No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [76]
'The wounded man's name was Stilicho...A queer name...I suppose it's Cornish...It was B Company in front of us.'
'You didn't bring 'em to a court martial?' Cowley asked. Tietjens said: No. He could not be quite certain. Though he was certain. But he had been worrying about a private matter. He had been worrying about it while he lay on the ground and that rather obscured his sense of what he saw. Besides, he said faintly, an officer must use his judgement. He had judged it better in this case not to have seen the...His voice had nearly faded away: it was clear to Sylvia that he was coming to a climax of some mental torture. Suddenly he exclaimed to Cowley:
'Supposing I let him off one life to get him killed two years after. My God! That would be too beastly!'
Cowley snuffled in Tietjens' ear something that Sylvia did not catch--consolatory and affectionate. That intimacy was more than she could bear. She adopted her most negligent tone to ask:
'I suppose the one man had been trifling with the other's girl. Or wife!'
Cowley exploded: 'God bless you, no! They'd agreed upon it between them. To get one of them sent 'ome and the other, at any rate, out of that 'ell, leading him back to the dressing-station.' She said:
'You mean to say that a man would do that, to get out of it?...'
Cowley said:
'God bless you, ma'am, with the 'ell the Tommies 'as of it...For it's in the line that the differences between the Other Ranks' life and the officers' comes in...I tell you, ma'am, old soldier as I am, and I've been in seven wars one with another...there were times in this war when I could have shrieked, holding my right hand down...'
He paused and said: 'It was my idea...And it's been a good many others', that if I 'eld my 'and up over the parapet with perhaps my hat on it, in two minutes there would be a German sharpshooter's bullet through it. And then me for Blighty, as the soldiers say...And if that could happen to me, a regimental sergeant-major, with twenty-three years in the service...
The bright orderly came in, said he had found a taxi, and melted into the dimness.
'A man,' the sergeant-major said, 'would take the risk of being shot for wounding his pal...They get to love their pals, passing the love of women...' Sylvia exclaimed: 'Oh!' as if at a pang of toothache. 'They do, ma'am,' he said, 'it's downright touching...'
He was by now very unsteady as he stood, but his voice was quite clear. That was the way it took him. He said to Tietjens:
'It's queer, what you say about home worries taking up your mind...I remember in the Afghan campaign, when we were in the devil of a hot corner, I got a letter from my wife, Mrs Cowley, to say that our Winnie had the measles...And there was only one difference between me and Mrs Cowley: I said that a child must have flannel next its skin, and she said flannelette was good enough. Wiltshire doesn't hold by wool as Lincolnshire does. Long fleeces the Lincolnshire sheep have...And... dodging the Afghan bullets all day among the boulders as we was, all I could think of...For you know, ma'am, being a mother yourself, that the great thing with measles is to keep a child warm...I kep' saying to myself--'arf crying I was--"If she only keeps wool next Winnie's skin! If she only keeps wool next Winnie's skin!"...But you know that, being a mother yourself. I've seen your son's photo on the captain's dressing-table. Michael, 'is name is...So you see, the captain doesn't forget you and 'im.'
Sylvia said in a clear voice:
'Perhaps you would not go on!'
Distracted as she was by the anti-air-gun in the garden, though it was on the other side of the hotel and permitted you to get in a sentence or two before splitting your head with a couple of irregular explosions, she was still more distracted by a sudden vision--a remembrance of Christopher's face when their boy had had a temperature of 105° with the measles, up at his sister's house in Yorkshire. He had taken the responsibility, which the village doctor would not face, of himself placing the child in a bath full of split ice...She saw him bending, expressionless in the strong lamp-light, with the child in his clumsy arms over the glittering, rubbled surface of the bath...He was just as expressionless then as now...He reminded her now of how he had been then: some strain in the lines of the face perhaps that she could not analyse...Rather as if he had a cold in the head--a little suffocating, with suppressing his emotions, of course: his eyes looking at nothing. You would not have said that he even saw the child--heir to Groby and all that!...Something had said to her, just in between two crashes of the gun: 'It's his own child. He went as you might say down to hell to bring it back to life...' She knew it was Father Consett saying that. She knew it was true: Christopher had been down to hell to bring the child back...Fancy facing its pain in that dreadful bath!...The thermometer had dropped, running down under their eyes...Christopher had said: 'A good heart, he's got! A good plucked one!' and then held his breath, watching the thin filament of bright mercury drop to normal...She said now, between her teeth: 'The child is his property as much as the damned estate...Well, I've got them both...'