Anthony Powell - The Military Philosophers

‘Ah, yes …’

He began to sort out papers, putting some away in a drawer. He gave an immediate impression, not only of knowing what he was about himself, but also of possessing the right sort of determination to use any information available from other sources. Inefficiency was rare in the building, but there was inevitably the occasional boor or temperamental obscurantist.

‘Polish evacuation — here we are — these troops held by our Russian Allies since their invasion of our Polish Allies in 1939. They’ve retained their own units and formations?’

‘We understand some in Central Asia have, or at least certain units have already been brigaded after release from prison camps. General Anders is organizing this.’

‘The lot are in Central Asia?’

‘At least eight or nine thousand Polish officers remain untraced.’

‘Rather a large deficiency.’

‘That’s a minimum, sir. It’s been put as high as fifteen thousand.’

‘Any idea where they are?’

‘Franz Josef Land’s been suggested, air.’

‘Within the Arctic Circle?’

‘Yes.’

He looked straight in front of him.

‘Unlikely they’ll be included in this evacuation, whatever its extent?’

‘Seems most unlikely, sir.’

‘Just the figures I have here?*

He pushed them over.

‘So far as we know at present. On the other hand, anything might happen.’

‘Let’s have a look at the map again … Yangi-yul … Alma Ata … There’s been constant pressure for the release of these troops?’

‘All the time — also to discover the whereabouts of the missing officers.’

He wrote some notes.

‘Lease-Lend …’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘You see the consignment papers?’

‘From time to time some minor item is earmarked for the Polish forces in Russia and the papers pass through our hands.’

Once, when one of these interminable lists of weapons and vehicles, matérial of war for the Eastern Front, had come to us, Pennistone had compared the diplomatic representations of the moment, directed to obtaining the release of the immobilized Polish army, with a very small powder in a very large spoon of Lease-Lend jam. Now, the Germans penetrating into the country on an extended front, these solicitations seemed at last to have attracted official Soviet attention. This must have been four or five months before the siege of Stalingrad. Q (Ops.) Colonel ran through facts and figures, asked a few additional questions, then shook the papers together and clipped them back into their file.

‘Right?’

‘Right, sir.’

He took up the green telephone again.

‘If the London Poles have anything to add to what I have here already, let me know.’

‘We will, sir.’

He ‘went over’ on the scrambler with whomever he was talking to, and, as I withdrew, could have been dealing with Icelandic matters. Like Orpheus or Herakles returning from the silent shades of Tartarus, I set off upstairs again, the objective now Finn’s room on the second floor.

Outside the Army Council Room, side by side on the passage wall, hung, so far as I knew, the only pictures in the building, a huge pair of subfusc massively framed oil-paintings, subject and technique of which I could rarely pass without re-examination. The murkily stiff treatment of these two unwontedly elongated canvases, although not in fact executed by Horace Isbister RA, recalled his brush- work and treatment, a style that already germinated a kind of low-grade nostalgia on account of its naïve approach and total disregard for any ‘modern’ development in the painter’s art. The merging harmonies — dark brown, dark red, dark blue — depicted incidents in the wartime life of King George V: Where Belgium greeted Britain , showing the bearded monarch welcoming Albert, King of the Belgians, on arrival in this country as an exile from his own: Merville, December 1st, 1914, in which King George was portrayed chatting with President Poincare, this time both with beards, the President wearing a hat somewhat resembling the head-dress of an avocat in the French lawcourts. Perhaps it was fur, on account of the cold. This time too busy to make a fresh assessment, aesthetic or sartorial, I passed the picture by. Finn’s door was locked. He might still be with the General, more probably was himself making a round of branches concerned with the evacuation. There was nothing for it but Blackhead, and restrictions on straw for hospital palliasses.

The stairs above the second floor led up into a rookery of lesser activities, some fairly obscure of definition. On these higher storeys dwelt the Civil branches and their subsidiaries, Finance, Internal Administration, Passive Air Defence, all diminishing in official prestige as the altitude steepened. Finally the explorer converged on attics under the eaves, where crusty hermits lunched frugally from paper bags, amongst crumb-powdered files and documents ineradicably tattooed with the circular brand of the teacup. At these heights, vestiges of hastily snatched meals endured throughout all seasons, eternal as the unmelted upland snows. Here, under the leads, like some unjustly confined prisoner of the Council of Ten, lived Blackhead. It was a part of the building rarely penetrated, for even Blackhead himself preferred on the whole to make forays on others, rather than that his own fastness should be invaded.

‘You’ll never get that past Blackhead,’ Pennistone had said, during my first week with the Section.

‘Who’s Blackhead?’

‘Until you have dealings with Blackhead, the word “bureaucrat” will have conveyed no meaning to you. He is the super -tchenovnik of the classical Russian novel. Even this building can boast no one else quite like him. As a special treat you can negotiate with Blackhead this afternoon on the subject of the issue of screwdrivers and other tools to Polish civilian personnel temporarily employed at military technical establishments.’

This suggested caricature, Pennistone’s taste for presenting individuals in dramatic form. On the contrary, the picture was, if anything, toned down from reality. At my former Divisional Headquarters, the chief clerk, Warrant Officer Class 1 Mr Diplock, had seemed a fair performer in the field specified. To transact business even for a few minutes with Blackhead was immediately to grasp how pitifully deficient Diplock had, in fact, often proved himself in evolving a really impregnable system of obstruction and preclusion; awareness of such falling short of perfection perhaps telling on his nerves and finally causing him to embezzle and desert.

‘Blackhead is a man apart,’ said Pennistone. ‘Even his colleagues are aware of that. His minutes have the abstract quality of pure extension.’

It was true. Closely ‘in touch’ with the Finance branch, he was, for some reason, not precisely categorized as one of them. Indeed, all precision was lacking where the branch to which Blackhead belonged was in question, even the house telephone directory, usually unequivocal, becoming all at once vague, even shifty. The phrase ‘inspection and collation of governmental civil and economic administration in relation to Allied military liaison’ had once been used by a member of one of the Finance branches themselves, then hastily withdrawn as if too explicit, something dangerous for security reasons to express so openly. Such prevarication hinted at the possibility that even his fellows by now could not exactly determine — anyway define to a layman — exactly what Blackhead really did. His rank, too, usually so manifest in every civil servant, seemed in Blackhead’s case to have become blurred by time and attrition. To whom was he responsible? Whom — if anyone — did he transcend? Obviously in the last resort he was subservient to the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for War, and Blackhead himself would speak of Assistant Under Secretaries — even of Principals — as if their ranks represented unthinkable heights of official attainment. On the other hand, none of these people seemed to have the will, even the power, to control him. It was as if Blackhead, relatively humble though his grading might be, had become an anonymous immanence of all their kind, a fetish, the Voodoo deity of the whole Civil Service to be venerated and placated, even if better — safer — hidden away out of sight: the mystic holy essence incarnate of arguing, encumbering, delaying, hairsplitting, all for the best of reasons.