In his hut, which was dim and profusely decorated with the doctor's ideals of female beauty in every known form of pictorial reproduction, so that it might have been lined with peach-blossom, Tietjens had the greatest difficulty in getting into his belt. He had at first forgotten to remove his hat, then he put his head through the wrong opening; his fingers on the buckles operated like sausages. He inspected himself in the doctor's cracked shaving-glass: he was exceptionally well shaved. He had shaved that morning at six-thirty: five minutes after the draft had got off. Naturally, the lorries had been an hour late. It was providential that he had shaved with extra care. An insolently calm man was looking at him, the face divided in two by the crack in the glass: a naturally white-complexioned double-half of a face: a patch of high colour on each cheekbone; the pepper-and-salt hair ruffled, the white streaks extremely silver. He had gone very silver lately. But he swore he did not look worn. Not careworn. McKechnie said from behind his back: "By Jove, what's this all about. The general's been strafing me to hell for not having my table tidy!" Tietjens, still looking in the glass, said: "You should keep your table tidy. It's the only strafe the battalion's had." The general, then, must have been in the orderly room of which he had put McKechnie in charge. McKechnie went on, breathlessly: "They say you knocked the general. . . ." Tietjens said: "Don't you know enough to discount what they say in this town?" He said to himself: "That was all right!" He had spoken with a cool edge on a contemptuous voice. He said to the sergeant-cook who was panting--another heavy, grey-moustached, very senior N.C.O.: "The general's going round the cook-houses. . . . You be damn certain there's no dirty cook's clothing in the lockers!" He was fairly sure that otherwise his cook-houses would be all right. He had gone round them himself the morning of the day before yesterday. Or was it yesterday? . . . It was the day after he had been up all night because the draft had been countermanded. . . . It didn't matter. He said: "I wouldn't serve out white clothing to the cooks. . . . I bet you've got some hidden away, though it's against orders." The sergeant looked away into the distance, smiled all-knowingly over his walrus moustache. "The general likes to see 'em in white," he said, "and he won't know the white clothing has been countermanded." Tietjens said: "The snag is that the beastly cooks always will tuck some piece of beastly dirty clothing away in a locker rather than take the trouble to take it round to their quarters when they've changed." Levin said with great distinctness: