A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [35]
It occurred to him that if he...call it 'stopped one' that day, Campion would probably marry his, Tietjens', widow...Sylvia in crepe. With perhaps a little white about it!
The cornet--obviously it was not a key-bugle--remarked:
: her pass by...
ing
I did but view
and then stopped to reflect. After a moment it added meditatively:
. her...
And . .
now . .
I . .
love . till
I die!
That would scarcely refer to Sylvia...Still, perhaps in crepe, with a touch of white, passing by, very tall...Say, in a seventeenth century street...
The only satisfactory age in England!...Yet what chance had it to-day? Or, still more, to-morrow? In the sense that the age of, say, Shakespeare had a chance. Or Pericles! or Augustus!
Heaven knew, we did not want a preposterous drumbeating such as the Elizabethans produced--and received. Like lions at a fair...But what chance had quiet fields, Anglican sainthood, accuracy of thought, heavy-leaved, timbered hedgerows, slowly creeping plough-lands moving up the slopes?...Still, the land remains...
The land remains...It remains!...At that same moment the dawn was wetly revealing; over there in George Herbert's parish...What was it called?...What the devil was its name? Oh, Hell!...Between Salisbury and Wilton...The tiny church...But he refused to consider the plough-lands, the heavy groves, the slow highroad above the church that the dawn was at that moment wetly revealing--until he could remember that name...He refused to consider that, probably even to-day, that land ran to...produced the stock of...Anglican sainthood. The quiet thing!
But until he could remember the name he would consider nothing...
He said:
'Are those damned Mills bombs coming?'
The Sergeant said:
'In ten minutes they'll be ere, sir. HAY Cumpny had just telephoned that they were coming in now.'
It was almost a disappointment: in an hour or so, without bombs, they might all have been done with. As quiet as the seventeenth century: in heaven...The beastly bombs would have to explode before that, now! They might, in consequence, survive...Then what was he, Tietjens, going to do! Take orders! It was thinkable...
He said:
'Those bloody imbeciles of Huns are coming over in an hour's time, Brigade says. Get the beastly bombs served out, but keep enough in store to serve as an emergency ration if we should want to advance...Say a third. For C and D Companies...Tell the Adjutant I'm going along all the trenches and I want the Assistant-Adjutant, Mr Aranjuez, and Orderly-Corporal Colley to come with me...As soon as the bombs come for certain!...I don't want the men to think they've got to stop a Hun rush without bombs...They're due to begin their barrage in fourteen minutes, but they won't really come over without a hell of a lot of preparation...I don't know how Brigade knows all this!'
The name Bemerton suddenly came on to his tongue. Yes, Bemerton, Bemerton, Bemerton was George Herbert's parsonage. Bemerton, outside Salisbury...The cradle of the race as far as our race was worth thinking about. He imagined himself standing up on a little hill, a lean contemplative parson, looking at the land sloping down to Salisbury spire. A large, clumsily bound seventeenth-century testament, Greek, beneath his elbow...Imagine standing up on a hill! It was the unthinkable thing there!
The Sergeant was lamenting, a little wearily, that the Huns were coming.
'Hi did think them bleeding 'uns, 'xcuse me, sir, wasn' per'aps coming this morning...Give us a rest an' a chance to clear up a bit...He had the tone of a resigned schoolboy saying that the Head might have given the school a holiday on the Queen's birthday. But what the devil did that man think about his approaching dissolution?
That was the unanswerable question. He, Tietjens, had been asked several times what death was like...Once, in a cattle truck under a bridge, near a Red-Cross Clearing Station, by a miserable fellow called Perowne. In the presence of the troublesome lunatic called McKechnie. You would have thought that even a Movement