‘True enough.’
‘He sees the role of authority as essentially artificial, the army a way of life in which there is as little room for uncontrolled fervour as for sullen indifference. The impetuous volunteer has as much to learn as the unwilling conscript.’
I thought of Gwatkin and his keenness; of Sayce, and his recalcitrance. There was something to be said for this view of the army. By this time, Pennistone and I were the only ones awake in the compartment. The button cleaners had abandoned their paraphernalia, resumed their tunics and nodded off like the rest. The quartermaster began to snore. He did not look particularly saintly, nor even dedicated, though one never could tell. Probably Vigny knew what he was talking about after fourteen years of it.
‘All the same,’ I said, ‘it’s a misapprehension to suppose, as most people do, that the army is inherently different from all other communities. The hierarchy and discipline give an outward illusion of difference, but there are personalities of every sort in the army, as much as out of it. On the whole, the man who is successful in civilian life, all things being equal, is successful in the army.’
‘Certainly – and there can be weak-willed generals and strong-willed privates.’
‘Look, for example, at the way you yourself compelled my neighbour to move his kit last night.’
Pennistone laughed.
‘One can just imagine Vigny romanticising that fat sod,’ he said, ‘but that is by the way. Probably Vigny, while emphasising that we are back with the citizen army of classical times which he himself envisaged, would agree with what you say. He was certainly aware that nothing is absolute in the army – least of all obeying orders. Take my own case. I was instructed to wait until this morning for a train, as there had been local complaints of army personnel overcrowding the railways over weekends to the detriment of civilian travel facilities. I made careful enquiries, found chances of retribution remote and started the night before, thus saving a day of my journey.’
‘In other words, the individual still counts, even in the army.’
‘Although consigned to circumstances in which, theoretically, no individuality – though much will-power – exists.’
‘What would Vigny have thought of your disobeying that order?’
‘I could have pleaded that the army was not my chosen profession, that my ill-conduct was a revulsion from uniform, drum, drill, the ritual of the parade ground, the act of an unworthy, amateur neophyte of war.’
We both went to sleep after that. When the train reached London, I said goodbye to Pennistone, who was making his way to the country and his home, there to stay until recalled to duty.
‘Perhaps we’ll meet again.’
‘Let’s decide to anyway,’ he said. ‘As we’ve agreed, these things are largely a matter of will.’
He waved, and disappeared into the crowds of the railway station. Later in the morning, while attending to the many odd jobs to be done during my few hours in London, I was struck by a thought as to where I might have seen Pennistone before. Was it at Mrs Andriadis’s party in Hill Street ten or twelve years ago? His identity was revealed. He was the young man with the orchid in his buttonhole with whom I had struck up a conversation in the small hours. This seemed our characteristic relationship. Stringham had taken me to the party, Pennistone informed me that the house itself belonged to the Duports. Pennistone had told me, too, that Bob Duport had married Peter Templer’s sister, Jean. It was Pennistone, that same evening – when all was confusion owing to Milly Andriadis’s row with Stringham – whom she had pushed into an armchair when he had tried to tell her an anecdote about Prince Theodoric and the Prince of Wales. By then Pennistone was rather tight. It all seemed centuries ago: the Prince of Wales now Duke of Windsor, Prince Theodoric, buttress of pro-Allied sentiment in a country threatened by German invasion, Pennistone and myself second-lieutenants in our middle thirties. I wondered what had happened to Stringham, Mrs Andriadis and the rest. However, there was no time to ponder long about all that. Other matters required attention. I was glad – overjoyed – to be back in England even for a month or so. There would be weekend leaves from the course, when it should be possible to get as far as my sister-in-law Frederica Budd’s house, where Isobel was staying until the child was born. The London streets, empty of traffic, looked incredibly bright and sophisticated, the tarts in Piccadilly dazzling nymphs. This was before the blitz. I knew how Persephone must have felt on the first day of her annual release from the underworld. An RAF officer of unconventional appearance advancing up the street turned out to be Barnby. He recognised me at the same moment.
‘I thought you were a war artist.’
‘I was for a time,’ he said. ‘Then I got sick of it and took a job doing camouflage for this outfit.’
‘Disguising aerodromes as Tudor cottages?’
‘That sort of thing.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘Not bad. If I’m not able to paint in the way I want, I’d as soon do this as anything else.’
‘I thought war artists were allowed to paint whatever they wanted.’
‘They are in a way,’ said Barnby, ‘I don’t know. I prefer this for some reason, while there’s a war on. They let me go on an occasional operational flight.’
I felt a pang. Barnby was a few years older than myself. I had nothing so lively to report. He looked rather odd in his uniform, thick, square, almost as if he were still wearing the blue overalls in which he was accustomed to paint.
‘Where are you, Nick?’ he asked.
I gave him some account of my life.
‘It doesn’t sound very exciting.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘I’ve got a wonderful new girl,’ he said.
I thought how, war or peace, nothing ever really changes in such aspects.
‘How long are you in London?’ he said. ‘I’d like to tell you about her. She’s got one extraordinary trait. It would amuse you to hear about it. Can’t we dine together tonight?’
‘I’ve got to report to Aldershot this afternoon. I’ve been sent there on a course. Are you stationed in London?’
‘Up for the night only. I have to see a man in the Air Ministry about some special camouflage equipment. How’s Isobel?’
‘Having a baby soon.’
‘Give her my love. What happened to the rest of the Tolland family?’
‘George is in France with a Guards battalion. He was on the Regular Reserve, of course, now a captain. Robert always a mysterious figure, is a lance-corporal in Field Security, believed to be on his way to getting a commission. Hugo doesn’t want to be an officer. He prefers to stay where he is as a gunner on the South Coast – bombardier now, I believe. He says you meet such awful types in the Officers’ Mess.’
‘What about those chaps Isobel’s sisters married?’
‘Roddy Cutts – as an MP – had no difficulty about getting into something. His own county Yeomanry, I think. I don’t know his rank, probably colonel by now. Susan is with him. Chips Lovell has joined the Marines.’
‘That’s an unexpected arm. Is Priscilla with him?’
‘So far as I know.’
We spoke of other matters, then parted. Talking to Barnby increased the feeling that I had been released from prison, at the same time inducing a new sensation, that prison life was all I was fit for. Barnby’s conversation, everything round about, seemed hopelessly unreal. There was boundless relief in being free, even briefly free, from the eternal presence of Gwatkin, Kedward, Cadwallader, Gwylt and the rest of them; not to have to worry whether the platoon was better occupied digging themselves in or attacking a hill; whether Davies, G., should have a stripe or Davies, L., lose one; yet, by comparison, the shapes of Barnby and Pennistone were little more than figments of the imagination, shadows flickering on the slides of an old-fashioned magic-lantern. I had scarcely arrived in London, in any case, before it was time to leave for Aldershot. In the train on the way there, I reflected on the ideas Pen
nistone had put forward: the ‘occasional operational flights’ of Barnby. How would one feel on such aerial voyages? It might be like Dai and Shoni in their balloon. In the army, as up to now experienced, danger, although it might in due course make appearance, at present skulked out of sight in the background; the foreground for ever cluttered with those moral obligations outlined by Vigny. I envied Pennistone, who could turn from war to Descartes, and back again, without perceptible effort. I knew myself incapable of writing a line of a novel – by then I had written three or four – however long released from duty. Whatever inner processes are required for writing novels, so far as I myself was concerned, war now utterly inhibited. That was one of the many disagreeable aspects of war. It was not only physically inescapable, but morally inescapable too. Why did one envy Barnby his operational flights? That was an absorbing question. Certainly not because one wanted to be killed, nor yet because the qualities of those who excel in violent action were the qualities to which one had any claim. For that matter, such qualities were not specially Barnby’s. There was perhaps the point. Yet it was absurd to regard war as a kind of competition of just that sort between individuals. If that was the aim in war, why not in peace? No doubt there were plenty of individuals who felt that sort of emulation in peacetime too, but their preoccupations were not one’s own. Looked at calmly, war created a situation in which the individual – if he wished to be on the winning side – was of importance only in so much as he contributed to the requirements of the machine, not according to the picturesque figure he cut in the eyes of himself and others. It was no more reasonable, if you were not that sort of person, to aspire to lead a cavalry charge, than, without financial gifts, to dream of cornering the pepper market; without scientific training, split the atom. All the same, as Pennistone had said, these things are largely a matter of the will. I thought of Dr Trelawney, the magician, the night Duport and I had helped him to bed after his asthma attack, when he had quoted as all that was necessary: ‘To know to dare, to will, to be silent.’ Armed with those emblems of strength, one might, however out of character, lead a cavalry charge, perhaps even corner the pepper market and split the atom too. Anyway, I thought, it would be a dull world if no one ever had dreams of glory. Moreland was fond of quoting Nietzsche’s opinion that there is no action without illusion. Arrival at Aldershot brought an end to these reflections. Most of the train’s passengers turned out to be officers on their way to the same course as myself. After reporting to the Orderly Room, we were shown the lines where we were to sleep, a row of small redbrick houses built round a sort of square. Their interiors were uninviting.
‘Former married quarters,’ said the gloomy C.3 lance-corporal guiding my group. ‘Condemned in 1914, don’t half wonder.’
I did not wonder either. 1914 was, in fact, the year when, as a child, I had last set eyes on these weary red cantonments, my father’s regiment stationed at a hutted camp between here and Stonehurst, the remote and haunted bungalow where my parents lived at that time. I remembered how the Battalion, polished and blancoed, in scarlet and spiked helmets, had marched into Aldershot for some ceremonial parade, drums beating, colours cased, down dusty summer roads. Afterwards, my father had complained of a sore heel caused by the rub of his Wellington boot, an abrasion scarcely cured before it was time to go to war. That war, too, had been no doubt the reason why these ramshackle married quarters had never been demolished and replaced. When peace came, there were other matters to think about. Here we were accommodated on the ground floor, a back and front room. Of the five others who were to share this billet, four – two from the Loyals, two from the Manchesters – were in their late twenties. They did their unpacking and went off to find the Mess. The remaining subaltern, from a Midland regiment, was much younger. He was short and square, with dark skin, grey eyes and very fair curly hair.
‘Those Lancashire lads in here with us are a dumb crowd,’ he remarked to me.
‘What makes you think so?’
‘Do you know they thought I talked so broad I must come from Burton-on-Trent,’ he said.
He spoke as if he had been mistaken for a Chinese or Ethiopian. There was something of Kedward about him; something, too, which I could not define, of my brother-in-law, Chips Lovell. He did not have a smudgy moustache like Kedward’s, and his personality was more forceful, more attractive too.
‘We’re going to be right cooped up in here,’ he said. ‘Would you be satisfied if I took over this area of floor space, and left you as far as the wall?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘My name is Stevens,’ he said, ‘Odo Stevens.’
I told him my own name. He spoke with a North Country or Midland intonation, not unlike that Quiggin used to assume in his earlier days, when, for social or literary reasons, he chose to emphasize his provincial origins and unvarnished, forthright nature. Indeed, I could see nothing inherently absurd in the mistake the ‘Lancashire lads’ had made in supposing Stevens a native of Burton-on-Trent. However, I laughed and agreed it was a ludicrous error. I was flattered that he considered me a person to take into his confidence on the subject; glad, too, that I was housed next to someone who appeared agreeable. In the army, the comparative assurance of your own unit, whatever its failings, is at once dissipated by changed circumstances, which threaten fresh conflicts and induce that terrible, recurrent army dejection, the sensation that no one cares a halfpenny whether you live or die.
‘Where do you come from?’
‘Brum, of course.’
‘Birmingham?’
‘What do you think,’ he said, as if it were almost insulting to suppose the matter in the smallest doubt. ‘Can’t you tell the way I say it? But I’ve managed to keep out of my home town for quite a while, thank God.’
‘Don’t you like it there?’
‘Finest city in the world,’ he said, laughing again, ‘but something livelier suits me. As a matter of fact, I was on the continent for the best part of six months before I joined the army.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Holland, Belgium. Even got as far afield as Austria.’
‘Doing what?’
‘There was an exchange of apprentices for learning languages. I pick up languages pretty easily for some reason. They were beginning to think I’d better come home and do some work just at the moment war broke out.’
‘What’s your job?’
‘Imitation jewellery.’
‘You sell it?’
‘My pa’s in a firm that makes it. Got me into it too. A business with a lot of foreign connexions. That’s how I fixed up getting abroad.’
‘Sounds all right.’
‘Not bad, as jobs go, but I don’t want to spend a lifetime at it. That’s why I wasn’t sorry to make a change. Shall we push along to the Mess?’
We sat next to each other at dinner that night. Stevens asked me what I did for a living.
‘You’re lucky to have a writing job,’ he said, ‘I’ve tried writing myself. Sometimes think I might take it up, even though peddling costume jewellery is a good trade for putting yourself over with the girls.’
‘What sort of writing?’
‘Spot of journalism in the local paper – “Spring comes to the Black Country” – “Sunset on Armistice Day” – that sort of thing. I knock it off easily, just as I can pick up languages.’
I saw Stevens would go far, if he did not get killed. He was aware of his own taste for self-applause and prepared to laugh at it. The journalistic streak was perhaps what recalled Chips Lovell, whom he did not resemble physically.
‘Did you volunteer for the Independent Companies?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t think I’d be much good at them.’
The Independent Companies – later called Commandos – were small guerilla units, copiously officered. They had been employed with some success in Norway. Raising them had skimmed off the best young officers from many battalions, so that they were not popular with some Commanding Officers for that r
eason.
‘I was in trouble with my CO the time they were recruiting them,’ said Stevens. ‘He bitched up my application. It was really because he thought me useful to him where I was. All the same, I’ll get away into something. My unit are a lot of louts. They’re not going to prevent me from having what fun the army has to offer.’
Here were dreams of military glory very different from Gwatkin’s. After all this talk, it was time to go to bed. The following morning there was drill on the square. We were squadded by a stagey cluster of glengarry-capped staff-sergeants left over from the Matabele campaign, with Harry Lauder accents and eyes like poached eggs. Amongst a couple of hundred students on the course, there was hope of an acquaintance, but no familiar face showed in the Mess the previous night. However, slow-marching across the asphalt I recognised Jimmy Brent in another squad moving at right-angles to our own, a tallish, fat, bespectacled figure forgotten since Peter Templer had brought him to see Stringham and myself when we were undergraduates. Brent looked much the same. I had not greatly liked him at the time. Nothing heard about him since caused me, in a general way, to want to see more of him. Here, however, any face from the past was welcome, especially so veteran a relic as Brent. After the parade was dismissed, I tackled him.
‘We met years ago, when you came over in Peter Templer’s second-hand Vauxhall, and he drove us all into the ditch.’
I told him my name. Brent clearly did not recognise me. There was little or no reason why he should. However, he remembered the circumstances of Templer’s car accident, and seemed pleased to find someone on the course who had known him in the outside world.
‘There were some girls in the car, weren’t there,’ he said, his face lighting up at that happy memory, ‘and Bob Duport too. I knew Peter took us to see a couple of friends he’d been at school with, but I wouldn’t be able to place them at this distance of time. So you were one of them? What a memory you’ve got. Well, it’s nice to find a pal in this god-forsaken spot.’
The Valley of Bones Page 11