The military philosophers (18 page)

Kucherman remained grave.

‘I don’t mean what you say isn’t true of the Germans,’ he said. ‘Of course it is – anyway up to a point, even in the last twenty years. What you underestimate is the same element in your own country.’

‘Not to any comparable degree.’

Kucherman remained obdurate.

‘I speak of something I have thought about and noticed,’ he said. ‘Your fathers were in the War Office too.’

For the moment – such are the pitfalls of an alien language and alien typifications, however familiar, for Kucherman spoke English and knew England well – it seemed he could only be facetious. I laughed, assuming he was teasing. He had not done so before, but so much optimism in the air may have made him feel a joke was required. He could scarcely be ignorant that nowhere – least of all within the professional army – was the phrase ‘War Office’ one for anything but raillery. Perhaps he had indeed known that and disregarded the fact, because a joke was certainly not intended. Kucherman was a man to make up his own mind. He did not take his ideas second-hand. Possibly, thinking it over that night on Fire Duty, there was even something to be said for his theory; only our incurable national levity made the remark at that moment sound satirical. A grain of truth, not necessarily derogatory, was to be traced in the opinion.

Fire Duty was something that came round at regular intervals. It meant hanging about the building all night, fully dressed, prepared to go on the roof, if the Warning sounded, with the object of extinguishing incendiary bombs that might fall there. These were said to be easily dealt with by use of sand and an instrument like a garden hoe, both of which were provided as equipment. On previous occasions, up to now, no raid had occurred, the hours passing not too unpleasantly with a book. Feeling I needed a change from the seventeenth century and Proust, I had brought Saltykov-Schredin’s
The Golovlyov Family
to read. A more trivial choice would have been humiliating, because Corporal Curtis turned out to be the accompanying NCO that night, and had
Adam Bede
under his arm. We made whatever mutual arrangements were required, then retired to our respective off-duty locations.

Towards midnight I was examining a collection of photographs taken on D-Day, which had not long before this replaced the two Isbister-like oil paintings. Why the pictures had been removed after being allowed to hang throughout the earlier years of the blitz was not apparent. Mime, now a captain, had just hurried past with his telegrams, when the Warning sounded. I found my way to the roof at the same moment as Corporal Curtis.

‘I understand, sir, that we ascend into one of the cupolas as an action station.’

‘We do.’

‘I thought I had better await your arrival and instructions, sir.’

‘Tell me the plot of
Adam Bede
as far as you’ve got. I’ve never read it.’

Like the muezzin going on duty, we climbed up a steep gangway of iron leading into one of the pepperpot domes constructed at each corner of the building. The particular dome allotted to us, the one nearest the river, was on the far side from that above our own room. The inside was on two floors, rather like an eccentric writer’s den for undisturbed work. Curtis and I proceeded to the upper level. These Edwardian belvederes, elaborately pillared and corniced like Temples of Love in a rococo garden, were not in themselves of exceptional beauty, and, when first erected, must have seemed obscure in functional purpose. Now, however, the architect’s design showed prophetic aptitude. The exigencies of war had transformed them into true gazebos, not, as it turned out, frequented to observe the ‘pleasing prospects’ with which such rotundas and follies were commonly associated, but at least to view their antithesis, ‘horridly gothick’ aspects of the heavens, lit up by fire and rent with thunder.

This extension of purpose was given effect a minute or two later. The moonlit night, now the melancholy strain of the sirens had died away, was surprisingly quiet. All Ack-Ack guns had been sent to the coast, for there was no point in shooting down V.1’s over built-up areas. They would come down anyway. Around lay the darkened city, a few solid masses, like the Donners-Brebner Building, recognisable on the far side of the twisting strip of water. Then three rapidly moving lights appeared in the southern sky, two more or less side by side, the third following a short way behind, as if lacking acceleration or will power to keep up. They travelled with that curious shuddering jerky movement characteristic of such bodies, a style of locomotion that seemed to suggest the engine was not working properly, might break down at any moment, which indeed it would. This impression that something was badly wrong with the internal machinery was increased by a shower of sparks emitted from the tail. A more exciting possibility was that dragons were flying through the air in a fabulous tale, and climbing into the turret with Curtis had been done in a dream. The raucous buzz could now be plainly heard. In imagination one smelt brimstone.

‘They appear to be heading a few degrees to our right, sir,’ said Curtis.

The first two cut-out. It was almost simultaneous. The noisy ticking of the third continued briefly, then also stopped abruptly. This interval between cutting-out and exploding always seemed interminable. At last it came; again two almost at once, the third a few seconds later. All three swooped to the ground, their flaming tails pointing upwards, certainly dragons now, darting earthward to consume their prey of maidens chained to rocks.

‘Southwark, do you think?’

‘Lambeth, sir – having regard to the incurvations of the river.’

‘Sweet Thames run softly …’

‘I was thinking the same, sir.’

‘I’m afraid they’ve caught it, whichever it was.’

‘I’m afraid so, sir.’

The All Clear sounded. We climbed down the iron gang, way.

‘Do you think that will be all for tonight?’

‘I hope so, sir. Just to carry the story on from where we were when we were interrupted: Hetty is then convicted of the murder of her child and transported.’

The rest of the tour of duty was quiet. I read
The Golovlyov Family
and thought what a pity Judushka had not lived at a more recent period and become a commissar. A month later the Allies entered Paris. George Tolland remained too ill to be moved from Cairo.

FOUR

In due course V.1’s went out of fashion, and V.2’s, a form of rocket, became the mode. They were apt to come over in the middle of the morning. Finn was talking to me one day about the transference of Luxembourg personnel from the Belgian artillery (where they manned a battery) to the newly raised army of the Grand Duchy (envisaged with a ceiling of three battalions), when his voice was completely drowned. The dull roar blotting out his comments had been preceded by an agonized trembling of the surrounding atmosphere, the window seeming about to cave in, but recovering itself. I just managed not to jump. Finn appeared totally unimpressed by the sound, whether from strength of nerve or deafness was uncertain. He repeated what he had to say without the smallest modification of tone, signed the minute and put down his pen.

‘We’ve been ordered to take the Allied military attachés overseas,’ he said. ‘Show ’em a few things. Bound to cause trouble, but there it is. Dempster will be in charge while I’m away. David will probably take the Neutrals when their turn comes, so I shall want you to act as an additional Conducting Officer, Nicholas. Just cast your eye over these papers. It’s going to be rather a scramble at such short notice.’

He talked about arrangements. I picked up the instructions and was about to go. Finn drummed on the table with his pen.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I’ve made it up with Farebrother. He’s in Civil Affairs now and he came in yesterday about some matter he thought might concern us. Of course, he’s a fellow of great charm, whatever else one thinks. Told me he was going to get married – a general’s widow in MI5, “Won’t be able to conceal anything from her!” he said.’

Finn laughed, as if he thought retribution would now claim Farebrother for any sins committed against law and order in connexion with the Szymanski affair.

‘Not a Mrs Conyers?’

‘That’s her name. Very capable lady, I understand. Don’t know whether marriage is a good idea at the age Farebrother’s reached, but that’s his business. Get to work right away on the details of the tour.’

When the day came, the military attachés assembled outside the staff entrance. We did not move off precisely on time, because General Lebedev was a minute or two late. While we waited, another of those quaverings of the air round about took place, that series of intensely rapid atmospheric tremors, followed by a dull boom. This one seemed to have landed somewhere in the direction of the Strand. The military attachés exchanged polite smiles. Van der Voort made a popping sound with finger and mouth. At that very moment Lebedev appeared at the end of the short street, giving the impression that he had just been physically ejected from a rocket-base on to a pin-pointed target just round the corner from where we stood, a method of arrival deliberately chosen by his superiors to emphasize Soviet technical achievement. He was, in truth, less than a couple of minutes behind time, most of the rest having arrived much too early. Possibly the high-collared blue uniform, with breeches, black top-boots and spurs, had taken longer to adjust than the battledress adopted for the occasion by most of the others. Major Prasad, representative of an independent state in the Indian sub-continent, also wore boots, brown ones without spurs. They were better cut than Lebedev’s, as were also his breeches, but that was only noticeable later, as Lebedev wore an overcoat. He was greeted with a shower of salutes, the formality of Bobrowski’s courteously ironical.

Finn was suffering that morning from one of his visitations of administrative anxiety. He counted the party three times before we entered the cars. I opened one of the doors for General Philidor.

‘You accompany us to France, Jenkins –
pour les vacances
?’

‘I do, sir.’

‘You will find a charming country. I lived there some years ago and was very satisfied.’

He was right about
les vacances
. Undoubtedly the buoyancy of a holiday outing was in the air. Only the V.2 had implied a call to order, a reminder that war was not yet done with. We took the Great West Road, passing the illuminated sign of the diving lady, where I had first kissed Jean Duport years before. I idly wondered what had happened to her, if she were involved in the war; what had happened to Duport, too, whether he had managed to ‘sweat it out’, the words he had used, in South America.

Although there might be a sense of exhilaration in our party, a crowd of officers unconnected by unit, brought together for some exceptional purpose, always tends to evoke a certain tension. The military attachés were no exception, even if on the whole more at ease than the average collection of British officers might prove in similar circumstances. This comparative serenity was, of course, largely due to the nature of the appointment, the fact that they were individuals handpicked for a job that required flexibility of manner. This was no doubt assisted by a tradition of Continental military etiquette in many respects at variance with our own. Officers of most other armies – so one got the impression – though they might be more formal with each other, were taught to be less verbally crisp, less surly, according to how you chose to assess the social bearing of our own officer corps. I had myself been more than once present at inter-Allied military conferences when the manners of our own people left much to be desired – been, in short, abominable by Continental standards – probably more on account of inexperience in dealing with foreign elements than from deliberate rudeness; still less any desire to appear unfriendly – as was apt to be supposed by the foreign officer concerned – for ‘political’ or ‘diplomatic’ reasons. However, if individual British officers could at times show themselves unpolished or ill-at-ease with their Allies, other sides of the picture were to be borne in mind. We put up with quite a lot from the Allies too, though usually in the official rather than the personal field.

By the time we entered the Dakota that was to ferry us across the Channel, heavy banter, some of it capable of giving offence among a lot of mixed nationalities, began to take the place of that earlier formality. This change from normal was probably due to nerves being on edge. There was reason for that. It was, indeed, an occasion to stir the least imaginative among those whose country had been involved in the war since the beginning, while he himself, all or most of the time, had been confined in an island awaiting invasion. Such badinage, in fluent but foreign English, was at that moment chiefly on the subject of the imaginary hazards of the flight, some of the party – especially those like Colonel Hlava, with years of flying experience and rows of decorations for bravery in the air – behaving as if they had never entered a plane before. Possibly a hulk like this was indeed a cause for disquiet, if you were used to piloting yourself through the clouds in an equipage of the first order of excellence and modernity. We went up the gangway. Colonel Ramos, the newly appointed Brazilian, swallowed a handful of pills as soon as he reached the top. This precaution was noticed by Van der Voort, whose round florid clean-shaven face looked more than ever as if it peered out of a Jan Steen canvas. Van der Voort was in his most boisterous form, seeming to belong to some anachronistic genre picture,
Boors at an Airport
or
The Airfield Kermesse
, executed by one of the lesser Netherlands masters. He clapped Ramos on the back.

‘Been having a night out, Colonel?’ he asked.

Ramos, in spectacles with a woollen scarf round his neck, looked a mild academic figure in spite of his military cap. He was obviously not at all well. The sudden impact of London wartime food – as well it might – had radically disordered his stomach. He had explained his case to me as soon as he arrived that morning, indicating this by gesture rather than words, his English being limited. I promised the aid of such medicaments as I carried, when we could get to them.

‘I believe you’ve been having a party with the girls, Colonel Ramos,’ said Van der Voort. ‘Staying up too late. Isn’t that true, old man?’

Ramos having, as already stated, no great command of the language, understood only that some enquiry, more or less kind, had been made about his health. He delighted Van der Voort by nodding his head vigorously in affirmation.

‘You’re new to London, but, my God, you haven’t taken long to make your way about,’ Van der Voort went on. ‘How do you find it? Do you like the place?’

‘Very good, very good,’ said Colonel Ramos.

‘Where have you been so far? Burlington Gardens? Have you seen the ladies there? Smeets and I always take a look on the way back from lunch. You ought to recce Burlington Gardens, Colonel.’

‘Yes, yes.’

Colonel Ramos nodded and smiled, laughing almost as much as Van der Voort himself. By this time we were all sitting on the floor of the plane, which was without any sort of interior furnishing. Finn and I had placed ourselves a little way from the rest, because he wanted to run through the programme again. Colonel Chu, who greatly enjoyed all forms of teasing, edged himself across to Ramos and Van der Voort, evidently wanting to join in. He was not in general very popular with his colleagues.

‘Like all his race, he’s dreadfully conceited,’ Kucherman had said. ‘
Vaniteux
– you never saw anything like them. I have been there more than once and insist they are the vainest people on earth.’

Chu was certainly pleased with himself. He began to finger the scarf Ramos was wearing. The Brazilian, for a man who looked as if he might vomit at any moment, took the broad witticisms of the other two in very good part. He probably understood very little of what was said. Watching the three of them, one saw what Chu had meant by saying he could ‘make himself young’. Probably he would have fitted in very tolerably as a boy at Eton, had he been able to persuade the school authorities to accept him for a while. He left his London appointment before the end of the War and returned to China, where he was promoted major-general. About three years later, so I was told, he was killed commanding one of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Divisions at Mukden. Chu must have been in his early forties then, no doubt still prepared to pass as a schoolboy. We floated out over a brilliant shining sea.

‘They’re not to be shown Pluto,’ said Finn. ‘I bet one and all of them make a bee-line for it. They’re as artful as a cartload of monkeys when it comes to breaking the rules.’

Pluto – Pipe Line Under The Ocean, appropriately recalling the Lord of the Underworld – was the system, an ingenious one, by which troops in a state of mobility were supplied with oil.

‘Not a hope they won’t see Pluto,’ repeated Finn gloomily.

That sort of thing sometimes got on his mind. He was still worrying about Pluto when we landed at the army airfield. Once more the military attachés were packed into cars. I was in the last one with Prasad, Al Sharqui and Gauthier de Graef. Kucherman, in his capacity as great industrial magnate, had been recalled to Brussels to confer with the new Government, so Gauthier had come on the tour in his place. The Belgians were heavily burdened with economic problems. They had had no Quisling figure to be taken seriously during the occupation, but their various Resistance movements were, some of them, inclined to be fractious. Gauthier was for taking a firm line with them. Prasad, next door to him, had only come with us owing to his own personal desire to do so. His creed and status at home made it doubtful whether it were permissible for him to take part in an expedition that would inevitably lead to eating in public. I had special instructions to see his requirements in the way of food and accommodation were strictly observed. Al Sharqui, rather shy in this hurly-burly of nationalities and generals, came from one of the Arab states. Like Prasad, he was a major.

‘This is like arriving on another planet,’ said Gauthier de Graef.

He was right. It was all very strange, incomparably strange. The company one was with certainly did not decrease this sense of fantasy. More personal sensations were harder to define, took time to resolve. I cannot remember whether it was the day we arrived or later that things crystallized. We were bowling along through Normandy and a region of fortified farms. Afterwards, in memory, the apple orchards were all in blossom, like isolated plantations on which snow for some unaccountable reason had fallen, light glinting between the tree trunks. But it was already November. There can have been no blossom. Blossom was a mirage. Autumnal sunshine, thin hard, penetrating, must have created that scenic illusion kindling white and silver sparkles in branches and foliage. What you see conditions feelings, not what is. For me the country was in blossom. At any season the dark ancientness of those massive granges, their stone walls loop-holed with arrow-slits, would have been mesmeric enough. Now, their mysterious aspect was rendered even more enigmatic by a surrounding wrack of armoured vehicles in multiform stages of dissolution. This residue was almost always concentrated within a comparatively small area, in fact where-ever, a month or two before, an engagement had been fought out. Then would come stretches of quite different country, fields, woodland, streams, to all intents untouched by war.

In one of these secluded pastoral tracts, a Corot landscape of tall poplars and water meadows executed in light greys, greens and blues, an overturned staff-car, wheels in the air, lay sunk in long grass. The camouflaged bodywork was already eaten away by rust, giving an impression of abandonment by that brook decades before. High up in the branches of one of the poplars, positioned like a cunningly contrived scarecrow, the tatters of a field-grey tunic, black-and-white collar patches just discernible, fluttered in the faint breeze and hard cold sunlight. The isolation of the two entities, car and uniform, was complete. There seemed no explanation of why either had come to rest where it was.

At that moment, an old and bearded Frenchman appeared plodding along the road. He was wearing a beret, and, like many of the local population, cloaked in the olive green rubber of a British army anti-gas cape. As our convoy passed, he stopped and waved a greeting. He looked absolutely delighted, like a peasant in a fairy story who has found the treasure. For some reason it was all too much. A gigantic release seemed to have taken place. The surroundings had suddenly become overwhelming.  I was briefly in tears. The others were sunk in unguessable reflections of their own; Prasad perhaps among Himalayan peaks; Al Sharqui, the sands of the desert; Gauthier, in Clanwaert’s magic realm, the Porte de Louise. We sped on down the empty roads.