But at that point the doctor’s batman had uttered, as if with a jocular, hoarse irony, the name:
“Poor — O 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 O 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… O 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 it was peopled by an in 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 playthings 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 enquiries 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 enquiries 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 Puffles 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 manœuvre, 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 manœuvre 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 rear-guard 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: