For if the acting lance-corporal, whose life hung by a hair, made a slip of the pen over a dozen pots of jam, back he went, Returned to duty . . . back to the frozen rifle, the ground-sheet on the liquid mud, the desperate suction on the ankle as the foot was advanced, the landscapes silhouetted with broken church towers, the continual drone of the planes, the mazes of duckboards in vast plains of slime, the unending Cockney humour, the great shells labelled Love to Little Willie. . . . Back to the Angel with the Flaming Sword. The wrong side of him! . . . So, on the whole, things moved satisfactorily. . . .
He was walking Colonel Levin imperiously between the huts towards the mess quarters, their feet crunching on the freezing gravel, the colonel hanging back a little; but a mere light-weight and without nails in his elegant bootsoles, so he had no grip on the ground. He was remarkably silent. Whatever he wanted to get out he was reluctant to come to. He brought out, however:
"I wonder you don't apply to be returned to duty . . . to your battalion. I jolly well should if I were you. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"Why? Because I've had a man killed on me? . . . There must have been a dozen killed to-night."
"Oh, more, very likely," the other answered. "It was one of our own planes that was brought down. . . . But it isn't that. . . . Oh, damn it! . . . Would you mind walking the other way? . . . I've the greatest respect . . . oh, almost ... for you personally. . . . You're a man of intellect. . . ."
Tietjens was reflecting on a nice point of military etiquette.
This lisping, ineffectual fellow—he was a very careful Staff officer or Campion would not have had him about the place!—was given to moulding himself exactly on his general. Physically, in costume as far as possible, in voice—for his lisp was not his own so much as an adaptation of the general's slight stutter—and above all in his uncompleted sentences and point of view. . . . Now, if he said:
"Look here, colonel . . ." or "Look here, Colonel Levin . . ." or "Look here, Stanley, my boy . . ." For the one thing an officer may not say to a superior whatever their intimacy was: "Look here, Levin . . ." If he said then:
"Look here, Stanley, you're a silly ass. It's all very well for Campion to say that I am unsound because I've some brains. He's my godfather and has been saying it to me since I was twelve, and had more brain in my left heel than he had in the whole of his beautifully barbered skull. . . . But when you say it you are just a parrot. You did not think that out for yourself. You do not even think it. You know I'm heavy, short in the wind, and self-assertive . . . but you know perfectly well that I'm as good on detail as yourself. And a damned sight more. You've never caught me tripping over a return. Your sergeant in charge of returns may have. But not you. . . ."