. This crowd was not going to get any satisfaction out of being led by a ‘gentleman’. They did not know what a gentleman was: a quite un-feudal crowd. Mostly Derby men. Small drapers, rate-collectors’ clerks, gas-inspectors. There were even three music-hall performers, two scene shifters and several milkmen.
It was another tradition that was gone. Still, they desired the companionship of elder, heavier men who had certain knowledges. A militiaman probably filled the bill! Well, he was that, officially!
He glanced aside and upwards at the whitewash cockscomb. He regarded it carefully and with amusement. He knew what it was that had made his mind take the particular turn it had insisted on taking… . The picks going in the dark under the H.Q. dug-out in the Cassenoisette section. The men called it Crackerjack.
He had been all his life familiar with the idea of picks going in the dark, underground. There is no North Country man who is not. All through that country, if you awake at night you hear the sound, and always it appears supernatural. You know it is the miners, at the pit-face, hundreds and hundreds of feet down.
But just because it was familiar, it was familiarly rather dreadful. Haunting. And the silence had come at a bad moment. After a perfect hell of noise; after so much of noise that he had been forced to ascend the slippery clay stairs of the dug-out… . And heaven knew if there was one thing that on account of his heavy-breathing chest he loathed, it was slippery clay … he had been forced to pant up those slippery stairs… . His chest had been much worse, then … two months ago!
Curiosity had forced him up. And no doubt FEAR. The large battle fear; not the constant little, haunting misgivings. God knew! Curiosity or fear. In terrific noise; noise like the rushing up of innumerable noises determined not to be late, whilst the earth rocks or bumps or quakes or protests, you cannot be very coherent about your thoughts. So it might have been cool curiosity or it might have been sheer panic at the thought
of being buried alive in that dug-out, its mouth sealed up. Anyhow, he had gone up from the dug-out where in his capacity of second-in-command, detested as an interloper by his C.O., he had sat ignominiously in that idleness of the second-in-command that it is in the power of the C.O. to inflict. He was to sit there till the C.O. dropped dead: then, however much the C.O. might detest him, to step into his shoes. Nothing the C.O. could do could stop that. In the meantime, as long as the C.O. existed, the second-in-command must be idle; he would be given nothing to do. For fear he got kudos!
Tietjens flattered himself that he cared nothing about kudos. He was still Tietjens of Groby; no man could give him anything, no man could take anything from him. He flattered himself that he in no way feared death, pain, dishonour, the afterdeath, feared very little disease – except for choking sensations! … But his Colonel got in on him.
He had no disagreeable feelings, thinking of the Colonel. A good boy, as boys go; perfectly warranted in hating his second-in-command… . There are positions like that! But the fellow got in on him. He shut him up in that reeling cellar. And, of course, you might lose control of your mind in a reeling cellar where you cannot hear your thoughts. If you cannot hear your thoughts how the hell are you going to tell what your thoughts are doing?
You couldn’t hear. There was an orderly with fever or shell-shock or something – a rather favourite orderly of the orderly room – asleep on a pile of rugs. Earlier in the night Orderly Room had asked permission to dump the boy in there because he was making such a beastly row in his sleep that they could not hear themselves speak and they had a lot of paperwork to do. They could not tell what had happened to the boy, whom they liked. The acting sergeant-major thought he must have got at some methylated spirits.
Immediately, that strafe had begun. The boy had lain, his face to the light of the lamp, on his pile of rugs – army blankets, that is to say… . A very blond boy’s face, contorted in the strong light, shrieking – positively shrieking obscenities at the flame. But with his eyes shut. And two minutes after that strafe had begun you could see his lips move, that was all.
Well, he, Tietjens, had gone up. Curiosity or fear? In the trench you could see nothing and noise rushed like black angels gone mad; solid noise that swept you off your feet… . Swept your brain off its feet. Something else took control of it. You became second-in-command of your own soul. Waiting for its C.O. to be squashed flat by the direct hit of a four point two before you got control again.
There was nothing to see; mad lights whirled over the black heavens. He moved along the mud of the trench. It amazed him to find that it was raining. In torrents. You imagined that the heavenly powers in decency suspended their activities at such moments. But there was positively lightning. They didn’t! A Verey light or something extinguished that – not very efficient lightning, really. Just at that moment he fell on his nose at an angle of forty-five degrees against some squashed earth where, as he remembered, the parapet had been revetted. The trench had been squashed in, level with the outside ground. A pair of boots emerged from the pile of mud. How the deuce did the fellow get into that position?
Broadside on to the hostilities in progress! … But, naturally, he had been running along the trench when that stuff buried him. Clean buried, anyhow. The obliging Verey light showed to Tietjens, just level with his left hand, a number of small smoking fragments. The white smoke ran level with the ground in a stiff breeze. Other little patches of smoke added themselves quickly. The Verey light went out. Things were coming over. Something hit his foot; the heel of his boot. Not unpleasantly, a smarting feeling as if his sole had been slapped.
It suggested itself to him, under all the noise, that there being no parapet there… . He got back into the trench towards the dug-out, skating in the sticky mud. The duckboards were completely sunk in it. In the whole affair it was the slippery mud he hated most. Again a Verey light obliged, but the trench being deep there was nothing to see except the backside of a man. Tietjens said:
‘If he’s wounded … Even if he’s dead one ought to pull him down… . And get the Victoria Cross!’
The figure slid down into the trench. Speedily, with drill-movements, engrossed, it crammed two clips of cartridges into a rifle correctly held at the loading angle. In a rift of the noise, like a crack in the wall of a house, it remarked:
‘Can’t reload lying up there, sir. Mud gets into your magazine.’ He became again merely the sitting portion of a man, presenting to view the only part of him that was not caked with mud. The Verey light faded. Another reinforced the blinking effect. From just overhead.
Round the next traverse after the mouth of their dug-out a rapt face of a tiny subaltern, gazing upwards at a Verey illumination, with an elbow on an inequality of the trench and the forearm pointing upwards suggested – the rapt face suggested The Soul’s Awakening! … In another rift in the sound the voice of the tiny subaltern stated that he had to economise the Verey cartridges. The battalion was very short. At the same time it was difficult to time them so as to keep the lights going… . This seemed fantastic! The Huns were just coming over.
With the finger of his upward pointing hand the tiny subaltern pulled the trigger of his upward pointing pistol. A second later more brilliant illumination descended from above. The subaltern pointed the clumsy pistol to the ground in the considerable physical effort – for such a tiny person! – to reload the large implement. A very gallant child – name of Aranjuez. Maltese, or Portuguese, or Levantine – in origin.
The pointing of the pistol downwards revealed that he had practically coiled around his little feet, a collection of tubular, dead, khaki limbs. It didn’t need any rift in the sound to make you understand that his loader had been killed on him… . By signs and removing his pistol from his grasp Tietjens made the subaltern – he was only two days out from England – understand that he had better go and get a drink and some bearers for the man who might not be dead.
He was, however. When they removed him a little to make room for Tietjens’ immensely larger boots his arms just flopped in the mud, the tin hat that covered the face, to the sky. Like a lay figure, but a little less stiff. Not yet cold.
Tietjens became like a solitary statue of the Bard of Avon, the shelf for his elbow being rather low. Noise increased. The orchestra was bringing in all the brass, all the strings, all the wood-wind, all the percussion instruments. The performers threw about biscuit tins filled with horse-shoes; they emptied sacks of coal on cracked gongs, they threw down forty-storey iron houses. It was comic to the extent that an operatic orchestra’s crescendo is comic. Crescendo! … Crescendo! CRRRRRESC… . The Hero must be coming! He didn’t!
Still like Shakespeare contemplating the creation of, say, Cordelia, Tietjens leaned against his shelf. From time to time he pulled the trigger of the horse-pistol; from time to time he rested the butt on his ledge and rammed a charge home. When one jammed he took another. He found himself keeping up a fairly steady illumination.
The Hero arrived. Naturally, he was a Hun. He came over, all legs and arms going, like a catamount; struck the face of the parados, fell into the trench on the dead body, with his hands to his eyes, sprang up again and danced. With heavy deliberation Tietjens drew his great trench-knife rather than his revolver. Why? The butcher instinct? Or trying to think himself with the Exmoor stag-hounds. The man’s shoulders had come heavily on him as he had rebounded from the parados-face. He felt outraged. Watching that performing Hun he held the knife pointed and tried to think of the German for Hands Up. He imagined it to be Hoch die Haende! He looked for a nice spot in the Hun’s side.
His excursion into a foreign tongue proved supererogatory. The German threw his arm abroad, his – considerably mashed! – face to the sky.
Always dramatic, Cousin Fritz! Too dramatic, really.
He fell, crumbling, into his untidy boots. Nasty boots, all crumpled too, up the calves! But he didn’t say Hoch der Kaiser, or Deutschland über alles, or anything valedicto
ry.
Tietjens fired another light upwards and filled in another charge, then, down on his hams in the mud he squatted over the German’s head, the fingers of both hands under the head. He could feel the great groans thrill his fingers. He let go and felt tentatively for his brandy flask.
But there was a muddy group round the traverse end. The noise reduced itself to half. It was bearers for the corpse. And the absurdly wee Aranjuez and a new loader… . In those days they had not been so short of men! Shouts were coming along the trench. No doubt other Huns were in.
Noise reduced itself to a third. A bumpy diminuendo. Bumpy! Sacks of coal continued to fall down the stairs with a regular cadence; more irregularly, Bloody Mary, who was just behind the trench, or seemed like it, shook the whole house as you might say and there were other naval howitzers or something, somewhere.
Tietjens said to the bearers:
‘Take the Hun first. He’s alive. Our man’s dead.’ He was quite remarkably dead. He hadn’t, Tietjens had observed, when he bent over the German, really got what you might call a head, though there was something in its place. What had done that?
Aranjuez, taking his place beside the trench-face, said:
‘Damn cool you were, sir. Damn cool. I never saw a knife drawn so slow!’ They had watched the Hun do the danse du ventre! The poor beggar had had rifles and the young feller’s revolver turned on him all the time. They would probably have shot him some more but for the fear of hitting Tietjens. Half a dozen Germans had jumped into that sector of trenches in various places. As mad as March hares! … That fellow had been shot through both eyes, a fact that seemed to fill the little Aranjuez with singular horror. He said he would go mad if he thought he would be blinded, because there was a girl in the tea-shop at Bailleul, and a fellow called Spofforth of the Wiltshires would get her if his, Aranjuez’s, beauty was spoiled. He positively whimpered at the thought and then gave the information that this was considered to be a false alarm, he meant a feigned attack to draw off troops from somewhere else where the real attempt was being made. There must be pretty good hell going on somewhere else, then.