Anthony Powell: The Military Philosophers

I suggested the Jeavons house in South Kensington. Ted Jeavons, having somehow managed to find a builder to patch up the roof and back wall — an achievement no one but himself would have brought off at that moment — was still in residence. Only the rear part of the structure had been damaged by the bomb, the front remaining almost untouched. Jeavons ran the house more or less as it had been run when Molly was alive, with a shifting population of visitors, some of whom lived there more or less permanently, paying rent. Lots of households of much that kind existed in wartime London, a matter of luck if, homeless like Templer, you knew where to apply. He wrote down the address, at the same time showing characteristic lack of interest in information about Jeavons.

‘I might propose myself,’ he said. ‘If a bomb’s already hit the place, with any luck it won’t happen again, though I don’t know that there’s any real reason to suppose that.’

He paused, then suddenly began to talk about himself in a manner that was oddly apologetic, quite unlike his accustomed style as remembered, or the tone he had been using up till now. Until then, I had felt all contact lost between us, that the picture I retained of him when we had been friends years before had become largely imaginary. Now a closer proximity seemed renewed.

‘I’ve given up girls,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be interested to know.’

‘Charles Stringham said the same when I ran across him in the ranks. Is this for the war?’

Templer laughed.

‘I used to think I was rather a success with the ladies,’ he said. ‘Now one wife’s run away and the other is where I indicated, I’m not so sure. At least I can’t be regarded as a great hand at marriage. It’s lately been made clear to me I’m not so hot extra-matrimonially either. That’s why I was beefing about age.’

He made a dismissive gesture.

‘I’ll ring your friend Jeavons,’ he said.

He strolled away. There was always the slight impression of which Stringham used to complain — persisting even into the universal shabbiness of wartime — that Templer was too well dressed. I had never before known him so dejected.

While eating breakfast after Night Duty, I reflected that it would be as well to warn Jeavons that Templer might be getting in touch with him. Without some such notification, knowing them both, nothing was more likely than that they would get at cross purposes with each other. Then I put personal matters from my mind and began to think about the day’s work that lay ahead.

‘You’ll be surprised at the decisions one has to take on one’s own here,’ Pennistone had said when I first joined the Section. ‘You might think that applied to the Operational people more than ourselves, but in fact captains and majors in “I” have to get used to giving snap answers about all sorts of relatively important policy matters.’

When I returned to the building, this time to our own room, Dempster, who looked after the Norwegians and had a passion for fresh air, was trying vainly to open one of the windows, laughing a lot while he did so. He was in the timber business and knew Scandinavia well, spending skiing holidays in Norway when a boy with an aunt who was a remote kinswoman of Ibsen’s. Dempster was always full of Ibsen stories. He had won a couple of MCs in ’14-’18, the second up at Murmansk during the War of Intervention, an interlude the less inhibited of the Russians would, once in a way, enjoy laughing about, if the subject came up after a lot of drinks at one of their own parties. That did not apply to the Soviet military attaché himself, General Lebedev, who was at all times a stranger to laughter. Dempster was a rather notably accomplished pianist, who had been known to play a duet with Colonel Hlava, the Czech, also a competent performer, though not quite in Dempster’s class.

‘No good,’ said Dempster.

Holding a long pole with a hook on the end with which he had been trying to open the windows, he looked like an immensely genial troll come south from the fjords to have a good time. Still laughing, he replaced the pole in its corner. This endlessly repeated game of trying to force open the window was always unsuccessful. The sun’s rays, when there was any sun, penetrated through small rectangles in otherwise bricked up glass. The room itself, irregular of shape, was on the first floor, situated in an angle of the building, under one of the domed cupolas that ornamented the four corners of the roof. In winter — it was now early spring — life here was not unlike that lived at the earth’s extremities, morning and evening only an hour or two apart, the sparse feeble light of day tailing away in early afternoon, until finally swallowed up into impenetrable outer blackness. Within, lamplight glowed dimly through the shadows and nimbus of cigarette smoke, the drone of dictating voices measuring a kind of plain-song against more brief emphatic exchanges made from time to time on one or more of the seven or eight telephones. This telephonic talk was, as often as not, in some language other than English; just as the badges and insignia of visitors tended, as often as not, to diverge from the common run of uniform.

Pennistone, still wearing a blue side-cap, was sitting in his chair, preparing for action by opening the small gold hunter that always lay on the desk in front of him during working hours, a watch that was wound with a key.

‘Good morning, Nick.’

‘You came down from Scotland last night?’

‘Got a sleeper by a bit of luck. I shared it with an air-commodore who snored. How did the Cabinet Office meeting go?’

‘All right — look, I’m just off night duty. What do you think? A message has come through that a few Poles are trickling over the Persian frontier.’

‘No?’

‘The Russians have released a driblet.’

‘This could mean a Second Polish Corps.’

Pennistone had fair hair with a high-bridged nose over which he could look exceeding severe at people who annoyed him, of whom there were likely to be quite a few in the course of a day’s business. Without possessing a conventionally military appearance, a kind of personal authority and physical ease of movement carried off in him the incisive demands of uniform. More basically, he could claim an almost uncanny instinctive grasp of what was required from a staff officer. Indeed, after months of dealing with him from day to day, General Bobrowski, when informed Pennistone was not a Regular, had exploded into a Polish ejaculation of utter astonishment, at the same time bursting into loud laughter, while executing in mid-air one of those snatching, clutching gestures of the fingers, so expressive of his own impatience with life. A major-general, Bobrowski, who was military attaché, had been with the Polish contingent in France at the beginning of the war, where, in contravention of the French Chief of Army Staff’s order that no Polish troops were to be evacuated to England, he had mounted brens on locomotives and brought the best part of two brigades to a port of embarkation.

‘Bobrowski began his military career in a Russian rifle regiment.’ Pennistone had told me. ‘He was praporschik — ensign, as usually translated — at the same time that Kielkiewicz was an aspirant — always a favourite rank of mine — in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry.’

Hanging his cap on one of the hooks by the door, Pennistone went upstairs at once to get orders from Finn about the news from Iran. Polish GHQ must have received the information simultaneously from their own sources — reports almost always comprehensive, if at times highly coloured — because Michalski, one of General Kielkiewicz’s ADCs, came through on the telephone just after Pennistone had left the room, seeking to arrange an interview with everyone from the Chief of the Imperial General Staff downwards. He was followed almost immediately on the line by Horaczko, one of Bobrowski’s assistants, with the same end in view for his master. We were on easy terms with both Michalski and Horaczko, so temporizing was not too difficult, though clearly fresh and more urgent solicitations would soon be on the way.