A Man Could Stand Up—, Ford Madox Ford [ebook reader macos .txt] 📗

Snap! Snap!⁠ ⁠… Clear sounds from a quarter of a mile away.⁠ ⁠… Bullets whined. Overhead. Long sounds, going away. Not snipers. The men of a battalion. A chance! Snap! Snap! Snap! Bullets whined overhead. Men of a battalion get excited when shooting at anything running. They fire high. Trigger pressure. He was now a fat, running object. Did they fire with a sense of hatred or fun! Hatred probably. Huns have not much sense of fun.

His breathing was unbearable. Both his legs were like painful bolsters. He would be on the relatively level in two steps if he made them.⁠ ⁠… Well, make them!⁠ ⁠… He was on the level. He had been climbing: up clods. He had to take an immense breath. The ground under his left foot gave way. He had been holding Aranjuez in front of his own body as much as he could, under his right arm. As his left foot sank in, the boy’s body came right on top of him. Naturally this stiffish earth in huge clods had fissures in it. Apertures. It was not like regular digging.

The boy kicked, screamed, tore himself loose.⁠ ⁠… Well, if he wanted to go! The scream was like a horse’s in a stable on fire. Bullets had gone overhead. The boy rushed off, his hands to his face. He disappeared round the mound. It was a conical mound. He, Tietjens, could now crawl on his belly. It was satisfactory.

He crawled. Shuffling himself along with his hips and elbows. There was probably a textbook way of crawling. He did not know it. The clods of earth appeared friendly. For bottom soil thrown to the top they did not feel or smell so very sour. Still, it would take a long time to get them into cultivation or under grass. Probably, agriculturally speaking that country would be in pretty poor condition for a long time.⁠ ⁠…

He felt pleased with his body. It had had no exercise to speak of for two months⁠—as second-in-command. He could not have expected to be in even the condition he was in. But the mind had probably had a good deal to do with that! He had, no doubt, been in a devil of a funk. It was only reasonable. It was disagreeable to think of those Hun devils hunting down the unfortunate. A disagreeable business. Still, we did the same.⁠ ⁠… That boy must have been in a devil of a funk. Suddenly. He had held his hands in front of his face. Afraid to see. Well, you couldn’t blame him. They ought not to send out schoolgirls. He was like a girl. Still, he ought to have stayed to see that he, Tietjens, was not pipped. He might have thought he was hit from the way his left leg had gone down. He would have to be strafed. Gently.

Cockshott and the Corporal were on their hands and knees digging with the short-handled shovels that are known as trenching-tools. They were on the rear side of the mound.

“We’ve found ’im, sir,” the Corporal said. “Regular buried. Just seed is foot. Dursen’t use a shovel. Might cut ’im in arf!”

Tietjens said:

“You’re probably right. Give me the shovel!”

Cockshott was a draper’s assistant, the Corporal a milkman. Very likely they were not good with shovels.

He had had the advantage of a boyhood crowded with digging of all sorts. Duckett was buried horizontally, running into the side of the conical mound. His feet at least stuck out like that, but you could not tell how the body was disposed. It might turn to either side or upwards. He said:

“Go on with your tools above! But give me room.”

The toes being to the sky, the trunk could hardly bend downwards. He stood below the feet and aimed terrific blows with the shovel eighteen inches below. He liked digging. This earth was luckily dryish. It ran down the hill conveniently. This man had been buried probably ten minutes. It seemed longer but it was probably less. He ought to have a chance. Probably earth was less suffocating than water. He said to the Corporal:

“Do you know how to apply artificial respiration?”

“To the drowned?”

Cockshott said:

“I do, sir. I was swimming champion of Islington baths!” A rather remarkable man, Cockshott. His father had knocked up the arm of a man who tried to shoot Mr. Gladstone in 1866 or thereabouts.

A lot of earth falling away, obligingly, after one withdrawal of the shovel Lance-Corporal Duckett’s thin legs appeared to the fork, the knees drooping.

Cockshott said:

“ ’E ain’t rubbin’ ’is ankles this journey!”

The Corporal said:

“Company C’mander is killed, sir. Bullet clean through the ’ed!”

It annoyed Tietjens that here was another head wound. He could not apparently get away from them. It was silly to be annoyed, because in trenches a majority of wounds had to be head wounds. But Providence might just as well be a little more imaginative. To oblige one. It annoyed him, too, to think that he had strafed that boy just before he was killed. For leaving his shovels about. A strafe leaves a disagreeable impression on young boys for quite half an hour. It was probably the last incident in his life. So he died depressed.⁠ ⁠… Might God be making it up to him!

He said to the Corporal:

“Let me come.” Duckett’s left hand and wrist had appeared, the hand drooping and improbably clean, level with the thigh. It gave the line of the body; you could clear away beside him.

“ ’E wasn’t on’y twenty-two,” the Corporal said.

Cockshott said: “Same age as me. Very particular ’e was about your rifle pull-throughs.”

A minute later they pulled Duckett out, by the legs. A stone might have been resting on his face, in that case his face would have been damaged. It wasn’t, though you had had to chance it. It was black but asleep.⁠ ⁠… As if Valentine Wannop had been reposing in an ash-bin. Tietjens left Cockshott applying artificial respiration very methodically and efficiently to the prostrate form.

It was to him a certain satisfaction that, at any rate, in that