A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [40]
It might of course be the signal for the German barrage to begin. Tietjens' heart stopped; his skin on the nape of the neck began to prickle: his hands were cold. That was fear: the BATTLE FEAR, experienced in strafes. He might not again be able to hear himself think. Not ever. What did he want of life?...Well, just not to lose his reason. One would pray: not that...Otherwise, perhaps a nice parsonage might do. It was just thinkable. A place in which for ever to work at the theory of waves...But of course it was not thinkable...
He was saying to McKechnie:
'You ought not to be here without a tin hat. You will have to put a tin hat on if you mean to stop here. I can give you your four minutes if that is not the strafe beginning. Who's been saying what?'
McKechnie said:
'I'm not stopping here. I'm going back, after I've given you a piece of my mind, to the beastly job you have got me defiled with.'
Tietjens said:
'Well, you'll put on a tin hat to go there, please. And don't ride your horse, if you've got it here, till after you're a hundred yards at least down a communication trench.'
McKechnie asked how Tietjens dared give him orders and Tietjens said: Fine he would look with Divisional Transport dead in his lines at five in the morning in a parade hat. McKechnie with objurgations said that the Transport Officer had the right to consult the C.O. of a battalion he supplied. Tietjens said:
'I'm commanding here. You've not consulted me!'
It appeared to him queer that they should be behaving like that when you could hear...oh, say: the wings of the angel of death...You can 'almost hear the very rustling of his wings' was the quotation. Good enough rhetoric...But of course that was how armed men would behave...At all times!
He had been trying the old trick of the military, clipped voice on the half-dotty subject. It had before then reduced McKechnie to some sort of military behaviour.
It reduced him in this case to a maudlin state. He exclaimed with a sort of lachrymose agony:
'This is what it has come to with the old battalion...the b----y, b----y, b----y old battalion of b----rs!' Each imprecation was a sob. 'How we worked at it...And now...you've got it!'
Tietjens said:
'Well, you were Vice-Chancellor's Latin Prizeman once. It's what we get reduced to.' He added: 'Vos mellificatis apes!'
McKechnie said with gloomy contempt:
'You...You're no Latinist!'
By now Tietjens had counted two hundred and eighty since the big cannon had said Phooooh'. Perhaps then it was not the signal for the barrage to begin...Had it been it would have begun before now; it would have come thumping along on the heels of the Phooooh'. His hands and the nape of his neck were preparing to become normal.
Perhaps the strafe would not come at all that day. There was the wind. If anything it was strengthening. Yesterday he had suspected that the Germans hadn't got any tanks handy. Perhaps the ugly, senseless armadillos--and incapable at that! Under-engined!--had all got stuck in the marshes in front of G section. Perhaps the heavy artillery fire of ours that had gone on most of yesterday had been meant to pound the beastly things to pieces. Moving, they looked like slow rats, their noses to the ground, snouting crumbs of garbage. When they were still they looked merely pensive.
Perhaps the strafe would not come. He hoped it would not. He did not want a strafe with himself in command of the battalion. He did not know what to do: what he ought to do by the book. He knew what he would do. He would stroll about along those deep trenches. Stroll. With his hands in his pockets. Like General Gordon in pictures. He would say contemplative things as the time dragged on...A rather abominable sort of Time really...But that would introduce into the Battalion a spirit of calm that it had lately lacked...The night before last the C.O., with a bottle in each hand, had hurled them both