Anthony Powell - Soldier's Art

He fixed me with his eye.

“Care to take the job on?”

“Yes — but, as I explained, I’m no great master of the language.”

He did not reply. Instead, he opened a drawer of the desk from which he took a document. He handed this to me. Then he rose and went to a door on the other side of the room. It gave on to a smaller room, almost a cupboard surrounded by dark green metal safes. In one corner was a little table on which stood a typewriter in its rubber cover. A chair was beside it.

“Make a French translation of these instructions,” he said. “Subsistence Allowance is frais d’alimentation. Here is paper — and a typewriter, should you use one. Alternatively, here too is la plume de ma tante.”

Smiling not unkindly, he shut me in. I settled down to examine the printed sheet handed to me. It turned out to be an Army Form, one specifying current regulations governing issue, or non-issue, of rations to troops in the field. At first sight the prose did not seem to make much sense in English; I saw at once there was little hope of my own French improving it. Balzac on provincial typesetting was going to be nothing to this. However, I sat down and worked away, because I wanted the job badly.

Outside, on cornices and parapets of government buildings, starlings in thousands chattered and quarrelled. I was aware of that dazed feeling that is part of the impact of coming on leave. I read through the document again, trying to compose my mind to its meaning. This was like being “kept in” at school. “… the items under (i) are obtainable on indent (A.B.55) which is the ordinary requisition of supplies … the items under (iii) and other items required to supplement the ration so as to provide variety and admit of the purchase of seasonable produce, and which are paid for with money provided by the Commuted Ration Allowance and Cash Allowance (iii above) … the officer i/c Supplies renders a return (A. F. B. 179), which shows the quantities and prices of rations actually issued in kind to the unit during the month, from which their total value is calculated …”

The instruction covered a couple of foolscap pages. I remembered being told never to write “and which,” but the mere grammar used by the author was by no means just most formidable side. It was not the words that were difficult. The words, on the whole, were fairly familiar. Giving them some sort of conviction in translation was the problem; conveying that particular tone sounded in official manifestos. Through the backwoods of this bureaucratic jungle, or the like, Widmerpool was hunting down Mr. Diplock, in relentless safari. Such distracting thoughts had to be put from the mind. I chose la plume de ma tante i n preference to the typewriter, typescript imparting an awful bareness to language of any kind, even one’s own. For a time I sweated away. Some sort of a version at last appeared. I read it through several times, making corrections. It did not sound ideally idiomatic. French; but then the original did not sound exactly idiomatic English. After embodying a few final improvements, I opened the door a crack.

“Come in, come in,” said the captain. “Have you finished? I thought you might have succumbed. It’s dreadfully stuffy in there.”

He was sitting with another officer, also a captain, tall, fair, rather elegant. A blue fore-and-aft cap lay beside him with the lion-and-unicorn General Service badge. I passed my translation across the desk to the I. Corps captain. He took it, and, rising from his chair, turned to the other man.

“I’ll be back in a moment, David,” he said — and to me: “Take a seat while I show this to Finn.”

He went out of the room. The other officer nodded to me and laughed. It was Pennistone. We had met on a train during an earlier leave of mine and had talked of Vigny. We had talked of all sorts of other things, too, that seemed to have passed out of my life for a long time. I remembered now Pennistone had insisted his own military employments were unusual. No doubt the Headquarters in which I now found myself represented the sort of world in which he habitually functioned.

“Splendid,” he said. “Of course we agreed to meet as an exercise of the will. I’m ashamed to say I’d forgotten until now. Your own moral determination does you credit. I congratulate you. Or is it just one of those eternal recurrences of Nietzsche, which one gets so used to? Have you come to work here?”

I explained the reason for my presence in the building,

“So you may be joining the Free Frogs.”

“And you?”

“I look after the Poles.”

“Do they have a place like this too?”

“Oh, no. The Poles are dealt with as a Power. They have an ambassador, a military attaché, all that. The point about France is that we still recognise the Vichy Government. The other Allied Governments are those in exile over here in London. That is why the Free French have their own special mission.”

“You’ve just come to see them?”

“To discuss some odds and ends of Polish affairs that overlap with Free French matters.”

We talked for a while. The other captain returned.

“Finn wants to see you,” he said.

I followed him along the passage into a room where an officer was sitting behind a desk covered with papers. The I. Corps captain announced my name and withdrew, I had left my cap in the other office, so, on entering, could not salute, but, with the formality that prevailed in the area where I was serving, came to attention. The major behind the desk seemed surprised at this. He rose very slowly from his desk, and, keeping his eye on me all the time, came round to the front and shook hands. He was small, cleanshaved, almost square in shape, with immensely broad shoulders, large head, ivory-coloured face, huge nose. His grey eyes were set deep back in their sockets. He looked like an enormous bird, an ornithological specimen very different from Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson, kindly but at the same time immensely more powerful. I judged him in his middle fifties. He wore an old leather-buttoned service-dress tunic, with a V.C., Légion d’Honneur, Croix de Guerre avec palmes, and a couple of other foreign decorations I could not identify.

“Sit down, Jenkins,” he said.

He spoke quietly, almost whispered. I sat down. He began to fumble among his papers.

“I had a note from your Divisional Commander,” he said. “Where is it? Draw that chair a bit nearer. I’m rather deaf in this ear. How is General Liddament?”

“Very well, sir.”

“Knocking the Division into shape?”

“That’s it, sir.”

“Territorial Division, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He’ll get a Corps soon.”

“You think so, sir?”

Major Finn nodded He seemed a little embarrassed about something. Although he gave out an extraordinary sense of his own physical strength and endurance, there was also something mild, gentle, almost undecided, about his manner.

“You know why you’ve been sent here?” he asked.

“It was explained, sir.”

He lowered his eyes to what I now saw was my translation. He began to read it to himself, his lips moving faintly. After a line or two of doing this, it became clear to We what the answer was going to be. The only question that remained was how long the agony would be drawn out. Major Finn read the whole of my version through to himself: then, rather nobly, read it through again. This was either to give dramatic effect, or to rouse himself t0 the required state of tension for making an unwelcome announcement. Those, at least, were the reasons that occurred to me at the time, because he must almost certainly have gone through the piece when the captain had first brought it to him. I appreciated the gesture, which indicated he was doing the best he could for me, including not sparing himself. When he came to the end for the second time, he looked across the desk, and, shaking his head, sighed and smiled.