No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [104]
There were shells dropping in Poperinghe...Five miles out, under his nose...The shells dropped. White vapour rose and ran away in plumes...What sort of shells?...There were twenty different kinds of shells...
The Huns were shelling Poperinghe! A senseless cruelty. It was five miles behind the lines! Prussian brutality...There were two girls who kept a tea-shop in Poperinghe...High coloured...General Plumer had liked them...a fine old general...The shells had killed them both...Any man might have slept with either of them with pleasure and profit...Six thousand of H.M. officers must have thought the same about those high-coloured girls. Good girls!...But the Hun shells got them...What sort of fate was that?...To be desired by six thousand men and smashed into little gobbets of flesh by Hun shells?
It appeared to be mere Prussianism--the senseless cruelty of the Hun!--to shell Poperinghe. An innocent town with a tea-shop five miles behind Ypres...Little noiseless plumes of smoke rising under the quiet blanketing of the pale maroon skies, with the haze from the aeroplane shelters, and the great aeroplanes over the Bethune slag-heaps...What a dreadful name--Bethune...
Probably, however, the Germans had heard that we were massing men in Poperinghe. It was reasonable to shell a town where men were being assembled...Or we might have been shelling one of their towns with an Army H.Q. in it. So they shelled Poperinghe in the silent grey day...That was according to the rules of the service...General Campion, accepting with equanimity what German airplanes did to the hospitals, camps, stables, brothels, theatres, boulevards, chocolate stalls and hotels of his town, would have been vastly outraged if Hun planes had dropped bombs on his private lodgings...The rules of war!...You spare, mutually, each other's headquarters and blow to pieces girls that are desired by six thousand men apiece...
That had been nineteen months before!...Now, having lost so much emotion, he saw the embattled world as a map...An embossed map of greenish papier mâché. The blood of 0 Nine Morgan was blurring luminously over it. At the extreme horizon was territory labelled White Ruthenians! Who the devil were those poor wretches?
He exclaimed to himself: 'By heavens! Is this epilepsy?' He prayed: 'Blessed saints, get me spared that!' He exclaimed: 'No, it isn't!...I've complete control of my mind. My uppermost mind.' He said to the general:
'I can't divorce, sir. I've no grounds.'
The general said:
'Don't lie. You know what Thurston knows. Do you mean that you have been guilty of contributory misconduct?...Whatever it is? And can't divorce! I don't believe it.'
Tietjens said to himself:
'Why the devil am I so anxious to shield the whore? It's not reasonable. It is an obsession!'
White Ruthenians are miserable people to the south of Lithuania. You don't know whether they incline to the Germans or to the Poles. The Germans don't even know...The Germans were beginning to take their people out of the line where we were weak: they were going to give them proper infantry training. That gave him, Tietjens, a chance. They would not come over strong for at least two months. It meant, though, a great offensive in the spring. Those fellows had sense. In the poor, beastly trenches the Tommies knew nothing but how to chuck bombs. Both sides did that. But the Germans were going to cure it! Stood chucking bombs at each other from forty yards. The rifle was obsolete! Ha! ha! Obsolete!...The civilian psychology!
The general said:
'No, I don't believe it. I knew you did not keep any girl in any tobacco-shop. I remember every word you said at Rye in 1912. I wasn't sure then. I am now. You tried to let me think it. You had shut up your house because of your wife's misbehaviour. You let me believe you had been sold up. You weren't sold up at all.'
...Why should it be the civilian psychology to chuckle with delight, uproariously, when the imbecile idea was promulgated that the rifle was obsolete? Why should public opinion force on the War Office a training-camp course that completely cut out any thorough instruction in the rifle and communication drill? It was queer...It was of course disastrous. Queer. Not altogether mean. Pathetic, too...