The Military Philosophers

by Anthony Powell

‘I can see that fellow has a touch of exaggerated narcissism.’

  The scene with Pamela had been altogether dismissed from Widmerpool’s mind, as he had risen above failure with Mrs Haycock. Just then I had other things to ponder: Isaiah: Blake: Cowley: the wayfaring men: matters of that sort that seemed to claim attention.

  A lot of people were still about the streets, making progress slow, so at the foot of Ludgate Hill I turned into New Bridge Street in the direction of the river. There was no need to hurry. A stroll along the Embankment might be what was required. Then my mind was suddenly recalled to duty. Colonel Flores was walking in front of me. Seeing a foreign military attaché, even a Neutral one, was at once to experience the conditioned reflex, by now second-nature, that is to say instant awareness that he must be looked after to the best of my ability, although not one of my own particular charges. I caught him up and saluted.

  ‘I think you’re going the wrong way for the official car park, Colonel, it’s —’

  Flores seized my hand and smiled.

  ‘None of my arrangements have been official today,’ he said. ‘In fact none of them have been properly conducted at all. My car had another job to do after dropping me at the Cathedral, so I arranged to meet it, when all was over, in one of the turnings off the Embankment. I thought there would be no parking difficulties there, whatever happened elsewhere. Was not that a brilliant idea? You must admire my knowledge of London topography.’

  ‘I do, sir.’

  ‘Come with me. I’ll give you a lift to wherever you want to go.’

  It was no use explaining that I only wanted to walk by the river for a while, to be left alone briefly, to think of other things for a time, before returning to our room to complete whatever remained to be done. There was a fair amount of that too.

  ‘You know London well, Colonel?*

  ‘Not really. It was all done with a map, this great plan for the car. Am I not a credit to our Staff College?’

  ‘It’s your first visit?’

  ‘I was here – what – fifteen years ago, it must be. With all my family, an absolute tribe of us. We stayed at the Ritz, I remember. Now we will cross the road and advance west along the line of the Thames.’

  He led the way to a side turning.

  ‘The car should be somewhere near this spot. Ah, here they are. It had to go and pick up my wife and stepdaughter.’

  An oldish Rolls, displaying a CD number plate, was drawn up by the pavement in one of the streets running north and south. It was a little way ahead. As we approached, two ladies stepped out and walked towards us. They both looked incredibly elegant. In fact their elegance appalled one. Nobody in England had been able to get hold of any smart clothes for a long time now – except for the occasional ‘unsolicited gift’ like Matilda’s – and the sight of these two gave the impression that they had walked off the stage, or from some display of exotic fashions, into the street. Colonel Flores shouted something in Spanish. We came up with them.

  ‘This is Major —’

  ‘Jenkins.’

  ‘Major Jenkins was incredibly kind to me in St Paul’s.’

  Madame Flores took my hand. In spite of the sunlessness of the day, she was wearing spectacles with dark lenses. When I turned to the younger one, her charming figure immediately renewed those thoughts of Jean Duport the atmosphere of the Cathedral had somehow generated. This girl had the same leggy, coltish look, untaught, yet hinting at the same time of captivating sophistications and artifices. She was much tidier than Jean had been when I first set eyes on her, tennis racquet against her hip.

  ‘But why was it necessary to be so kind to Carlos?’ asked her mother.

  She spoke English as well as her husband, the accent even less perceptible.

  ‘Major Jenkins allowed me to sit in his own special seats.’

  ‘How very grand of him to have special seats.’

  ‘Otherwise there would have been nowhere but the steps of the altar.’

  ‘A most unsuitable place for you, Carlos.’

  ‘We are going to take Major Jenkins as far as Whitehall.’

  The tone of Colonel Flores with his wife was that of a man in complete control. She seemed to accept this. All the same, she began to laugh a lot.

  ‘Nick,’ she said. ‘You look so different in uniform.’

  ‘You know each other already?’ asked Flores.

  ‘Of course we do,’ said Jean.

  ‘But we haven’t met for a long time.’

  ‘This is perfectly splendid,’ said Colonel Flores. ‘Come along. Let’s jump into the car.’

  It was not only the dark lenses and changed hair-do. Jean had altered her whole style. Even the first impression, that she had contracted the faint suggestion of a foreign accent, was not wholly imaginary. The accent was there, though whether result of years in foreign parts, or adopted as a small affectation on return to her own country as a wife of a foreigner, was uncertain. Oddly enough, the fact of having noticed at once that Polly Duport looked so like her mother when younger, made the presence of Jean herself less, rather than more, to be expected. It was as if the mother was someone different; the daughter, the remembered Jean. About seventeen or eighteen, Polly Duport was certainly a very pretty girl; prettier, so far as that went, than her mother at the same age. Jean’s attraction in those days had been something other than mere prettiness. Polly had a certain look of her father, said to be very devoted to her. She seemed quite at ease, obviously brought up in a rather old-fashioned tradition, Spanish or exported English, that made her seem older than her age. Relations with her step-father appeared cordial. The whole story began to come back. Duport himself had spoken of the South American army officer his wife had married after her affair with Brent.

  ‘He looks like Rudolph Valentino on an off day,’ Duport had said.

  Colonel Flores did not fall short of that description; if anything, he rose above it. He seemed not at all surprised that his wife and I knew each other. I wondered what sort of a picture, if any, Jean had given him of her life before their marriage. Probably reminiscence played no part whatever in their relationship. It does with few people. For that matter, one did not know what the former life of Flores himself had been. We exchanged conversational banalities. Formal and smiling, Jean too was perfectly at ease. More so than myself. I suddenly remembered about Peter. She had always been fond of her brother, without anything at all obsessive about that affection. His death must have upset her.

  ‘Poor Peter, yes. I suppose you heard over here before we did. He didn’t write often. We were rather out of touch in a way. Babs was sent the official thing, being rather in with that sort of world, and as …’

  She meant that, in the circumstances, her elder sister had been informed of Templer’s death, rather than his wife.

  ‘Used you to see anything of him?’ she asked.

  ‘Once or twice at the beginning of the war. Not after he went into that secret show.’

  ‘I don’t even know where it was.’

  ‘Nor me – for certain.’

  One suddenly remembered that she was the wife of a Neutral military attaché, with whom secret matters must even now not be discussed.

  ‘It’s all too sad. Why did he do it?’

  This was not really a question. In any case, to speak of Pamela Flitton would be too complicated. Bob Duport was better unmentioned too. The car was not an ideal place for conversations of that sort, especially with her husband present.

  ‘You must come and see us,’ she said. ‘We’re really not properly moved in yet. I expect you know we’ve only just arrived. The appointment was quite a surprise – due to a change of Government.’

  She mentioned an address in Knightsbridge, as it happened not far from the flat at the back of Rutland Gate, where once, quite naked, she had opened the door when we were lovers. Like so many things that have actually taken place, the incident was now wholly unbelievable. How could this chic South American lady have shared with me embraces,
passionate and polymorphous as those depicted on the tapestry of Luxuria that we had discussed together when we had met at Stourwater? Had she really used those words, those very unexpected expressions, she was accustomed to cry out aloud at the moment of achievement? Once I had thought life unthinkable without her. How could that have been, when she was now only just short of a perfect stranger? An absurd incident suddenly came into my head to put things in proportion. Representatives of the Section had to attend an official party the Greeks were giving at the Ritz. In the hall, a page-boy had said to another: ‘General de Gaulle’s in that room over there’. The second boy had been withering. He had simply replied: ‘Give me news, not history.’ Jean, I remembered, had become history. Perhaps not so much history as legend, the story true only in a symbolical sense; because, although its outlines might have general application to ourselves, or even to other people, Jean and I were no longer the persons we then had been.

  ‘Where would you like the chauffeur to drop you?” asked Colonel Flores.

  ‘Just on this corner would be perfect.’

  There were a lot more assurances, endless ones, that we must meet again, in spite of difficulties about getting the flat straight in the midst of such shortage of labour, and the imminence of demobilization, which would be followed by absence from London. I got out. The car drove off. Jean turned and waved, making that particular gesture of the hand, the palm inwards, the movement rather hesitating, that I well remembered. Vavassor had not been at the Service. He was on duty in the hall when I came through the door. We had a word together.

  ‘Big crowd?’

  ‘Pretty big.’

  ‘Dull day for an affair like that.’

  ‘Very dull.’

  ‘How did the King look.’

  ‘I was too far away to sec.*

  ‘All your foreigners?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Later in the afternoon I took some letters up to Finn for signature. He was sitting in his chair looking straight ahead of him.

  ‘I got that fish.’

  ‘You did, sir?’

  ‘Home and dry.’

  ‘A great relief?’

  Finn nodded.

  ‘Did I tell you David Pennistone is going to join our Paris firm ?’ he said.

  Pennistone, though he would not reveal before he left what his post-war plans were, had said they would make me laugh when I heard them.

  ‘I think the work will appeal to him,’ said Finn. ‘He wants a change. Tired of all that…’

  He paused, searching for the right word.

  ‘Liaison?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Finn. ‘I don’t mean his work here. All that… philosophy.’

  He smiled at the absurdity of the concept.

  ‘Any idea what you’re going to do yourself when you get out of uniform, Nicholas?’

  I outlined a few possibilities. Even on my own ears, they sounded grotesque figments of a fevered imagination. Finn accepted them apparently; anyway for what they were worth. I excused myself by adding that the whole idea of starting up all that sort of thing again after six years seemed strange enough.

  ‘Remember Borrit?’ asked Finn.

  It already seemed a hundred years since Borrit had been with the Section, but I admitted his image faintly lingered on. Finn pushed back his chair. He spoke slowly.

  ‘Borrit told me when he was serving on the Gold Coast, one of the Africans said to him: “What is it white men write at their desks all day?” ’

  Finn nodded his head several times.

  ‘It’s a question I’ve often asked myself,’ he said. ‘Ah, well. Let’s see those files, Nicholas.’

  Just before my own release was due, I went to take formal leave of General Philidor, whose staff by this time lived in one of the streets off Grosvenor Square. I looked in on Kernével’s room on the way out, but he was not at home. Then, when I reached the pavement outside, someone shouted from a top storey window. It was Kernével himself.

  ‘Wait a moment – I’m coming down.’

  I returned to the hall. Kernével came clattering down the stairs. Travelling at high speed, he was red in the face.

  ‘Some wine’s arrived from France. Come and have a glass. We’re in one of the upper rooms.’

  We climbed the stairs. I told him this was probably the last time we should meet officially.

  ‘You know that French writer you spoke about? Something to do with a plage – in Normandie?’

  ‘Proust?’

  ‘That’s the one. I’ve been into it about him. He’s not taught in the schools.’

  Kernével looked severe. He implied that the standards of literature must be kept high. We reached a room on the top floor with which I was not familiar. Borda, Kernével’s assistant – who came from Roussillon and afterwards married an English girl – was there, with a French captain called Montsaldy, who seemed responsible for the wine. There were several bottles. It was a red Bordeaux, soft and fruity after the Algerian years. We talked about demobilization.

  ‘It is true your army gives you a suit of clothes when you retire?’ asked Borda.

  ‘More than just a suit – shirt, tie, vest, pants, socks, shoes, hat, mackintosh.’

  ‘Some of the uniform I wore in North Africa will do for civilian life, I think,’ said Borda. ‘In the hot weather.’

  ‘I carried tropical uniform in the other war,’ said Montsaldy, who looked a grizzled fifty. ‘It wears out quickly.’

  ‘Me, too,’ said Kernével. ‘Tropical uniform always makes me think of Leprince. He was a big fellow in our platoon. Ah, Leprince, c’était un lapin. What a fellow. We used to call him le prince des cons. That man was what you call well provided. I remember we were being inspected one day by a new officer. As I say, we were in tropical uniform. The major came to the end of the line where Leprince stood. He pointed to Leprince. “A quoi, cet homme?’”

  Kernével jumped to attention and saluted, as if he were the platoon sergeant.

  ‘ “C’est son sexe, mon commandant.”

  “C’est dégoûtant !” ’

  Kernével made as if to march on, now acting the outraged major.

  ‘He was an old fellow,’ he said, ‘white haired and very religious.’

  We all laughed.

  ‘Borda’s blushing,’ said Kernével. ‘He’s going to be married quite soon.’

  That was the last time Kernével and I met in uniform, but we used to see each other occasionally afterwards, because he continued to work in London. Indeed, we shared a rather absurd incident together a few years after the war was over. Kernével had been awarded an MBE for his work with us, but for some reason, the delay probably due to French rather than British red tape, this decoration did not ‘come through’ for a long time. Kernével, at last told by his own authorities he could accept the order, was informed by ours that it would be presented by the CIGS; not, of course, the same one who had held the post during the war. Kernével, also notified that he might bring a friend to witness the ceremony, invited me to attend. We were taken to the Army Council Room – Vasassor, too, seemed by now to have faded away – where it turned out the investiture consisted of only half-a-dozen recipients, of whom Kernével was the only Frenchman. When the citations were read out, it appeared the rest had performed prodigies of bravery. There were two Poles, an American, an Australian and a New Zealander, perhaps one or two more, all equally distinguished operationally, but whose awards had for one reason or another been deferred. The Field-Marshal now CIGS – again not the one whose Tactical HQ we had visited – was a very distinguished officer, but without much small talk. Huge, impressive, serieux to a degree, he was not, so it appeared, greatly at ease in making the appropriate individual remark when the actual medal was handed out. Before this was done, an officer from the Military Secretary’s branch read aloud each individual citation:

  ‘In the face of heavy enemy fire … total disregard for danger … although already twice wounded … managed to reach the objecti
ve … got through with the message … brought up the relief in spite of … silenced the machine-gun nest…’

  Kernével came last.

  ‘Captain Kernével,’ announced the MS officer.

  He paused for a second, then slightly changed his tone of voice.

  ‘Citation withheld for security reasons.’

  For a moment I was taken by surprise, almost immediately grasping that a technicality of procedure was involved. Liaison duties came under ‘Intelligence’, which included all sorts of secret activities; accordingly, ‘I’ awards were automatically conferred without citation. It was one of those characteristic regulations to which the routine of official life accustoms one. However, the CIGS heard the words with quite other reactions to these. Hitherto, as I have said, although perfectly correct and dignified in his demeanour, his cordiality had been essentially formal, erring if anything on emphasis of the doctrine that nothing short of unconditional courage is to be expected of a soldier. These chronicles of the brave had not galvanized him into being in the least garrulous. Now, at last, his face changed and softened. He was deeply moved. He took a step forward. A giant of a man, towering above Kernével, he put his hand round his shoulder.

  ‘You people were the real heroes of that war,’ he said.

  Afterwards, when we walked back across the Horse Guards, Kernével insisted I had arranged the whole incident on purpose to rag him.

  ‘It was a good leg-pull,’ he said. ‘How did you manage it?’

  ‘I promise you.’

  ‘That’s just what you pretend.’

  ‘I suppose it would be true to say that there were moments when the Vichy people might have taken disagreeable measures if they had been able to lay their hands on you.’

  ‘You never know,’ said Kernével.

  The final rites were performed the day after I took wine with the Frenchmen in Upper Grosvenor Street. Forms were signed, equipment handed in, the arcane processes of entering the army enacted, like one of Dr Trelawney’s Black Masses, in reverse continuity with an unbelievable symmetry of rhythm. I almost expected the greatcoat, six years before seeming to symbolize induction into this world through the Looking Glass, would be ceremonially lifted from my shoulders. That did not take place. Nevertheless, observances similarly sartorial in character were to close the chapter. This time the mise-en-scène was Olympia, rather than the theatrical costumier’s, a shop once more, yet at the same time not a shop.