They had gone back up the hill so that Levin might telephone to headquarters for his own car in case the general’s chauffeur should not have the sense to return for him. But that was as far as Tietjens got in uninterrupted reminiscences of that scene . . . He was sitting in his fleabag, digging idly with his pencil into the squared page of his note-book which had remained open on his knees, his eyes going over and over again over the words with which his report on his own case had concluded — the words: So the interview ended rather untidily. Over the words went the image of the dark hillside with the lights of the town, now that the air-raid was finished, spreading high up into the sky below them . . .

But at that point the doctor’s batman had uttered, as if with a jocular, hoarse irony, the name:

‘Poor —— 0 Nine Morgan! . . . ’ and over the whitish sheet of paper on a level with his nose Tietjens perceived thin films of reddish purple to be wavering, then a glutinous surface of gummy scarlet pigment. Moving! It was once more an effect of fatigue, operating on the retina, that was perfectly familiar to Tietjens. But it filled him with indignation against his own weakness. He said to himself: Wasn’t the name of the wretched 0 Nine Morgan to be mentioned in his hearing without his retina presenting him with the glowing image of the fellow’s blood? He watched the phenomenon, growing fainter, moving to the right-hand top corner of the paper and turning a faintly luminous green. He watched it with a grim irony.

Was he, he said to himself, to regard himself as responsible for the fellow’s death? Was his inner mentality going to present that claim upon him? That would be absurd. The end of the earth! The absurd end of the earth . . . Yet that insignificant ass Levin had that evening asserted the claim to go into his, Tietjens of Groby’s, relations with his wife. That was an end of the earth as absurd! It was the unthinkable thing, as unthinkable as the theory that the officer can be responsible for the death of the man . . . But the idea had certainly presented itself to him. How could he be responsible for the death? In fact — in literalness — he was. It had depended absolutely upon his discretion whether the man should go home or not. The man’s life or death had been in his hands. He had followed the perfectly correct course. He had written to the police of the man’s home town, and the police had urged him not to let the man come home . . . Extraordinary morality on the part of a police force! The man, they begged, should not be sent home because a prize-fighter was occupying his bed and laundry . . . Extraordinary common sense, very likely . . . They probably did not want to get drawn into a scrap with Red Evans of the Red Castle . . .

For a moment he seemed to see . . . he actually saw . . . 0 Nine Morgan’s eyes, looking at him with a sort of wonder, as they had looked when he had refused the fellow his leave . . . A sort of wonder! Without resentment, but with incredulity. As you might look at God, you being very small and ten feet or so below His throne when He pronounced some inscrutable judgment! . . . The Lord giveth home-leave, and the Lord refuseth . . . Probably not blessed, but queer, be the name of God-Tietjens!

And at the thought of the man as he was alive and of him now, dead, an immense blackness descended all over Tietjens. He said to himself: I am very tired. Yet he was not ashamed . . . It was the blackness that descends on you when you think of your dead . . . It comes, at any time, over the brightness of sunlight, in the grey of evening, in the grey of the dawn, at mess, on parade: it comes at the thought of one man or at the thought of half a battalion that you have seen, stretched out, under sheeting, the noses making little pimples: or not stretched out, lying face downwards, half buried. Or at the thought of dead that you have never seen dead at all . . . Suddenly the light goes out . . . In this case it was because of one fellow, a dirty enough man, not even very willing, not in the least endearing, certainly contemplating desertion . . . But your dead . . . Yours . . . Your own. As if joined to your own identity by a black cord . . .

In the darkness outside, the brushing, swift, rhythmic pacing of an immense number of men went past, as if they had been phantoms. A great number of men in fours, carried forward, irresistibly, by the overwhelming will of mankind in ruled motion. The sides of the hut were so thin that is was peopled by an innumerable throng. A sodden voice, just at Tietjens’ head, chuckled: ‘For God’s sake, sergeant-major, stop these —— I’m too —— drunk to halt them . . . ’

It made for the moment no impression on Tietjens’ conscious mind. Men were going past. Cries went up in the camp. Not orders, the men were still marching. Cries.

Tietjens’ lips — his mind was still with the dead — said:

‘That obscene Pitkins! I’ll have him cashiered for this . . . ’ He saw an obscene subaltern, small, with one eyelid that drooped.

He came awake at that. Pitkins was the subaltern he had detailed to march the draft to the station and go on to Bailleul under a boozy field officer of sorts.

McKechnie said from the other bed:

‘That’s the draft back.’

Tietjens said:

‘Good God! . . . ’

McKechnie said to the batman:

‘For God’s sake go and see if it is. Come back at once . . . ’

The intolerable vision of the line, starving beneath the moon, of grey crowds murderously elbowing back a thin crowd in brown, zigzagged across the bronze light in the hut. The intolerable depression that, in those days, we felt — that all those millions were the play-things of ants busy in the miles of corridors beneath the domes and spires that rise up over the central heart of our comity, that intolerable weight upon the brain and the limbs, descended once more on those two men lying upon their elbows. As they listened their jaws fell open. The long, polyphonic babble, rushing in from an extended line of men stood easy, alone rewarded their ears.

Tietjens said:

‘That fellow won’t come back . . . He can never do an errand and come back . . . ’ He thrust one of his legs cumbrously out of the top of his flea-bag. He said:

‘By God, the Germans will be all over here in a week’s time!’

He said to himself:

‘If they so betray us from Whitehall that fellow Levin has no right to pry into my matrimonial affairs. It is proper that one’s individual feelings should be sacrificed to the necessities of a collective entity. But not if that entity is to be betrayed from above. Not if it hasn’t the ten-millionth of a chance . . . ’ He regarded Levin’s late incursion on his privacy as inquiries set afoot by the general . . . Incredibly painful to him . . . like a medical examination into nudities, but perfectly proper. Old Campion had to assure himself that the other ranks were not demoralized by the spectacle of officers’ matrimonial ‘infidelities . . . But such inquiries were not to be submitted to if the whole show were one gigantic demoralization!

McKechnie said, in reference to Tietjens’ protruded foot:

‘There’s no good your going out . . . Cowley will get the men into their lines. He was prepared.’ He added: ‘If the fellows in Whitehall are determined to do old Puffies in, why don’t they recall him?’

The legend was that an eminent personage in the Government had a great personal dislike for the general in command of one army — the general being nicknamed Puffles. The Government, therefore, were said to be starving his command of men so that disaster should fall upon his command.

‘They can recall generals easy enough,’ McKechnie went on, ‘or anyone else!’

A heavy dislike that this member of the lower middle classes should have opinions on public affairs overcame Tietjens. He exclaimed: ‘Oh, that’s all tripe!’

He was himself outside all contact with affairs by now. But the other rumour in that troubled host had it that, as a political manoeuvre, the heads round Whitehall — the civilian heads — were starving the army of troops in order to hold over the allies of Great Britain the threat of abandoning altogether the Western Front. They were credited with threatening a strategic manoeuvre on an immense scale in the Near East, perhaps really intending it, or perhaps to force the hands of their allies over some political intrigue. These atrocious rumours reverberated backwards and forwards in the ears of all those millions under the black vault of heaven. All their comrades in the line were to be sacrificed as a rearguard to their departing host. That whole land was to be annihilated as a sacrifice to one vanity. Now the draft had been called back. That seemed proof that the Government meant to starve the line! McKechnie groaned:

‘Poor —— old Bird! . . . He’s booked. Eleven months in the front line, he’s been . . . Eleven months! . . . I was nine, this stretch. With him.’

He added:

‘Get back into bed, old bean . . . I’ll go and look after the men if it’s necessary . . . ’

Tietjens said:

‘You don’t so much as know where their lines are . . . ’ And sat listening. Nothing but the long roll of tongues came to him. He said:

‘Damn it 1 The men ought not to be kept standing in the cold like that . . . ’ Fury filled him beneath despair. His eyes filled with tears. ‘God,’ he said to himself, ‘the fellow Levin presumes to interfere in my private affair . . . Damn it,’ he said again, ‘it’s like doing a little impertinence in a world that’s foundering . . . ’

‘I’d go out,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want to have to put that filthy little Pitkins under arrest. He only drinks because he’s shellshocked. He’s not man enough else, the unclean little Nonconformist . . . ’

McKechnie said:

‘Hold on! . . . I’m a Presbyterian myself . . . ’

Tietjens answered:

‘You would be! . . . ’ He said: ‘I beg your pardon . . . There will be no more parades . . . The British Army is dishonoured for ever . . . ’

McKechnie said:

‘That’s all right, old bean . . . ’

Tietjens exclaimed with sudden violence:

‘What the hell are you doing in the officers’ lines? . . . Don’t you know it’s a court-martial offence?’

He was confronted with the broad, mealy face of his regimental quartermaster-sergeant, the sort of fellow who wore an officer’s cap against the regulations, with a Tommie’s silver-plated badge. A man determined to get Sergeant-Major Cowley’s job. The man had come in unheard under the roll of voices outside. He said:

‘Excuse me, sir, I took the liberty of knocking . . . The sergeant-major is in an epileptic fit . . . I wanted your directions before putting the draft into the tents with the other men . . . ’ Having said that tentatively he hazarded cautiously: ‘The sergeant-major throws these fits, sir, if he is suddenly woke up . . . And Second-Lieutenant Pitkins woke him very suddenly . . . ’

Tietjens said:

‘So you took on you the job of a beastly informer against both of them . . . I shan’t forget it.’ He said to himself:

‘I’ll get this fellow one day . . . ’ and he seemed to hear with pleasure the clicking and tearing of the scissors as, inside three parts of a hollow square, they cut off his stripes and badges.

McKechnie exclaimed:

‘Good God, man, you aren’t going out in nothing but your pyjamas. Put your slacks on under your British warm . . . ’

Tietjens said:

‘Send the Canadian sergeant-major to me at the double . . . ’ to the quarter. ‘My slacks are at the tailor’s, being pressed.’ His slacks were being pressed for the ceremony of the signing of the marriage contract of Levin, the fellow who had interfered in his private affairs. He continued into the mealy broad face and vague eyes of the quartermaster: ‘You know as well as I do that it was the Canadian sergeant-major’s job to report to me . . . I’ll let you off this time, but, by God, if I catch you spying round the officers’ lines again you are for a D.C.M . . . ’

He wrapped a coarse, Red Cross, grey-wool muffler under the turned-up collar of his British warm.

‘That swine,’ he said to McKechnie, ‘spies on the officers’ lines in the hope of getting a commission by catching out —— little squits like Pitkins, when they’re drunk . . . I’m seven hundred braces down. Morgan does not know that I know that I’m that much down. But you can bet he knows where they have gone . . . ’

McKechnie said:

‘I wish you would not go out like that . . . I’ll make you some cocoa . . . ’

Tietjens said:

‘I can’t keep the men waiting while I dress . . . I’m as strong as a horse . . . ’

He was out amongst the bitterness, the mist, and the moongleams on three thousand rifle barrels, and the voices . . . He was seeing the Germans pour through a thin line, and his heart was leaden . . . A tall, graceful man swam up against him and said, through his nose, like an American: ‘There has been a railway accident, due to the French strikers. The draft is put back till three pip emma the day after to-morrow, sir.’

Tietjens exclaimed:

‘It isn’t countermanded?’ breathlessly.

The Canadian sergeant-major said:

‘No, sir . . . A railway accident . . . Sabotage by the French, they say . . . Four Glamorganshire sergeants, all nineteen-fourteen men, killed, sir, going home on leave. But the draft is not cancelled . . . ’ Tietjens said:

‘Thank God!’

The slim Canadian with his educated voice said:

‘You’re thanking God, sir, for what’s very much to our detriment. Our draft was ordered for Salonika till this morning. The sergeant in charge of draft returns showed me the name Salonika scored off in his draft roster. Sergeant-Major Cowley had got hold of the wrong story. Now it’s going up the line. The other would have been a full two months’ more life for us.’

The man’s rather slow voice seemed to continue for a long time. As it went on Tietjens felt the sunlight dwelling on his nearly coverless limbs, and the tide of youth returning to his veins. It was like champagne. He said:

‘You sergeants get a great deal too much information. The sergeant in charge of returns had no business to show you his roster. It’s not your fault, of course. But you are an intelligent man. You can see how useful that news might be to certain people: people that it’s not to your own interest should know these things . . . ’ He said to himself: ‘A landmark in history . . . ’ And then: ‘Where the devil did my mind get hold of that expression at this moment?’

They were walking in mist, down an immense lane, one hedge of which was topped by the serrated heads and irregularly held rifles that showed here and there. He said to the sergeant-major: ‘Call ’em to attention. Never mind their dressing, we’ve got to get ’em into bed. Roll-call will be at nine tomorrow.’

His mind said:

‘If this means the single command . . . And it’s bound to mean the single command, it’s the turning point . . . Why the hell am I so extraordinarily glad? What’s it to me?’

He was shouting in a round voice:

‘Now then, men, you’ve got to go six extra in a tent. See if you can fall out six at a time at each tent. It’s not in the drill book, but see if you can do it for yourselves. You’re smart men: use your intelligences. The sooner you get to bed the sooner you will be warm. I wish I was. Don’t disturb the men who’re already in the tents. They’ve got to be up for fatigues tomorrow at five, poor devils. You can lie soft till three hours after that . . . The draft will move to the left in fours . . . Form fours . . . Left . . . ’ Whilst the voices of the sergeants in charge of companies yelped varyingly to a distance in the quick march order he said to himself:

‘Extraordinarily glad . . . A strong passion . . . How damn well these fellows move! . . . Cannon fodder . . . Cannon fodder . . . That’s what their steps say . . . ’ His whole body shook in the grip of the cold that beneath his loose overcoat gnawed his pyjamaed limbs. He could not leave the men, but cantered beside them with the sergeant-major till he came to the head of the column in the open in time to wheel the first double company into a line of ghosts that were tents, silent and austere in the moon’s very shadowy light . . . It appeared to him a magic spectacle. He said to the sergeant-major: ‘Move the second company to B line, and so on,’ and stood at the side of the men as they wheeled, stamping, like a wall in motion. He thrust his stick half-way down between the second and third files. ‘Now then, a four and half a four to the right; remaining half-four and next four to the left. Fall out into first tents to right and left . . . ’ He continued saying ‘First four and half, this four to the right Damn you, by the left! How can you tell which beastly four you belong to if you don’t march by the left . . . Remember you’re soldiers, not new-chum lumbermen . . .

It was sheer exhilaration to freeze there on the downside of the extraordinary pure air with the extraordinarily fine men. They came round, marking time with the stamp of guardsmen. He said, with tears in his voice:

‘Damn it all, I gave them that extra bit of smartness . . . Damn it all, there’s something I’ve done . . . ’ Getting cattle into condition for the slaughter-house . . . They were as eager as bullocks running down by Camden Town to Smithfield Market . . . Seventy per cent. of them would never come back . . . But it’s better to go to heaven with your skin shining and master of your limbs than as a hulking lout . . . The Almighty’s orderly room will welcome you better in all probability . . . He continued exclaiming monotonously . . . ‘Remaining half-four and next four to the left . . . Hold your beastly tongues when you fall out. I can’t hear myself give orders . . . ’ It lasted a long time. Then they were all swallowed up.

He staggered, his knees wooden-stiff with the cold, and the cold more intense now the wall of men no longer sheltered him from the wind, out along the brink of the plateau to the other lines. It gave him satisfaction to observe that he had got his men into their lines seventy-five per cent. quicker than the best of the N.C.O.’s who had had charge of the other lines. Nevertheless, he swore bitingly at the sergeants: their men were in knots round the entrance to the alleys of ghost-pyramids . . . Then there were no more, and he drifted with regret across the plain towards his country street of huts. One of them had a coarse evergreen rose growing over it. He picked a leaf, pressed it to his lips and threw it up into the wind . . . ‘That’s for Valentine,’ he said meditatively. ‘Why did I do that? . . . Or perhaps it’s for England . . . ’ He said: ‘Damn it all, this is patriotism? . . . This is patriotism . . . ’ It wasn’t what you took patriotism as a rule to be. There were supposed to be more parades, about that job! . . . But this was just a broke to the wide, wheezy, half-frozen Yorkshireman, who despised every one in England not a Yorkshireman, or from more to the North, at two in the morning picking a leaf from a rose-tree and slobbering over it, without knowing what he was doing. And then discovering that it was half for a pug-nosed girl whom he presumed, but didn’t know, to smell like a primrose; and half for . . . England! . . . At two in the morning with the thermometer ten degrees below zero . . . Damn, it was cold! . . .

And why these emotions? . . . Because England, not before it was time, had been allowed to decide not to do the dirty on her associates! . . . He said to himself: ‘It is probably because a hundred thousand sentimentalists like myself commit similar excesses of the subconscious that we persevere in this glorious but atrocious undertaking. All the same, I didn’t know I had it in me!’ A strong passion! . . . For his girl and his country! . . . Nevertheless, his girl was a pro-German . . . It was a queer mix-up . . . Not of course a pro-German, but disapproving of the preparation of men, like bullocks, with sleek healthy skins for the abattoirs in Smithfield . . . Agreeing presumably with the squits who had been hitherto starving the B.E.F. of men . . . A queer mix-up . . .

At half-past one the next day, in chastened winter sunlight, he mounted Schomburg, a coffin-headed, bright chestnut, captured from the Germans on the Marne by the second battalion of the Glamorganshires. He had not been on the back of the animal two minutes before he remembered that he had forgotten to look it over. It was the first time in his life that he had ever forgotten to look at an animal’s hoofs, fetlocks, knees, nostrils and eyes, and to take a pull at the girth before climbing into the saddle. But he had ordered the horse for a quarter to one and, even though he had bolted his cold lunch like a cannibal in haste, there he was three-quarters of an hour late, and with his head still full of teasing problems. He had meant to clear his head by a long canter over the be-hutted downs, dropping down into the city by a bypath.

But the ride did not clear his head — rather, the sleeplessness of the night began for the first time then to tell on him after a morning of fatigues, during which he had managed to keep the thought of Sylvia at arm’s length. He had to wait to see Sylvia before he could see what Sylvia wanted. And morning had brought the common-sense idea that probably she wanted to do nothing more than pull the string of the showerbath — which meant committing herself to the first extravagant action that came into her head — and exulting in the consequences.

He had not managed to get to bed at all the night before. Captain McKechnie, who had had some cocoa — a beverage Tietjens had never before tasted — hot and ready for him on his return from the lines, had kept him till past half-past four, relating with a male fury his really very painful story. It appeared that he had obtained leave to go home and divorce his wife, who, during his absence in France, had been living with an Egyptologist in Government service. Then, acting under conscientious scruples of the younger school of the day, he had refrained from divorcing her. Campion had in consequence threatened to deprive him of his commission . . . The poor devil — who had actually consented to contribute to the costs of the household of his wife and the Egyptologist — had gone raving mad and had showered an extraordinary torrent of abuse at the decent old fellow that Campion was . . . A decent old fellow, really. For the interview, being delicate, had taken place in the general’s bedroom and the general had not felt it necessary, there being no orderlies or junior officers present, to take any official notice of McKechnie’s outburst. McKechnie was a fellow with an excellent military record; you could in fact hardly have found a regimental officer with a better record. So Campion had decided to deal with the man as suffering from a temporary brain-storm and had sent him to Tietjens’ unit for rest and recuperation. It was an irregularity, but the general was of a rank to risk what irregularities he considered to be of use to the service.

It had turned out that McKechnie was actually the nephew of Tietjens’ very old intimate, Sir Vincent Mac-master, of the Department of Statistics, being the son of his sister who had married the assistant to the elder Macmaster, a small grocer in the Port of Leith in Scotland . . . That indeed had been why Campion had been interested in him. Determined as he was to show his godson no unreasonable military favours, the general was perfectly ready, to do a kindness that he thought would please Tietjens. All these pieces of information Tietjens had packed away in his mind for future consideration and, it being after four-thirty before McKechnie had calmed himself down, Tietjens had taken the opportunity to inspect the breakfasts of the various fatigues ordered for duty in the town, these being detailed for various hours from a quarter to five to seven. It was a matter of satisfaction to Tietjens to have seen to the breakfasts, and inspected his cook-houses, since he did not often manage to make the opportunity and he could by no means trust his orderly officers.

At breakfast in the depot mess-hut he was detained by the colonel in command of the depot, the Anglican padre and McKechnie; the colonel, very old, so frail that you would have thought that a shudder or a cough would have shaken his bones one from another, had yet a passionate belief that the Greek Church should exchange communicants with the Anglican: the padre, a stout, militant Churchman, had a gloomy contempt for Orthodox theology. McKechnie from time to time essayed to define the communion according to the Presbyterian rite. They all listened to Tietjens whilst he dilated on the historic aspects of the various schisms of Christianity and accepted his rough definition to the effect that, in transubstantiation, the host actually became the divine presence, whereas in consubstantiation the substance of the host, as if miraculously become porous, was suffused with the presence as a sponge is with water . . . They all agreed that the breakfast bacon supplied from store was uneatable and agreed to put up half a crown a week apiece to get better for their table.

Tietjens had walked in the sunlight down the lines, past the hut with the evergreen climbing rose, in the sunlight, thinking in an interval good humouredly about his official religion: about the Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible, but knowing all about the estate down to the last hind at the home farm and the last oak: Christ, an almost too benevolent Land-Steward, son of the Owner, knowing all about the estate down to the last child at the porter’s lodge, apt to be got round by the more detrimental tenants: the Third Person of the Trinity, the spirit of the estate, the Game as it were, as distinct from the players of the game: the atmosphere of the estate, that of the interior of Winchester Cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been finished, a perpetual Sunday, with, probably, a little cricket for the young men. Like Yorkshire of a Saturday afternoon; if you looked down on the whole broad county you would not see a single village green without its white flannels. That was why Yorkshire always leads the averages . . . Probably by the time you got to heaven you would be so worn out by work on this planet that you would accept the English Sunday, for ever, with extreme relief!

With his belief that all that was good in English literature ended with the seventeenth century, his imaginations of heaven must be materialist — like Bunyan’s . He laughed good-humouredly at his projection of a hereafter. It was probably done with. Along with cricket. There would be no more parades of that sort. Probably they would play some beastly yelping game . . . Like baseball or Association football . . . And heaven? . . . Oh, it would be a revival meeting on a Welsh hillside. Or Chautauqua, wherever that was . . . And God? A Real Estate Agent, with Marxist views . . . He hoped to be out of it before the cessation of hostilities, in which case he might be just in time for the last train to the old heaven . . .

In his orderly hut he found an immense number of papers. On the top an envelope marked Urgent. Private with a huge rubber stamp. From Levin. Levin, too, must have been up pretty late. It was not about Mrs Tietjens, or even Miss de Bailly. It was a private warning that Tietjens would probably have his draft on his hands another week or ten days, and very likely another couple of thousand men extra as well. He warned Tietjens to draw all the tents he could get hold of as soon as possible . . . Tietjens called to a subaltern with pimples who was picking his teeth with a pen-nib at the other end of the hut: ‘Here, you! . . . Take two companies of the Canadians to the depot store and d............