No More Parades - Ford Madox Ford (the gingerbread man read aloud .TXT) 📗

worried over there. Each man a man with a backbone, knees, breeches, braces, a rifle, a home, passions, fornications, drunks, pals, some scheme of the universe, corns, inherited diseases, a greengrocer’s business, a milk walk, a paper stall, brats, a slut of a wife⁠ ⁠… The Men: the Other Ranks! And the poor ⸻ little officers. God help them. Vice-Chancellor’s Latin Prize men⁠ ⁠…

This particular poor ⸻ Prize man seemed to object to noise. They ought to keep the place quiet for him⁠ ⁠…

By God, he was perfectly right. That place was meant for the quiet and orderly preparation of meat for the shambles. Drafts! A Base is a place where you meditate: perhaps you should pray: a place where in peace the Tommies should write their last letters home and describe ’ow the guns are ’owling ’orribly.

But to pack a million and a half of men into and round that small town was like baiting a trap for rats with a great chunk of rotten meat. The Hun planes could smell them from a hundred miles away. They could do more harm there than if they bombed a quarter of London to pieces. And the air defences there were a joke: a mad joke. They popped off, thousands of rounds, from any sort of pieces of ordnance, like schoolboys bombarding swimming rats with stones. Obviously your best-trained air-defence men would be round your metropolis. But this was no joke for the sufferers.

Heavy depression settled down more heavily upon him. The distrust of the home Cabinet, felt by then by the greater part of that army, became like physical pain. These immense sacrifices, this ocean of mental sufferings, were all undergone to further the private vanities of men who amidst these hugenesses of landscapes and forces appeared pygmies! It was the worries of all these wet millions in mud-brown that worried him. They could die, they could be massacred, by the quarter million, in shambles. But that they should be massacred without jauntiness, without confidence, with depressed brows: without parade⁠ ⁠…

He knew really nothing about the officer in front of him. Apparently the fellow had stopped for an answer to some question. What question? Tietjens had no idea. He had not been listening. Heavy silence settled down on the hut. They just waited. The fellow said with an intonation of hatred:

“Well, what about it? That’s what I want to know!”

Tietjens went on reflecting⁠ ⁠… There were a great many kinds of madness. What kind was this? The fellow was not drunk. He talked like a drunkard, but he was not drunk. In ordering him to sit down Tietjens had just chanced it. There are madmen whose momentarily subconscious selves will respond to a military command as if it were magic. Tietjens remembered having barked: “About⁠ ⁠… turn,” to a poor little lunatic fellow in some camp at home and the fellow who had been galloping hotfoot past his tent, waving a naked bayonet with his pursuers fifty yards behind, had stopped dead and faced about with a military stamp like a guardsman. He had tried it on this lunatic for want of any better expedient. It had apparently functioned intermittently. He risked saying:

“What about what?”

The man said as if ironically:

“It seems as if I were not worth listening to by your high and mightiness. I said: ‘What about my foul squit of an uncle?’ Your filthy, best friend.”

Tietjens said:

“The general’s your uncle? General Campion? What’s he done to you?”

The general had sent this fellow down to him with a note asking him, Tietjens, to keep an eye in his unit on a very good fellow and an admirable officer. The chit was in the general’s own writing, and contained the additional information as to Captain Mackenzie’s scholastic prowess⁠ ⁠… It had struck Tietjens as queer that the general should take so much trouble about a casual infantry company commander. How could the fellow have been brought markedly to his notice? Of course, Campion was good-natured, like another man. If a fellow, half dotty, whose record showed that he was a very good man, was brought to his notice Campion would do what he could for him. And Tietjens knew that the general regarded himself, Tietjens, as a heavy, bookish fellow, able reliably to look after one of his protégés⁠ ⁠… Probably Campion imagined that they had no work to do in that unit: they might become an acting lunatic ward. But if Mackenzie was Campion’s nephew the thing was explained.

The lunatic exclaimed:

“Campion, my uncle? Why, he’s yours!”

Tietjens said:

“Oh no, he isn’t.” The general was not even a connection of his, but he did happen to be Tietjens’ godfather and his father’s oldest friend.

The other fellow answered:

“Then it’s damn funny. Damn suspicious⁠ ⁠… Why should he be so interested in you if he’s not your filthy uncle? You’re no soldier⁠ ⁠… You’re no sort of a soldier⁠ ⁠… A meal sack, that’s what you look like⁠ ⁠…” He paused and then went on very quickly: “They say up at H.Q. that your wife has got hold of the disgusting general. I didn’t believe it was true. I didn’t believe you were that sort of fellow. I’ve heard a lot about you!”

Tietjens laughed at this madness. Then, in the dark brownness, an intolerable pang went all through his heavy frame⁠—the intolerable pang of home news to these desperately occupied men, the pain caused by disasters happening in the darkness and at a distance. You could do nothing to mitigate them!⁠ ⁠… The extraordinary beauty of the wife from whom he was separated⁠—for she was extraordinarily beautiful!⁠—might well have caused scandals about her to have penetrated to the general’s headquarters, which was a sort of family party! Hitherto there had, by the grace of God, been no scandals. Sylvia Tietjens had been excruciatingly unfaithful, in the most painful manner. He could not be certain that the child he adored was his own⁠ ⁠… That was not unusual with extraordinarily beautiful⁠—and cruel!⁠—women. But she had been haughtily circumspect.

Nevertheless, three months ago, they had parted⁠ ⁠… Or he thought