In the last chapter of No More Parades the hero, Christopher Tietjens, is being promoted to certain death by being made second in command of Colonel Partridge’s regiment in the 6th battalion of General Perry, commanding the 16th section. He is told by his godfather, his father’s oldest friend, commanding officer General Edward Campion that ‘The second in command of a battalion has nothing to do but sit about in arm-chairs waiting for the colonel to be killed.’ Tietjens knows the reality and recalls a moment from October 1916:
It is unbearable: it is that that has ruined us…The mud!…He had heard these words, standing amidst volcano craters of mud, amongst ravines, monstrosities of slime, cliffs and distances, all of slime…
And the slime had moved….
The moving slime was German deserters…
In advanced pockets of mud, in dreadful solitude amongst those ravines…suspended in eternity, at the last day of the world.
This picture recalls the scenes from Dante’s Inferno and it is thought-provoking to compare this nightmare vision with a passage from Wyndham Lewis’s account of the war in his autobiographical book Blasting and Bombardiering:
Ford said to me ‘When this war’s over nobody is going to worry six months afterwards, what you did or didn’t do in the course of it. One month after it’s ended, it will be forgotten. Everybody will want to forget it—it will be bad form to mention it. Within a year disbanded ‘heroes’ will be selling matches in the gutter. No-one likes the ex-soldier—if you’ve lost a leg, more fool you!’
‘Do you think that? I said, for he almost made my leg feel sorry for itself.
‘Of course,’ he answered. ‘It’s always been the same. After all the wars that’s what’s happened.’
This wordly forecast was verified to the letter.
Ian Brinton