Anthony Powell: The Military Philosophers

‘Do you mind if we go, Pennistone?’ said Borrit. ‘Otherwise I’ll be late for my appointment with Van der Voort.’

Pennistone, never to be hurried, stood in deep thought. He was as likely to be reflecting on Cartesianism as on the best way to approach Q (Ops.). Borrit made another move towards the door.

‘What was it? I know — trouble again about Szymanski. You wouldn’t think it possible one man could be such a nuisance. There’s now doubt whether it’s his real name, because a lot of people are called that. MI5 want a word about him. Try and clear it up. Another good deed would be to extract an answer from Blackhead about the supply of straw for stuffing medical establishment palliasses. They’re frantic about it in Scotland.’

‘Blackhead’s not raised objection to that?’

‘He says straw comes under a special restrictive order. He should be alerted about the evacuation too, so that he can think of difficulties.’

Borrit opened the door, allowing a sharp current of air to drive in from the passages. This was done as a challenge. He leant on the handle, looking rather aggrieved. There were some shouts from the others requiring that the door be shut at once. Borrit pointed to Pennistone and myself. He would not venture to leave without Pennistone, but, to humour him, we both made a move towards the corridor.

‘Come as far as the staff entrance,’ said Pennistone. ‘In case I think of other urgent problems.’

We followed Borrit down the back staircase. On the first floor, Intelligence, in its profuse forms, mingled with Staff Duties, a grumpy crowd, most of them, especially the Regulars (‘If they were any good, they wouldn’t be here,’ Pennistone said) and a few Operational sections, on the whole less immediately active ones, the more vital tending to have rooms on the floor above, close to the generals and higher-grade brigadiers. A few civilian hauts fonctionnaires, as Pennistone called them, were also located here, provided with a strip of carpet as they rose in rank; at the highest level — so it was rumoured — even a cupboard containing a chamber pot. The Army Council Room was on this floor, where three or four colonels, Finn among them, had also managed to find accommodation. The great double staircase leading from the marble hall of the main entrance (over which the porter, Vavassor, presided in a blue frock coat with scarlet facings and top hat with gold band) led directly to these, as it were, state apartments. On the ground floor, technical branches and those concerned with supply rubbed shoulders with all sorts and conditions, internal security contacts of a more or less secret sort, Public Relations, typing pools, dispatch-riders, Home Guard.

‘Kielkiewicz has heard of Kafka,’ said Pennistone, as we reached the foot of the stairs.

‘You put them all through their literary paces as a matter of routine?’

‘He laughed yesterday when I used the term Kafka-esque.’

‘Wasn’t that rather esoteric?’

‘It just slipped out.’

Pennistone laughed at the thought. Though absolutely dedicated to his duties with the Poles, he also liked getting as much amusement out of the job as possible.

‘In the course of discussing English sporting prints with Bobrowski,’ he said, ‘a subject he’s rather keen on. It turned out the Empire style in Poland is known as “Duchy of Warsaw”. That’s nice, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t look forward to this tussle with Blackhead about palliasse straw — by the way, what happened in the war about the Air Cooperation Squadron and which command it came under?’

‘One of my notable achievements up there was to settle that. But go and see Q (Ops.). That’s the big stuff now. Then have a talk with Finn. Where’s the driver?’

Borrit gave a shout. An AT came quickly from behind the screen that stood on one side of the untidy cramped little hall, crowded with people showing identity cards as they passed into the building. She glanced at us without interest, then went through the door into the street.

‘Not bad,’ said Borrit. ‘I hadn’t seen her before.’

Very young, she was one of those girls with a dead white complexion and black hair, the only colouring capable of rising above the boundlessly unbecoming hue of khaki. Instead of the usual ATS tunic imposed by some higher authority anxious that the Corps should look, if not as masculine as possible, at least as Sapphic, she had managed to provide herself, as some did, with soldier’s battledress, paradoxically more adapted to the female figure. It had to be admitted that occasional intrusion at ‘official level’ of an attractive woman was something rather different from, more exciting than, the intermittent pretty secretary or waitress of peacetime, perhaps more subtly captivating from a sense that you and she belonged to the same complicated organism, in this case the Army. At the same time, Borrit’s comment was one of routine rather than particular interest, because, according to himself, he lived a rather melancholy emotional life. His wife, a Canadian, had died about ten years before, and, while Borrit marketed fruit in Europe, their children preferred to live with grandparents in Canada. His own relations with the opposite sex took an exclusively commercial form.

‘I’ve never had a free poke in my life,’ he said. ‘Subject doesn’t seem to arise when you’re talking to a respectable woman.’

He had confided this remark to the room in general. In spite of existing in this amatory twilight, he presented a reasonably cheerful exterior to the world, largely sustained by such phrases as ‘What news on the Rialto?’ or ‘Bring on the dancing girls’. He and Pennistone followed the driver to where the Section’s car was parked outside. I turned away from the staff entrance and made for Q (Ops.).

The new flight of stairs led down into the bowels of the earth, the caves and potholes of the basement and sub-basement, an underground kingdom comparable with that inhabited by Widmerpool. It might have been thought that Mime and his fellow Nibelungen haunted these murky subterranean regions, but they were in fact peopled by more important, less easily replaceable beings, many of whom practised mysteries too momentous to be exposed (in a target registering already more than a dozen outers, though as yet no bull’s eye) to the comparative uncertainties of life at street level or above. Here, for example, the unsleeping sages of Movement Control spun out their lives, sightless magicians deprived eternally of the light of the sun, while, by their powerful arts, they projected armies or individual over land and sea or through the illimitable wastes of the air. The atmosphere below seemed to demand such highly coloured metaphor, thoughts of magic and necromancy bringing Dr Trelawney to mind, and the rumours in the earlier war that he had been executed in the Tower as a spy. I wondered if the Good Doctor, as Moreland used to call him, were still alive. Indiscreet observance of the rites of his cult, especially where these involved exotic drugs, could bring trouble in this war, though retribution was likely to stop short of the firing squad. Moreland himself, with Mrs Maclintick, had left London months before on some governmentally sponsored musical tour of the provinces.

Like a phantasm in one of Dr Trelawney’s own narcotically produced reveries, I flitted down passage after passage, from layer to layer of imperfect air-conditioning, finding the right door at last in an obscure corner. Q (Ops.) Colonel was speaking on the scrambler when I entered the room, so I made as if to withdraw. He vigorously beckoned me to stay, continuing to talk for a few seconds about some overseas force. Abyssinia might have been a good guess. He hung up. I explained where I came from and put myself at his disposal.