No More Parades quotes

All these men toys: all these agonies mere occasions for picturesque phrases to be put into politicians’ speeches without heart or even intelligence.

Hundreds of thousands of men tossed here and there in that sordid and gigantic mud-brownness of midwinter⁠ ⁠… By God, exactly as if they were nuts wilfully picked up and thrown over the shoulder by magpies⁠ ⁠…

But men. Not just populations. Men you worried over there.

It was the worries of all these wet millions in mud-brown that worried him. They could die, they could be massacred, by the quarter million, in shambles.

But that they should be massacred without jauntiness, without confidence, with depressed brows: without parade⁠ ⁠…

He knew really nothing about the officer in front of him. Apparently the fellow had stopped for an answer to some question. What question? Tietjens had no idea. He had not been listening. Heavy silence settled down on the hut. They just waited.

It was Tietjens’ duty to preserve this fellow as it was his duty to prevent deterioration in any other piece of the King’s property. That was implicit in the oath of allegiance. He went on talking:

The curse of the army, as far as the organization is concerned, was our imbecile national belief that the game is more than the player.

That was our ruin, mentally, as a nation. We were taught that cricket is more than clearness of mind, so the blasted quartermaster, O.C.

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!

The nose was there, half the mouth with the teeth showing in the firelight … It was extraordinary how defined the peaked nose and the serrated teeth were in that mess … The eye looked jauntily at the peak of the canvas hut-roof …

Gone with a grin. Singular the fellow should have spoken! After he was dead.

He must have been dead when he spoke. It had been done with the last air automatically going out of the lungs.

You got quiet and engrossment there.

It was a queer thing: the only place where he, Christopher Tietjens of Groby, could be absently satisfied was in some orderly room or other.

The only place in the world … And why? It was a queer thing …

No scenes, then, for the sake of the public. And indeed, with him, the instinct for privacy—as to his relationships, his passions, or even as to his most unimportant motives—was as strong as the instinct of life itself.

He would, literally, rather be dead than an open book.

And, until that afternoon, he had imagined that his wife, too, would rather be dead than have her affairs canvassed by the other ranks … But that assumption had to be gone over. Revised … Of course he might say she had gone mad.

It was sheer exhilaration to freeze there on the downside of the extraordinary pure air with the extraordinarily fine men. They came round, marking time with the stamp of guardsmen. He said, with tears in his voice:

“Damn it all, I gave them that extra bit of smartness⁠ ⁠… Damn it all, there’s something I’ve done⁠ ⁠…”

Getting cattle into condition for the slaughterhouse … They were as eager as bullocks running down by Camden Town to Smithfield Market … Seventy percent of them would never come back … But it’s better to go to heaven with your skin shining and master …

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

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

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

fixed. Not insolent, but simply gazing over the heads of all things and created beings, into a world too distant for them to enter … And yet it seemed to her, since he was so clumsy and worn out, almost not sporting to persecute him.

It was like whipping a dying bulldog⁠ ⁠…

She sank back into her chair with a movement almost of discouragement. She said:

She suddenly coiled her legs into her chair.

“I know now what I came here for,” she said.

Major Wilfrid Fosbrooke Eddicker Perowne of Perowne, the son of his mother, was one of those individuals who have no history, no strong proclivities, nothing. His knowledge seemed to be bounded by the contents of his newspaper for the immediate day;

She was by that time tired of men … or she imagined that she was; for she was not prepared to be certain, considering the muckers she saw women coming all round her over the most unpresentable individuals.

Men, at any rate never fulfilled expectations.

They might, upon acquaintance, turn out more entertaining than they appeared; but almost always taking up with a man was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it.

It was as if he had the evil eye: or some special protector.

He was so appallingly competent, so appallingly always in the centre of his own picture.

The general said, rather joyfully:

Behind the general’s back Levin was making signs with his eyes which he meaningly closed and opened. The general, however, remained extraordinarily dry in manner, his face having its perfectly expressionless air of studied politeness which allowed no muscle of its polished-cherry surface to move.

The extreme politeness of the extremely great to the supremely unimportant!

He glanced round the hut markedly. It was Tietjens’ own office and contained nothing but the blanket-covered tables and, hanging from a strut, an immense calendar on which days were roughly crossed out in red ink and blue pencil. He said:

And a consideration of the virtues of humanity does not omit the other side. If we lose they win. If success is necessary to your idea of virtue—virtus—they then provide the success instead of ourselves.

But the thing is to be able to stick to the integrity of your character, whatever earthquake sets the house tumbling over your head⁠ ⁠…

That, thank God, we’re doing …”

Maliciously! It was then that he had observed the handle of the door moving minutely. She had incredible arms, stretched out amongst a wilderness of besilvered cosmetics. Extraordinarily lascivious! Yet clean! Her gilded sheath gown was about her hips on the chair …

Well! she had pulled the strings of one too many shower-baths!

Shining; radiating glory but still shrivelled so that he reminded Tietjens of an old apple inside a damascened helmet; the general had seated himself once more on the bully-beef case before the blanketed table. He fingered his very large, golden fountain-pen. He said:

“I should forget that, if I were you …

The second in command of a battalion has nothing to do but sit about in armchairs waiting for the colonel to be killed.

” He added: “It’s the best I can do for you … I’ve thought it out very carefully. It’s the best I can do for you.”

“I shall, of course, forget my category, sir …”

Of course he would never fight any treatment of himself!

There it was then: the natural catastrophe! As when, under thunder, a dam breaks. His mind was battling with the waters. What would it pick out as the main terror? The mud: the noise: dread always at the back of the mind? Or the worry!

“Yes! that’s just it … What the hell are you? … You’re not a soldier. You’ve got the makings of a damn good soldier. You amaze me at times. Yet you’re a disaster; you are a disaster to everyone who has to do with you.

You are as conceited as a hog; you are as obstinate as a bullock⁠ ⁠… You drive me mad

… And you have ruined the life of that beautiful woman … For I maintain she once had the disposition of a saint … Now: I’m waiting for your explanation!”

“I knew you were working round to that, sir. But

I’ve no politics that did not disappear in the eighteenth century. You, sir, prefer the seventeenth!

”

“Of course,” Tietjens said, “if it’s Sylvia that called me a Socialist, it’s not astonishing.

I’m a Tory of such an extinct type that she might take me for anything. The last megatherium.

She’s absolutely to be excused …”

“My father,” Tietjens said—the general saw his jaw stiffen—“committed suicide because a fellow called Ruggles told him that I was … what the French called maquereau … I can’t think of the English word. My father’s suicide was not an act that can be condoned.

A gentleman does not commit suicide when he has descendants.

It might influence my boy’s life very disastrously …”