No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [12]
Sergeant-Major Cowley said:
'No, no prize-fighter's fist would have done that, sir...And then he added, 'Oh, I take your meaning, sir...0 Nine Morgan's wife, sir...'
Tietjens moved, his feet sticking, towards the sergeant-major's table. The other runner had placed a tin basin with water in it. There was a hooded candle there now, alight; the water shone innocently, a half-moon of translucence wavering over the white bottom of the basin. The runner from Pontardulais said:
'Wash your hands first, sir!'
He said:
'Move a little out of it, cahptn.' He had a rag in his black hands. Tietjens moved out of the blood that had run in a thin stream under the table. The man was on his knees, his hands rubbing Tietjens' boot welts heavily, with the rags. Tietjens placed his hands in the innocent water and watched light purple-scarlet mist diffuse itself over the pale half-moon. The man below him breathed heavily, sniffing. Tietjens said:
'Thomas, 0 Nine Morgan was your mate?'
The man's face, wrinkled, dark and ape-like, looked up. 'He was a good pal, pore old ----,' he said. 'You would not like, surely to goodness, to go to mess with your shoes all bloody.'
'If I had given him leave,' Tietjens said, 'he would not be dead now.'
'No, surely not,' One Seven Thomas answered. 'But it is all one. Evans of Castell Goch would surely to goodness have killed him.'
'So you knew, too, about his wife!' Tietjens said.
'We thocht it wass that,' One Seven Thomas answered, 'or you would have given him leave, cahptn. You are a good cahptn.'
A sudden sense of the publicity that that life was came over Tietjens.
'You knew that,' he said. 'I wonder what the hell you fellows don't know and all!' he thought. 'If anything went wrong with one it would be all over the command in two days. Thank God, Sylvia can't get here!'
The man had risen to his feet. He fetched a towel of the sergeant-major's, very white with a red border.
'We know,' he said, 'that your honour is a very goot cahptn. And Captain McKechnie is a fery goot cahptn, and Captain Prentiss, and Le'tennat Jonce of Merthyr..'
Tietjens said:
'That'll do. Tell the sergeant-major to give you a pass to go with your mate to the hospital. Get someone to wash this floor.'
Two men were carrying the remains of 0 Nine Morgan, the trunk wrapped in a ground sheet. They carried him in a bandy chair out of the hut. His arms over his shoulders waved a jocular farewell. There would be an ambulance stretcher on bicycle wheels outside.
II
The 'All Clear' went at once after that. Its suddenness was something surprising, the mournful-cheerful, long notes dying regretfully on a night that had only just gone quiet after the perfectly astonishing row. The moon had taken it into its head to rise; begumboiled, jocular and grotesque, it came from behind the shoulder of one of the hut-covered hills and sent down the lines of Tietjens' huts long, sentimental rays that converted the place into a slumbering, pastoral settlement. There was no sound that did not contribute to the silence, little dim lights shone through the celluloid casements. Of Sergeant-Major Cowley, his numerals gilded by the moon in the lines of A Company, Tietjens, who was easing his lungs of coke vapours for a minute, asked in a voice that hushed itself in tribute to the moonlight and the now keen frost:
'Where the deuce is the draft?'
The sergeant-major looked poetically down a ribbon of whitewashed stones that descended the black down-side. Over the next shoulder of hill was the blur of a hidden conflagration.
'There's a Hun plane burning down there. In Twenty-Seven's parade ground. The draft's round that, sir,' he said. Tietjens said:
'Good God!' in a voice of caustic tolerance. He added, 'I did think we had drilled some discipline into these blighters in the seven weeks we have had them...You remember the first time when we had them on parade and that acting lance-corporal left the ranks to heave a rock at a sea-gull...And called you 'OP' Hunkey!...Conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline? Where's that Canadian