No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [24]
Now, if he said:
'Look here, colonel...' or 'Look here, Colonel Levin...' or 'Look here, Stanley, my boy...' For the one thing an officer may not say to a superior whatever their intimacy was: 'Look here, Levin...' If he said then:
'Look here, Stanley, you're a silly ass. It's all very well for Campion to say that I am unsound because I've some brains. He's my godfather and has been saying it to me since I was twelve, and had more brain in my left heel than he had in the whole of his beautifully barbered skull...But when you say it you are just a parrot. You did not think that out for yourself. You do not even think it. You know I'm heavy, short in the wind, and self-assertive...but you know perfectly well that I'm as good on detail as yourself. And a damned sight more. You've never caught me tripping over a return. Your sergeant in charge of returns may have. But not you...'
If Tietjens should say that to this popinjay, would that be going farther than an officer in charge of detachment should go with a member of the Staff set above him, though not on parade and in a conversation of intimacy? Off parade and in intimate conversation all His Majesty's poor ---- officers are equals...gentlemen having his Majesty's commission: there can be no higher rank and all that Bilge!...For how off parade could this descendant of an old-clo' man from Frankfurt be the equal of him, Tietjens of Groby? He wasn't his equal in any way--let alone socially. If Tietjens hit him he would drop dead; if he addressed a little sneering remark to Levin, the fellow would melt so that you would see the old spluttering Jew swimming up through his carefully arranged Gentile features. He couldn't shoot as well as Tietjens, or ride, or play a hand at auction. Why, damn it, he, Tietjens, hadn't the least doubt that he could paint better water-colour-pictures...And, as for returns...he would undertake to tear the guts out of half a dozen new and contradictory A.C.I.'s--Army Council Instructions--and write twelve correct Command Orders founded on them, before Levin had lisped out the date and serial number of the first one...He had done it several times up in the room, arranged like a French blue-stocking's salon, where Levin worked at Garrison headquarters...He had written Levin's blessed command order while Levin fussed and fumed about their being delayed for tea with Mlle de Bailly...and curled his delicate moustache...Mlle de Badly, chaperoned by old Lady Sachse, had tea by a clear wood fire in an eighteenth-century octagonal room, with blue-grey tapestried walls and powdering closets, out of priceless porcelain cups without handles. Pale tea that tasted faintly of cinnamon!
Mlle de Bailly was a long, dark high-coloured Provençale. Not heavy, but precisely long, slow, and cruel; coiled in a deep arm-chair, saying the most wounding, slow things to Levin, she resembled a white Persian cat luxuriating, sticking out a tentative pawful of expanding claws. With eyes slanting pronouncedly upwards and a very thin hooked nose...almost Japanese...And with a terrific cortege of relatives, swell in a French way. One brother a chauffeur to a Marshal of France...An aristocratic way of shirking!
With all that, obviously even off parade, you might well be the social equal of a Staff colonel: but you jolly well had to keep from showing that you were his superior. Especially intellectually. If you let yourself show a Staff officer that he was a silly ass--you could say it as often as you liked as long as you didn't prove it!--you could be certain that you would be for it before long. And quite properly. It was not English to be intellectually adroit. Nay, it was positively un-English. And the duty of field officers is to keep messes as English as possible...So a Staff officer would take it out of such a regimental inferior. In a perfectly creditable way.