A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [78]
Cockshott was a draper's assistant, the Corporal a milkman. Very likely they were not good with shovels.
He had had the advantage of a boyhood crowded with digging of all sorts. Duckett was buried horizontally, running into the side of a conical mound. His feet at least stuck out like that, but you could not tell how the body was disposed. It might turn to either side or upwards. He said:
'Go on with your tools above! But give me room.'
The toes being to the sky, the trunk could hardly bend downwards. He stood below the feet and aimed terrific blows with the shovel eighteen inches below. He liked digging. This earth was luckily dryish. It ran down the hill conveniently. This man had been buried probably ten minutes. It seemed longer but it was probably less. He ought to have a chance. Probably earth was less suffocating than water. He said to the Corporal:
'Do you know how to apply artificial respiration?' 'To the drowned?'
Cockshott said:
'I do, sir. I was swimming champion of Islington baths!' A rather remarkable man, Cockshott. His father had knocked up the arm of a man who had tried to shoot Mr Gladstone in 1866 or thereabouts.
A lot of earth falling away, obligingly, after one withdrawal of the shovel Lance-Corporal Duckett's thin legs appeared to the fork, the knees dropping.
Cockshott said:
'E ain't rubbin' 'is ankles this journey!'
The Corporal said:
'Company Commander is killed, sir. Bullet clean thru the ed!'
It annoyed Tietjens that here was another head wound. He could not apparently get away from them. It was silly to be annoyed, because in trenches a majority of wounds had to be head wounds. But Providence might just as well be a little more imaginative. To oblige one. It annoyed him, too, to think that he had strafed that boy just before he was killed. For leaving his shovels about. A strafe leaves a disagreeable impression on young boys for quite half an hour. It was probably the last incident in his life. So he died depressed...Might God be making it up to him!
He said to the Corporal:
'Let me come.' Duckett's left hand and wrist had appeared, the hand drooping and improbably clean, level with the thigh. It gave the line of the body; you could clear away beside him.
''E wasn't on'y twenty-two,' the Corporal said. Cockshott said: 'Same age as me. Very particular e was about your rifle pull-throughs.'
A minute later they pulled Duckett out, by the legs. A stone might have been resting on his face, in that case his face would have been damaged. It wasn't, though you had had to chance it. It was black but asleep...As if Valentine Wannop had been reposing in an ash-bin. Tietjens left Cockshott applying artificial respiration very methodically and efficiently to the prostrate form.
It was to him a certain satisfaction that, at any rate, in that minute affair he hadn't lost one of the men but only an officer. As satisfaction it was not militarily correct, though as it harmed no one there was no harm in it. But for his men he always felt a certain greater responsibility; they seemed to him to be there infinitely less of their own volition. It was akin to the feeling that made him regard cruelty to an animal as a more loathsome crime than cruelty to a human being, other than a child. It was no doubt irrational.
Leaning, in the communication trench, against the corrugated iron that boasted a great whitewashed A, in, a very clean thin Burberry boasting half a bushel of badges of rank--worsted crowns and things!--and in a small tin hat that looked elegant, was a slight figure. How the devil can you make a tin hat look elegant! It carried a hunting switch and wore spurs. An Inspecting General. The General said benevolently:
'Who are you?' and then with irritation: 'Where the devil is the officer commanding this Battalion? Why can't he be found?' He added: 'You're disgustingly dirty. Like a blackamoor. I suppose you've an explanation.'
Tietjens was being spoken to by General Campion. In a hell of a temper. He stood to attention like a scarecrow. He said:
'I am in command