A Man Could Stand Up— - Ford Madox Ford (best books to read for success .TXT) 📗

“So that,” Tietjens said, “they look at me as a sort of an atheist.”

He forced himself to look over the parapet again, climbing heavily to his place of observation. It was sheer impatience and purely culpable technically. But he was in command of the regiment, of an establishment of a thousand and eighteen men, or that used to be the Establishment of a battalion; of a strength of three hundred and thirty three. Say seventy-five per company. And two companies in command of second lieutenants, one just out.⁠ ⁠… The last four days.⁠ ⁠… There ought to be, say, eighty pairs of eyes surveying what he was going to survey. If there were fifteen it was as much as there were!⁠ ⁠… Figures were clean and comforting things. The chance against being struck by a shell-fragment that day, if the Germans came in any force, was fourteen to one against. There were battalions worse off than they. The sixth had only one one six left!

The tortured ground sloped down into mists. Say a quarter of a mile away. The German front lines were just shadows, like the corrugations of photographs of the moon: the paradoses of our own trenches two nights ago! The Germans did not seem to have troubled to chuck up much in the way of parapets. They didn’t. They were coming on. Anyhow they held their front lines always very sparsely.⁠ ⁠… Was that the phrase? Was it even English?

Above the shadows the mist behaved tortuously: mounting up into umbrella shapes. Like snow-covered umbrella pines.

Disagreeable to force the eye to examine that mist. His stomach turned over.⁠ ⁠… That was the sacks. A flat, slightly disordered pile of wet sacks, half-right at two hundred yards. No doubt a shell had hit a G.S. wagon coming up with sacks for trenching. Or the bearers had bolted, chucking the sacks down. His eyes had fallen on that scattered pile four times already that morning. Each time his stomach had turned over. The resemblance to prostrate men was appalling. The enemy creeping up.⁠ ⁠… Christ! Within two hundred yards. So his stomach said. Each time, in spite of the preparation.

Otherwise the ground had been so smashed that it was flat: went down into holes but did not rise up into mounds. That made it look gentle. It sloped down. To the untidiness. They appeared mostly to lie on their faces; Why? Presumably they were mostly Germans pushed back in the last counterattack. Anyhow you saw mostly the seats of their trousers. When you did not, how profound was their repose! You must phrase it a little like that⁠—rhetorically. There was no other way to get the effect of that profoundness. Call it profundity!

It was different from sleep. Flatter. No doubt when the appalled soul left the weary body, the panting lungs.⁠ ⁠… Well, you can’t go on with a sentence like that.⁠ ⁠… But you collapsed inwards. Like the dying pig they sold on trays in the street. Painter fellows doing battlefields never got that intimate effect. Intimate to them there. Unknown to the corridors in Whitehall.⁠ ⁠… Probably because they⁠—the painters⁠—drew from living models or had ideas as to the human form.⁠ ⁠… But these were not limbs, muscles, torsi.⁠ ⁠… Collections of tubular shapes in field-grey or mud-colour they were. Chucked about by Almighty God! As if He had dropped them from on high to make them flatten into the earth.⁠ ⁠… Good gravel soil, that slope and relatively dry. No dew to speak of. The night had been covered.⁠ ⁠…

Dawn on the battlefield.⁠ ⁠… Damn it all, why sneer? It was dawn on the battlefield.⁠ ⁠… The trouble was that this battle was not over. By no means over. There would be a hundred and eleven years, nine months and twenty-seven days of it still.⁠ ⁠… No, you could not get the effect of that endless monotony of effort by numbers. Nor yet by saying “Endless monotony of effort”.⁠ ⁠… It was like bending down to look into darkness of corridors under dark curtains. Under clouds.⁠ ⁠… Mist.⁠ ⁠…

At that, with dreadful reluctance his eyes went back to the spectral mists over the photographic shadows. He forced himself to put his glasses on the mists. They mopped and mowed, fantastically; grey, with black shadows; drooping like the dishevelled veils of murdered bodies. They were engaged in fantastic and horrifying layings out of corpses of vast dimensions; in silence but in accord they performed unthinkable tasks. They were the Germans. This was fear. This was the intimate fear of black quiet nights, in dugouts where you heard the obscene suggestions of the miners’ picks below you: tranquil, engrossed. Infinitely threatening.⁠ ⁠… But not fear.

It was in effect the desire for privacy. What he dreaded at those normal times when fear visited him at lunch; whilst seeing that the men got their baths or when writing, in a trench, in support, a letter to his bank-manager, was finding himself unhurt, surrounded by figures like the brothers of the Misericordia, going unconcerned about their tasks, noticing him hardly at all.⁠ ⁠… Whole hillsides, whole stretches of territory, alive with myriads of whitish-grey, long cagoules, with slits for eyeholes. Occasionally one would look at him through the eye-slits in the hoods.⁠ ⁠… The prisoner!

He would be the prisoner: liable to physical contacts⁠—to being handled and being questioned. An invasion of his privacy!

As a matter of fact that wasn’t so far out; not so dotty as it sounded. If the Huns got him⁠—as they precious near had the night before last!⁠—they would be⁠—they had then been⁠—in gas-masks of various patterns. They must be short of these things: but they looked, certainly, like goblin pigs with sore eyes, the hood with the askew, blind-looking eyeholes and the mouthpiece or the other nose attachment going down into a box, astonishingly like snouts!⁠ ⁠… Mopping and mowing⁠—no doubt shouting through the masks!

They had appeared with startling suddenness and as if with a supernatural silence, beneath a din so overwhelming that you could not any longer bother to notice it. They were there, as it were, under a