No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [85]
But here!...She seemed to be in the very belly of the ugly affair...It moved and moved, under your eyes dissolving, yet always there. As if you should try to follow one diamond of pattern in the coil of an immense snake that was in irrevocable motion...It gave her a sense of despair: the engrossment of Tietjens, in common with the engrossment of this disreputable toper. She had never seen Tietjens put his head together with any soul before: he was the lonely buffalo...Now 1 Anyone: any fatuous staff-officer, whom at home he would never so much as have spoken to: any trustworthy beer-sodden sergeant, any street urchin dressed up as orderly...They had only to appear and all his mind went into a close-headed conference over some ignoble point in the child's game: the laundry, the chiropody, the religions, the bastards...of millions of the indistinguishable...Or their deaths as well! But, in heaven's name what hypocrisy, or what inconceivable chicken-heartedness was this? They promoted this beanfeast of carnage for their own ends: they caused the deaths of men in inconceivable holocausts of pain and terror. Then they had crises of agony over the death of one single man. For it was plain to her that Tietjens was in the middle of a full nervous breakdown. Over one man's death! She had never seen him so suffer; she had never seen him so appeal for sympathy: him, a cold fiend of reticence! Yet he was now in an agony! Now!...And she began to have a sense of the infinitely spreading welter of pain, going away to an eternal horizon of night...'Ell for the Other Ranks! Apparently it was hell for the officers as well.
The real compassion in the voice of that snuffling, half-drunken old man had given her a sense of that enormous wickedness...These horrors, these infinities of pain, this atrocious condition of the world had been brought about in order that men should indulge themselves in orgies of promiscuity...That in the end was at the bottom of male honour, of male virtue, observance of treaties, upholding of the flag...An immense warlock's carnival of appetites, lusts, ebrieties...And once set in motion there was no stopping it...This state of things would never cease...Because once they had tasted of the joy--the blood--of this game, who would let it end?...These men talked of these things that occupied them there with the lust of men telling dirty stories in smoking-rooms...That was the only parallel!
There was no stopping it, any more than there was any stopping the by now all but intoxicated ex-sergeant major. He was off! With, as might be expected, advice to a young couple with differences of opinion! The wine had made him bold!
In the depth of her pictures of these horrors, snatches of his wisdom penetrated to her intelligence...Queer snatches...She was getting it certainly in the neck!...Someone, to add to the noise, had started some mechanical musical instrument in an adjacent hall.
'Corn an' lasses
Served by Ras'us!'
a throaty voice proclaimed,
'I'd be tickled to death to know that I could go
And stay right there...
The ex-sergeant-major was adding to her knowledge the odd detail that when he, Sergeant-Major Cowley, went to the wars--seven of them--his missus, Mrs Cowley, spent the first three days and nights unpicking and re-hemstitching every sheet and pillow-slip in the 'ouse. To keep 'erself f'm thinking...This was apparently meant as a reproof or an exhortation to her, Sylvia Tietjens...Well, he was all right! Of the same class as Father Consett, and with the same sort of wisdom.
The gramophone bowled: a new note of rumbling added itself to the exterior tumult and continued through six mitigated thumps of the gun in the garden...In the next interval, Cowley was in the midst of a valedictory address to her. He was asking her to remember that the captain had