No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [42]
But it put a confounded lot more work on him...He said to Sergeant-Major Cowley, whom he found in the next hut where all the paper work of the unit was done:
'I should have thought you would have been enormously better off as regimental sergeant-major than with a commission. I know I would rather have the job.' Cowley answered--he was very pallid and shaken--that with his unfortunate infirmity, coming on at any moment of shock, he would be better in a job where he could slack off, like an O.T.C. He had always been subject to small fits, over in a minute, or couple of seconds even...But getting too near a H.E. shell--after Noircourt, which had knocked out Tietjens himself--had brought them on, violent. There was also, he finished, the gentility to be considered. Tietjens said:
'Oh, the gentility!...That's not worth a flea's jump...There won't be any more parades after this war. There aren't any now. Look at who your companions will be in an officer's quarters; you'd be in a great deal better society in any self-respecting sergeants' mess.' Cowley answered that he knew the service had gone to the dogs. All the same his missis liked it. And there was his daughter Winnie to be considered. She had always been a bit wild, and his missis wrote that she had gone wilder than ever, all due to the war. Cowley thought that the bad boys would be a little more careful how they monkeyed with her if she was an officer's daughter...There was probably something in that!
Coming out into the open, confidentially with Tietjens, Cowley dropped his voice huskily to say:
'Take Quartermaster-Sergeant Morgan for R.S.M., sir.' Tietjens said explosively:
'I'm damned if I will.' Then he asked: 'Why?' The wisdom of an old N.C.O.'s is a thing no prudent officer neglects.
'He can do the work, sir,' Cowley said. 'He's out for a commission, and he'll do his best...He dropped his husky voice to a still greater depth of mystery:
'You're over two hundred--I should say nearer three hundred--pounds down in your battalion stores. I don't suppose you want to lose a sum of money like that?'
Tietjens said:
'I'm damned if I do...But I don't see...Oh, yes, I do...If I make him sergeant-major he has to hand over the stores all complete...To-day...Can he do it?'
Cowley said that Morgan could have till the day after to-morrow. He would look after things till then.
'But you'll want to have a flutter before you go,' Tietjens said. 'Don't stop for me.'
Cowley said that he would stop and see the job through. He had thought of going down into the town and having a flutter. But the girls down there were a common sort, and it was bad for his complaint...He would stop and see what could be done with Morgan. Of course it was possible that Morgan might decide to face things out. He might prefer to stick to the money he'd got by disposing of Tietjens' stores to other battalions that were down, or to civilian contractors. And stand a court martial! But it wasn't likely. He was a Nonconformist deacon, or pew-opener, or even a minister possibly, at home in Wales...From near Denbigh! And Cowley had got a very good man, a first-class man, an Oxford professor, now a lance-corporal at the depot, for Morgan's place. The colonel would lend him to Tietjens and would get him rated acting quartermaster-sergeant unpaid...Cowley had it all arranged...Lance-Corporal Caldicott was a first-class man, only he could not tell his right hand from his left on parade. Literally could not tell them...
So the battalion settled itself down...Whilst Cowley and he were at the colonel's orderly room arranging for the transfer of the professor--he was really only a fellow of his college--who did not know his right hand from his left, Tietjens was engaged in the remains of the colonel's furious argument as to the union of the Anglican and Eastern rites. The colonel--he was a full colonel--sat in his lovely private office, a light, gay compartment of a tin-hutment, the walls being papered in scarlet, with, on the purplish, thick, soft baize of his table-cover, a tall glass vase from which sprayed out pale Riviera roses, the gift of young lady admirers amongst the V.A.D.'s in the town because he was a darling, and an open, very gilt and leather-bound volume of a biblical encyclopaedia beneath his delicate septuagenarian features. He was confirming his opinion that a union between the Church of England and the Greek Orthodox Church was the only thing that could save civilization. The whole war turned on that. The Central Empires represented Roman Catholicism, the Allies Protestantism and Orthodoxy. Let them unite. The papacy was a traitor to the cause of civilization. Why had the Vatican not protested with no uncertain voice about the abominations practised on the Belgian Catholics?...