The Soldier's Art

by Anthony Powell

  “… Medium Field Regiment proceeding from … on the move at … must have reached … in fact, sir, should already have passed that point on the road twenty minutes ago … Motor Ambulance Convoy … shouldn’t be anywhere near the Royal Signals route … proceeding to base via one of the minor roads parallel to and south of our main body … I’ll show you on the map in a second, sir … only thing I can think of is some trouble must have occurred on that narrow iron bridge crossing the canal. That bridge wasn’t built for heavy traffic. I’ll send a D.R. right away …”

  These details showed commendable knowledge of local transport conditions. Widmerpool recapitulated a lot more in the same vein, possessing apparently the movement-tables of the entire Division, an awareness that certainly did him credit as D.A.A.G. The information should have satisfied Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson that, whatever else could have happened, Widmerpool, at least on the face of it, was not to blame for any muddle that might have taken place. However, Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson was in no state of mind to give consideration to any such possibility; nor, indeed, to look at the problem, or anything else, in the light of reason. There was something to be said for this approach. It is no good being too philosophical about such questions as a column of troops in a traffic jam. Action is required, not explanation. Such action may have to transcend reason. Historical instances would not be difficult to find. That concept provided vindication for Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson’s method, hard otherwise to excuse.

  “You’ve made a disgraceful mess of things,” he said. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I know we have to put up these days with a lot of amateur staff officers who’ve had little or no experience, and possess even less capacity for learning the A.B.C. of military affairs. Even so, we expect something better than this. Off you go now and find out immediately what’s happened. When you’ve done so, report back to me. Look sharp about it.”

  Widmerpool’s face had gone dark red. It was an occasion as painful to watch as the time when Budd had hit him between the eyes full-pitch with an overripe banana; or that moment, even more portentous, when Barbara Goring poured sugar over his head at a ball. Under the impact of those episodes, Widmerpool’s bearing had indicated, under its mortification, masochistic acceptance of the assault – ”that slavish look” Peter Templer had noted on the day of the banana. Under Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson’s tirade, Widmerpool’s demeanour proclaimed no such thing. Perhaps that was simply because Hogbourne-Johnson was not of sufficiently high rank, in comparison with Budd (then captain of the Eleven), not a person of any but local and temporary importance in the eyes of someone like Widmerpool, who thought big – in terms of the Army Council and beyond – while Barbara had invoked a passion in him which placed masochism in love’s special class. All the same, the difference is worth recording.

  “Right, sir,” he said.

  He saluted, turned smartly on his heel (rather in the manner of one of Bithel’s boyhood heroes), and tramped out of the cowshed. Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson showered a hail of minor rebukes on several others present, then went off to raise hell elsewhere. In due course, not without delays, matters were sorted out. The dispatch-rider sent by Widmerpool returned with news that one of the field ambulances, skidding in mud churned up by the passing and repassing of tanks, had wedged its back wheels in a deep ditch. Meanwhile, the Light Aid Detachment, occupied some miles away with an infantry battalion’s damaged carrier tracks, was not allowed – as too heavy in weight – to cross the iron bridge mentioned by Widmerpool. The L.A.D. had therefore been forced to make a detour. The blocked road necessitated several other traffic diversions, which resulted in the temporary hold-up. That had already been cleared up by the time the D.R. reached the crossroads. No one was specially to blame, certainly not Widmerpool, such accidents as that of the ambulance representing normal wear-and-tear to be expected from movement of most of the available Command transport across country where roads were few and bad.

  At the same time, to be unjustly hauled over the coals about such a matter is in the nature of things, certainly military things. Incidents like this must take place all the time in the army. In due course, I was to witness generals holding impressive appointments receiving a telling-off in the briskest manner imaginable, from generals of even greater eminence, all concerned astronomically removed from the humble world of Hogbourne-Johnson and Widmerpool. All the same, it was true Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson had been violent in his denunciation, conveying strictures on what he believed to be inefficiency with a kind of personal contempt that was unfitting, something over and above an official reprimand for supposed administrative mishandling. In addition, Hogbourne-Johnson, as a rule, seemed thoroughly satisfied with Widmerpool, as Widmerpool himself had often pointed out.

  Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, Widmerpool was very sore about it. He took it as badly as my former Company Commander, Rowland Gwatkin, used to take his tickings-off from the adjutant, Maelgwyn-Jones. In fact this comparatively trivial exchange between them transformed Widmerpool from an adherent of Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson – even if, in private, a condescending one – to becoming the Colonel’s most implacable enemy. As it turned out, opportunity to make himself awkward arose the day we returned from the exercise. In fact, revenge was handed to Widmerpool, as it were, on a plate. This came about in connection with Mr. Diplock, Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson’s chief clerk.

  “Diplock may be an old rascal,” Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson himself had once commented, “but he knows his job backwards.”

  Repeating the remark later, Widmerpool had indulged in one of his rare excursions into sarcasm.

  “We all know Diplock’s a rascal,” he had remarked, “and also knows his job backwards. The question is – does he know it forwards? In my own view, Diplock is one of the major impediments to the dynamic improvement of this formation.”

  Mr. Diplock (so styled from holding the rank of Warrant Officer, Class One) was a Regular Army Reservist, recalled to the colours at the outbreak of war. As indicating status bordering on the brink of a commissioned officer’s (more highly paid than a subaltern), he was entitled to service dress of officer-type cloth (though high-collared) and shoes instead of boots. His woolly grey hair, short thick body, air of perpetual busyness, suggested an industrious gnome conscripted into the service of the army; a gnome who also liked to practise considerable malice against the race of men with whom he mingled, by making as complicated as possible every transaction they had to execute through himself. Diplock was totally encased in military obscurantism. Barker-Shaw, the F.S.O. – as Bithel mentioned, a don in civil life – had cried out, in a moment of exasperation, that Diplock, with education behind him, could have taken on the whole of the Civil Service, collectively and individually, in manipulation of red tape; and emerged victorious. He would have outdone them all, Barker-Shaw said, in pedantic observance of regulation for its own sake to the detriment of practical requirement. Diplock’s answer to such criticism was always the same: that no other way of handling the matter existed. Filling in forms, rendering “states,” the whole process of documentation, seemed to take the place of religion in his inner life. The skill he possessed in wielding army lore reached a pitch at which he could sabotage, or at least indefinitely protract, almost any matter that might have earned the disapproval of himself or any superior of whom he happened to be the partisan – in practice, Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson – while at the same time, if something administratively unusual had to be arranged, Diplock always said he knew how to arrange it. This self-confidence, on the whole justified, was perhaps the main reason why Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson was so well affected towards his chief clerk. The other was no doubt the parade of deference – of a deeper, better understood sort than Cocksidge’s – that Diplock, in return, offered to Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson. Diplock’s methods had always irritated Widmerpool, although himself no enemy to formal routine as a rule.

  “I told Hogbourne-Johnson in so many words this morning that we should never get
anything done here so long as we had a chief clerk who was such an old woman. Do you know what he said?”

  Although Widmerpool prided himself on his own grasp of army life, he had not been able wholly to jettison the more civilian approach, that you are paid to give advice to your superiors in whatever happens to be a specialised aspect of your particular job; that such advice should be presented in the plainest, most forceful terms. He never quite became accustomed to a tradition that aims at total self-effacement in the subordinate, more especially when his professional recommendations are controversial.

  “What was the answer?”

  “‘Diplock wasn’t an old woman when he won the Military Medal’.”

  “How does he know? – some old women are very tough.”

  “I replied in the most respectful manner that Diplock won the M.M. a long time ago,” said Widmerpool, ignoring this facetiousness. “That I was only referring to his present fumbling about with A.C.I.s, Ten-Ninety-Eights, every other bit of bumph he can lay his hands on, especially when something is needed in a hurry. I suppose Hogbourne-Johnson thought he was snubbing me. He gave that curious snarling laugh of his.”

  This slight brush had taken place before Widmerpool’s more disastrous encounter with the Colonel. It illustrated not only Widmerpool’s retention, in certain respects, of civilian values, but also his occasional lack of grasp of some quite obvious matter. Even in civilian life, a frontal attack would have been ill-judged in approaching a relationship in a business firm such as Hogbourne-Johnson’s with Diplock. It was not going to alter the stranglehold Diplock enjoyed on Hogbourne-Johnson. At the same time, the fact that Widmerpool felt it possible to offer that remark about Diplock at all, absolved him from any suggestion of later deliberately assailing the Colonel through insidious attack by way of his own chief clerk. Widmerpool had already decided Diplock was unsatisfactory. When the time came, of course, he was not blind to pleasure derived from that method, but he did not contrive it of sheer malice. Once the ball was rolling, as D.A.A.G., he had no alternative but to follow up suspicions aroused.

  That even the lightest of such suspicions should have come into being on the subject of Mr. Diplock behaving in an irregular manner might seem out of the question; far less, that there should be indications he was embezzling government funds. However, that was how things began to look. Possibly so much rectitude in observing the letter of the law in matters of daily routine required, psychologically speaking, release in another direction. General Conyers had been fond of expatiating on something of the sort. Anyway, the affair opened by Widmerpool saying one day, soon after the three-day exercise, that he was not satisfied with the financial administration of the H.Q. Sergeants’ Mess.

  “Something funny is going on there,” he said. “Diplock is at the bottom of it, I’m sure. I’ve told those Mess treasurers time and again to take the bottle from the cellar account and charge it to the bar account. They never seem to understand. In Diplock’s case, it looks to me as if he won’t understand.”

  These doubts were not set at rest as the weeks passed. Not long after Widmerpool made this comment, several small sums of money disappeared from places where they had been deposited.

  “I’ve recommended that cash-boxes be screwed to the floor,” said Widmerpool. “At least you know then where they’ve been left. Diplock put all sorts of difficulties in the way, but I insisted.”

  “Have you mentioned these losses higher up?”

  “I had a word with Pedlar, who didn’t at all agree with what I am beginning to wonder – I try to have as few direct dealings as possible now with Hogbourne-Johnson. I am well aware I should not receive a sympathetic hearing there. It will be a smack in the eye for him if my suspicions turn out to be correct.”

  Then it appeared, in addition to the Sergeants’ Mess, something unsatisfactory was afoot in connection with the Commuted Ration Allowance.

  “Mark my words,” said Widmerpool. “This is all going to link up. What I require is evidence. As a start, you will go out to the Supply Column tomorrow and make a few enquiries. I must have facts and figures. As you are to be travelling in that direction, it will be a good opportunity to explain those instructions I have here just issued to RA.S.C. sub-units. You can go on to the Ammunition Company and the Petrol Company, after you’ve gathered the other information. Take haversack rations, as they’re some distance apart, and the other thing will need some little time to extract. There may be lack of co-operation. C.R.A.S.C. has been difficult ever since the business of those trucks, which I was, in fact, putting to a perfectly legitimate use.”

  At one time or another, Widmerpool had quarrelled with most of the officers at Divisional Headquarters. The row with C.R.A.S.C. – Commanding Royal Army Service Corps at H.Q., a lieutenant-colonel – had been about employment of government transport on some occasion when interpretation of regulations was in doubt. It had been a drawn battle, like that with Sunny Farebrother. Widmerpool’s taste for conflict seemed to put him less at a disadvantage than might be supposed. His undoubted reputation for efficiency had indeed been to some extent built up on being regarded as a difficult man to deal with; rather than on much more deserved respect for the plodding away at unspectacular work to which he used to devote himself every night in his own office. Personal popularity is an asset easy to exaggerate in the transaction of practical affairs. Possibly it can even be a handicap. The fact that Widmerpool was brusque with everyone he met, even actively disobliging to most, never seemed in the last resort to weaken his position. However the Diplock affair was rather a different matter.

  Enquiries at the quarters of the Supply Column indicated that, as Widmerpool supposed, all was not well. His feud with C.R.A.S.C. had certainly penetrated there, if unwillingness to spare time to impart information was anything to judge by. I left the place with a clearer understanding of my father’s strictures, in the distant past, regarding Uncle Giles’s transference to the Army Service Corps. However, certain essential details were now to some extent available. There could be no doubt that, at best, existing arrangements, so far as the Sergeants’ Mess was concerned, were in disorder; at worst, something more serious was taking place in which Diplock might be involved. I brought back the material required by Widmerpool that evening.

  “Just as I thought,” he said, “I’ll go and have a word with A. & Q. right away.”

  Widmerpool stayed a long time with Colonel Pedlar. He had told me to wait until his return, in case further information collected during the day might be needed. When he came back to the room his expression immediately showed that he regarded the interview to have been unsatisfactory.

  “Things will have to be looked into further,” he said. “Pedlar’s still unwilling to believe anything criminal is taking place. I don’t agree with him. Just run through what they told you again.”

  It was nearly dinner time when I arrived back that night at F Mess. I went to the bedroom to change into service dress. When I came down the stairs, the rest of them were going into the room where we ate*

  “Buck up, Jenkins,” said Biggs, “or you’ll miss all the lovely bits of gristle Sopey’s been collecting from the swill tubs all the afternoon for us to gnaw. Wonder he has the cheek to put the stuff he does in front of a man.”

  He was in one of his noisy moods that night. When Biggs felt cheerful – which was not often – he liked to shout and indulge in horseplay. This usually took the form of ragging Soper, the Divisional Catering Officer. Soper, also a captain with ’14-’18 ribbons, was short and bandy-legged, which, with heavy eyebrows and deep-set shifty eyes, gave him a simian appearance that for some reason suggested a professional comedian. In civil life one of the managers, on the supply side, of a chain of provincial restaurants, he was immersed in his work as D.C.O., never in fact making a remark that in the least fitted in with his promisingly slapstick appearance, or even one to be classed as a joke. Off-duty he talked of scarcely any subject but army allowances. Biggs and Soper to some extent r
eproduced, at their lower level, the relationship of Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson and Colonel Pedlar in the General’s Mess; that is to say they grated on each other’s nerves, but, as twin veterans of the earlier war, maintained some sort of uneasy alliance. This bond was strengthened by a fellow feeling engendered by the relatively unexalted nature of their own appointments, both being much on their dignity where the “G” staff – ”operational” in duties – was concerned. There was, however, this important deviation in their reflection of the two colonels’ relationship, for, although Biggs, aggressive and strident, so to speak bullied Soper (like Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson oppressing Colonel Pedlar), it was Soper who, vis-à-vis Biggs, enjoyed the role of man of the world, pundit of a wider sophistication. For example, Soper’s knowingness about food – albeit army food – impressed Biggs, however unwillingly.

  “How are the diet sheets, Sopey?” said Biggs, belching as he sat down. “When are you going to give us a decent bit of beefsteak for a change? Can you tell me that?”

  Soper showed little or no interest in this enquiry, certainly predominantly rhetorical in character. He had picked up a fork, from which he was removing with his thumbnail a speck of dried vegetable matter that adhered to the handle.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” was all he replied, adding to the table in general, “Suppose if I complain about the washing up, we’ll just be told there’s not enough water.”

  The raid that had taken place while we were on the Command exercise had damaged one of the local mains, so that F Mess was suffering from a water shortage; produced as excuse for every inadequacy in the kitchen.

  “What do you say, Doc?” said Biggs, turning in the other direction. “Couldn’t you do with a nice cut of rump steak with a drop of blood on it? I know I could. Makes my mouth water, the thought. I’d just about gobble it up.”

  Macfie, D.A.D.M.S., a regular Royal Army Medical Corps major, who had seen some pre-war service in India, gaunt, glum, ungenial, rarely spoke at meals or indeed at any other time. Now, glancing at Biggs with something like aversion, he made no answer beyond jerking his head slightly a couple of times before returning to the typewritten report he was thumbing over. No one among the two or three others at the table seemed any more disposed to comment.