No More Parades by Ford Madox Ford

Author:Ford Madox Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: First World War Fiction
Publisher: epubBooks Classics
Published: 2014-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

II

She found an early opportunity to carry on her investigations. For, at dinner that night, she found herself, Tietjens having gone to the telephone with a lance–corporal, opposite what she took to be a small tradesman, with fresh–coloured cheeks, and a great, grey, forward–sprouting moustache, in a uniform so creased that the creases resembled the veins of a leaf…A very trustworthy small tradesman: the grocer from round the corner whom, sometimes, you allow to supply you with paraffin…He was saying to her:

'If, ma'am, you multiply two–thousand nine hundred and something by ten you arrive at twenty–nine thousand odd…

And she had exclaimed:

'You really mean that my husband, Captain Tietjens, spent yesterday afternoon in examining twenty–nine thousand toe–nails…And two thousand nine hundred toothbrushes…

'I told him,' her interlocutor answered with deep seriousness, 'that these being Colonial troops it was not so necessary to examine their toothbrushes…Imperial troops will use the brush they clean their buttons with for their teeth so as to have a clean toothbrush to show the medical officer…

'It sounds,' she said with a little shudder, 'as if you were all schoolboys playing a game…And you say my husband really occupies his mind with such things…'

Second–Lieutenant Cowley, dreadfully conscious that the shoulder–strap of his Sam Browne belt, purchased that afternoon at the Ordnance, and therefore brand–new, did not match the abdominal part of the belt that he had had for nearly ten years—a splendid bit of leather, that!—answered nevertheless stoutly:

'Madam! If the brains of an army aren't, the life of an army is…in its feet…And nowadays, the medical officers say, in its teeth…Your husband, ma'am, is an admirable officer…He says that no draft he turns out shall…

She said:

'He spent three hours in…You say, foot and kit inspection…'

Second–Lieutenant Cowley said:

'Of course he had other officers to help him with the kit…but he looked at every foot himself…'

She said:

'That took him from two till five…Then he had tea, I suppose…And went to…What is it?…The papers of the draft…'

Second–Lieutenant Cowley said, muffled through his moustache:

'If the captain is a little remiss in writing letters…I have heard…You might, madam…I'm a married man myself…with a daughter…And the army is not very good at writing letters…You might say, in that respect, that thank God we have got a navy, ma'am…'

She let him stagger on for a sentence or two, imagining that, in his confusion, she might come upon traces of Miss Wannop in Rouen. Then she said handsomely:

'Of course you have explained everything, Mr. Cowley, and I am very much obliged…Of course my husband would not have time to write very full letters…He is not like the giddy young subalterns who run after…

He exclaimed in a great roar of laughter:

'The captain run after skirts…Why, I can number on my hands the times he's been out of my sight since he's had the battalion!'

A deep wave of depression went over Sylvia.

'Why,' Lieutenant Cowley laughed on, 'if we had a laugh against him it was that he mothered the lot of us as if he was a hen sitting

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