Dear Illusion

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The House resettled itself rather sulkily, feeling, and muttering, that it was always the bloody same: the moment you got a decent row going, some pernickety sod piped up with some moan about order. Might as well be sitting in the billet reading last week’s paper.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Speaker.’ Doll stared across at Hargreaves. ‘As a matter of fact I welcome the opportunity of saying something about those elections. I find it rather odd that the Reds should be so keen to get those elections held at this stage, with the country still in turmoil – but then it’ll be all right really, won’t it? – with the Reds everywhere to see fair play. No undemocratic interference from us or the French or the Yanks that might result in free elections, because the wrong people might get elected then, mightn’t they? Can’t have that, can we? Comrade Stalin wouldn’t like that.

  ‘I should like to round off this question with a few words on the Warsaw rising and the Reds’ unfortunate inability to come to the aid of their Polish brothers in arms. In the spring of this year—’

  Hargreaves had lost all the poise that might have been expected of a Foreign Secretary, even a mock one. He leant forward on the heavy, scarred wooden bench and put his head in his hands. If only he knew more and could think faster; if only he had at his side, as living proof that Doll was wrong, one or other of the fine men and women he knew on his local Labour Party branch committee, people who had grown up in the service of Socialism and given it all their spare energy, fighting in Spain, leading hunger marches, canvassing in hopelessly impregnable Tory strongholds . . . He tried not to think of all that going to waste, failing ever to find its way to power. His almost continuous excitement over the results of the British General Election, due to be announced the following week, froze momentarily into despair. Contrary to what everyone thought, he had never been a member of the Communist Party. He was suspicious of the one-party system and his doubts about the Russian labour camps still lingered. But if Doll’s ideas carried the day at home there was only one logical step to take. Hargreaves was enough of a Marxist to recognize a situation in which the Left must combine against the main enemy. To have taken this half-decision brought him no relief: on tonight’s showing he was politically useless.

  His obvious dejection was not lost on Major Raleigh, whose soft face had softened somewhat since Doll began to put things in the right perspective and who was now leaning back in his chair in search of what degree of comfort it could provide. This was not great. Like everything else in the room it seemed to have been made without reference to human use. Typical German unimaginativeness, the major thought to himself. The small oblong windows, through which a strong late-evening sun was pouring, were set too high in the wall to be properly seen out of, certainly by most of the children who until recently had attended prayers here, sung Nazi songs or whatever it was they did in their school hall. Two rows of flat-topped desks had been dragged out of an adjacent store-room to form the Government and Opposition front benches. It would have taken a long-torsoed boy or girl to work at one with any ease or even see fairly over it, and the design demonstrably called for a far shorter-legged man than the average mock parliamentarian currently in occupation.

  The major brooded for a time upon Hargreaves and the many things that could be done with or to him to make him less all-embracingly unsatisfactory – failing which, some positive enactment of how the world in general felt about him would do him good. The things available to the major ranged from giving Hargreaves an extra duty for being unshaven (any and every day would do) to getting him transferred elsewhere. An influential contact in the relevant department at General HQ was in the habit of seeing to it that, to a large extent, the major was able to decide who should and who should not be posted out of his command. There was only one place where, after a brief break in the United Kingdom, Hargreaves would finally be sent: a very hot and distant place, full of stuff which would interest him and which, as a budding expert on world affairs, he could not afford not to know about.

  In one of his rare moments of self-contemplation, brought on by slight uneasiness over the impending Election result, the major had started wondering about the morality of dispatching jungle-ward anybody under his authority who had happened to annoy him. The moment had sped harmlessly by when he remembered that, to an experienced and conscientious officer such as he trusted he was, men who annoyed him were certain to be, corresponded one hundred per cent with, men who were bad soldiers. It did not worry him that he was thus filling the relevant units of South-East Asia Command with drunks, incompetents, homosexuals, Communists, ration-vendors and madmen. His first duty was to the formation he led.

  Thoughts of the Japanese campaign naturally led him to consider another person who was going the right way about getting to it soon. Lieutenant F. N. Archer, sometime defendant in a celebrated unconstitutional Court of Inquiry staged by the major in an only half-successful attempt to humiliate him, was now scowling openly at what Doll was saying. Archer sat in a tall ecclesiastical-looking throne affair, much carved with Gothic lettering, at the far end of the room from the Visitors’ Gallery. This was no gallery, but a simple row of hard chairs at floor level. The real gallery over the oak doorway had not suited the major, who still resented Archer’s original attempt to make him and his friends sit up there as if they were nothing to do with the proceedings. It had been just like Archer not to see that it was absurd to try and reproduce the House of Commons set-up in details like that. Not seeing the obvious was his speciality, as his regimental work showed. To have appointed him Speaker of this fandango had probably been a mistake, but then he was the one who was always showing off his political knowledge in the Mess. A fat lot that had amounted to.

  His voice sounding hollow in the barely furnished room, Doll said: ‘But before that we must immediately negotiate a peace with Japan, while she still has some sort of military machine left. We’re going to need every ship and plane and man they have. A settlement wouldn’t be difficult. They’re talking about peace already. Nobody really cares who owns those islands – it’s the bases that count. And with a common enemy that’d soon sort itself out.’

  ‘What about the Chinese?’ the Postmaster-General asked. He was a corporal of dispatch-riders from the parachute formation, one of the few recent arrivals who had taken part in the parliament.

  Doll never smiled, but cordiality enhanced his tones when he answered: ‘An excellent question. I think the Japs with their reduced bargaining-power could probably be bullied into making enough concessions to the Chinks to keep them quiet. Certainly the Yanks have got quite enough cash to bribe the Nationalist Chinks – Chiang’s lot – into selling their little yellow souls. The Red Chinks are more of a problem, though they won’t amount to much for a good while yet. I think there’s a fair chance they could be bought off too, into some sort of tacit neutrality anyway.

  ‘But the real problem is Europe. The thing there is to advance until we’re stopped. We stop wherever they start shooting. And they won’t do that for a bit. We push into Czechoslovakia and Hungary and the Balkans and southern Poland if we can get there, until we’re stopped. Then we dig in. They can’t have troops everywhere. Later on we straighten the line by agreement with the Reds. It’s our only chance of saving any of these people – to fight on our side later, if necessary.

  ‘We’ll need troops for that, of course. To dig in and stay there. Demobilization must be halted at once. Twenty-eight days’ leave in the UK for everybody we can spare, then back on the job. No Yanks are going home if I have anything to do with it; they’re all needed here. Re-form the French, Dutch, Belgian and Italian armies. And the Germans, as many of those boys as we can get. It does seem a pity we spent so much energy killing so many of them, doesn’t it? When if we’d gone in with them when they asked us in 1941 we’d have smashed the Reds between us by now? But we’ll leave that for the time being. We’ll have to put the Nazi Party back on its feet, by the way. They understand these things. Perhaps o
ld Adolf will turn up from wherever he is and give us a hand. We could use him.

  ‘Well, that’s about it. Keep them nattering away in Potsdam as long as possible and move like hell meanwhile. I think it would probably work. Everybody’s exhausted, but our manpower and resources are superior. What we almost certainly haven’t got is the will. That’s their strong suit. In conclusion, let me just say formally that in foreign affairs the first policy of my party is resistance to Communism.’

  Doll sat down, having finished his speech, a rare achievement in this chamber. There was a lot of applause, most of it based on close attention to what had been said. Nodding his head to the pair of gloomy subalterns who sat beside him, the major joined judicially in. He knew he was supposed to be impartial, but really there could be no question but that the whole thing was on the right lines, except perhaps for the bit about the Nazi Party, which was premature to say the least. His speculations why Doll had never put in for a commission were interrupted by the Foreign Secretary, who clattered to his feet and cleared his throat in a long bellow. Hargreaves’s normally mottled face was flushed; parts of his scrubby hair stuck out horizontally; his chest rose and fell.

  ‘Could I ask first of all,’ he said in a trembling voice, ‘if the Honourable Member imagines that any British Government would put the policy he outlines, put into effect the policy he outlines?’

  Doll’s stare was not unfriendly. ‘Oh no. That’s to say almost certainly not. They’d be turned out as soon as the electorate realized what they’d let themselves in for. You’d be asking people to admit in effect that they’d been fighting on the wrong side, you see, and having their relatives killed doing it. And they’re tired too. No, I’d say the chances—’

  ‘Then what . . . what the hell . . . ? I mean what’s the point of—?’

  ‘The point? The point of what we’re doing as I see it is to work out what we think we should do, not what the Government we elect probably will do. If we’re all just playing a guessing game, then I think I’m with you. You’ll very likely get what you want, especially if the country’s fool enough to elect those Socialist prigs. I only hope you enjoy it when you find out what it’s really like.’

  ‘Mr Speaker, sir,’ Hargreaves cried, and he was looking directly at Archer, ‘I never thought to sit in this House, which is a, which exists only with the traditions of that other House across the sea, sir, and hear an Honourable Member admit to an admiration for the Nazi Party, which has been responsible for so many dreadful crimes, and which, the German Army I mean, we’ve been fighting it all these years and now I hear this said, or perhaps he now wishes to—’

  ‘I didn’t admit to an admiration for the Nazi Party, and I would never do so. Their racial policy was against reason and their appeal was based on mass hysteria. No, I was only arguing that in a desperate situation like ours you need all the allies you can get, especially if they can organize and fight. That we all know the Nazis can do.’

  ‘No wonder you want the Nazis. You’re an aggressor, you want to aggress – you want to attack the Russians. The people who’ve died in their millions to stop the Nazis from conquering the world – honestly, how insane can you—’

  The Foreign Secretary’s voice tailed off. The House was perfectly silent, crossing its fingers with the wish that no pernickety sod was going to invoke order. Doll said efficiently: ‘The Nazis could never have conquered the world. There were too few of them and they were confined to one country. The Reds are an international conspiracy. And my proposals were entirely defensive. What interests me is resistance to Communism, as I said, not an assault on it. It’s too early for that, or too late. There’s only been one assault on it in our lifetime, and it failed because we were too stupid to join in. And now perhaps somebody else might care to—’

  ‘Fascist!’ Hargreaves screamed. ‘The strong arm, that’s the thing for you, isn’t it? The jackboot. The good old truncheon. I know your sort, Doll. There are people like you in England, all over, in the bloody Empire, Africa and India, smooth as buggery in the club with the old brandy and soda and then off to break a strike or flog a wog or . . . You’re all the same. And everybody who clapped you . . .’ His unblinking glance swept the chamber, meeting the major’s eyes for a moment. ‘Ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Black-and-Tan material. You’re going to lose. You’re on the side of death. History’ll get you. Auden warned you but you never listened. I won’t even sit in the same room with you.’

  Sincere emotion enforces a hearing. Hargreaves had almost reached the impressive exit doorway – no more than twenty years old but, to an English eye, redolent of weighty Teutonic medievalism – before comment and protest got properly going. Doll smoothed his abundant straight dark hair. Archer and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Home Office gazed with similar expressions after the retreating Hargreaves. The major blew his nose and tucked the pale tan silk handkerchief into the sleeve of his battledress blouse. His soft face concealed emotion at the hardly won memory (he did not care to blur with too much detail his faculty for making quick decisions) that Archer was Hargreaves’s section officer and, as such, responsible for everything he did.

  II

  ‘Anything special for me this morning, Wilf?’ Major Raleigh hung up his service-dress hat – which, in defiance of his own edict, he regularly wore with battledress – on the fist-sized bronze knob of the bookcase door. Behind the glass of this, apart from a couple of dozen battered books in a foreign language or two, there huddled a heap of painted china vases and ewers which the major thought might be eighteenth century or nineteenth century or one of those. He had collected them from various houses and shops in the area and sometimes wondered what to do with them.

  Captain Cleaver looked listlessly at a pad on his table. ‘I don’t think so, Major. There’s the pay to collect.’

  ‘Get one of the cable wallahs to go. Time they did something to earn their living.’

  ‘Well, it’s a trip, you know, Major.’

  ‘So much the better.’

  ‘No, I was thinking somebody might like to go. Get out of the place for a bit.’

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Go yourself if you like, Wilf.’

  ‘Well, actually I was hoping to look in at the Officers’ Shop if you’re not going to need me here. That’s in the opposite direction to the cashier.’

  ‘Ask that parachute chap, then, Pinch or Finch or whatever his name is. He’s been looking a bit down in the mouth.’

  ‘Winch. Yes, he has, hasn’t he? He must feel a bit of a fish out of water here. Nothing going on. It must have been a bit different at Arnhem. All that excitement. Pretty hectic too, though. I expect he misses that, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’ The major, at his in-tray, stared up over his reading glasses. They made him look ineffectively studious, like a neglected schoolboy at a crammer’s. ‘Misses what?’

  ‘You know, the excitement and the big bangs and so on at Arnhem. I was asking you if you thought he was missing it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Winch, the parachute chap.’

  ‘How the hell should I know what he’s missing and what he isn’t missing? And he wasn’t at Arnhem, I asked him. Got taken off the drop at the last minute because of dysentery.’

  ‘I understood him to say—’

  ‘He wasn’t on the Normandy drop, either.’

  ‘Well, he wouldn’t have been, would he? Normandy was Sixth Airborne. Arnhem was First.’

  ‘Yes. Look, Wilf, if you’re going to the Officers’ Shop there are a couple of things you might pick up for me, if you would.’

  ‘Certainly, Major, of course.’ Cleaver turned to a fresh page of his pad, pleased at the chance of writing something down, and poised his pencil devotedly. ‘Now then, what can I do for you?’

  ‘Half a dozen handkerchiefs, the silk ones. Don’t seem to be able to get anything ironed round here. Three pairs of the lightweight socks, size eight shoe. Not the elastic tops. If there’s only the elastic tops
don’t get anything. Ties? No, I’m all right for those.’

  The major appeared to fall into a muse. Cleaver said: ‘Anything else, Major?’

  ‘Hold on, I’m thinking . . . Those American shirts. Has he got any left, do you know?’

  ‘Well, he’s probably got some more in by this time. He said he was getting some more in.’

  ‘Make sure they’re the same. The same as I’m wearing now. See? . . . You’re not looking.’

  ‘I am, honestly, sir. I know the sort.’

  ‘Make sure the collar’s the same. Get me three of them. Fifteen and a half neck.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Just a moment.’ The major fondled his throat, his blue eyes bulging as he tried to see what he was doing. ‘Better say sixteen to be on the safe side. I’ll settle up with you when you see what you’ve got, okay?’

  ‘Right, Major. Oh, by the way, I meant to tell you—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A message came over the blower from Movement Control in Hildesfeld. Just an advance warning – there’ll be a teleprint through this afternoon with all the griff. A platoon of the Montgomeryshire Light Infantry are moving into the area some time tomorrow and we’re to help them find accommodation. They were supposed to be doing guard duty at one of the DP camps, but it closed down a couple of days ago and so there’s nowhere for them to—’

  ‘But it’s not our responsibility to fix them up. They’re not Signals.’ Raleigh spoke with an anxious severity, as if, conceivably, the platoon referred to might turn out to be the one in which someone very dangerous to him was serving, someone who had seen him cheating at picquet or torturing a prisoner.

  ‘I know, but that’s not what they’re on about. These people will come under the Admin Company in the ordinary way. It’s just that – well, the Staff Captain in Hildesfeld seemed to think that with our knowledge of the area we could be pretty useful to these MLI types. Know where to look and save them time. Just lend them an officer and a sergeant for a day or so. Nobody at Movement Control who’d do and if there were they couldn’t spare him. They’re run off their feet there.’