up from an office table at somebody else. "Afraid we can't, sir," said somebody else. This new rule, you know, sir- about keeping M.C.'s for things done in action." 66 Vandals and Goths of the New Army approaching the sanctuaries; so up goes this rule. It hath a twofold operation, like old Falstaff's drinks-keeps out any future Staff crowd, and it runs up the stock for Oh, damn! D.S.O., then." the crowd who got in on the "Very good, sir." So Colin left with a new red and blue stain on his coat, and none at all on his character as a soldier. He bore no grudge against his persecutors. He was too deeply amused. What tickled him most was that he was the very last, he believed, of all the old-world D.S.O.'s, the men to whom the gaud came, like the Garter, with "no damned merit about it." A rule came into force, almost immediately after, that D.S.O.'s were not to be given any longer for telephoning or clerking, or any other mode of escape from the Germans; they were all to be for the mere hack-work of fighting. "I'm like the last Groom of the Posset," said Colin, "or Clerk of the Royal Backstairs. I'm the Last British Wolf. I ought to be stuffed, when I die, and bought for the nation, and put up on the Horse Guards Parade. It has kind of brain, you know, the dear Old Regular Army; its madness has method. For three years of war all of it gorges itself with these D.S.O.'s-I mean, all of it that is not busy fighting. Meanwhile it invents the M.C., and settles on that also, till every unconscientious objector in France has got one or both. Then it sees all the ground-floor. Look at my own little investment. Every new D.S.O. from this day forth will only prove more and more what a terrible fellow I was in the trenches." 66 I found that Claude, too, gave the new regulation his blessing. We met and dined, on my own way back from a leave, at the splendid new G.H.Q. Officers' Club at Montreuil. Presently the benign operation of Louis Roederer, 1906, slightly unlaced and unbuttoned the fine Prussian greatcoat and boots of Claude's mind. seriously think," he seriously said, "that at least a large proportion of these decorations ought to be given for purely physical acts of valour. Otherwise they may lose caste, as it were, in the sight of the public. You may say to me, 'Why not just do our duty and let the public be damned? ' Still the public is there, and it's only fair to ourselves to mind, in some slight degree, what it thinks. When I got my own D.S.O. and M.C. I knew myself, and I think my friends knew, that I had earned them. But how is the public to know, or even to guess ? All you can do to help it, and make the most hard-earned distinction worth having, is to keep them connected, in people's minds, with the more obvious sorts of good workfront-line stunts and so on,the only things, I suppose, that the man in the street can understand about soldiering." I tried to work this clear in my mind, assisted by the illuminating radiance of the H.A.C. band, the foaming grape of Eastern France, and the beautiful W.A.A.C. waitresses dressed as comic-opera gitanas -all rendered curiously intoxicant by the sound of the rain on the roof and the imminence of my return to a little wet home in the earth of the Salient. "So the bread of the children," I construed, thinking aloud, "ought to be sometimes rather often given to dogs, because somehow its being half-eaten by dogs makes it still more nice for the children ? " "I don't call those brave fellows in the trenches dogs," said Claude somewhat distantly. He had a way of talking about the trenches, to us who lived in them, that made us feel it must only be in some incomplete, unreal sense that we lived there at all; whereas in a spiritually higher and more valid sense he, the authentically rugged soldier, abode there himself, so that, in the sight of Heaven, his were war's thorns, and ours her roses. "Nor I," said I, "really,' somewhat discomfited. I scarcely ever touch irony without getting into some mess and showing up badly. Claude, still severe, said, "And I wouldn't exactly call the Staff children." "Nor I," said I, feeling I must have been rude. "Then I don't see your point," Claude austerely pursued. "No" said I, still believing that somewhere or other I had one, but not feeling quite sure. And how could one waste in ill-humour the last night of music and light, and the shine of clean glasses and white tablecloths? XII. I next heard of Claude from entered into his kingdom. Colin, in London. A portion Claude has done the imposof me had gone the way of all sible, the unthinkable-found flesh in the Salient, and Colin a new seam, a very Bonanza, came to liven me up in a deso- where the most piercing eyes late Mayfair palace used as a in the Army had only seen hospital. Colin never grudged level sand. You know how the War Office's time to any all the princes and counsellors work of good-nature. Some of the earth go out to visit men took it all for themselves. Douglas Haig. D. H. believes "You've not heard about they must all be longing to Claude?" he answered my get sniped and bombarded, question. "Why, Claude has just because he likes it him self. So, in pure kindness of heart, he puts them into a car and packs them off for long days at the front. But Claude really knoweth man's heart. He has found them a way of escape some sort of safety first' apparatus, no one quite knows what-whether it's a quiet shebeen in the wilds of the Somme where they can lie perdus all day, till it's time to go home, or a whole dummy battlefield, well out of harm's way, with old German helmets and rifles lying about for the visitors to absorb as war souvenirs. Some brain-wave like that." Perhaps I looked puzzled. How could a mere Acting Major have so happy a thought, and no Colonel or General knock him down and take it away and use it himself? "Oh, Claude worked the flotation all right," Colin assured me. "Claude knew his chief, Blunt, was a fool with a temper. So he unfolded his little idea at nine on a morning when old Blunt was looking his cheapest and blackest. "Think it a good idea, do you?' said Blunt. Well, I think it a damn bad idea, so you shall work it out yourself, and don't come whining to me when you've failed.' Can't you imagine him saying it ? " Yes, I knew that dodge of drowning new-born reformers like kittens, in bucketfuls of detail. "Of course," Colin said sagely, "Blunt was right, in a way. If you're a downy old serpent, you don't want any Infant Hercules kicking about. And yet Blunt was a fool. Claude had got him on the ground hop, just as he'd planned. For then he was able to go right on with his plan of the funk-hole. He did, and now this contraption of his is the envy of all G.H.Q. They say the proud and the great of this world are tumbling over each other to get in at the door. I hear that unless you're of royal blood, or a Premier, Claude becomes quite short and dry with you. Once he had two live Kings and two Queens in the place, all at once-all the court cards in one hand-the sort of thing people write to the Field' about. When he comes home from the wars he'll sell his visitors' book and buy land and live on his rents. When the august go away they always give him an Order apiece before stepping into the car. His Legion of Honour is said to be lost in the crush. It's thought the ribbons will soon go all round his back, like a gym. belt, in a broad band. I fear it can't last, though." "Why?" said I. "Are there not enough Kings in the world?" "When a rather small hen," said Colin, "finds a large hunch of bread in the run, is a welter-weight cock to look on unmoved? Is Blunt, because he has been a fool once, to be a fool always? Believe me, he suffers remorse for his harshness to Claude. He will say, I have sinned.' He will undo the past. He will re- darkness, and Blunt will feed organise the establishment. all the auriferous geese out of Claude will be in the outer his own lily hand.” XIII. Then Colin talked about himself. He always had frankness, almost to the point of disease. He was, he said, eaten by care, because he had never yet failed to overtrump little Claude, and now little Claude had played such a whacking big trump. Colin said he had known an old woman once, in the country, who died of lying awake at night, fearing the patchwork quilt of the old woman next door was getting on faster than hers. Colin avowed he was hag-ridden too, with the thought of that textile mosaic on Claude's bosom expanding swiftly and inexorably. Things, he said, must be thought out, lest he should die. With Colin, to think was to talk; his thought worked best along a kind of paper-chase track of vivid words laid for the pursuing intellect by the forerunning tongue. So there he sat, by my bed, and made more picturesquely clear, to himself as well as to me, the thing that had struck him most in all his war travels across Northern France, between the coast and our front -how, as he went east, the ribbons on passing men's breasts seemed always to die down and wither just as the corn and the roses did, by the road, till on the wastes of thistle and poppies where the shell-fire began you would seldom see a decorated man. He thought, aloud, of that Brigade H.Q. where he had slept for a resonant fortnight his nearest point of approach to the firing line. That thricewounded Major there had not had a ribbon at all. None of the officers and men who had come in to that place from the actual front had had any. Colour had only begun to break forth again where, on Colin's way back to the sea, he had passed a Divisional H.Q. five miles farther west"first streaks of auroral rose breaking," Colin said, "only not in the East. No stars in the East; precious little dayspring to visit it "In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright.' "And then it was only at Corps Headquarters, twenty miles farther away from the fight, that the real noon came, all the flora of valour well out, the 'high midsummer pomp,' and so forth, fully on. The Army H.Q. again, when I got there, seemed like the Tropics. I've worked it out that on the average the number of ribbons a British officer gets in this war varies in direct propor tion to the square of his distance from the front. It's a 'law,' like the laws about heat and the conservation of energy." I knew he hadn't worked it out before; he was only doing it now, led on by his own talk, that wildly intuitive advanceguard of his marching mind. And then, from ascertained facts, unquestionable laws, he went on visibly to speculate. Why should the working of any such law of nature as this -a law of the nature of manbe interrupted by any mere physical accident such as a sea ? Was it not of the very nature of things that the London clays should be to the payable sands of Boulogne and the rich quartz rock of Montreuil as these soils were to the utter deserts of Ypres and La Bassée ? All civilisation, the great world movement, had always been westward. Was not human experience now confirming this scientific hypothesis-rain ribbons as it might in maritime France, it poured in Whitehall. That was the centre of things; there all the fountains of honour played most freshly and amply, unexhausted as yet with watering the thirsty fields of France. Colin left me in rather a hurry at last. He had seen a great light. Things had come clear. He had to be off and withdraw his application for fresh employment in France. Not there, but on British soil, must Claude be outshone. The job that Colin, under this new inspiration, sought from the proper person, and presently got, was, I fancy, that of a kind of occasional A.D.C., to be lent to august foreigners passing through town on their way to visit our front. Princes and Premiers, Marshals and Admirals, Colin saw them safe through the great wicked city. Claude might draw on them later, but Colin tapped the stream nearer its source. He had his reward. When I caught sight of him next the thin red lines across his tunic had been-well, reinforced. This narrative has to end without any climax. If it were fiction it might, no doubt, culminate in some one superlative masterpiece of acquisition by one or other of its heroes. But life does not work in that way: we constantly have to put up with the ineffectiveness of truth. The two seemed to pass out of my sight like two racing yachts on a day of light airs. First one of them would catch a little local breeze and skim away with a lead, and then would run into some patch of dead air ; while the other would pick up a puff and be carried ahead, to be then becalmed in his turn. I heard they looked most beautiful, with three full rows of ribbons apiece, like commanders - in chief, and that people turned round to look at them in the street, marvelling that men so young should have had time for so much valour. |