superior. Especially intellectually. If you let yourself show a Staff officer that he was a silly ass—you could say it as often as you liked as long as you didn't prove it!—you could be certain that you would be for it before long. And quite properly. It was not English to be intellectually adroit. Nay, it was positively un-English. And the duty of field officers is to keep messes as English as possible. . . . So a Staff officer would take it out of such a regimental inferior. In a perfectly creditable way. You would never imagine the hash headquarters warrant officers would make of your returns. Until you were worried and badgered and in the end either you were ejected into, or prayed to be transferred to . . . any other command in the whole service. . . .
And that was beastly. The process, not the effect. On the whole Tietjens did not care where he was or what he did as long as he kept out of England, the thought of that country, at night, slumbering across the Channel, being sentimentally unbearable to him. . . . Still, he was fond of old Campion, and would rather be in his command than any other. He had attached to his staff a very decent set of fellows, as decent as you could be in contact with . . . if you had to be in contact with your kind. . . . So he just said:
"Look here, Stanley, you are a silly ass," and left it at that, without demonstrating the truth of the assertion.
The colonel said:
"Why, what have I been doing now? . . . I wish you would walk the other way. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"No, I can't afford to go out of camp. . . . I've got to come to witness your fantastic wedding-contract to-
