No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [16]
Under cover of his voice Tietjens had been writing:
'Now we affront the grinning chops of Death,' and saying to Lieutenant Hotchkiss: 'In the I.B.D. ante-room you'll find any number of dirty little squits of Glamorgan-shires drinking themselves blind over La Vie Parisienne...Ask any one of them you like...' He wrote:
'And in between the carcases and the moil
Of marts and cities, toil and moil and coil...'
'You think this difficult!' he said to Mackenzie. 'Why, you've written a whole undertaker's mortuary ode in the rhymes alone,' and went on to Hotchkiss: 'Ask anyone you like as long as he's a P.B. officer...Do you know what P.B. means? No, not Poor B----y, Permanent Base. Unfit...If he'd like to take a draft to Bailleul.'
The hut was filling with devious, slow, ungainly men in yellow-brown. Their feet shuffled desultorily; they lumped dull canvas bags along the floor and held in unliterary hands small open books that they dropped from time to time. From outside came a continuing, swelling and descending chant of voices; at times it would seem to be all one laugh, at times one menace, then the motives mingled fugally, like the sea on a beach of large stones. It seemed to Tietjens suddenly extraordinary how shut in on oneself one was in this life...He sat scribbling fast: 'Old Spectre blows a cold protecting breath...Vanity of vanities, the preacher saith...No more parades, not any more, no oil...' He was telling Hotchkiss, who was obviously shy of approaching the Glamorganshires in their ante-room...'Unambergris'd our limbs in the naked soil...' that he did not suppose any P.B. officer would object. They would go on a beanfeast up into the giddy line in a first-class carriage and get draft leave and command pay too probably...'No funeral struments cast before our wraiths...' If any fellow does object, you just send his name to me and I will damn well shove it into extra orders...
The advanced wave of the brown tide of men was already at his feet. The extraordinary complications of even the simplest lives...A fellow was beside him Private Logan, formerly, of all queer things for a Canadian private, a trooper of the Inniskillings: owner, of all queer things, of a milk-walk or a dairy farm, outside Sydney, which is in Australia...A man of sentimental complications, jauntiness as became an Inniskilling, a Cockney accent such as ornaments the inhabitants of Sydney, and a complete distrust of lawyers. On the other hand, with the completest trust in Tietjens. Over his shoulder--he was blond, upright, with his numerals shining like gold, looked a lumpish, café-au-lait, eagle-nosed countenance: a half-caste member of one of the Six Nations, who had been a doctor's errand boy in Quebec...He had his troubles, but was difficult to understand. Behind him, very black-avised with a high colour, truculent eyes and an Irish accent, was a graduate of McGill University who had been a teacher of languages in Tokyo and had some sort of claim against the Japanese Government...And faces, two and two, in a coil round the hut...Like dust: like a cloud of dust that would approach and overwhelm a landscape: every one with preposterous troubles and anxieties, even if they did not overwhelm you personally with them...Brown dust...
He kept the Inniskilling waiting while he scribbled the rapid sestet to his sonnet which ought to make a little plainer what it all meant. Of course the general idea was that, when you got into the line or near it, there