The Military Philosophers

by Anthony Powell

  ‘No fire?’ said the Prince.

  ‘Don’t let us have any coal when the weather’s short of freezing,’ said Vavassor. ‘That grate takes the best part of a hundredweight a day, it’s the truth. Wasn’t made for rationing.’

  He pointed to the huge fireplace. One supposed that at a certain level of rank – say, lieutenant-general – he called officers ‘sir’, though I had never heard him do so. In any case it was a formality he always considered inappropriate for foreigners, royal or otherwise.

  ‘When I wait to be summoned by Colonel Finn and warm myself beside the fire,’ said Theodoric, ‘I always feel like St Peter.’

  ‘I hope you won’t cut off any ears, sir, when delay has been intolerably long.’

  ‘How reassuring, Captain Jenkins, that your General Staff are brought up on the Scriptures. They are the foundation of knowledge. Now I must say goodbye. Tell Colonel Finn I will check the figures I gave him – persuade him, something I think he is rather nervous about, that I will not involve him in any matter of which he might disapprove.’

  Theodoric laughed. He had evidently summed up Finn correctly. I remembered Sillery (who had recently written a long letter to The Times in praise of Stalin’s declared war aims) speaking of the shrewdness Theodoric inherited from ‘that touch of Coburg blood’, adding with characteristic malice, ‘though I suppose one should not hint at that.’ I saw the Prince down the steps. He waved his hand, and set off at a sharp pace in the direction of Trafalgar Square. I returned under the high portal.

  ‘Prince, is he?’ asked Vavassor. ‘That’s what he calls himself when he arrives.’

  ‘That’s what he is.’

  ‘Allied or Neutral?’

  ‘So far as he himself is concerned, Allied.’

  ‘See ’em all down here if you wait long enough.’

  ‘I bet you do.’

  ‘I suppose some of ’em help to win the war.*

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  ‘Not too good in the Far East at the moment of speaking.’

  ‘Ever serve there?’

  ‘Eight years to a day.’

  ‘Things may pick up.’

  ‘I worry too much,’ said Vavassor. ‘Shakespeare’s dying words.’

  His attention, my own too, was at that moment unequivocally demanded by the hurricane-like imminence of a thickset general, obviously of high rank, wearing enormous horn-rimmed spectacles. He had just burst from a flagged staff-car almost before it had drawn up by the kerb.

  Now he tore up the steps of the building at the charge, exploding through the inner door into the hall. An extraordinary current of physical energy, almost of electricity, suddenly pervaded the place. I could feel it stabbing through me. This was the CIGS. His quite remarkable and palpable extension of personality, in its effect on others, I had noticed not long before, out in the open. Coming down Sackville Street, I had all at once been made aware of something that required attention on the far pavement and saw him pounding along. I saluted at admittedly longish range. The salute was returned. Turning my head to watch his progress, I then had proof of being not alone in acting as a kind of receiving-station for such rays – which had, morally speaking, been observable, on his appointment to the top post, down as low as platoon commander. On this Sackville Street occasion, an officer a hundred yards or more ahead, had his nose glued to the window of a bookshop. As the CIGS passed (whom he might well have missed in his concentration on the contents of the window), this officer suddenly swivelled a complete about-turn, saluting too. No doubt he had seen the reflection in the plate glass. All the same, in its own particular genre, the incident gave the outward appearance of exceptional magnetic impact. That some such impact existed, was confirmed by this closer conjunction in the great hall. Vavassor, momentarily overawed – there could be no doubt of it – came to attention and saluted with much more empressement than usual. Having no cap, I merely came to attention. The CIGS glanced for a split second, as if summarizing all the facts of one’s life.

  ‘Good morning.’

  It was a terrific volume of sound, an absolute bellow, at the same time quite effortless. A moment later, he was on the landing halfway up the stairs, where Theodoric had paused. Then he disappeared from sight. Vavassor grinned and nodded. He was without comment for once. I left him to his reflections about the Far East, hurrying myself now, again in the hope of catching Finn, quickly passing Kitchener’s cold and angry eyes, haunting and haunted, surveying with the deepest disapproval all who came that way. Finn was free. He made no reference to Farebrother.

  ‘You’ll have to be quick, Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Asbjornsen’s due at any moment, but he’s sometimes a second or two late. Now what about Q (Ops.)?’

  He had quite set aside his deafness. I ran over the points at speed. Finn made some notes, collating the information with whatever material had emerged from his session with our own General. He was now quite recovered from the phase, reported by Pennistone, of feeling the only hope of getting the thing properly done would be to fly to Persia and himself arrange it singlehanded.

  ‘The civilian elements are now definitely coming out, sir?’

  ‘Anders insisted – no doubt rightly – but the women and children will not make the operation any easier.’

  There had been controversy about these camp-followers who had managed to exist in the wake of the army, largely on its shared rations. At first it had seemed they might have to stay behind.

  ‘Some of the boys are old enough to be trained as cadets. The CIGS himself noted that point on the paper with approval.’

  Finn’s telephone bell rang.

  ‘Ask him to come up,’ he said. ‘It’s Asbjornsen. We’ll return to the evacuation later, Nicholas. I shall have to keep Asbjornsen from talking too much, as Colonel Chu is due in less than twenty minutes. Did I tell you Chu’s latest after his six months’ course at Sandhurst?’

  The Chinese military attaché, well known for the demanding nature of his requests, had just completed an attachment as cadet to the Royal Military College.

  ‘Chu enjoyed the RMC so much he wants to go to Eton.’

  ‘He could see Windsor Castle at the same time, though the state apartments are probably not open.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Finn. ‘He doesn’t just want to visit the place – he hopes to attend the school as a pupil.’

  ‘He’s a shade old, sir.’

  ‘I told him thirty-eight is regarded as too mature in this country to be still at school. It was no good. All he said was “I can make myself young.”

  Finn sighed.

  ‘I wish I could,’ he said.

  Sometimes the military attachés dispirited him. Chu’s unreasonableness seemed to have achieved that. General Asbjornsen arrived in the room. Tall, like General Lebedev, not much given to laughter, he always reminded me of Monsieur Ørn, the long craggy Norwegian, who had been at La Grenadière when, as a boy, I had stayed with the Leroys in Touraine. He shook hands with Finn and myself gravely. I withdrew to our room. Corporal Curtis had again increased the pile of stuff on the desk. I was still going through this when Pennistone returned from the Titian.

  ‘What on earth were you about, David, minuting Blackhead please amplify?’

  ‘Has it upset him?’

  ‘Beyond description.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘What were your reasons?’

  ‘Renan says complication is anterior to simplicity. I thought Blackhead would make an interesting experiment for trying out that theory.’

  ‘We can only pray Renan was right.’

  ‘Renan would find prayer charming, but ineffectual. Did you see Q (Ops.)?’

  Pennistone went through the points I had cleared with Finn.

  ‘Look, Nick,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be able to collect the Klnisaszewski Report tomorrow afternoon, as there’s another meeting about the evacuation. Will you get it? Nothing whatever required, except to receive it from the Polish officer on duty.’

&
nbsp; The Klnisaszewski Report was one of those items of Intelligence that fell, as such items sometimes do, in a no-man’s-land between normal official channels and those secret services so cautiously handled by Finn. Even Finn saw no harm in our trafficking in this particular exchange of information, which the Operational and ‘Country’ sections liked to see. For some internal reason, the Polish branch concerned preferred to hand over the report direct, rather than present it, in the normal manner, through the Second Bureau of their GHQ. Pennistone, as it happened, always collected the Klnisaszewski Report, though merely, in the division of our duties, because he had fallen into the habit of doing so.

  ‘Here’s the address,’ he said. ‘It’s the north side of the Park. We might discuss some of these evacuation points further at lunch.’

  The following day I arranged to collect the report in the afternoon. When I went down to the staff entrance and shouted for our driver, the white-faced girl commended by Borrit again appeared from behind the screen. She was as sulky as ever. The Section’s car was just large enough to hold four persons in great discomfort. If you were the only passenger, you could travel at the back or beside the driver, according to whim. I told her the street number and sat in front.

  ‘Can you find your way there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know London pretty well?’

  She hardly answered. After a few minutes beside her, it was clear this AT possessed in a high degree that power which all women – some men – command to a greater or lesser extent when in the mood, of projecting round them a sense of vast resentment. The girl driving, I noticed, was able to do this with quite superlative effect. Her rankling animosity against the world in general was discharged with adamantine force, comparable with Audrey Maclintick’s ill humours when her husband was alive, or Anne Stepney’s intimations of rebellion before she had shaken off the trammels of family life. However, those two, although not without their admirers, were hardly in the same class as this girl when it came to looks. Borrit had been right in marking her down. She was very striking. All the same, after another remark received with little or no response, I gave up further talk. Perhaps she had a grievance or the curse. These drivers usually only did duty for a week or two and at the moment inducement was lacking to coax her out of that mood. It occurred to me – one never feels older than in the middle thirties – that she was bored with all but young men or had taken an instantaneous dislike to me. Conversation lapsed. Then, while driving through Hyde Park, she suddenly spoke of her own accord, though even then in a way to suggest that speech was a painful effort to her, every word so far as possible to be conserved.

  ‘You’re Captain Jenkins, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I think you know my mother.’

  ‘What’s your mother’s name?’

  ‘Flavia Wisebite – but I’m Pamela Flitton. My father was her first husband.’

  This was Stringham’s niece. I remembered her holding the bride’s train at his wedding. She must have been five or six years old then. At one stage of the service there had been a disturbance at the back of the church and someone afterwards said she had been sick in the font. Whoever had remarked that found nothing surprising in unsatisfactory behaviour from her. Someone else had commented: ‘That child’s a fiend.’ I knew little of her father, Cosmo Flitton – not even whether he were still alive – except for the fact that he had lost an arm in the earlier war, drank heavily, and was said to be a professional gambler. Alleged to be not too scrupulous in business dealings, Flitton had been involved in Baby Wentworth’s divorce, later rejecting marriage with her. He had left Pamela’s mother when this girl was not much more than a baby. Establishing the sequence of inevitable sameness that pursues individual progression through life, Flavia had married another drunk, Harrison F. Wisebite, son of a Minneapolis hardware millionaire, whose jocularity he had inherited with only a minute fragment of a post-depression fortune. I wondered idly whether Flavia owed her name to The Prisoner of Zenda. Mrs Foxe would have been quite capable of that. Mrs Foxe was said to have given her daughter a baddish time. Pamela, an only child, must be at least twenty by now. She looked younger.

  ‘Where is your mother at the moment?’

  ‘She’s helping with Red Cross libraries. She gets sent all over the place.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve no news of your Uncle Charles?’

  ‘Charles Stringham?’

  ‘The last I saw of him, he’d been posted overseas. I don’t even know where.’

  She began driving the little car very fast and we nearly ran into an army truck coming across the Park from the opposite direction. She did not answer. I repeated the question.

  ‘You’ve heard nothing?’

  ‘He was at Singapore.’

  ‘Oh, God…’

  With that strange instinct that exists in the ranks for guessing a destination correctly, Stringham had supposed himself on the way to the Far East.

  ‘Nothing’s known, I suppose?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just reported missing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He used to be a great friend of mine.’

  ‘We were close when I was quite a child.’

  She said that in an odd way, as if almost intending to imply something not to be investigated too far. When I thought the remark over later, it seemed to me unlikely she had seen much of Stringham when she was a child, and he was being cured of drink in the iron grip of Miss Weedon. Later, I understood that the ambiguity might have been deliberate. Girls of Pamela’s sort take pleasure in making remarks like that, true or not.

  ‘Will you tell your mother – how dreadfully sorry …’

  Again she made no answer. Iciness of manner remained complete. She was perhaps not altogether normal, what Borrit called ‘a bit off the beam’. There was no denying she was a striking girl to look at. Many men would find this cosmic rage with life, as it seemed to be, an added attraction. Perhaps all these suppositions were wide of the mark, and she was just in poor form because she considered herself crossed in love or something obvious of that sort. All the same, the impression was of an uneasy personality, one to cause a lot of trouble. The news about Stringham made relations even more difficult. Her demeanour suggested only gross indifference on my own part had kept me in ignorance of what had happened, that she did not wish to speak more about a matter specially painful to herself.

  ‘How did you discover I was in the Section?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Your name cropped up somewhere the other night. I was saying what a bloody awful series of jobs I always get, and the next one was to drive for this outfit. Somebody said you were in it.’

  ‘You don’t like the ATS?’

  ‘Who wants to be a bloody AT?’

  By this time we had entered the confines of Bayswater. Some of the big houses here had been bombed and abandoned, others were still occupied. Several blocks that had formerly housed Victorian judges and merchants now accommodated refugees from Gibraltar, whose tawny skins and brightly coloured shirts and scarves made this once bleak and humdrum quarter of London, with its uncleaned or broken windows and peeling plaster, look like the back streets of a Mediterranean port. Even so, the area was not yet so squalid as it was in due course to become in the period immediately following the end of the war, when squares and crescents over which an aroma of oppressive respectability had gloomily hung, became infested at all hours of day and night by prostitutes of the lowest category.

  ‘What number did you say?’

  ‘It must be the one on the corner.’

  She drew up the car in front of a large grey house in the midst of a complex of streets that had on the whole escaped bomb damage. Several steps led up to a sub-palladian porch, the fanlight over the open door daubed with dark paint to comply with black-out regulations. The place had that slightly sinister air common to most of the innumerable buildings hurriedly converted to official use, whether or not they were enclaves of a mor
e or less secret nature.

  ‘Will you wait with the car? I shan’t be long.’

  After the usual vetting at the door, my arrival being expected, quick admission took place. A guide in civilian clothes led the way to a particular office where the report was to be obtained. We went up some stairs, through a large hall or ante-chamber where several men and women were sitting in front of typewriters, surrounded by walls covered with a faded design of blue and green flowers, enclosed above and below by broad parchment-like embossed surfaces. This was no doubt the double-drawing-room of some old-fashioned family, who had not redecorated their home for decades. I was shown into the office of a Polish lieutenant-colonel in uniform, from whom the report was to be received. We shook hands.

  ‘Good afternoon … Please sit down … prosze Pana, prosze Pana … I usually see Major Pennistone, yes.’

  He unlocked a drawer and handed over the report. We spoke about its contents for a minute or two, and shook hands again. Then he accompanied me back to where I could find my way out, and, after shaking hands for the third time, we parted. Halfway down the stairs, I grasped that I was in the Ufford, ancient haunt of Uncle Giles. The place of typewriters, so far from being the drawing-room of some banker or tea-broker (perhaps that once), was the combined ‘lounge’ and ‘writing-room’, in the former of which my Uncle used to entertain me with fishpaste sandwiches and seed cake. There, Mrs Erdleigh had ‘set out the cards’, foretold the rows about St John Clarke’s book on Isbister, my love affair with Jean Duport. The squat Moorish tables of those days had been replaced by trestles: the engraving of Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time, by a poster of characteristically Slavonic design announcing an exhibition of Polish Arts and Crafts. On the ledge of the mantelpiece, on which under a glass dome had stood the clock with hands eternally pointing to twenty minutes past five, were photographs of General Sikorski and Mr Churchill. It struck me the Ufford was in reality the Temple of Janus, the doors between the lounge and the writing-room closed in peace, open in war.