Anthony Powell: Soldier's Art

“Bit of a sweat to have to get up like this night after night,” he said. “Shall we take a turn up the field?”

His sympathy was not without a touch of despair. Few officers could have looked less on their toes than himself at that moment.

“Wait till I’ve checked this bren.”

The section was found correct. Bithel and I strolled across the grass towards a broken-down cricket pavilion or changing room, a small wooden structure, not much more than a hut. The place had been the cause of trouble lately, because Biggs, Staff Officer Physical Training, had mislaid the key just at the moment when the civilian owners of the requisitioned sports field wanted to store benches or garden seats there. Widmerpool had complained greatly of time wasted on this matter, and, with justice, had been very cross with Biggs, to whom the hut and its key had become almost an obsession. I tried the door to see if it had been properly locked again after the key had been found and the seats moved there. It would not open. Biggs must have seen to that.

The noise of the cannonade round about was deepening. An odour like smouldering rubber imposed a rank, unsavoury surface smell on lesser exhalations of soot and smoke. Towards the far side of the town — the direction of the harbour — thin greenish rays of searchlight beams rapidly described wide intersecting arcs backwards and forwards against the eastern horizon, their range ever reducing, ever extending, as they sliced purposefully across each other’s tracks. Then, all at once, these several zigzagging angles of light would form an apex on the same patch of sky, creating a small elliptical compartment through which, once in a way, rapidly darted a tiny object, moving like an insect confined in a bottle. As if reacting in deliberately regulated unison to the searchlights’ methodical fluctuations, shifting masses of cloudbank alternately glowed and faded, constantly redesigning by that means half-a-dozen intricately pastelled compositions of black and lilac, grey and saffron, pink and gold. Out of this resplendent firmament — which, transcendentally speaking, seemed to threaten imminent revelation from on high — slowly descended, like Japanese lanterns at a fete, a score or more of flares released by the raiding planes. Clustered together in twos and threes, they drifted at first aimlessly in the breeze, after a time scarcely losing height, only swaying a little this way and that, metamorphosed into all but stationary lamps, apparently suspended by immensely elongated wires attached to an invisible ceiling. Suddenly, as if at a prearranged signal for the climax of the spectacle — a set-piece at midnight — high swirling clouds of inky smoke rose from below to meet these flickering airborne torches. At ground level, too, irregular knots of flame began to blaze away like a nest of nocturnal forges in the Black Country. All the world was dipped in a livid, unearthly refulgence, theatrical yet sinister, a light neither of night nor day, the penumbra of Pluto’s frontiers. The reek of scorched rubber grew more than ever sickly. Bithel fidgeted with the belt of his mackintosh.

“There’s been a spot of bother about a cheque,” he said,

“Yours?”

“I think that’s what was really keeping me awake as much as lack of those pills. Things may work out all right because I’ve paid up — borrowed a trifle from the Postal Officer, as a matter of fact — but cheques are always a worry. They ought to be abolished.”

“Perhaps they will after the war.”

“That’ll be too late for me,” said Bithel.

He spoke quite seriously.

“Large sum?”

“Matter of a quid or two — but it did bounce.”

“Can’t you keep it quiet?”

“I don’t think the D.A.A.G. knows up to date.”

That was an important factor from Bithel’s point of view. Otherwise Widmerpool might find the opportunity for which he was waiting. I was about to commiserate further, when a deep, rending explosion, that seemed to split the earth, sounded above the regular thud-thud-thud of the guns, vibrations of its crash echoing back in throbbing, shuddering waves from the surrounding hills. Bithel shook his head, his attention distracted for the moment from his own troubles, no doubt worrying enough.

“That must have got home,” he said.

“Sounded like it.”

He began to speak again, then for some reason stopped, apparently changing his mind about the way he was going to put a question. Having evidently decided to frame it in a different form, he made the enquiry with conscious diffidence.

“Told me you were a reader — like me — didn’t you?”

“Yes, I am. I read quite a lot.”

I no longer attempted to conceal the habit, with all its undesirable implications. At least admitting to it put one in a recognisably odd category of persons from whom less need be expected than the normal run.

“I love a good book when I have the time,” said Bithel. “St. John Clarke’s Match Me Such Marvel , that sort of thing. Something serious that takes a long time to get through.”

“Never read that one, as it happens.”

Bithel seemed scarcely aware of my answer. St. John Clarke’s novel was evidently a side issue, not at all the goal at which these ranging shots were aimed. Though rarely possible to guess, when in a mood for intimate conversation, what he would say next, such pronouncements of Bithel’s were always worth attention. Something special was on his mind. When he put the next question, there was a kind of fervour in his voice.

“Ever buy magazines like Chums and the Boy’s Own Paper when you were a nipper?”

“Of course — used to read them in bound annuals as a rule. I’ve a brother-in-law who still does.”

It was Erry’s only vice, though one he tried to keep dark, as showing in himself a lack of earnestness and sense of social obligation. Bithel made some reply, but a sudden concentrated burst of ack-ack fire, as if discharged deliberately for that purpose, drowned his utterance.

“What was that you said?”

Bithel spoke again.

“Still can’t hear.”

He came closer.

“… hero…” he shouted.

“You feel a hero?”

“No … I…”

The noise lessened, but he still had to yell at the top of his voice to make himself heard.

“… always imagined myself the hero of those serials .”

The shouted words were just audible above the clatter of guns. He seemed to think they offered a piece of unparalleled psychological revelation on his own part.

“Every boy does,” I yelled back.

“Everyone?”

He was disappointed at that answer.

“I’m sure my brother-in-law does to this day.”

Bithel was not at all interested in my own, or anyone else’s, brother-in-law’s tendency to self-identification while reading fiction. That was reasonable, because he knew nothing of Erridge’s existence. Besides, he wanted only to talk about himself. Although wholly concentrated on that subject, he remained at the same time apologetic as well as intense.

“Only I was thinking the other night — when Jerry first came over — that I was having the very experience I used to read about as a lad.”

“How do you mean?”

“ ‘Coming under fire for the first time’ — that was always a great moment in the hero’s career. You must remember. Where he ‘showed his mettle,’ as the story usually put it.”

He laughed, as if trying to excuse such reckless flights of fancy, in doing so displaying the double row of Low Comedy teeth.

‘“The rattle of musketry from distant hills’ — ’a little shower of sand churned up by a bullet in front of the redoubt’?”

These conventional phrases from boys’ adventure stories might encourage Bithel to plunge further into observations about life. The clichés did indeed stir him.