He thought he suddenly understood. For the Lincolnshire sergeant-major the word Peace meant that a man could stand up on a hill. For him it meant someone to talk to.
V
THE COLONEL said:
“Look here, Tietjens, lend me two hundred and fifty quid. They say you’re a damn beastly rich fellow. My accounts are all out. I’ve got a loathsome complaint. My friends have all gone back on me. I shall have to face a Court of Enquiry if I go home. But my nerve’s gone. I’ve got to go home.”
He added:
“I daresay you knew all that.”
From the sudden fierce hatred that he felt at the thought of giving money to this man, Tietjens knew that his inner mind based all its. calculations on the idea of living with Valentine Wannop… when men could stand up on hills.
He had found the Colonel in his cellar — it really, actually was a cellar, the remains of a farm — sitting on the edge of his camp-bed, in his shorts, his khaki shirt very open at the neck. His eyes were a little bloodshot, but his cropped, silver-grey hair was accurately waved, his grey moustache beautifully pointed. His silver-backed hair-brushes and a small mirror were indeed on the table in front of him. By the rays of the lamp that, hung overhead, rendered that damp stone place faintly nauseating, he looked keen, clean, and resolute. Tietjens wondered how he would look by daylight. He had remarkably seldom seen the fellow by daylight. Beside the mirror and the brushes lay, limply, an unfilled pipe, a red pencil and the white buff papers from Whitehall that Tietjens had already read.
He had begun by looking at Tietjens with a keen, hard, bloodshot glance. He had said:
“You think you can command this battalion? Have you had any experience? It appears you suggest that I take two months’ leave.”
Tietjens had expected a violent outbreak. Threats even. None had come. The Colonel had continued to regard him with intentness, nothing more. He sat motionless, his long arms, bare to the elbow, dependent over each of his knees, which were far apart. He said that if he decided to go he didn’t want to leave his battalion to a man that would knock it about. He continued staring hard at Tietjens. The phrase was singular in that place and at that hour, but Tietjens understood it to mean that he did not want his battalion discipline to go to pieces.
Tietjens answered that he did not think he would let the discipline go to pieces. The Colonel had said:
“How do you know? You’re no soldier, are you?”
Tietjens said he had commanded in the line a Company at full strength — nearly as large as the battalion and, out of it, a unit of exactly eight times its present strength. He did not think any complaints had been made of him. The Colonel said, frostily:
“Well! I know nothing about you.” He had added:
“You seem to have moved the battalion all right the night before last. I wasn’t in a condition to do it myself. I’m not well. I’m obliged to you. The men appear to like you. They’re tired of me.”
Tietjens felt himself on tenterhooks. He had, now, a passionate desire to command that battalion. It was the last thing he would have expected of himself. He said:
“If it becomes a question of a war of motion, sir, I don’t know that I should have much experience.”
The Colonel answered:
“It won’t become a war of motion before I come back. If I ever do come back.”
Tietjens said:
“Isn’t it rather like a war of motion now, sir?” It was perhaps the first time in his life he had ever asked for information from a superior in rank — with an implicit belief that he would get an exact answer. The Colonel said:
“No. This is only falling back on prepared positions. There will be positions prepared for us right back to the sea. If the Staff has done its work properly. If it hasn’t, the war’s over. We’re done, finished, smashed, annihilated, non-existent.”
Tietjens said:
“But if the great strafe that, according to Division, is due now…”
The Colonel said: “What?” Tietjens repeated his words and added:
“We might get pushed beyond the next prepared position.”
The Colonel appeared to withdraw his thoughts from a great distance.
“There isn’t going to be any great strafe,” he said. He was beginning to add: “Division has got….” A considerable thump shook the hill behind their backs. The Colonel sat listening without much attention. His eyes gloomily rested on the papers before him. He said, without looking up:
“Yes, I don’t want my battalion knocked about!” He went on reading again — the communication from Whitehall. He said: “You’ve read this?” and then:
“Falling back on prepared positions isn’t the same as moving in the open. You don’t have to do more than you do in a trench-to-trench attack. I suppose you can get your direction by compass all right. Or get someone to, for you.”
Another considerable Crump of sound shook the earth, but from a little further away. The Colonel turned the sheet of paper from Whitehall over. Pinned to the back of it was the private note of the Brigadier. He perused this also with gloomy and unsurprised eyes.
“Pretty stiff, all this,” he said, “you’ve read it? I shall have to go back and see about this.”
He exclaimed:
“It’s rough luck. I should have liked to leave my battalion to some-one that knew it. I don’t suppose you do. Perhaps you do, though.”
An immense collection of fire-irons: all the fire-irons in the world fell just above their heads. The sound seemed to prolong itself in echoes, though of course it could not have; it was repeated.
The Colonel looked upwards negligently. Tietjens proposed to go to see. The Colonel said:
“No, don’t. Notting will tell us if anything’s wanted…. Though nothing can be wanted!” Notting was the beady-eyed Adjutant in the adjoining cellar. “How could they expect us to keep accounts straight in August 1914? How can they expect me to remember what happened? At the Depot. Then!” He appeared listless, but without resentment. “Rotten luck…” he said. “In the battalion and… with this!” He rapped the back of his hand on the papers. He looked up at Tietjens.
“I suppose I could get rid of you; with a bad report,” he said. “Or perhaps I couldn’t… General Campion put you here. You’re said to be his bastard.”
“He’s my god-father,” Tietjens said. “If you put in a bad report of me I should not protest. That is, if it were on the grounds of lack of experience. I should go to the Brigadier over anything else.”
“It’s the same thing,” the Colonel said. “I mean a god-son. If I had thought you were General Campion’s bastard, I should not have said it…. No; I don’t want to put in a bad report of you. It’s my own fault if you don’t know the battalion. I’ve kept you out of it. I didn’t want you to see what a rotten state the papers are in. They say you’re the devil of a paper soldier. You used to be in a Government office, didn’t you?”
Heavy blows were being delivered to the earth with some regularity on each side of the cellar. It was as if a boxer of the size of a mountain were delivering rights and lefts in heavy alternation. And it made hearing rather difficult.
“Rotten luck,” the Colonel said. “And McKechnie’s dotty. Clean dotty.” Tietjens missed some words. He said that he would probably be able to get the paper work of the battalion straight before the Colonel came back.
The noise rolled down hill like a heavy cloud. The Colonel continued talking and Tietjens, not being very accustomed to his voice, lost a good deal of what he said but, as if in a rift, he did hear: