With all that, obviously even off parade, you might well be the social equal of a Staff colonel: but you jolly well had to keep from showing that you were his 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-morrow afternoon, haven't I? . . . I can't leave camp twice in one week. . . ." "You've got to come down to the camp-guard," Levin said. "I hate to keep a woman waiting in the cold . . . though she _is_ in the general's car. . . ." Tietjens exclaimed: "You've not been . . . oh, extraordinarily enough, to bring Miss de Bailly out here? To talk to me?" Colonel Levin mumbled, so low Tietjens almost imagined that he was not meant to hear: "It isn't Miss de Bailly!" Then he exclaimed quite aloud: "Damn it all, Tietjens, haven't you had hints enough? . . ."