‘Why, you’ve written a whole undertaker’s mortuary ode in the rhymes alone,’ and went on to Hotchkiss: ‘Ask anyone you like as long as he’s a P.B. officer…Do you know what P.B. means? No, not Poor B–-y, Permanent Base. Unfit…If he’d like to take a draft to Bailleul.’

The hut was filling with devious, slow, ungainly men in yellow-brown. Their feet shuffled desultorily; they lumped dull canvas bags along the floor and held in unliterary hands small open books that they dropped from time to time. From outside came a continuing, swelling and descending chant of voices; at times it would seem to be all one laugh, at times one menace, then the motives mingled fugally, like the sea on a beach of large stones. It seemed to Tietjens suddenly extraordinary how shut in on oneself one was in this life…He sat scribbling fast: ‘Old Spectre blows a cold protecting breath…Vanity of vanities, the preacher saith…No more parades, not any more, no oil…’ He was telling Hotchkiss, who was obviously shy of approaching the Glamorganshires in their ante-room…’Unambergris’d our limbs in the naked soil…’ that he did not suppose any P.B. officer would object. They would go on a beanfeast up into the giddy line in a first-class carriage and get draft leave and command pay too probably…’No funeral struments cast before our wraiths…’ If any fellow does object, you just send his name to me and I will damn well shove it into extra orders…

The advanced wave of the brown tide of men was already at his feet. The extraordinary complications of even the simplest lives…A fellow was beside him Private Logan, formerly, of all queer things for a Canadian private, a trooper of the Inniskillings: owner, of all queer things, of a milk-walk or a dairy farm, outside Sydney, which is in Australia…A man of sentimental complications, jauntiness as became an Inniskilling, a Cockney accent such as ornaments the inhabitants of Sydney, and a complete distrust of lawyers. On the other hand, with the completest trust in Tietjens. Over his shoulder—he was blond, upright, with his numerals shining like gold, looked a lumpish, café-au-lait, eagle-nosed countenance: a half-caste member of one of the Six Nations, who had been a doctor’s errand boy in Quebec…He had his troubles, but was difficult to understand. Behind him, very black-avised with a high colour, truculent eyes and an Irish accent, was a graduate of McGill University who had been a teacher of languages in Tokyo and had some sort of claim against the Japanese Government…And faces, two and two, in a coil round the hut…Like dust: like a cloud of dust that would approach and overwhelm a landscape: every one with preposterous troubles and anxieties, even if they did not overwhelm you personally with them…Brown dust…

He kept the Inniskilling waiting while he scribbled the rapid sestet to his sonnet which ought to make a little plainer what it all meant. Of course the general idea was that, when you got into the line or near it, there was no room for swank: typified by expensive funerals. As you might say: No flowers by compulsion…No more parades!…He had also to explain, while he did it, to the heroic veterinary sexagenarian that he need not feel shy about going into the Glamorganshire Mess on a man-catching expedition. The Glamorganshires were bound to lend him, Tietjens, P.B. officers if they had not got other jobs. Lieutenant Hotchkiss could speak to Colonel Johnson, whom he would find in the mess and quite good natured over his dinner. A pleasant and sympathetic old gentleman who would appreciate Hotchkiss’s desire not to go superfluously into the line. Hotchkiss could offer to take a look at the colonel’s charger: a Hun horse, captured on the Marne and called Schomburg, that was off its feed…He added: ‘But don’t do anything professional to Schomburg. I ride him myself!’

He threw his sonnet across to Mackenzie, who with a background of huddled khaki limbs and anxious faces was himself anxiously counting out French currency notes and dubious-looking tokens…What the deuce did men want to draw money—sometimes quite large sums of money, the Canadians being paid in dollars converted into local coins—when in an hour or so they would be going up? But they always did and their accounts were always in an incredibly entangled state. Mackenzie might well look worried. As like as not he might find himself a fiver or more down at the end of the evening for unauthorized payments. If he had only his pay and an extravagant wife to keep, that might well put the wind up him. But that was his funeral. He told Lieutenant Hotchkiss to come and have a chat with him in his hut, the one next the mess. About horses. He knew a little about horse-illness himself. Only empirically, of course.

Mackenzie was looking at his watch.

‘You took two minutes and eleven seconds,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it for granted it’s a sonnet…I have not read it because I can’t turn it into Latin here…I haven’t got your knack of doing eleven things at once…’

A man with a worried face, encumbered by a bundle and a small book, was studying figures at Mackenzie’s elbow.