“What does Terence say about him this morning?”
The nice thing to have said would have been:
“Of course, old man, I’ll do all I can to keep it dark!” Terence was the M.O. — the man who had chucked his cap at the Hun orderly.
McKechnie said:
“That’s the damnable thing! Terence is ratty with him. He won’t take a pill!”
Tietjens said:
“What’s that? What’s that?”
McKechnie wavered; his desire for comfort became overpowering.
He said:
“Look here! Do the decent thing! You know how poor Bill has worked for us! Get Terence not to report him to Brigade!”
This was wearisome, but it had to be faced.
A very minute subaltern — Aranjuez — in a perfectly impossible tin hat peered round the side of the bank. Tietjens sent him away for a moment…. These tin hats were probably all right, but they were the curse of the army. They bred distrust! How could you trust a man whose incapable hat tumbled forward on his nose? Or another, with his hat on the back of his head, giving him the air of a ruined gambler? Or a fellow who had put on a soap-dish, to amuse the children — not a serious proceeding…. The Germans’ things were better — coming down over the nape of the neck and rising over the brows. When you saw a Hun sideways he looked something: a serious proposition. Full of ferocity. A Hun up against a Tommie looked like a Holbein lansknecht fighting a music-hall turn. It made you feel that you were indeed a rag-time army. Rubbed it in!
McKechnie was reporting that the C.O. had refused to take a pill ordered him by the M.O. Unfortunately the M.O. was ratty that morning — too much hooch overnight! So he said he should report the C.O. to Brigade. Not as being unfit for further service, for he wasn’t. But for refusing to take the pill. It was damnable. Because if Bill wouldn’t take a pill he wouldn’t…. The M.O. said that if he took a pill, and stayed in bed that day — without hooch of course! — he would be perfectly fit on the morrow. He had been like that often enough before. The C.O. had always been given the dose before as a drench. He swore he would not take it as a ball. Sheer contrariety!
Tietjens was accustomed to think of the C.O. as a lad — a good lad, but young. They were, all the same, much of an age, and, for the matter of that, because of his deeply-lined forehead the Colonel looked the older often enough. But when he was fit he was fine. He had a hooked nose, a forcible, grey moustache, like two badger-haired paintbrushes joined beneath the nose, pink skin as polished as the surface of a billiard ball, a noticeably narrow but high forehead, an extremely piercing glance from rather colourless eyes; his hair was black and most polished in slight waves. He was a soldier.
He was, that is to say, the ranker. Of soldiering in the English sense — the real soldiering of peace-time, parades, social events, spit and polish, hard-worked summers, leisurely winters, India, the Bahamas, Cairo seasons, and the rest he only knew the outside, having looked at it from the barrack windows, the parade ground and, luckily for him, from his Colonel’s house. He had been a most admirable batman to that Colonel, had — in Simla — married the Colonel’s memsahib’s lady’s maid, had been promoted to the orderly-room, to the corporals’ and sergeants’ messes, had become a Musketry-colour sergeant and, two months before the war had been given a commission. He would have gained this before but for a slight — a very slight — tendency to overdrinking, which had given on occasion a similarly slight tone of insolence to his answers to field-officers. Elderly field-officers on parade are apt to make slight mistakes in their drill, giving the command to move to the right when technically, though troops are moving to the right, the command should be: “Move to the left!”; and the officer’s left being the troops’ right, on a field-day, after lunch, field-officers of a little rustiness are apt to grow confused. It then becomes the duty of warrant-officers present if possible to rectify, or if not, to accept the responsibility for the resultant commotion. On two occasions during his brilliant career, being slightly elated, this war-time C.O. had neglected this military duty, the result being subsequent Orderly Room strafes which remained as black patches when he looked back on his past life and which constantly embittered his remembrances. Professional soldiers are like that.
In spite of an exceptionally fine service record he remained bitter, and upon occasion he became unreasonable. Being what the men — and for the matter of that the officers of the battalion, too — called a b—y h-11 of a pusher, he had brought his battalion up to a great state of efficiency; he had earned a double string of ribbons and by pushing his battalion into extremely tight places, by volunteering it for difficult services which, even during trench warfare did present themselves, and by extricating what remained of it with singular skill during the first battle of the Somme on an occasion — perhaps the most lamentable of the whole war — when an entire division commanded by a political rather than a military general had been wiped out, he had earned for his battalion a French decoration called a Fourragère which is seldom given to other than French regiments. These exploits and the spirit which dictated them were perhaps less appreciated by the men under his command than was imagined by the C.O. and his bosom friend Captain McKechnie who had loyally aided him, but they did justify the two in attaching to the battalion the sort of almost maudlin sentimentality that certain parents will bestow upon their children.
In spite, however, of the appreciation that his services had received, the C.O. remained embittered. He considered that, by this time, he ought at least to have been given a brigade, if not a division, and he considered that, if that was not the case, it was largely due to the two black marks against him as well as to the fact of his low social origin. And, when he had taken a little liquor these obsessions exaggerated themselves very quickly to a degree that very nearly endangered his career. It was not that he soaked — but there were occasions during that period of warfare when the consumption of a certain amount of alcohol was a necessity if the human being were to keep on carrying on and through rough places. Then, happy was the man who carried his liquor well.
Unfortunately the C.O. was not one of these. Worn out by continual attention to papers — at which he was no great hand — and by fighting that would continue for days on end, he would fortify himself with whisky and immediately his bitternesses would overwhelm his mentality, the aspect of the world would change and he would rail at his superiors in the army and sometimes would completely refuse to obey orders, as had been the occasion a few nights before, when he had refused to let his battalion take part in the concerted retreat of the Army Corps. Tietjens had had to see to this.
Now, exasperated by the aftereffects of several day’s great anxieties and alcoholisms, he was refusing to take a pill. This was a token of his contempt for his superiors, the outcome of his obsession of bitterness.
III
AN ARMY – especially in peace time — is a very complex and nicely adjusted affair, and though active operations against an enemy force are apt to blunt nicenesses and upset compensations — as they might for a chronometer — and although this of ours, according to its own computation was only a rag-time aggregation, certain customs of times when this force was also Regular had an enormous power of survival.
It may seem a comic affair that a Colonel commanding a regiment in the midst of the most breathless period of hostilities, should refuse to take a pill. But the refusal, precisely like a grain of sand in the works of a chronometer, may cause the most singular perturbations. It was so in this case.