A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [53]
But it would take time. Months! Anything like adequate reinforcements would take months.
And at that moment, in the most crucial point of the line of the Army, of the Expeditionary Force, the Allied Forces, the Empire, the Universe, the Solar system, they had three hundred and sixty-six men commanded by the last surviving Tory. To face wave on wave of the Enemy. In one minute the German barrage was due.
Aranjuez said to him:
'You can write a sonnet in two and a half minutes, sir...And your syphon works like anything in that damp trench...It took my mother's great-uncle, the canon of Oporto, fifteen weeks to finish his celebrated sonnet. I know because my mother told me...But you oughtn't to be here, sir.'
Aranjuez then was the nephew of the author of the Sonnet to Night. He could be. You had to have that sort of oddity to make up this world. So naturally he was interested in sonnets.
And, having got hold of a battalion with a stretch of damp trench, Tietjens had had the opportunity of trying a thing he had often thought of--of drying out vertically cut, damp soil by means of a syphon of soil-pipes put in, not horizontally but vertically. Fortunately Hackett, the commander of B Company, that had the wet trench, had been an engineer in civil life. Aranjuez had been along, out of sheer hero-worship, to B trenches to see how his hero's syphons had worked. He reported that they worked like a dream.
Little Aranjuez said:
'These trenches are like Pompeii, sir.'
Tietjens had never seen Pompeii, but he understood that Aranjuez was referring to the empty square-cut excavations in the earth. Particularly to their emptiness. And to the deadly stillness in the sunlight...Admirable trenches. Made to hold an establishment of several thousand men. To bustle with Cockney life. Now dead empty. They passed three sentries in the pinkish gravel passage and two men, one with a pick, the other with a shovel. They were exactly squaring the juncture of the wall and the path, as they might have done in Pompeii. Or in Hyde Park! A perfect devil for tidiness, 'A' Comany Commander. But the men seemed to like it. They were sniggering, though they stopped that, of course when Tietjens passed...
A nice, dark, tiny boy, Aranjuez: his adoration was charming. From the very first--and naturally, frightened out of his little life, he had clung to Tietjens as a child clings to an omnipotent father. Tietjens, all-wise, could direct the awful courses of war and decree safety for the frightened! Tietjens needed that sort of worship. The boy said it would be awful to have anything happen to your eyes. Your girl naturally would not look at you. Not more than three miles away, Nancy Truefitt was now. Unless they had evacuated her. Nancy was his flame. In a tea-shop at Bailleul.
A man was sitting outside the mouth of 'A' dugout, just after they passed the mouth of the communication trench...Comforting that channel in the soil looked, running uphill. You could saunter away up there, out of all this...But you couldn't! There was no turning here either to the right or to the left!
The man writing in a copy-book had his tin hat right over his eyes. Engrossed, he sat on a gravel-step, his copybook on his knees. His name was Slocombe and he was a dramatist. Like Shakespeare. He made fifty pounds a time writing music-hall sketches: for the outer halls. The outer halls were the cheap music-halls that go in a ring round the suburbs of London. Slocombe never missed a second, writing in his copy-books. If you fell the men out for a rest when marching Slocombe would sit by the roadside--and out would come his copy-book and his pencil. His wife would type out what he sent home. And write him grumbling letters if the supply of copy failed. How was she to keep up the Sunday best of George and Flossie if he did not keep on writing one-act sketches? Tietjens had this information through censoring one of