Free Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh Page B

return march, the priest accosted Guy at the gate. ‘Won’t you just slip in to the presbytery, Captain, and pass the time of day? I’ve a bottle of whisky a good soul gave me, that needs opening.’
    ‘I won’t, thank you, Father Whelan. I’ve got to take the men back to barracks.’
    ‘Well now and what a wonderful thing the army is to be sure, that a lot of grown lads can’t walk half a mile by themselves.’
    ‘Those are the orders, I’m afraid.’
    ‘Now that little matter of the list of names, Captain. His Lordship wants a list of all the names of the Catholic serving men for his records as I think I mentioned to you last Sunday.’
    ‘Very good of you to take so much interest in us. I think you get a capitation grant from the War Office, don’t you, Father Whelan, when there’s no Catholic chaplain?’
    ‘Well, I do now, Captain, and isn’t it me right at law?’
    ‘I’m not a captain. You’d better write to the adjutant.’
    ‘And how would I be telling one officer from another and me not a military man at all?’
    ‘Just write “the Adjutant, the Royal Corps of Halberdiers”. That’ll get to him all right.’
    ‘Well, if you won’t help, you won’t, I suppose. God bless you, Captain,’ he said curtly and turned to a woman who had been standing unnoticed at his elbow. ‘Well, my dear woman, and what’s troubling you now?’
    On the march home they passed the parish church, a lofty elaborate tower rising from a squat earlier building of flint and grey stone, with low dog-toothed arches. It stood in a well-kept graveyard behind ancient yews. Within from the hammer-beams hung the spider’s-web Colours of the Corps. Guy knew them well. He often stopped there on Saturday afternoons with his weekly papers. From such a doorway as that Roger de Waybroke had stepped out on his unaccomplished journey, leaving his madam padlocked.
    Less constrained than the Lady of Waybroke, the womenfolk of the Halberdiers were all over the ante-room when Guy returned. He knew most of them now and for half an hour he helped order sherry, move ashtrays and light cigarettes. One of his own batch, the athletic young man named Leonard, had brought his wife that morning. She was plainly pregnant. Guy knew Leonard little for he lodged in the town and spent his evenings there, but he recognized him as peculiarly fitted for the Halberdiers. Apthorpe looked like any experienced soldier but Leonard seemed made of the very stuff that constituted the Corps. In peace he had worked in an insurance office and had travelled every winter Saturday afternoon, carrying his ‘change’ in an old leather bag, to outlying football grounds to play scrum-half for his club.
    In his first speech of welcome the Captain-Commandant had hinted that there might be permanent commissions for some of them after the war. Guy could imagine Leonard in twelve years’ time as hairy and kindly and idiomatic as Major Tickeridge. But that was before he met his madam.
    The Leonards sat with Sarum-Smith talking of money.
    ‘I’m here because I’ve got to be,’ Sarum-Smith was saying. ‘I went to town last week-end and it cost me over a fiver. I shouldn’t have thought twice of it when I was in business. Every penny counts in the army.’
    ‘Is it true, Mr Crouchback, that they’re moving you all after Christmas?’
    ‘I gather so.’
    ‘Isn’t it a shame? No sooner settled in one place than you’re off somewhere else. I don’t see the sense of it.’
    ‘One thing I won’t do,’ said Sarum-Smith, ‘and that’s buy a map-case.
Or
King’s Regulations.’
    ‘They say we’ve got to pay for our battle-dress when it comes. I call that a bit thick,’ said Leonard.
    ‘It’s no catch being an officer. They’re always making you buy something you don’t want. The War Office is so busy sucking up to the other ranks it hasn’t time for the poor bloody officers. There was three bob on my mess bill yesterday marked entertainment I asked what