No More Parades

When you came in the space was desultory, rectangular, warm after the drip of the winter night, and transfused with a brown-orange dust that was light. It was shaped like the house a child draws. Three groups of brown limbs spotted with brass took dim highlights from shafts that came from a bucket pierced with holes, filled with incandescent coke, and covered in with a sheet of iron in the shape of a tunnel. Two men, as if hierarchically smaller, crouched on the floor beside the brazier; four, two at each end of the hut, drooped over tables in attitudes of extreme indifference. From the eaves above the parallelogram of black that was the doorway fell intermittent drippings of collected moisture, persistent, with glass-like intervals of musical sound. The two men squatting on their heels over the brazier⁠—they had been miners⁠—began to talk in a low singsong of dialect, hardly audible. It went on and on, monotonously, without animation. It was as if one told the other long, long stories to which his companion manifested his comprehension or sympathy with animal grunts⁠ ⁠…

An immense tea-tray, august, its voice filling the black circle of the horizon, thundered to the ground. Numerous pieces of sheet-iron said, “Pack. Pack. Pack.” In a minute the clay floor of the hut shook, the drums of ears were pressed inwards, solid noise showered about the universe, enormous echoes pushed these

“At the beginning of the war,” Tietjens said, “I had to look in on the War Office, and in a room I found a fellow⁠ ⁠… What do you think he was doing⁠ ⁠… what the hell do you think he was doing? He was devising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion. You can’t say we were not prepared in one matter at least⁠ ⁠… Well, the end of the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease: the band would play ‘Land of Hope and Glory,’ and then the adjutant would say: ‘There will be no more parades’⁠ ⁠… Don’t you see how symbolical it was: the band playing ‘Land of Hope and Glory,’ and then the adjutant saying ‘There will be no more parades?’⁠ ⁠… For there won’t. There won’t, there damn well won’t⁠ ⁠… No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country⁠ ⁠… Nor for the world, I dare say⁠ ⁠… None⁠ ⁠… Gone⁠ ⁠… Na poo, finny! No⁠ ⁠… more⁠ ⁠… parades!”

“I dare say you’re right,” the other said slowly. “But, all the same, what am I doing in this show? I hate soldiering. I hate this whole beastly business⁠ ⁠…”

“I suppose you speak seven languages and all?” Tietjens asked.

“Five,” the other said patiently, “and read two more. And Latin and Greek, of course.”

A man, brown, stiff, with a haughty parade step, burst into the light. He said with a high wooden voice:

“ ’Ere’s another bloomin’ casualty.” In the shadow he appeared to have draped half his face and the right side of his breast with crape. He gave a high, rattling laugh. He bent, as if in a stiff bow, woodenly at his thighs. He pitched, still bent, on to the iron sheet that covered the brazier, rolled off that and lay on his back across the legs of the other runner, who had been crouched beside the brazier. In the bright light it was as if a whole pail of scarlet paint had been dashed across the man’s face on the left and his chest. It glistened in the firelight⁠—just like fresh paint, moving! The runner from the Rhondda, pinned down by the body across his knees, sat with his jaw fallen, resembling one girl that should be combing the hair of another recumbent before her. The red viscousness welled across the floor; you sometimes so see fresh water bubbling up in sand. It astonished Tietjens to see that a human body could be so lavish of blood. He was thinking it was a queer mania that that fellow should have, that his uncle was a friend of his, Tietjens. He had no friend in trade, uncle of a fellow who in ordinary times would probably bring you pairs of boots on approval⁠ ⁠… He felt as he did when you patch up a horse that has been badly hurt.

In the admirably appointed, white-enamelled, wickerworked, bemirrored lounge of the best hotel of that town Sylvia Tietjens sat in a wickerwork chair, not listening rather abstractedly to a staff-major who was lachrymosely and continuously begging her to leave her bedroom door unlocked that night. She said:

“I don’t know⁠ ⁠… Yes, perhaps⁠ ⁠… I don’t know⁠ ⁠…” And looked distantly into a bluish wall-mirror that, like all the rest, was framed with white-painted cork bark. She stiffened a little and said:

“There’s Christopher!”

The staff-major dropped his hat, his stick and his gloves. His black hair, which was without parting and heavy with some preparation of a glutinous kind, moved agitatedly on his scalp. He had been saying that Sylvia had ruined his life. Didn’t Sylvia know that she had ruined his life? But for her he might have married some pure young thing. Now he exclaimed:

“But what does he want?⁠ ⁠… Good God!⁠ ⁠… what does he want?”

“He wants,” Sylvia said, “to play the part of Jesus Christ.”

Major Perowne exclaimed:

“Jesus Christ!⁠ ⁠… But he’s the most foul-mouthed officer in the general’s command⁠ ⁠…”

“Well,” Sylvia said, “if you had married your pure young thing she’d have⁠ ⁠… What is it?⁠ ⁠… cuckolded you within nine months⁠ ⁠…”

Perowne shuddered a little at the word. He mumbled:

“I don’t see⁠ ⁠… It seems to be the other way⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh, no, it isn’t,” Sylvia said. “Think it over⁠ ⁠… Morally, you’re the husband⁠ ⁠… Immorally, I should say⁠ ⁠… Because he’s the man I want⁠ ⁠… He looks ill⁠ ⁠… Do hospital authorities always tell wives what is the matter with their husbands?”

She found an early opportunity to carry on her investigations. For, at dinner that night, she found herself, Tietjens having gone to the telephone with a lance-corporal, opposite what she took to be a small tradesman, with fresh-coloured cheeks, and a great, grey, forward-sprouting moustache, in a uniform so creased that the creases resembled the veins of a leaf⁠ ⁠… A very trustworthy small tradesman: the grocer from round the corner whom, sometimes, you allow to supply you with paraffin⁠ ⁠… He was saying to her:

“If, ma’am, you multiply two-thousand nine hundred and something by ten you arrive at twenty-nine thousand odd⁠ ⁠…”

And she had exclaimed:

“You really mean that my husband, Captain Tietjens, spent yesterday afternoon in examining twenty-nine thousand toenails⁠ ⁠… And two thousand nine hundred toothbrushes⁠ ⁠…”

“I told him,” her interlocutor answered with deep seriousness, “that these being Colonial troops it was not so necessary to examine their toothbrushes⁠ ⁠… Imperial troops will use the brush they clean their buttons with for their teeth so as to have a clean toothbrush to show the medical officer⁠ ⁠…”

“It sounds,” she said with a little shudder, “as if you were all schoolboys playing a game⁠ ⁠… And you say my husband really occupies his mind with such things⁠ ⁠…”

Second-Lieutenant Cowley, dreadfully conscious that the shoulder-strap of his Sam Browne belt, purchased that afternoon at the Ordnance, and therefore brand-new, did not match the abdominal part of the belt that he had had for nearly ten years⁠—a splendid bit of leather, that!⁠—answered nevertheless stoutly: