No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [19]
His eyes met the non-committal glance of a dark, gentlemanly thin fellow with a strikingly scarlet hatband, a lot of gilt about his khaki and little strips of steel chain-armour on his shoulders...Levin...Colonel Levin, G.S.O. II, or something, attached to General Lord Edward Campion...How the hell did fellows get into these intimacies of commanders of units and their men? Swimming in like fishes into the brown air of a tank and there at your elbow... ---- spies!...The men had all been called to attention and stood like gasping codfish. The ever-watchful Sergeant-Major Cowley had drifted to his, Tietjens', elbow. You protect your orfcers from the gawdy Staff as you protect your infant daughters in lambswool from draughts. The dark, bright, cheerful staffwallah said with a slight lisp:
'Busy, I see.' He might have been standing there for a century and have a century of the battalion headquarters' time to waste like that. 'What draft is this?'
Sergeant-Major Cowley, always ready in case his orfcer should not know the name of his unit or his own name, said:
'No. 16 I.B.D. Canadian First Division Casual Number Four Draft, sir.'
Colony Levin let air lispingly out between his teeth.
'No. 16 Draft not off yet...Dear, dear! Dear, dear!...We shall be strafed to hell by First Army...' He used the word hell as if he had first wrapped it in eau-de-cologned cotton-wadding.
Tietjens, on his feet, knew this fellow very well: a fellow who had been a very bad Society water-colour painter of good family on the mother's side: hence the cavalry gadgets on his shoulders. Would it then be good...say good taste to explode? He let the sergeant-major do it. Sergeant-Major Cowley was of the type of N.C.O. who carried weight because he knew ten times as much about his job as any Staff officer. The sergeant-major explained that it had been impossible to get off the draft earlier. The colonel said:
'But surely, sergeant-majah...'
The sergeant-major, now a deferential shopwalker in a lady's store, pointed out that they had had urgent instructions not to send up the draft without the four hundred Canadian Railway Service men who were to come from Etaples. These men had only arrived that evening at 5.30...at the railway station. Marching them up had taken three-quarters of an hour. The colonel said:
'But surely, sergeant-majah...'
Old Cowley might as well have said 'madam' as 'sir' to the red hat-band...The four-hundred had come with only what they stood up in. The unit had had to wangle everything: boots, blankets, tooth-brushes, braces, rifles, iron-rations, identity disks out of the depot store. And it was now only twenty-one twenty...Cowley permitted his commanding officer at this point to say:
'You must understand that we work in circumstances of extreme difficulty, sir...'
The graceful colonel was lost in an absent contemplation of his perfectly elegant knees.
'I know, of course...' he lisped. 'Very difficult...He brightened up to add: 'But you must admit you're unfortunate...You must admit that...' The weight settled, however, again on his mind.
Tietjens said:
'Not, I suppose, sir, any more unfortunate than any other unit working under a dual control for supplies...'
The colonel said:
'What's that? Dual...Ah, I see you're there, Mackenzie...Feeling well...feeling fit, eh?'
The whole hut stood silent. His anger at the waste of time made Tietjens say:
'If you understand, sir, we are a unit whose principal purpose is drawing things to equip drafts with...' This fellow was delaying them atrociously. He was brushing his knees with a handkerchief!'I've had,' Tietjens said, 'a man killed on my hands this afternoon because we have to draw tin-hats for my orderly room from Dublin on an A.F.B. Canadian from Aldershot...Killed here...We've only just mopped up the blood from where you're standing...'
The cavalry colonel exclaimed:
'Oh, good gracious me!...' jumped a little and examined his beautiful