No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [41]
In his orderly hut he found an immense number of papers. On the top an envelope marked Urgent. Private with a huge rubber stamp. From Levin. Levin, too, must have been up pretty late. It was not about Mrs Tietjens, or even Miss de Bailly. It was a private warning that Tietjens would probably have his draft on his hands another week or ten days, and very likely another couple of thousand men extra as well. He warned Tietjens to draw all the tents he could get hold of as soon as possible...Tietjens called to a subaltern with pimples who was picking his teeth with a pen-nib at the other end of the hut: 'Here, you!...Take two companies of the Canadians to the depot store and draw all the tents you can get up to two hundred and fifty...Have 'em put alongside my D lines...Do you know how to look after putting up tents?...Well then, get Thompson...no, Pitkins, to help you...' The subaltern drifted out sulkily. Levin said that the French railway strikers, for some political reason, had sabotaged a mile of railway, the accident of the night before had completely blocked up all the lines, and the French civilians would not let their own breakdown gangs make any repairs. German prisoners had been detailed for that fatigue, but probably Tietjens' Canadian railway corps would be wanted. He had better hold them in readiness. The strike was said to be a manoeuvre for forcing our hands--to get us to take over more of the line. In that case they had jolly well dished themselves, for how could we take over more of the line without more men, and how could we send up more men without the railway to send them by? We had half a dozen army corps all ready to go. Now they were all jammed. Fortunately the weather at the front was so beastly that the Germans could not move. He finished up 'Four in the morning, old bean, à tantot!' the last phrase having been learned from Mlle de Bailly. Tietjens grumbled that if they went on piling up the work on him like this he would never get down to the signing of that marriage contract.
He called the Canadian sergeant-major to him.
'See,' he said, 'that you keep the Railway Service Corps in camp with their arms ready, whatever their arms are. Tools, I suppose. Are their tools all complete? And their muster roll?'
'Girtin has gone absent, sir,' the slim dark fellow said, with an air of destiny. Girtin was the respectable man with the mother to whom Tietjens had given the two hours' leave the night before.
Tietjens answered:
'He would have!' with a sour grin. It enhanced his views of strictly respectable humanity. They blackmailed you with lamentable and pathetic tales and then did the dirty on you. He said to the sergeant-major:
'You will be here for another week or ten days. See that you get your tents up all right and the men comfortable. I will inspect them as soon as I have taken my orderly room. Full marching order. Captain McKechnie will inspect their kits at two.'
The sergeant-major, stiff but graceful, had something at the back of his mind. It came out:
'I have my marching orders for two-thirty this afternoon. The notice for inserting my commission in depot orders is on your table. I leave for the O.T.C. by the three train...'
Tietjens said:
'Your commission!...' It was a confounded nuisance.
The sergeant-major said:
'Sergeant-Major Cowley and I applied for our commissions three months ago. The communications granting them are both on your table together...
Tietjens said:
'Sergeant-Major Cowley...Good God! Who recommended you?'
The whole organization of his confounded battalion fell to pieces. It appeared that a circular had come round three months before--before Tietjens had been given command of that unit--asking for experienced first-class warrant officers capable of serving as instructors in Officers' Training Corps, with commissions. Sergeant-Major Cowley had been recommended by the colonel of the depot, Sergeant-Major Ledoux by his own colonel. Tietjens felt as if he had been let down--but of course he had not been. It was just the way of the army, all the time. You got a platoon, or a battalion, or, for the matter of that, a dug-out or a tent, by herculean labours into good fettle. It ran all right for a day or two, then it all fell to pieces, the personnel scattered to the four winds by what appeared merely wanton orders, coming from the most unexpected headquarters, or the premises were smashed up by a chance shell that might just as well have fallen somewhere else...The finger of Fate!...