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 Tietjens’ 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 ‘OP’ 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 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.W.B. 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 over-hanging 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 food ‘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 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 =military 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 fieldmarshal — 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’ Eurydice? . . . ’ he hummed. Absurd! And of course it might have been only the maid that had spoken . . . She too had a remarkably clear voice. So that the mystic word ‘Paddington’ might perfectly well be no symbol at all, and Mrs Sylvia Tietjens, far from being faint and pale, might perfectly well be playing the very devil with half the general officers commanding in chief from Whitehall to Alaska.

Mackenzie — he was like a damned clerk — was transferring the rhymes that he had no doubt at last found, on to another sheet of paper. Probably he had a round, copybook hand. Positively, his tongue followed his pen round, inside his lips. These were what His Majesty’s regular officers of to-day were. Good God! A damned intelligent, dark-looking fellow. Of the type that is starved in its youth and takes all the scholarships that the board schools have to offer. Eyes too big and black. Like a Malay’s . . . Any blasted member of any subject race.

The A.S.C. fellow had been talking positively about horses. He had offered his services in order to study the variation of pink-eye that was decimating all the service horses in the lines. He had been a professor — positively a professor — in some farriery college or other. Tietjens said that, in that case, he ought to be in the A.V.C. — the Royal Army Veterinary Corps perhaps it was. The old man said he didn’t know. He imagined that the R.A.S.C. had wanted his service for their own horses . . .

Tietjens said:

‘I’ll tell you what to do, Lieutenant Hitchcock . . . For, damn it, you’re a stout fellow . . . ’ The poor old fellow, pushing out at that age from the cloisters of some provincial university . . . He certainly did not look a horsy sportsman . . .

The old lietutenant said:

‘Hotchkiss . . . ’ And Tietjens exclaimed:

‘Of course it’s Hotchkiss . . . I’ve seen your name signing a testimonial to Pigg’s Horse Embrocation . . . Then if you don’t want to take this draft up the line . . . Though I’d advise you to . . . It’s merely a Cook’s Tour to Hazebrouck . . . No, Bailleul . . . And the sergeant-major will march the men for you . . . And you will have been in the First Army Lines and able to tell all your friends you’ve been on active service at the real front . . . ’

His mind said to himself while his words went on . . .

‘Then, good God, if Sylvia is actively paying attention to my career I shall be the laughing-stock of the whole army. I was thinking that ten minutes ago! . . . What’s to be done? What in God’s name is to be done?’ A black crape veil seemed to drop across his vision . . . Liver . . .

Lieutenant Hotchkiss said with dignity:

‘I’m going to the front. I’m going to the real front. I was passed A1 this morning. I am going to study the blood reactions of the service horse under fire.’

‘Well, you’re a damn good chap,’ Tietjens said. There was nothing to be done. The amazing activities of which Sylvia would be capable were just the thing to send laughter raging like fire through a cachinnating army. She could not thank God, get into France: to that place. But she could make scandals in the papers that every Tommie read. There was no game of which she was not capable. That sort of pursuit was called ‘pulling the strings of shower-baths’ in her circle of friends. Nothing. Nothing to be done . . . The beastly hurricane lamp was smoking.

‘I’ll tell you what to do,’ he said to Lieutenant Hotchkiss.

Mackenzie had tossed his sheet of rhymes under his nose. Tietjens read: Death, moil, coil, breath . . . Saith— The dirty Cockney!’ Oil, soil, wraith . . .

‘I’d be blowed,’ Mackenzie said with a vicious grin, ‘if I was going to give you rhymes you had suggested yourself . . . ’

The officer said:

‘I don’t of course want to be a nuisance if you’re busy.’

‘It’s no nuisance,’ Tietjens said. ‘It’s what we’re for. But I’d suggest that now and then you say “sir” to the officer commanding your unit. It sounds well before the men . . . Now you go to No. XVI I.B.D. Mess ante-room . . . The place where they’ve got the broken bagatelle-table . . . ’

The voice of Sergeant-Major Cowley exclaimed tranquilly from outside:

-Fall in now. Men who’ve got their ring papers and identity disks — three of them — on the left. Men who haven’t, on the right. Any man who has not been able to draw his blankets tell Colour-Sergeant Morgan. Don’t forget. You won’t get any where you’re going. Any man who hasn’t made his will in his Soldier’s Small Book or elsewhere and wants to, to consult Captain Tietjens. Any man who wants to draw money, ask Captain Mackenzie. Any R.C. who wants to go to confession after he has got his papers signed can find the R.C. padre in the fourth hut from the left in the Main Line from here . . . And damn kind it is of his reverence to put himself out for a set of damn blinking mustard-faced red herrings like you who can’t keep from running away to the first baby’s bonfire you sees. You’ll be running the other way before you’re a week older, though what good they as asks for you thinks you’ll be out there God knows. You look like a squad of infants’ companions from a Wesleyan Sunday school. That’s what you look like and, thank God, we’ve got a Navy.’

Under cover of his voice Tietjens had been writing:

‘Now we affront the grinning chops of Death,’ and saying to Lieutenant Hotchkiss: ‘In the I.B.D. ante-room you’ll find any number of dirty little squits of Glamorgan-shires drinking themselves blind over La Vie Parisienne . . . Ask any one of them you like . . . ’ He wrote:

‘And in between the carcases and the moil

Of marts and cities, toil and moil and coil . . . ’

‘You think this difficult!’ he said to Mackenzie. ‘Why, you’ve written a whole undertaker’s mortuary ode in the rhymes alone,’ and went on to Hotchkiss: ‘Ask anyone you like as long as he’s a P.B. officer . . . Do you know what P.B. means? No, not Poor B——y, Permanent Base. Unfit . . . If he’d like to take a draft to Bailleul.’

The hut was filling with devious, slow, ungainly men in yellow-brown. Their feet shuffled desultorily; they lumped dull canvas bags along the floor and held in unliterary hands small open books that they dropped from time to time. From outside came a continuing, swelling and descending chant of voices; at times it would seem to be all one laugh, at times one menace, then the motives mingled fugally, like the sea on a beach of large stones. It seemed to Tietjens suddenly extraordinary how shut in on oneself one was in this life . . . He sat scribbling fast: ‘Old Spectre blows a cold protecting breath . . . Vanity of vanities, the preacher saith . . . No more parades, not any more, no oil . . . ’ He was telling Hotchkiss, who was obviously shy of approaching the Glamorganshires in their ante-room . . . ‘Unambergris’d our limbs in the naked soil . . . ’ that he did not suppose any P.B. officer would object. They would go on a beanfeast up into the giddy line in a first-class carriage and get draft leave and command pay too probably . . . ‘No funeral struments cast before our wraiths . . . ’ If any fellow does object, you just send his name to me and I will damn well shove it into extra orders . . .

The advanced wave of the brown tide of men was already at his feet. The extraordinary complications of even the simplest lives . . . A fellow was beside him Private Logan, formerly, of all queer things for a Canadian private, a trooper of the Inniskillings: owner, of all queer things, of a milk-walk or a dairy farm, outside Sydney, which is in Australia . . . A man of sentimental complications, jauntiness as became an Inniskilling, a Cockney accent such as ornaments the inhabitants of Sydney, and a complete distrust of lawyers. On the other hand, with the completest trust in Tietjens. Over his shoulder — he was blond, upright, with his numerals shining like gold, looked a lumpish, café-au-lait, eagle-nosed countenance: a half-caste member of one of the Six Nations, who had been a doctor’s errand boy in Quebec . . . He had his troubles, but was difficult to understand. Behind him, very black-avised with a high colour, truculent eyes and an Irish accent, was a graduate of McGill University who had been a teacher of languages in Tokyo and had some sort of claim against the Japanese Government . . . And faces, two and two, in a coil round the hut . . . Like dust: like a cloud of dust that would approach and overwhelm a landscape: every one with preposterous troubles and anxieties, even if they did not overwhelm you personally with them . . . Brown dust . . .

He kept the Inniskilling waiting while he scribbled the rapid sestet to his sonnet which ought to make a little plainer what it all meant. Of course the general idea was that, when you got into the line or near it, there was no room for swank: typified by expensive funerals. As you might say: No flowers by compulsion . . . No more parades! . . . He had also to explain, while he did it, to the heroic veterinary sexagenarian that he need not feel shy about going into the Glamorganshire Mess on a man-catching expedition. The Glamorganshires were bound to lend him, Tietjens, P.B. officers if they had not got other jobs. Lieutenant Hotchkiss could speak to Colonel Johnson, whom he would find in the mess and quite good natured over his dinner. A pleasant and sympathetic old gentleman who would appreciate Hotchkiss’s desire not to go superfluously into the line. Hotchkiss could offer to take a look at the colonel’s charger: a Hun horse, captured on the Marne and called Schomburg, that was off its feed . . . He added: ‘But don’t do anything professional to Schomburg. I ride him myself!’

He threw his sonnet across to Mackenzie, who with a background of huddled khaki limbs and anxious faces was himself anxiously counting out French currency notes and dubious-looking tokens . . . What the deuce did men want to draw money — sometimes quite large sums of money, the Canadians being paid in dollars converted into local coins — when in an hour or so they would be going up? But they always did and their accounts were always in an incredibly entangled state. Mackenzie might well look worried. As like as not he might find himself a fiver or more down at the end of the evening for unauthorized payments. If he had only his pay and an extravagant wife to keep, that might well put the wind up him. But that was his funeral. He told Lieutenant Hotchkiss to come and have a chat with him in his hut, the one next the mess. About horses. He knew a little about horse-illness himself. Only empirically, of course.

Mackenzie was looking at his watch.

‘You took two minutes and eleven seconds,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it for granted it’s a sonnet . . . I have not read it because I can’t turn it into Latin here . . . I haven’t got your knack of doing eleven things at once . . . ’

A man with a worried face, encumbered by a bundle and a small book, was studying figures at Mackenzie’s elbow. He interrupted Mackenzie in a high American voice to say that he had never drawn fourteen dollars seventy-five cents in Thrasna Barracks, Aldershot.

Mackenzie said to Tietjens:

‘You understand. I have not read your sonnet. I shall turn it into Latin in the mess: in the time stipulated. I don’t want you to think I’ve read it and taken time to think about it.’

The man besides him said:

‘When I went to the Canadian Agent, Strand, London, his office was shut up . . . ’

Mackenzie said with white fury:

‘How much service have you got? Don’t you know better than to interrupt an officer when he is talking? You must settle your own figures with your own confounded Colonial paymaster: I’ve sixteen dollars thirty cents here for you. Will you take them or leave them?’

Tietjens said:

‘I know that man’s case. Turn him over to me. It isn’t complicated. He’s got his paymaster’s cheque, but doesn’t know how to cash it and of course they won’t give him another . . .

The man with slow, broad, brown features looked from one to the other officer’s face and back again with a keen black-eyed scrutiny as if he were looking into a wind and dazed by the light. He began a long story of how he owed Fat-Eared Bill fifty dollars lost at House. He was perhaps half Chinese, half Finn. He continued to talk, being in a state of great anxiety about his money. Tietjens addressed himself to the cases of the Sydney Inniskilling ex-trooper and the McGill graduate who had suffered at the hands of the Japanese Educational Ministry. It made altogether a complicated effect. ‘You would say,’ Tietjens said to himself, ‘that, all together, it ought to be enough to take my mind up.’

The upright trooper had a very complicated sentimental history. It was difficult to advise him before his fellows. He, however, felt no diffidence. He discussed the points of the girl called Rosie whom he had followed from Sydney to British Columbia, of the girl called Gwen with whom he had taken up in Aberystwyth, of the woman called Mrs Hosier with whom he had lived maritally, on a sleeping-out pass, at Berwick St. James, near Salisbury Plain. Through the continuing voice of the half-caste Chinaman he discussed them with a large tolerance, ex-p aiming that he wanted them all to have a bit, as a souvenir, if he happened to stop one out there. Tietjens handed him the draft of a will he had written out for him, asked him to read it attentively and copy it with his own hand into his soldier’s small book. Then Tietjens would witness it for him. He said:

‘Do you think this will make my old woman in Sydney part? I guess it won’t. She’s a sticker, sir. A regular July bur, God bless her.’ The McGill graduate was beginning already to introduce a further complication into his story of complications with the Japanese Government. It appeared that in addition to his scholastic performances he had invested a little money in a mineral water spring near Kobe, the water, bottled, being exported to San Francisco. Apparently his company had been indulging in irregularities according to Japanese law, but a pure French Canadian, who had experienced some difficulties in obtaining his baptismal certificate from a mission somewhere in the direction of the Klondike, was allowed by Tietjens to interrupt the story of the graduate; and several men without complications, but anxious to get their papers signed so as to write last letters home before the draft moved, overflowed across Tietjens’ table . . .

The tobacco smoke from the pipes of the N.C.O.’s at the other end of the room hung, opalescent, beneath the wire cages of the brilliant hurricane lamps hung over each table; buttons and numerals gleamed in the air that the universal khaki tinge of the limbs seemed to turn brown, as if into a gas of dust. Nasal voices, throat voices, drawling voices, melted into a rustle so that the occasional high, sing-song profanity of a Welsh N.C.O.: Why the hell haffn’t you got your 124? Why the —— hell haffn’t you got your 124? Don’t you know you haff to haff your bleedin’ 124’s? seemed to wail tragically through a silence . . . The evening wore on and on. It astounded Tietjens, looking at one time at his watch, to discover that it was only 21 hrs. 19. He seemed to have been thinking drowsily of his own affairs for ten hours . . . For, in the end, these were his own affairs . . . Money, women, testamentary bothers. Each of these complications from over the Atlantic and round the world were his own troubles: a world in labour: an army being moved off in the night. Shoved off. Anyhow. And over the top. A lateral section of the world . . .

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 na?ve 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............