No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [38]
Was he, he said to himself, to regard himself as responsible for the fellow's death? Was his inner mentality going to present that claim upon him? That would be absurd. The end of the earth! The absurd end of the earth...Yet that insignificant ass Levin had that evening asserted the claim to go into his, Tietjens of Groby's, relations with his wife. That was an end of the earth as absurd! It was the unthinkable thing, as unthinkable as the theory that the officer can be responsible for the death of the man...But the idea had certainly presented itself to him. How could he be responsible for the death? In fact--in literalness--he was. It had depended absolutely upon his discretion whether the man should go home or not. The man's life or death had been in his hands. He had followed the perfectly correct course. He had written to the police of the man's home town, and the police had urged him not to let the man come home...Extraordinary morality on the part of a police force! The man, they begged, should not be sent home because a prize-fighter was occupying his bed and laundry...Extraordinary common sense, very likely...They probably did not want to get drawn into a scrap with Red Evans of the Red Castle...
For a moment he seemed to see...he actually saw...0 Nine Morgan's eyes, looking at him with a sort of wonder, as they had looked when he had refused the fellow his leave...A sort of wonder! Without resentment, but with incredulity. As you might look at God, you being very small and ten feet or so below His throne when He pronounced some inscrutable judgment!...The Lord giveth home-leave, and the Lord refuseth...Probably not blessed, but queer, be the name of God-Tietjens!
And at the thought of the man as he was alive and of him now, dead, an immense blackness descended all over Tietjens. He said to himself: I am very tired. Yet he was not ashamed...It was the blackness that descends on you when you think of your dead...It comes, at any time, over the brightness of sunlight, in the grey of evening, in the grey of the dawn, at mess, on parade: it comes at the thought of one man or at the thought of half a battalion that you have seen, stretched out, under sheeting, the noses making little pimples: or not stretched out, lying face downwards, half buried. Or at the thought of dead that you have never seen dead at all...Suddenly the light goes out...In this case it was because of one fellow, a dirty enough man, not even very willing, not in the least endearing, certainly contemplating desertion...But your dead...Yours...Your own. As if joined to your own identity by a black cord...
In the darkness outside, the brushing, swift, rhythmic pacing of an immense number of men went past, as if they had been phantoms. A great number of men in fours, carried forward, irresistibly, by the overwhelming will of mankind in ruled motion. The sides of the hut were so thin that is was peopled by an innumerable throng. A sodden voice, just at Tietjens' head, chuckled: 'For God's sake, sergeant-major, stop these ---- I'm too ---- drunk to halt them...'
It made for the moment no impression on Tietjens' conscious mind. Men were going past. Cries went up in the camp. Not orders, the men were still marching. Cries.
Tietjens' lips--his mind was still with the dead--said:
'That obscene Pitkins! I'll have him cashiered for this...' He saw an obscene subaltern, small, with one eyelid that drooped.
He came awake at that. Pitkins was the subaltern he had detailed to march the draft to the station and go on to Bailleul under a boozy field officer of sorts.
McKechnie said from the other bed:
'That's the draft back.'
Tietjens said:
'Good God!...'
McKechnie said to the batman:
'For God's sake go and see if it is. Come back at once...'
The intolerable vision of the line, starving beneath the moon, of grey crowds murderously elbowing back a thin crowd in brown, zigzagged across the bronze light in the hut. The