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

meant that there was nothing behind their backs⁠—from there to the North Sea!⁠ ⁠… The French were hurrying along probably.⁠ ⁠… He imagined a lot of little blue fellows in red breeches trotting along pink, sunlit plains.

(You cannot control your imagination’s pictures. Of course the French no longer wore red trousers.) He saw the line breaking just where the blue section came to: the rest, swept back into the sea. He saw the whole of the terrain behind them. On the horizon was a glistening haze. That was where they were going to be swept to. Or of course they would not be swept. They would be lying on their faces, exposing the seats of their breeches. Too negligible for the large dustpan and broom.⁠ ⁠… What was death like: the immediate process of dissolution? He stuffed the papers into his tunic pocket.

He remembered with grimmish amusement that one chit promised him reinforcements. Sixteen men! Sixteen! Worcesters! From a Worcester training camp.⁠ ⁠… Why the deuce weren’t they sent to the Worcester battalion just next door? Good fellows, no doubt. But they hadn’t got the drill quiffs of our lot: they were not pals with our men: they did not know the officers by name. There would be no welcome to cheer them.⁠ ⁠… It was a queer idea, the deliberate destruction of regimental esprit de corps that the Home Authorities now insisted on. It was said to be imitated at the suggestion of a civilian of advanced social views from the French who in turn had imitated it from the Germans. It is of course lawful to learn of the Enemy: but is it sensible?

Perhaps it is. The Feudal Spirit was broken. Perhaps it would therefore be harmful to Trench Warfare. It used to be comfortable and cosy. You fought beside men from your own hamlet under the leadership of the parson’s son. Perhaps that was not good for you?

At any rate, as at present arranged, dying was a lonely affair.

He, Tietjens, and little Aranjuex there, if something hit them would die⁠—a Yorkshire territorial magnate’s son and the son of, positively, an Oporto Protestant minister, if you can imagine such a thing!⁠—the dissimilar souls winging their way to heaven side by side. You’d think God would find it more appropriate if Yorkshiremen went with other North Country fellows, and Dagoes with other Papists. For Aranjuez, though the son of a Nonconformist of sorts, had reverted to the faith of his fathers.

He said:

“Come along, Aranjuez.⁠ ⁠… I want to see that wet bit of trench before the Hun shells hit it.”

Well.⁠ ⁠… They were getting reinforcements. The Home Authorities had awakened to their prayers. They sent them sixteen Worcesters. They would be three hundred and forty-four⁠—no, forty-three, because he had sent back O-Eleven Griffith, the fellow with the cornet⁠—three hundred and forty-three lonely souls against⁠ ⁠… say two Divisions! Against about eighteen thousand, very likely. And they were to stick it till they burst. Reinforced!

Reinforced. Good God!⁠ ⁠… Sixteen Worcesters!

What was at the bottom of it all?

Campion was going to command that Army. That meant that real reinforcements had been promised from the millions of men that filled the base camps. And it meant the Single Command! Campion would not have consented to take the command of that Army if he had not had those very definite promises.

But it would take time. Months! Anything like adequate reinforcements would take months.

And at that moment, in the most crucial point of the line of the Army, of the Expeditionary Force, the Allied Forces, the Empire, the Universe, the Solar-system, they had three hundred and sixty-six men commanded by the last surviving Tory. To face wave on wave of the Enemy.

In one minute the German barrage was due.

Aranjuez said to him:

“You can write a sonnet in two and a half minutes, sir.⁠ ⁠… And your syphon works like anything in that damp trench.⁠ ⁠… It took my mother’s great-uncle, the canon of Oporto, fifteen weeks to finish his celebrated sonnet. I know because my mother told me.⁠ ⁠… But you oughtn’t to be here, sir.”

Aranjuez then was the nephew of the author of the “Sonnet to Night.” He could be. You had to have that sort of oddity to make up this world. So naturally he was interested in sonnets.

And, having got hold of a battalion with a stretch of damp trench, Tietjens had had the opportunity of trying a thing he had often thought of⁠—of drying out vertically cut, damp soil by means of a syphon of soil-pipes put in, not horizontally but vertically. Fortunately Hackett, the commander of B Company, that had the wet trench, had been an engineer in civil life. Aranjuez had been along, out of sheer hero-worship, to B trenches to see how his hero’s syphons had worked. He reported that they worked like a dream.

Little Aranjuez said:

“These trenches are like Pompeii, sir.”

Tietjens had never seen Pompeii, but he understood that Aranjuez was referring to the empty square-cut excavations in the earth. Particularly to their emptiness. And to the deadly stillness in the sunlight.⁠ ⁠… Admirable trenches. Made to hold an establishment of several thousand men. To bustle with Cockney life. Now dead empty. They passed three sentries in the pinkish gravel passage and two men, one with a pick, the other with a shovel. They were exactly squaring the juncture of the wall and the path, as they might have done in Pompeii. Or in Hyde Park! A perfect devil for tidiness, A Company Commander. But the men seemed to like it. They were sniggering, though they stopped that, of course, when Tietjens passed⁠ ⁠…

A nice, dark, tiny boy, Aranjuez: his adoration was charming. From the very first⁠—and naturally, frightened out of his little life, he had clung to Tietjens as a child clings to an omnipotent father. Tietjens, all-wise, could direct the awful courses of war and decree safety for the frightened! Tietjens needed that sort of worship. The boy said it would be awful to have anything happen to your eyes. Your girl naturally would not look at