Tietjens said:
"That's perfectly correct, sir. There is nothing else that you can do. . . ." He was finished. There was now nothing left but to find out how his mind was going to take it. He wished they could go to his cook-houses!
The general said:
"What was I saying? . . . I'm dreadfully tired. . . . No one could stand this. . . ." He drew from inside his tunic a lapis-lazuli coloured, small be-coroneted note-case and selected from it a folded paper that he first looked at and then slipped between his belt and his tunic. He said: "On top of all the responsibility I have to bear!" He asked: "Has it occurred to you that, if I'm of any service to the country, your taking up my energy—sapping my energy over your affairs!—is aiding your country's enemies? . . . I can only afford four hours' sleep as it is. . . . I've got some questions to ask you. . . ." He referred to the slip of paper from his belt, folded it again and again slipped it into his belt.
Tietjens' mind missed a notch again. . . . It was the fear of the mud that was going to obsess him. Yet, curiously, he had never been under heavy fire in mud. . . . You would think that would not have obsessed him. But in his ear he had just heard uttered in a whisper of intense weariness, the words: Es ist nicht zu ertragen; es ist das dasz uns verloren hat . . . words in German, of utter despair, meaning: It is unbearable: it is that has ruined us. . . . The mud! . . . He had heard those words, standing amidst volcano craters of mud, amongst ravines, monstrosities of slime, cliffs and distances, all of slime. . . . He had been going, for curiosity or instruction, from Verdun where he had been attached to the French—on a holiday afternoon when nothing was doing, with a guide, to visit one of the outlying forts. . . . Deaumont? . . . No, Douaumont. . . . Taken from the enemy about a week before. . . . When would that be? He had lost all sense of chronology. . . . In November. . . . A beginning of some November. . . . With a miracle of sunshine: not a cloud: the mud towering up shut you in intimately with a sky that ached for limpidity. . . . And the slime had moved . . . following a French bombardier who was strolling along eating nuts, disreputably, his shoulders rolling. . . . Déserteurs. . . . The moving slime was German deserters. . . . You could not see them: the leader of them—an officer!—had his glasses so thick with mud that you could not see the colour of his eyes, and his half-dozen decorations were like the beginnings of swallows' nests, his beard like stalactites. . . . Of the other men you could only see the eyes—extraordinarily vivid: mostly blue like the sky! . . . Deserters! Led by an officer! Of the Hamburg Regiment! As if an officer of the Buffs had gone over! . . . It was incredible. . . . And that was what the officer had said as he passed: not shamefacedly, but without any humanity left in him . . . Done! . . . Those moving saurians compacted of slime kept on passing him afterwards, all the afternoon. . . . And he could not help picturing their immediate antecedents for two months. . . . In advanced pill-boxes. . . . No, they didn't have pill-boxes then. . . . In advanced pockets of mud, in dreadful solitude amongst those ravines. . . . suspended in eternity, at the last day of the world. And it had horribly shocked him to hear again the German language a rather soft voice, a little suety. . . . Like an obscene whisper. . . . The voice obviously of the damned: hell could hold nothing curious for those poor beasts. . . . His French guide had said sardonically: On dirait l'Inferno de Dante! . . . Well, those Germans were getting back on him. They were now to become an obsession! A complex, they said nowadays. . . . The general said coolly:
"I presume you refuse to answer?"
That shook him cruelly.
He said desperately:
"I had to end what I took to be an unbearable position for both parties. In the interests of my son!" Why in the world had he said that? . . . He was going to be sick. It came back to him that the general had been talking of his separation from Sylvia. Last night that had happened. He said: "I may have been right: I may have been wrong. . . ."
The general said icily: