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

Tietjens, might flush with pleasure at the words of some squit with a red band round his hat!

He said:

“Even if the Germans don’t come it might have been helpful. It might have been even more helpful. It might have been the means of keeping them back.” Because of course if the Germans knew that we had got hold of their Movement Order they might change their plans. That would inconvenience them. It was not likely. There was perhaps not time for the news that we knew to have got through to their Important Ones. But it was possible. Such things had happened.

Aranjuez and the Lance-Corporal stood still and so silent in the sunlight that they resembled fragments of the reddish trench. The red gravel of the trenches began here, however, to be smirched with more agricultural marl. Later the trenches became pure alluvial soil and then ran down more smartly into stuff so wet that it was like a quicksand. A bog. It was there he had tried revetting with a syphon-drain. The thought of that extreme of his line reminded him. He said:

“You know all about keeping in communication with immediately neighbouring units?”

The grim fellow said:

“Only what they taught in the training camps at the beginning of the war, sir. When I joined up. It was fairly thorough but it’s all forgotten now.”

Tietjens said to Aranjuez:

“You’re Signalling Officer. What do you know about keeping in communication with units on your right and left?”

Aranjuez, blushing and stammering, knew all about buzzers and signals. Tietjens said:

“That’s only for trenches, all that. But, in motion. At your O.T.C. Didn’t they practice you in keeping communication between troops in motion?”

They hadn’t at the O.T.C.⁠ ⁠… At first it had been in the programme. But it had always been crowded out by some stunt. Rifle-grenade drill. Bomb-throwing. Stokes-gun drill. Any sort of machine drill as long as it was not moving bodies of men over difficult country⁠—sand-hills, say⁠—and hammering into them that they must keep in touch unit with unit or drop connecting files if a unit itself divided up.

It was perhaps the dominant idea of Tietjens, perhaps the main idea that he got out of warfare⁠—that at all costs you must keep in touch with your neighbouring troops. When, later, he had to command the escorts over immense bodies of German prisoners on the march it several times occurred to him to drop so many connecting files for the benefit of the men or N.C.O.’s⁠—or even the officers, of his escort who had fallen out through sheer fatigue or disease, that he would arrive in a new camp at the day’s end with hardly any escort left at all⁠—say thirty for three thousand prisoners. The business of an escort being to prevent the escape of prisoners it might have been thought better to retain the connecting files for that purpose. But, on the other hand, he never lost a prisoner except by German bombs, and he never lost any of his stragglers at all.

… He said to O.C. A Company:

“Please look after this matter in your Company. I shall arrange as soon as I can to transfer you to the outside right of the unit. If the men are doing nothing lecture them, please, yourself on this subject and talk very seriously to all lance-corporals, section leaders and oldest privates of platoons. And be good enough to get into communication at once with the Company Commander of the Wiltshires immediately on our right. In one of two ways the war is over. The war of trenches. Either the Germans will immediately drive us into the North Sea or we shall drive them back. They will then be in a state of demoralisation and we shall need to move fast. Lieutenant Aranjuez, you will arrange to be present when Captain Gibbs talks to his Company and you will repeat what he says in the other Companies.”

He was talking quickly and distinctly, as he did when he was well, and he was talking stiltedly on purpose. He could not obviously call an officers’ conference with a German attack possibly impending; but he was pretty certain that something of what he said would penetrate to nearly every ear of the Battalion if he said it before a Company Commander, a Signalling Lieutenant and an Orderly-room Lance-Corporal. It would go through that the Old Man was dotty on this joke, and Sergeants would see that some attention was paid to the matter. So would the officers. It was all that could be done at the moment.

He walked behind Gibbs along the trench which at this point was perfectly intact and satisfactory, the red gravel gradually giving place to marle. He remarked to the good fellow that in that way they would do something to checkmate the blasted civilians whose meddling with the processes of war had put them where they were. Gibbs agreed gloomily that civilian interference had lost the war. They so hated the regular army that whenever a civilian saw a trace of regular training remaining in this mud-fighting that they liked us to indulge in, he wrote a hundred letters under different names to the papers, and the War Secretary at once took steps to retain that hundred votes; Gibbs had been reading a home-newspaper that morning.

Tietjens surprised himself by saying:

“Oh, we’ll beat them yet!” It was an expression of impracticable optimism. He sought to justify his words by saying that their Army Commanders having put up such a damn good fight in spite of the most criminal form of civilian interference had begun to put a stopper on their games. Campion’s coming was a proof that soldiers were going to be allowed to have some say in the conduct of the war. It meant the single command.⁠ ⁠… Gibbs expressed a muted satisfaction. If the French took over those lines as they certainly would if they had the Single Command he would no doubt be able to go home and