Anthony Powell - The Valley of Bones

‘True enough.’

‘He sees the role of authority as essentially artificial, the army a way of life in which there is as little room for uncontrolled fervour as for sullen indifference. The impetuous volunteer has as much to learn as the unwilling conscript.’

I thought of Gwatkin and his keenness; of Sayce, and his recalcitrance. There was something to be said for this view of the army. By this time, Pennistone and I were the only ones awake in the compartment. The button cleaners had abandoned their paraphernalia, resumed their tunics and nodded off like the rest. The quartermaster began to snore. He did not look particularly saintly, nor even dedicated, though one never could tell. Probably Vigny knew what he was talking about after fourteen years of it.

‘All the same,’ I said, ‘it’s a misapprehension to suppose, as most people do, that the army is inherently different from all other communities. The hierarchy and discipline give an outward illusion of difference, but there are personalities of every sort in the army, as much as out of it. On the whole, the man who is successful in civilian life, all things being equal, is successful in the army.’

‘Certainly — and there can be weak-willed generals and strong-willed privates.’

‘Look, for example, at the way you yourself compelled my neighbour to move his kit last night.’

Pennistone laughed.

‘One can just imagine Vigny romanticising that fat sod,’ he said, ‘but that is by the way. Probably Vigny, while emphasising that we are back with the citizen army of classical times which he himself envisaged, would agree with what you say. He was certainly aware that nothing is absolute in the army — least of all obeying orders. Take my own case. I was instructed to wait until this morning for a train, as there had been local complaints of army personnel overcrowding the railways over weekends to the detriment of civilian travel facilities. I made careful enquiries, found chances of retribution remote and started the night before, thus saving a day of my journey.’

‘In other words, the individual still counts, even in the army.’

‘Although consigned to circumstances in which, theoretically, no individuality — though much will-power — exists.’

‘What would Vigny have thought of your disobeying that order?’

‘I could have pleaded that the army was not my chosen profession, that my ill-conduct was a revulsion from uniform, drum, drill, the ritual of the parade ground, the act of an unworthy, amateur neophyte of war.’

We both went to sleep after that. When the train reached London, I said goodbye to Pennistone, who was making his way to the country and his home, there to stay until recalled to duty.

‘Perhaps we’ll meet again.’

‘Let’s decide to anyway,’ he said. ‘As we’ve agreed, these things are largely a matter of will.’

He waved, and disappeared into the crowds of the railway station. Later in the morning, while attending to the many odd jobs to be done during my few hours in London, I was struck by a thought as to where I might have seen Pennistone before. Was it at Mrs Andriadis’s party in Hill Street ten or twelve years ago? His identity was revealed. He was the young man with the orchid in his buttonhole with whom I had struck up a conversation in the small hours. This seemed our characteristic relationship. Stringham had taken me to the party, Pennistone informed me that the house itself belonged to the Duports. Pennistone had told me, too, that Bob Duport had married Peter Templer’s sister, Jean. It was Pennistone, that same evening — when all was confusion owing to Milly Andriadis’s row with Stringham — whom she had pushed into an armchair when he had tried to tell her an anecdote about Prince Theodoric and the Prince of Wales. By then Pennistone was rather tight. It all seemed centuries ago: the Prince of Wales now Duke of Windsor, Prince Theodoric, buttress of pro-Allied sentiment in a country threatened by German invasion, Pennistone and myself second-lieutenants in our middle thirties. I wondered what had happened to Stringham, Mrs Andriadis and the rest. However, there was no time to ponder long about all that. Other matters required attention. I was glad — overjoyed — to be back in England even for a month or so. There would be weekend leaves from the course, when it should be possible to get as far as my sister-in-law Frederica Budd’s house, where Isobel was staying until the child was born. The London streets, empty of traffic, looked incredibly bright and sophisticated, the tarts in Piccadilly dazzling nymphs. This was before the blitz. I knew how Persephone must have felt on the first day of her annual release from the underworld. An RAF officer of unconventional appearance advancing up the street turned out to be Barnby. He recognised me at the same moment.

‘I thought you were a war artist.’

‘I was for a time,’ he said. ‘Then I got sick of it and took a job doing camouflage for this outfit.’

‘Disguising aerodromes as Tudor cottages?’

‘That sort of thing.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Not bad. If I’m not able to paint in the way I want, I’d as soon do this as anything else.’

‘I thought war artists were allowed to paint whatever they wanted.’

‘They are in a way,’ said Barnby, ‘I don’t know. I prefer this for some reason, while there’s a war on. They let me go on an occasional operational flight.’

I felt a pang. Barnby was a few years older than myself. I had nothing so lively to report. He looked rather odd in his uniform, thick, square, almost as if he were still wearing the blue overalls in which he was accustomed to paint.

‘Where are you, Nick?’ he asked.

I gave him some account of my life.

‘It doesn’t sound very exciting.’

‘It isn’t.’

‘I’ve got a wonderful new girl,’ he said.

I thought how, war or peace, nothing ever really changes in such aspects.

‘How long are you in London?’ he said. ‘I’d like to tell you about her. She’s got one extraordinary trait. It would amuse you to hear about it. Can’t we dine together tonight?’

‘I’ve got to report to Aldershot this afternoon. I’ve been sent there on a course. Are you stationed in London?’

‘Up for the night only. I have to see a man in the Air Ministry about some special camouflage equipment. How’s Isobel?’

‘Having a baby soon.’

‘Give her my love. What happened to the rest of the Tolland family?’

‘George is in France with a Guards battalion. He was on the Regular Reserve, of course, now a captain. Robert always a mysterious figure, is a lance-corporal in Field Security, believed to be on his way to getting a commission. Hugo doesn’t want to be an officer. He prefers to stay where he is as a gunner on the South Coast — bombardier now, I believe. He says you meet such awful types in the Officers’ Mess.’

‘What about those chaps Isobel’s sisters married?’

‘Roddy Cutts — as an MP — had no difficulty about getting into something. His own county Yeomanry, I think. I don’t know his rank, probably colonel by now. Susan is with him. Chips Lovell has joined the Marines.’

‘That’s an unexpected arm. Is Priscilla with him?’

‘So far as I know.’

We spoke of other matters, then parted. Talking to Barnby increased the feeling that I had been released from prison, at the same time inducing a new sensation, that prison life was all I was fit for. Barnby’s conversation, everything round about, seemed hopelessly unreal. There was boundless relief in being free, even briefly free, from the eternal presence of Gwatkin, Kedward, Cadwallader, Gwylt and the rest of them; not to have to worry whether the platoon was better occupied digging themselves in or attacking a hill; whether Davies, G., should have a stripe or Davies, L., lose one; yet, by comparison, the shapes of Barnby and Pennistone were little more than figments of the imagination, shadows flickering on the slides of an old-fashioned magic-lantern. I had scarcely arrived in London, in any case, before it was time to leave for Aldershot. In the train on the way there, I reflected on the ideas Pennistone had put forward: the ‘occasional operational flights’ of Barnby. How would one feel on such aerial voyages? It might be like Dai and Shoni in their balloon. In the army, as up to now experienced, danger, although it might in due course make appearance, at present skulked out of sight in the background; the foreground for ever cluttered with those moral obligations outlined by Vigny. I envied Pennistone, who could turn from war to Descartes, and back again, without perceptible effort. I knew myself incapable of writing a line of a novel — by then I had written three or four — however long released from duty. Whatever inner processes are required for writing novels, so far as I myself was concerned, war now utterly inhibited. That was one of the many disagreeable aspects of war. It was not only physically inescapable, but morally inescapable too. Why did one envy Barnby his operational flights? That was an absorbing question. Certainly not because one wanted to be killed, nor yet because the qualities of those who excel in violent action were the qualities to which one had any claim. For that matter, such qualities were not specially Barnby’s. There was perhaps the point. Yet it was absurd to regard war as a kind of competition of just that sort between individuals. If that was the aim in war, why not in peace? No doubt there were plenty of individuals who felt that sort of emulation in peacetime too, but their preoccupations were not one’s own. Looked at calmly, war created a situation in which the individual — if he wished to be on the winning side — was of importance only in so much as he contributed to the requirements of the machine, not according to the picturesque figure he cut in the eyes of himself and others. It was no more reasonable, if you were not that sort of person, to aspire to lead a cavalry charge, than, without financial gifts, to dream of cornering the pepper market; without scientific training, split the atom. All the same, as Pennistone had said, these things are largely a matter of the will. I thought of Dr Trelawney, the magician, the night Duport and I had helped him to bed after his asthma attack, when he had quoted as all that was necessary: ‘To know to dare, to will, to be silent.’ Armed with those emblems of strength, one might, however out of character, lead a cavalry charge, perhaps even corner the pepper market and split the atom too. Anyway, I thought, it would be a dull world if no one ever had dreams of glory. Moreland was fond of quoting Nietzsche’s opinion that there is no action without illusion. Arrival at Aldershot brought an end to these reflections. Most of the train’s passengers turned out to be officers on their way to the same course as myself. After reporting to the Orderly Room, we were shown the lines where we were to sleep, a row of small redbrick houses built round a sort of square. Their interiors were uninviting.