The Military Philosophers

by Anthony Powell

  ‘But will want to be brought up to date from our end – and we’ll need their background stuff to tell the London Poles.’

  ‘Do you mind if we go, Pennistone?’ said Borrit. ‘Otherwise I’ll be late for my appointment with Van der Voort.’

  Pennistone, never to be hurried, stood in deep thought. He was as likely to be reflecting on Cartesianism as on the best way to approach Q (Ops.). Borrit made another move towards the door.

  ‘What was it? I know – trouble again about Szymanski. You wouldn’t think it possible one man could be such a nuisance. There’s now doubt whether it’s his real name, because a lot of people are called that. MI5 want a word about him. Try and clear it up. Another good deed would be to extract an answer from Blackhead about the supply of straw for stuffing medical establishment palliasses. They’re frantic about it in Scotland.’

  ‘Blackhead’s not raised objection to that?’

  ‘He says straw comes under a special restrictive order. He should be alerted about the evacuation too, so that he can think of difficulties.’

  Borrit opened the door, allowing a sharp current of air to drive in from the passages. This was done as a challenge. He leant on the handle, looking rather aggrieved. There were some shouts from the others requiring that the door be shut at once. Borrit pointed to Pennistone and myself. He would not venture to leave without Pennistone, but, to humour him, we both made a move towards the corridor.

  ‘Come as far as the staff entrance,’ said Pennistone. ‘In case I think of other urgent problems.’

  We followed Borrit down the back staircase. On the first floor, Intelligence, in its profuse forms, mingled with Staff Duties, a grumpy crowd, most of them, especially the Regulars (‘If they were any good, they wouldn’t be here,’ Pennistone said) and a few Operational sections, on the whole less immediately active ones, the more vital tending to have rooms on the floor above, close to the generals and higher-grade brigadiers. A few civilian hauts fonctionnaires, as Pennistone called them, were also located here, provided with a strip of carpet as they rose in rank; at the highest level – so it was rumoured – even a cupboard containing a chamber pot. The Army Council Room was on this floor, where three or four colonels, Finn among them, had also managed to find accommodation. The great double staircase leading from the marble hall of the main entrance (over which the porter, Vavassor, presided in a blue frock coat with scarlet facings and top hat with gold band) led directly to these, as it were, state apartments. On the ground floor, technical branches and those concerned with supply rubbed shoulders with all sorts and conditions, internal security contacts of a more or less secret sort, Public Relations, typing pools, dispatch-riders, Home Guard.

  ‘Kielkiewicz has heard of Kafka,’ said Pennistone, as we reached the foot of the stairs.

  ‘You put them all through their literary paces as a matter of routine?’

  ‘He laughed yesterday when I used the term Kafka-esque.’

  ‘Wasn’t that rather esoteric?’

  ‘It just slipped out.’

  Pennistone laughed at the thought. Though absolutely dedicated to his duties with the Poles, he also liked getting as much amusement out of the job as possible.

  ‘In the course of discussing English sporting prints with Bobrowski,’ he said, ‘a subject he’s rather keen on. It turned out the Empire style in Poland is known as “Duchy of Warsaw”. That’s nice, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t look forward to this tussle with Blackhead about palliasse straw – by the way, what happened in the war about the Air Cooperation Squadron and which command it came under?’

  ‘One of my notable achievements up there was to settle that. But go and see Q (Ops.). That’s the big stuff now. Then have a talk with Finn. Where’s the driver?’

  Borrit gave a shout. An AT came quickly from behind the screen that stood on one side of the untidy cramped little hall, crowded with people showing identity cards as they passed into the building. She glanced at us without interest, then went through the door into the street.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Borrit. ‘I hadn’t seen her before.’

  Very young, she was one of those girls with a dead white complexion and black hair, the only colouring capable of rising above the boundlessly unbecoming hue of khaki. Instead of the usual ATS tunic imposed by some higher authority anxious that the Corps should look, if not as masculine as possible, at least as Sapphic, she had managed to provide herself, as some did, with soldier’s battledress, paradoxically more adapted to the female figure. It had to be admitted that occasional intrusion at ‘official level’ of an attractive woman was something rather different from, more exciting than, the intermittent pretty secretary or waitress of peacetime, perhaps more subtly captivating from a sense that you and she belonged to the same complicated organism, in this case the Army. At the same time, Borrit’s comment was one of routine rather than particular interest, because, according to himself, he lived a rather melancholy emotional life. His wife, a Canadian, had died about ten years before, and, while Borrit marketed fruit in Europe, their children preferred to live with grandparents in Canada. His own relations with the opposite sex took an exclusively commercial form.

  ‘I’ve never had a free poke in my life,’ he said. ‘Subject doesn’t seem to arise when you’re talking to a respectable woman.’

  He had confided this remark to the room in general. In spite of existing in this amatory twilight, he presented a reasonably cheerful exterior to the world, largely sustained by such phrases as ‘What news on the Rialto?’ or ‘Bring on the dancing girls’. He and Pennistone followed the driver to where the Section’s car was parked outside. I turned away from the staff entrance and made for Q (Ops.).

  The new flight of stairs led down into the bowels of the earth, the caves and potholes of the basement and sub-basement, an underground kingdom comparable with that inhabited by Widmerpool. It might have been thought that Mime and his fellow Nibelungen haunted these murky subterranean regions, but they were in fact peopled by more important, less easily replaceable beings, many of whom practised mysteries too momentous to be exposed (in a target registering already more than a dozen outers, though as yet no bull’s eye) to the comparative uncertainties of life at street level or above. Here, for example, the unsleeping sages of Movement Control spun out their lives, sightless magicians deprived eternally of the light of the sun, while, by their powerful arts, they projected armies or individual over land and sea or through the illimitable wastes of the air. The atmosphere below seemed to demand such highly coloured metaphor, thoughts of magic and necromancy bringing Dr Trelawney to mind, and the rumours in the earlier war that he had been executed in the Tower as a spy. I wondered if the Good Doctor, as Moreland used to call him, were still alive. Indiscreet observance of the rites of his cult, especially where these involved exotic drugs, could bring trouble in this war, though retribution was likely to stop short of the firing squad. Moreland himself, with Mrs Maclintick, had left London months before on some governmentally sponsored musical tour of the provinces.

  Like a phantasm in one of Dr Trelawney’s own narcotically produced reveries, I flitted down passage after passage, from layer to layer of imperfect air-conditioning, finding the right door at last in an obscure corner. Q (Ops.) Colonel was speaking on the scrambler when I entered the room, so I made as if to withdraw. He vigorously beckoned me to stay, continuing to talk for a few seconds about some overseas force. Abyssinia might have been a good guess. He hung up. I explained where I came from and put myself at his disposal.

  ‘Ah, yes …’

  He began to sort out papers, putting some away in a drawer. He gave an immediate impression, not only of knowing what he was about himself, but also of possessing the right sort of determination to use any information available from other sources. Inefficiency was rare in the building, but there was inevitably the occasional boor or temperamental obscurantist.

  ‘Polish evacuation – here we are – these troops held by our Russian
Allies since their invasion of our Polish Allies in 1939. They’ve retained their own units and formations?’

  ‘We understand some in Central Asia have, or at least certain units have already been brigaded after release from prison camps. General Anders is organizing this.’

  ‘The lot are in Central Asia?’

  ‘At least eight or nine thousand Polish officers remain untraced.’

  ‘Rather a large deficiency.’

  ‘That’s a minimum, sir. It’s been put as high as fifteen thousand.’

  ‘Any idea where they are?’

  ‘Franz Josef Land’s been suggested, air.’

  ‘Within the Arctic Circle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked straight in front of him.

  ‘Unlikely they’ll be included in this evacuation, whatever its extent?’

  ‘Seems most unlikely, sir.’

  ‘Just the figures I have here?*

  He pushed them over.

  ‘So far as we know at present. On the other hand, anything might happen.’

  ‘Let’s have a look at the map again … Yangi-yul … Alma Ata … There’s been constant pressure for the release of these troops?’

  ‘All the time – also to discover the whereabouts of the missing officers.’

  He wrote some notes.

  ‘Lease-Lend …’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘You see the consignment papers?’

  ‘From time to time some minor item is earmarked for the Polish forces in Russia and the papers pass through our hands.’

  Once, when one of these interminable lists of weapons and vehicles, matérial of war for the Eastern Front, had come to us, Pennistone had compared the diplomatic representations of the moment, directed to obtaining the release of the immobilized Polish army, with a very small powder in a very large spoon of Lease-Lend jam. Now, the Germans penetrating into the country on an extended front, these solicitations seemed at last to have attracted official Soviet attention. This must have been four or five months before the siege of Stalingrad. Q (Ops.) Colonel ran through facts and figures, asked a few additional questions, then shook the papers together and clipped them back into their file.

  ‘Right?’

  ‘Right, sir.’

  He took up the green telephone again.

  ‘If the London Poles have anything to add to what I have here already, let me know.’

  ‘We will, sir.’

  He ‘went over’ on the scrambler with whomever he was talking to, and, as I withdrew, could have been dealing with Icelandic matters. Like Orpheus or Herakles returning from the silent shades of Tartarus, I set off upstairs again, the objective now Finn’s room on the second floor.

  Outside the Army Council Room, side by side on the passage wall, hung, so far as I knew, the only pictures in the building, a huge pair of subfusc massively framed oil-paintings, subject and technique of which I could rarely pass without re-examination. The murkily stiff treatment of these two unwontedly elongated canvases, although not in fact executed by Horace Isbister RA, recalled his brush- work and treatment, a style that already germinated a kind of low-grade nostalgia on account of its naïve approach and total disregard for any ‘modern’ development in the painter’s art. The merging harmonies – dark brown, dark red, dark blue – depicted incidents in the wartime life of King George V: Where Belgium greeted Britain, showing the bearded monarch welcoming Albert, King of the Belgians, on arrival in this country as an exile from his own: Merville, December 1st, 1914, in which King George was portrayed chatting with President Poincare, this time both with beards, the President wearing a hat somewhat resembling the head-dress of an avocat in the French lawcourts. Perhaps it was fur, on account of the cold. This time too busy to make a fresh assessment, aesthetic or sartorial, I passed the picture by. Finn’s door was locked. He might still be with the General, more probably was himself making a round of branches concerned with the evacuation. There was nothing for it but Blackhead, and restrictions on straw for hospital palliasses.

  The stairs above the second floor led up into a rookery of lesser activities, some fairly obscure of definition. On these higher storeys dwelt the Civil branches and their subsidiaries, Finance, Internal Administration, Passive Air Defence, all diminishing in official prestige as the altitude steepened. Finally the explorer converged on attics under the eaves, where crusty hermits lunched frugally from paper bags, amongst crumb-powdered files and documents ineradicably tattooed with the circular brand of the teacup. At these heights, vestiges of hastily snatched meals endured throughout all seasons, eternal as the unmelted upland snows. Here, under the leads, like some unjustly confined prisoner of the Council of Ten, lived Blackhead. It was a part of the building rarely penetrated, for even Blackhead himself preferred on the whole to make forays on others, rather than that his own fastness should be invaded.

  ‘You’ll never get that past Blackhead,’ Pennistone had said, during my first week with the Section.

  ‘Who’s Blackhead?’

  ‘Until you have dealings with Blackhead, the word “bureaucrat” will have conveyed no meaning to you. He is the super-tchenovnik of the classical Russian novel. Even this building can boast no one else quite like him. As a special treat you can negotiate with Blackhead this afternoon on the subject of the issue of screwdrivers and other tools to Polish civilian personnel temporarily employed at military technical establishments.’

  This suggested caricature, Pennistone’s taste for presenting individuals in dramatic form. On the contrary, the picture was, if anything, toned down from reality. At my former Divisional Headquarters, the chief clerk, Warrant Officer Class 1 Mr Diplock, had seemed a fair performer in the field specified. To transact business even for a few minutes with Blackhead was immediately to grasp how pitifully deficient Diplock had, in fact, often proved himself in evolving a really impregnable system of obstruction and preclusion; awareness of such falling short of perfection perhaps telling on his nerves and finally causing him to embezzle and desert.

  ‘Blackhead is a man apart,’ said Pennistone. ‘Even his colleagues are aware of that. His minutes have the abstract quality of pure extension.’

  It was true. Closely ‘in touch’ with the Finance branch, he was, for some reason, not precisely categorized as one of them. Indeed, all precision was lacking where the branch to which Blackhead belonged was in question, even the house telephone directory, usually unequivocal, becoming all at once vague, even shifty. The phrase ‘inspection and collation of governmental civil and economic administration in relation to Allied military liaison’ had once been used by a member of one of the Finance branches themselves, then hastily withdrawn as if too explicit, something dangerous for security reasons to express so openly. Such prevarication hinted at the possibility that even his fellows by now could not exactly determine – anyway define to a layman – exactly what Blackhead really did. His rank, too, usually so manifest in every civil servant, seemed in Blackhead’s case to have become blurred by time and attrition. To whom was he responsible? Whom – if anyone – did he transcend? Obviously in the last resort he was subservient to the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for War, and Blackhead himself would speak of Assistant Under Secretaries – even of Principals – as if their ranks represented unthinkable heights of official attainment. On the other hand, none of these people seemed to have the will, even the power, to control him. It was as if Blackhead, relatively humble though his grading might be, had become an anonymous immanence of all their kind, a fetish, the Voodoo deity of the whole Civil Service to be venerated and placated, even if better – safer – hidden away out of sight: the mystic holy essence incarnate of arguing, encumbering, delaying, hairsplitting, all for the best of reasons.

  Blackhead might be a lone wolf, a one-man band, but he was a force that had to be reckoned with, from whom there was no court of appeal, until once in a way Operations would cut the Gordian knot, brutally disregarding Blackhead himself, overriding his objections,
as it were snapping asunder the skinny arm he had slipped through the bolt- sockets of whatever administrative door he was attempting to hold against all comers. Operations would, as I say, sometimes thrust Blackhead aside, and continue to wage war unimpeded by him against the Axis. However, such a confrontation took place only when delay had become desperate. There was no doubt he would make himself felt by delaying tactics when the evacuation got under way, until something of that drastic sort took place.

  ‘Of course I’m not an officer,’ he had once remarked bitterly to Pennistone when a humiliation of just that kind had been visited on him, ‘I’m only Mr Blackhead.’

  Some years after the war was over – by chance attending a gathering of semi-official character, possibly a soirée organized for a fund or charity – I enquired Blackhead’s story from a former colleague of his who happened to be present. This personage (even in war days of distinguished rank, one of the hauts fonctionnaires on the second floor) would at first do no more than laugh, loudly though a shade uncomfortably. He seemed anxious to evade the question. In fact, all at length recoverable from his answers, such as they were, became reduced to the hypothesis that Blackhead had been deliberately relegated to an appointment peculiar to himself – that in which our Section had dealings with him – chiefly in order to keep him out of the way of more important people. As unique occupant of his individual branch, even if he did not promote the war effort, he did not greatly impede it – so, at least, my informant insisted – while duties almost anywhere else might prove less innocuous. This highly successful person nodded several times when he admitted that. Self-esteem made the reply a little unacceptable to me. Did we matter so little? I argued the point. Why could not Blackhead be eradicated entirely? No such machinery existed. That was definite. Blackhead’s former colleague showed himself as nearly apologetic about the fact as anyone of his calling had it in him. He fiddled with the decoration round his neck.

  ‘The process was known afterwards as doing a Blackhead,’ he allowed. ‘Alternatively, having a Blackhead done on you. The public may think we’re a staid crowd, but we have our professional jokes like everyone else. I say, what are your views on liquid refreshment? Would it be acceptable? I wouldn’t say no myself. Don’t I see a buffet over there? Let’s make tracks.’