A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [34]
Nice to be in poor old Puffles' army. Nice but wearisome...Nice girls with typewriters in well-ventilated offices. Did they still put paper cuffs on to keep their sleeves from ink? He would ask Valen...Valen...It was warm and still...On such a night...
'Bringt dem Hauptmann eine Kerze!' A voice from under his camp bed! He imagined that the Hauptmann spook must be myopic: short-sightedly examining a tamping fuze...If they used tamping fuzes or if that was what they called them in the army!
He could not see the face or the spectacles of the Hauptmann any more than he could see the faces of his men. Not through his flea-bag and shins! They were packed in the tunnel; whitish-grey, tubular agglomerations...Large! Like the maggots that are eaten by Australian natives...Fear possessed him!
He sat up in his flea-bag, dripping with icy sweat.
'By Jove, I'm for it!' he said. He imagined that his brain was going: he was mad and seeing himself go mad. He cast about in his mind for some subject about which to think so that he could prove to himself that he had not gone mad.
II
The key-bugle remarked with singular distinction to the dawn:
dy
I know a lad fair kind
and
Was never face
so mind
please my
y
A sudden waft of pleasure at the seventeenth-century air that the tones gave to the landscape went all over Tietjens...Herrick and Purcell!...Or perhaps it was a modern imitation, Good enough. He asked:
'What the devil's that row, Sergeant?'
The Sergeant disappeared behind the muddied sacking curtain. There was a guard-room in there. The key-bugle said:
Fair kind...
and
Fair Fair Fair
kind...
and ... and ... and
It might be two hundred yards off along the trenches. Astonishing pleasure came to him from that seventeenth-century air and the remembrance of those exact, quiet words...Or perhaps he had not got them right. Nevertheless, they were exact and quiet. As efficient working beneath the soul as the picks of miners in the dark.
The Sergeant returned with the obvious information that it was 011 Griffiths practising on the cornet. Captain McKechnie ad promised to ear im after breakfast n recommend im to the Divisional Follies to play at the concert tonight, if e like im.
Tietjens said:
'Well, I hope Captain McKechnie likes him!'
He hoped McKechnie, with his mad eyes and his pestilential accent, would like that fellow. That fellow spread seventeenth-century atmosphere across the landscape over which the sun's rays were beginning to flood a yellow wash. Then, might the seventeenth century save the fellow's life, for his good taste! For his life would probably be saved. He, Tietjens, would give him a pass back to Division to get ready for the concert. So he would be out of the strafe...Probably none of them would be alive after the strafe that Brigade reported to be coming in...Twenty-seven minutes, by now! Three hundred and twenty-eight fighting men against...Say a Division. Any preposterous number...Well, the seventeeth century might as well save one man!
What had become of the seventeenth century? And Herbert and Donne and Crashaw and Vaughan, the Silurist?...Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky!...By Jove, it was that!...Old Campion flashing like a popinjay in the scarlet and gilt of the Major-General, had quoted that in the base camp, years ago. Or was it months? Or wasn't it: 'But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariots hurrying near,' that he had quoted?
Anyhow, not bad for an old General!
He wondered what had become of that elegant collection of light yellow, scarlet and gilt...Somehow he always thought of Campion as in light yellow, rather than khaki, so much did he radiate light...Campion and his, Tietjens', wife, radiating light together--she in a golden gown!
Campion was about due in these latitudes. It was astonishing that he had not turned up before. But poor old Puffles with his abominably weakened Army had done too jolly well to be replaced. Even at the request of the Minister