"I could," Christopher said, "but I suppose I shall go back to liaison work."
"I don't think you will," Mark said. "I could put in a word for you with the transport people."
"I wish you would," Christopher said. "I'm not fit to go back into the front line. Besides I'm no beastly hero! And I'm a rotten infantry officer. No Tietjens was ever a soldier worth talking of."
They turned the corner of the arch. Like something fitting in, exact and expected, Valentine Wannop stood looking at the lists of casualties that hung beneath a cheaply green-stained deal shelter against the wall, a tribute at once to the weaker art movements of the day and the desire to save the ratepayers' money.
With the same air of finding Christopher Tietjens fit in exactly to an expected landscape she turned on him. Her face was blue-white and distorted. She ran upon him and exclaimed:
"Look at this horror! And you in that foul uniform can support it!"
The sheets of paper beneath the green roof were laterally striped with little serrated lines: each line meant the death of a man, for the day.
Tietjens had fallen a step back off the curb of the pavement that ran round the quadrangle. He said:
"I support it because I have to. Just as you decry it because you have to. They're two different patterns that we see." He added: "This is my brother Mark."
She turned her head stiffly upon Mark: her face was perfectly waxen. It was as if the head of a shopkeeper's lay-figure had been turned. She said to Mark: