"Colour-Sergeant Morgan and Lance-Corporal Trench are obliging us by coming from depot orderly room to help with the draft's papers. Why don't you and the other officer go and get a bit of dinner, sir? The colonel and the padre have only just come in to mess, and I've warned the mess orderlies to keep your food 'ot. . . . Both good men with papers, Morgan and Trench. We can send the soldiers' small books to you at table to sign. . . ." His feminine solicitude enraged and overwhelmed Tietjens with blackness. He told the sergeant-major that he was to go to hell, for he himself was not going to leave that hut till the draft was moved off. Captain Mackenzie could do as he pleased. The sergeant-major told Captain Mackenzie that Captain Tietjens took as much trouble with his rag-time detachments as if he had been the Coldstream adjutant at Chelsea sending off a draft of Guards. Captain Mackenzie said that was why they damn well got their details off four days faster than any other I.B.D. in that camp. He _would_ say that much, he added grudgingly and dropped his head over his papers again. The hut was moving slowly up and down before the eyes of Tietjens. He might have just been kicked in the stomach. That was how shocks took him. He said to himself that by God he must take himself in hand. He grabbed with his heavy hands at a piece of buff paper and wrote on it in a column of fat, wet letters: a b b a a b b a and so on. He said opprobriously to Captain Mackenzie: "Do you know what a sonnet is? Give me the rhymes for a sonnet. That's the plan of it." Mackenzie grumbled: "Of course I know what a sonnet is. What's your game?" Tietjens said: "Give me the fourteen end-rhymes of a sonnet and I'll write the lines. In under two minutes and a half." Mackenzie said injuriously: "If you do I'll turn it into Latin hexameters in three. In _under_ three minutes."