The Military Philosophers

by Anthony Powell

  There was an impression of copes and mitres, vestments of cream and gold, streaks of ruby-coloured velvet, the Lord Mayor bearing the City Sword point upward, khaki uniforms and blue, a train of royal personages – the phrase always recalled Mr Deacon speaking of Mrs Andriadis’s past – the King and Queen, the Princesses, King of the Hellenes, Regent of Iraq, King and Queen of Jugoslavia, Prince Theodoric. Colonel Budd, as it happened, was in attendance. The years seemed to have made no impression on him. White-moustached, spruce, very upright, he glanced about him with an air of total informality, as if prepared for any eventuality from assassination to imperfect acoustics. When the Royal Party reached their seats, all knelt. Prayers followed. We rose for a hymn.

  ‘Angels in the height, adore him;

  Ye behold him face to face;

  Saints triumphant, bow before him,

  Gather’d in from every race.’

  Under the great dome, saints or not, they were undoubtedly gathered in from every race. Colonel Flores and the Partisan Colonel were sharing a service paper. General Asbjornsen, legitimately proud of his powerful baritone, sang out with full lungs. Hymns always made me think of Stringham, addicted to quoting their imagery within the context of his own life.

  ‘Hymns describe people and places so well,’ he used to say. ‘Nothing else quite like them. What could be better, for example, on the subject of one’s friends and relations than:

  Some are sick and some are sad,

  And some have never loved one well,

  And some have lost the love they had.

  The explicitness of the categories is marvellous. Then that wonderful statement: “fading is the world’s best pleasure”. One sees very clearly which particular pleasure its writer considered the best.’

  Thoughts about Singapore: the conditions of a Japanese POW camp. Cheesman must have been there too, the middle-aged subaltern in charge of the Mobile Laundry Unit, that bespectacled accountant who had a waistcoat made to fit under his army tunic, and renounced the Pay Corps because he wanted to ‘command men’. Had he survived? In any case there were no limits to the sheer improbability of individual fate. Templer, for instance, even as a boy innately opposed to the romantic approach, dying in the service of what he himself would certainly regard as a Musical Comedy country, on account of a Musical Comedy love affair. On the subject of dead), it looked as if George Tolland was not going to pull through. An ecclesiastic began to read from Isaiah.

  ‘The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose … Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees … And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein …’

  The habitation of dragons. Looking back on the V.1’s flying through the night, one thought of dragons as, physically speaking, less remote than formerly. Probably they lived in caves and came down from time to time to the banks of a river or lake to drink. The ground ‘where each lay’ would, of course, be scorched by fiery breath, their tails too, no doubt, giving out fire that made the water hiss and steam, the sedge become charred. Not all the later promises of the prophecy were easily comprehensible. An intense, mysterious beauty pervaded the obscurity of the text, its assurances all the more magical for being enigmatic. Who, for example, were the wayfaring men? Were they themselves all fools, or only some of them? Perhaps, on the contrary, the wayfaring men were contrasted with the fools, as persons of entirely different sort. One thing was fairly clear, the fools, whoever they were, must keep off the highway; ‘absolutely verboten’, as Biggs, Staff Officer Physical Training, used to say. Brief thoughts of Biggs, hanging by the neck until he was dead in that poky little cricket pavilion; another war casualty, so far as it went. The problem of biblical exegesis remained. Perhaps it was merely a warning: wayfaring men should not make fools of themselves. Taking the war period, limiting the field to the army, one had met quite a few wayfaring men. Biggs himself was essentially not of that category: Bithel, perhaps: Odo Stevens, certainly. Borrit? It was fascinating that Borrit should have remembered Pamela Flitton’s face after three years or more.

  ‘I’ve been in Spain on business sometimes,’ Borrit said. ‘A honeymoon couple would arrive at the hotel. Be shown up to their bedroom. Last you’d see of them. They wouldn’t leave that room for a fortnight – not for three weeks. You’d just get an occasional sight of a brassed-off chambermaid once in a way lugging off a slop-pail. They’ve got their own ways, the Spaniards. “With a beard, St Joseph; without, the Virgin Mary.” That’s a Spanish proverb. Never quite know what it means, but it makes you see what the Spaniards are like somehow.’

  There were more prayers. A psalm. The Archbishop unenthrallingly preached. We rose to sing Jerusalem.

  ‘Bring me my Bow of burning gold;

  Bring me my Arrows of desire;

  Bring me my spear; O Clouds unfold!

  Bring me my chariot of fire!’

  Was all that about sex too? If so, why were we singing it at the Victory Service? Blake was as impenetrable as Isaiah; in his way, more so. It was not quite such wonderful stuff as the Prophet rendered into Elizabethan English, yet wonderful enough. At the same time, so I always felt, never quite for me. Blake was a genius, but not one for the classical taste. He was too cranky. No doubt that was being ungrateful for undoubted marvels offered and accepted. One often felt ungrateful in literary matters, as in so many others. It would be interesting to know what the military attachés made of the poem. General Asbjornsen certainly enjoyed singing the words. He was quite flushed in the face, like a suddenly converted Viking, joining in with the monks instead of massacring them.

  Reflections about poetry, its changes in form and fashion, persisted throughout further prayers. ‘Arrows of desire’, for example, made one think of Cowley. Cowley had been an outstanding success in his own time. He had been buried in Westminster Abbey. That was something which would never have happened to Blake. However, it was Blake who had come out on top in the end. Pope was characteristically direct on the subject

  ‘Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,

  His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;

  Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art,

  But still I love the language of his heart’

  But, admitting nobody read the Pindarique Odes, surely the pointed wit was just what did survive? In Cowley’s quite peculiar grasp of the contrasted tenderness and brutality of love, wit was just the quality he brought to bear with such remarkable effect:

  ‘Thou with strange adultery

  Doest in each breast a brothel keep;

  Awake, all men do lust for thee,

  And some enjoy thee when they sleep.’

  No poet deserved to be forgotten who could face facts like that, the blending of conscious and unconscious, Love’s free-for-all in dreams. You only had to compare the dream situation with that adumbrated by poor old Edgar Allan Poe – for whom, for some reason, I always had a weakness – when he trafficked in a similar vein:

  ‘Now all my days are trances

  And all my nightly dreams

  Are where thy grey eye glances,

  And where thy footstep gleams –

  In what ethereal dances

  By what eternal streams.’

  Ethereal dances would have been no good to Cowley, by eternal streams or anywhere else. He wanted substance. That verse used to run in my head when in love with Jean Duport – her grey eyes – though she laid no claims to being a dancer, and Poe’s open-air interpretive choreography sounded unimpressive. However, there were no limits when one was in that state. We rose once more for another hymn, ‘Now thank we all our God’, which was, I felt pretty sure, of German origin. Whoever
was responsible for choosing had either forgotten that, or judged it peculiarly apposite for this reason. We had just prayed for the ‘United Nations’ and ‘our enemies in defeat’. In the same mood, deliberate selection of a German hymn might be intended to indicate public forgiveness and reconciliation. Quite soon, of course, people would, in any case, begin to say the war was pointless, particularly those, and their associates, moral and actual, who had chalked on walls, ‘Strike now in the West’ or ‘Bomb Rome’. Political activities of that kind might by now have brought together Mrs Andriadis and Gypsy Jones. The Te Deum. Then the National Anthem, all three verses:

  ‘God save our gracious King!

  Long live our noble King!

  God save the King!

  Send him victorious,

  Happy and glorious

  Long to reign over us;

  God save the King!

  O Lord our God arise

  Scatter his enemies,

  And make them fall.

  Confound their politics,

  Frustrate their knavish tricks,

  On thee our hopes we fix;

  God save us all.

  Thy choicest gift in store

  On him be pleased to pour;

  Long may he reign!

  May he defend our laws,

  And ever give us cause

  To sing with heart and voice,

  God save the King I’

  Repetitive, jerky, subjective in feeling, not much ornamented by imagination nor subtlety of thought and phraseology, the words possessed at the same time a kind of depth, an unpretentious expression of sentiments suited somehow to the moment. It would be interesting to know whether, at the period they were written, ‘reign’ had been considered an adequate rhyme to ‘king’; or whether the poet had simply not bothered to achieve identity of sound in the termination of the last verse. Language, pronunciation, sentiment, were always changing. There must have been advantages, moral and otherwise, in living at an outwardly less squeamish period, when the verbiage of high-thinking had not yet cloaked such petitions as those put forward in the second verse, incidentally much the best; when, in certain respects at least, hypocrisy had established less of a stranglehold on the public mind. Such a mental picture of the past was no doubt largely unhistorical, indeed totally illusory, freedom from one sort of humbug merely implying, with human beings of any epoch, thraldom to another. The past, just as the present, had to be accepted for what it thought and what it was.

  The Royal Party withdrew. There was a long pause while photographs were taken outside on the steps. The Welsh Guards turned their attention to something in Moreland’s line, Walton’s ‘Grand March’. Orders had been issued that the congregation was to leave by the south portico, the door just behind us. It was now thrown open. Finn and I drove the military attachés like sheep before us in that direction. Once in the street, they would have to find their own cars. The last of them disappeared into the crowd. Finn drew a deep breath.

  ‘That appeared to go off all right*

  ‘I think so, sir.’

  ‘Might have been trouble when we couldn’t fit that fellow in.’

  ‘He was quite happy with my lot’

  ‘Nice chap.’

  ‘He seemed to be.’

  ‘Going back now?’

  ‘I was, sir. Shall I get the car?’

  Something was troubling Finn.

  ‘Look here, Nicholas, will you operate under your own steam – leave me the car?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  Finn paused again. He lowered his voice.

  ‘I’ll make a confession to you, Nicholas.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘A friend of mine has sent me a salmon from Scotland.’

  That was certainly a matter for envy in the current food situation, though hardly basis for the sense of guilt that seemed to be troubling Finn. There was no obvious reason why he should make such a to-do about the gift His voice became a whisper.

  ‘I’ve got to collect the fish.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘At Euston Station.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m going to take the Section’s car,’ said Finn. ‘Risk court-martial if I’m caught. Be stripped of my VC. It’s the only way to get the salmon.’

  ‘I won’t betray you, sir.’

  ‘Good boy.’

  Finn nodded his head several times, laughing to himself, looking even more than usual like a Punchinello.

  ‘After all, we’ve won the war,’ he said ‘We’ve just celebrated the fact.’

  He thought for a moment.

  ‘Another thing about Flores,’ he said. ‘Just while I think of it. The Foreign Office are very anxious to keep in with his country. They want us to give him a decoration. He’s going to get a CBE.’

  ‘But he’s only just arrived.’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s just to improve relations between the two countries.’

  ‘But we were frightfully stingy in what we handed out to the Allies in the way of decorations after six years. Hlava told me he didn’t know how he was going to face his people when he reported what we offered. Foreigners expect something after they’ve worked with you for ages.’

  ‘The argument is that we like to make our decorations rare.’

  ‘And then we hand one out to a chap who’s just got off the plane.’

  ‘It’s all a shambles,’ said Finn. ‘You get somebody like myself who does something and gets a VC. Then my son- in-law’s dropped in France and killed, and no one ever hears about him at all, or what he’s done. It’s just a toss-up.’

  ‘I didn’t know about your son-in-law.’

  ‘Long time ago now,’ said Finn. ‘Anyway, Flores is going to get a CBE. Don’t breathe a word about the car.’

  He turned away and stumped off towards the car park. It had evidently been a heavy decision for him to transgress in this manner; use a War Department vehicle for a private purpose, even over so short a distance. This was an unexpected piece of luck so far as I was concerned. Just what I wanted. There had seemed no avoiding going back with Finn to duty, when in fact some sort of a break was badly required. Now it would be possible to walk, achieve adjustment, after the loaded atmosphere of the Cathedral. One was more aware of this need outside in the open air than within, when the ceremony was just at an end. After all, one did not every day of the week attend a Thanksgiving Service in St Paul’s for Victory after six years of war. It was not unreasonable to experience a need to mull things over for half an hour or so. The ritual itself might not have been exactly moving, too impersonal for that, too well thought out, too forward-looking in the fashionable sense (except for the invocation to confound their politics and frustrate their knavish tricks), but I was aware of some sort of inner disturbance, though its form was hard to define. There were still large crowds round the Cathedral. I hung about for a while by the west door, waiting for them to disperse.

  ‘So you were lucky enough to be invited to the Service?’

  It was Widmerpool.

  ‘I’ve been superintending the military attachés.’

  ‘Ah, I wondered how you got here – though of course I knew they selected at all levels.’

  ‘Including yours.’

  ‘I did not have much trouble in arranging matters. What a splendid ceremony. I was carried away. I should like to be buried in St Paul’s – would prefer it really to the Abbey.’

  ‘Make that clear in your will.’

  Widmerpool laughed heartily.

  ‘Look, Nicholas,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we met. You were present at a rather silly incident when Pam and I had a tiff. At that embassy. I hope you did not attribute too much seriousness to the words that passed.’

  ‘It was no business of mine.’

  ‘Of course not – but people do not always understand her moods. I flatter myself I do. Pamela is undoubtedly difficile at times. I did not wish you to form a wrong impression.’

  ‘All’s made up?’<
br />
  ‘Perfectly. I am glad to have this opportunity of putting you right, if you ever supposed the contrary. The very reckless way she was talking about official matters was, of course, the sheerest nonsense. Perhaps you hardly took in how absurd she was being. One can forgive a lot to a little person who looks so decorative, however. Now I must hurry off.’

  ‘The Minister again?’

  ‘The Minister showed the utmost good humour about my lateness on that occasion. I knew he would, but I thought it was right for Pam to be apprised that official life must take precedence.’

  He went off, infinitely pleased with himself, bringing back forcibly the opinion once expressed by General Conyers: