The Soldier's Art (12 page)

“I never get
time to settle down to serious writing,” he used to say, thereby making what
almost amounted to a legal declaration in defining his own inclusion within an
easily recognisable category of non-starting literary apprenticeship.

These were
some of the thoughts about Lovell that passed through my head while I sat on a
bench in the hall waiting to see Major Finn. The address in Westminster to
which I had been told to report turned out to be a large house converted to the
use of military headquarters. After a while a Free French corporal, his arm in
a sling, joined me on the bench; then two members of the Free French women’s
service. Soon the three of them began an argument together in their own
language. I re-read Moreland’s postcard – a portrait of Wagner in a kind of
tam-o’-shanter – confirming our dinner that night. Enigmatic in tone, its
wording indefinably lacked the liveliness of manner usual in this, Moreland’s
habitual mode of communication.

We had not met
since the first week of the war, soon after Matilda had left him. Matilda’s
subsequent marriage to Sir Magnus Donners had been effected with an avoidance
of publicity remarkable even at a time when all sorts of changes, public and
private, many of these revolutionary enough, were being quietly brought about.
Muting the news of the ceremony was no doubt to some extent attributable to
controls Sir Magnus found himself in a position to exercise in certain fields.
The wedding of the divorced wife of a musician, well known even if not
particularly prosperous,
to a member of the Government rated in general more attention, even allowing
for the paper shortage, than the few scattered paragraphs that appeared at the
time. People said the break-up of Moreland’s marriage had at first so much
disturbed him that he seemed likely to go to pieces entirely, giving himself up
increasingly to drink, while living as best he could from one day to the next.
However, a paradox of that moment in the war was an excess, rather than
deficiency, of musical employment; so that, in fact, Moreland found himself
immersed in work of one sort or another, which, even if not very inspiring
professionally, kept him alive and busy. That, at any rate, was what I had
heard. Inevitably we had lost touch with each other since I had been in the
army. Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward
– in contrast with love – is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally
mysterious nourishment; like love, too, bearing also within its embryo inherent
seeds of dissolution, something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than
the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events which had, for
example, come between Stringham and myself.

These rather
sombre speculations were interrupted by a door opening nearby. A Free French
officer in a képi appeared. Middle-aged, with spectacles, rather red in the
face, he was followed from the room by a youngish, capless captain, wearing
Intelligence Corps badges.

“
Et
maintenant, une dernière chose, mon Capitaine
,” said the Frenchman, “
maintenant que nous avons terminé avec
I’affaire Szymanski. Le Colonel s’est arrangé avec certains membres du
Commandement pour que quelques jeunes officiers soient placés dans le Génie. Il
espère que vous n’y verrez pas d’inconvenient
.”

“
Vous n’avez
pas utilisé la procédure habituelle, Lieutenant
?”

“
Mon
Capitaine, le Colonel Michelet a pensé que pour une pareille broutille on
pouvait se dispenser des voies hierachiques
.”

“
Nous aurons
des ennuis
.”

“
Le Colonel
Michelet est convaincu qu’ils seront négligeables
.”

“
Ca m’étonnerait
.”

“
Vous croyez
vraiment
?”

“
J’en suis sûr.
II nous jaut immédiatement une liste de ces noms
.”

“
Très bien,
mon Capitaine, vous les aurez
.”

The English
officer shook his head to express horror at what had been contemplated. They
both laughed a lot.

“
Au revoir,
Lieutenant
.”

“
Au revoir,
mon Capitaine
.”

The Frenchman
retired. The captain turned to me.

“Jenkins?”

“Yes.”

“Finn told me
about you. Come in here, will you.”

I followed
into his room, and sat opposite while he turned the pages of a file.

“What have you
been doing since you joined the army?”

Reduced to
narrative form, my military career up to date did not sound particularly
impressive. However, the captain seemed satisfied. He nodded from time to time.
His manner was friendly, more like the good-humoured approach of my old
Battalion than the unforthcoming demeanour of most of the officers at Div. H.Q.
The story came to an end.

“I see – how
old are you?”

I revealed my
age. He looked surprised that anyone could be so old.

“And what do
you do in civilian life?”

I indicated
literary activities.

“Oh, yes,” he
said. “I believe I read one.”

However, he
showed none of General Liddament’s keen merest in the art of the novel, made no
effort to explore further
this aspect of my life.

“What about
French?”

It seemed simplest to furnish the same
descriptive phrases
offered to the General.

“I can read a
book as a rule, but get held up with slang or something like the technical
descriptions of Balzac.”

The captain
laughed.

“Well,” he
said, “suppose we come back to that later. Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“Children?”

“One.”

“Prepared to
go abroad?”

“Of course.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

He seemed
almost surprised at this rather minimal acceptance of military obligation.

“We’re looking
for liaison officers with the Free French,” he said. “At battalion level. They’re
not entirely easy to find. Speaking another language tolerably well seems so
often to go with unsatisfactory habits.”

The captain
smiled sadly, a little archly, across the desk at me.

“Whilst our
Allies expect nothing less than one hundred per cent service,” he said, “and
quite right too.”

He fixed me
with his eye.

“Care to take
the job on?”

“Yes – but, as
I explained, I’m no great master of the language.”

He did not
reply. Instead, he opened a drawer of the desk from which he took a document.
He handed this to me. Then he rose and went to a door on the other side of the
room. It gave on to a smaller room, almost a cupboard surrounded by dark green
metal safes. In one corner was a little table on which stood a typewriter in
its rubber cover. A chair was beside it.

“Make a French
translation of these instructions,” he said. “Subsistence Allowance is
frais d’alimentation.
Here is paper
– and a typewriter, should you use one. Alternatively, here too is
la plume de ma tante.”

Smiling not
unkindly, he shut me in. I settled down to examine the printed sheet handed to
me. It turned out to be an Army Form, one specifying current regulations
governing issue, or non-issue, of rations to troops in the field. At first
sight the prose did not seem to make much sense in English; I saw at once there
was little hope of my own French improving it. Balzac on provincial typesetting
was going to be nothing to this. However, I sat down and worked away, because I
wanted the job badly.

Outside, on
cornices and parapets of government buildings, starlings in thousands chattered
and quarrelled. I was aware of that dazed feeling that is part of the impact of
coming on leave. I read through the document again, trying to compose my mind
to its meaning. This was like being “kept in” at school. “… the items under (i)
are obtainable on indent (A.B.55) which is the ordinary requisition of supplies
… the items under (iii) and other items required to supplement the ration so as
to provide variety and admit of the purchase of seasonable produce, and which
are paid for with money provided by the Commuted Ration Allowance and Cash
Allowance (iii above) … the officer i/c Supplies renders a return (A. F. B.
179), which shows the quantities and prices of rations actually issued in kind
to the unit during the month, from which their total value is calculated …”

The
instruction covered a couple of foolscap pages. I remembered being told never
to write “and which,” but the mere grammar used by the author was by no means
just most formidable side. It was not the words
that were
difficult. The
words, on the whole, were fairly
familiar. Giving
them some sort of conviction in translation was the problem; conveying that
particular tone sounded in official manifestos. Through the
backwoods of this bureaucratic jungle,
or the like, Widmerpool was hunting down Mr. Diplock, in relentless safari.
Such distracting thoughts had to be put from the mind. I chose
la plume de ma tante
i
n preference to the typewriter,
typescript imparting an awful bareness to language of any kind,
even one’s own. For a time I sweated away. Some sort of a version at last
appeared. I read it through several times, making corrections. It did not sound
ideally idiomatic. French; but then the original did not sound exactly
idiomatic English. After embodying a few final improvements, I opened the door
a crack.

“Come in, come
in,” said the captain. “Have you finished? I thought you might have succumbed.
It’s dreadfully stuffy in there.”

He was sitting
with another officer, also a captain, tall, fair, rather elegant. A blue
fore-and-aft cap lay beside him with the lion-and-unicorn General Service
badge. I passed my translation across the desk to the I. Corps captain. He took
it, and, rising from his chair, turned to the other man.

“I’ll be back
in a moment, David,” he said – and to me: “Take a seat while I show this to
Finn.”

He went out of
the room. The other officer nodded to me and laughed. It was Pennistone. We had
met on a train during an earlier leave of mine and had talked of Vigny. We had
talked of all sorts of other things, too, that seemed to have passed out of my
life for a long time. I remembered now Pennistone had insisted his own military
employments were unusual. No doubt the Headquarters in which I now found myself
represented the sort of world in which he habitually functioned.

“Splendid,” he
said. “Of course we agreed to meet as an exercise of the will. I’m ashamed to
say I’d forgotten until now. Your own moral determination does you credit. I
congratulate you. Or is it just one of those eternal recurrences of Nietzsche,
which one gets so used to? Have you come to work here?”

I explained
the reason for my presence in the building,

“So you may be
joining the Free Frogs.”

“And you?”

“I look after
the Poles.”

“Do they have
a place like this too?”

“Oh, no. The
Poles are dealt with as a Power. They have an ambassador, a military attaché,
all that. The point about France is that we still recognise the Vichy
Government. The other Allied Governments are those in exile over here in
London. That is why the Free French have their own special mission.”

“You’ve just
come to see them?”

“To discuss
some odds and ends of Polish affairs that overlap with Free French matters.”

We talked for
a while. The other captain returned.

“Finn wants to
see you,” he said.

I followed him
along the passage into a room where an officer was sitting behind a desk
covered with papers. The I. Corps captain announced my name and withdrew, I had
left my cap in the other office, so, on entering, could not salute, but, with
the formality that prevailed in the area where I was serving, came to
attention. The major behind the desk seemed surprised at this. He rose very
slowly from his desk, and, keeping his eye on me all the time, came round to
the front and shook hands. He was small, cleanshaved, almost square in shape,
with immensely broad shoulders,
large head, ivory-coloured face, huge nose. His grey eyes were set deep back in
their sockets. He looked like an enormous bird, an ornithological specimen very
different from Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson, kindly but at the same time immensely
more powerful. I judged him in his middle fifties. He wore an old
leather-buttoned service-dress tunic, with a V.C., Légion d’Honneur, Croix de
Guerre avec palmes, and a couple of other foreign decorations I could not
identify.

“Sit down,
Jenkins,” he said.

He spoke quietly,
almost whispered. I sat down. He began to fumble among his papers.

“I had a note
from your Divisional Commander,” he said. “Where is it? Draw that chair a bit
nearer. I’m rather deaf in this ear. How is General Liddament?”

“Very well,
sir.”

“Knocking the
Division into shape?”

“That’s it,
sir.”

“Territorial
Division, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He’ll get a
Corps soon.”

“You think so,
sir?”

Major Finn
nodded He seemed a little embarrassed about something. Although he gave out an
extraordinary sense of his own physical strength and endurance, there was also
something mild, gentle, almost undecided, about his manner.

“You know why
you’ve been sent here?” he asked.

“It was
explained, sir.”

He lowered his
eyes to what I now saw was my translation. He began to read it to himself, his
lips moving faintly. After a line or two of doing this, it became clear to We
what the answer was going to be. The only question that remained was how long
the agony would be drawn out. Major Finn read the whole of my version through
to himself: then, rather nobly, read it through again. This was
either to give dramatic effect, or to rouse himself t0 the required
state of tension for making an unwelcome announcement. Those, at least, were
the reasons that occurred to me at the time, because he must almost certainly
have gone through the piece when the captain had first brought it to him. I
appreciated the gesture, which indicated he was doing the best he could for me,
including not sparing himself. When he came to the end for the second time, he
looked across the desk, and, shaking his head, sighed and smiled.