The Military Philosophers Read online

  ‘You hadn’t heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘About Betty?’

  ‘Not ill, I hope.’

  It occurred to me she might have been killed in a raid. That could happen to acquaintances and remain unknown to one for months.

  ‘She went off her rocker,’ he said.

  ‘You mean …’

  ‘Just what I say. She’s in the bin.’

  He spoke roughly. The deliberate brutality of the statement was so complete, so designed to let no one, least of all myself, off any of its implications, that it could only be accepted as concealing an abyss of painful feeling. At least, correctly or not, such downright language had to be given the benefit of the doubt in that respect.

  ‘Rather a peach, isn’t she?’

  That was what he had said of her, when I had first seen them together at Umfraville’s night-club, a stage in their relationship when Templer could not remember whether his future wife’s surname was Taylor or Porter. Now, he made no effort to help out the situation. There was nothing whatever to be said in return. I produced a few conventional phrases, none in the least adequate, at the same time feeling rather aggrieved that Templer himself should choose, first, to carry curtness of manner to the point of seeming positively unfriendly; then change to a tone that only long intimacy in the past could justify. Perhaps – thinking over Betty’s demeanour staying with Sir Magnus Dormers – this ultimate disaster was not altogether surprising. Having such cares on his mind could to some extent explain Templer’s earlier unaccommodating manner.

  ‘Just one of those things,’ he said.

  He spoke this time as if a little to excuse himself for what might look like an earlier show of heartlessness.

  ‘To tell the truth, I’m feeling a shade fed up about marriage, women, my job, in fact the whole bag of tricks,’ he said. ‘Then this awful business of one’s age. You keep on getting back to that. If it isn’t one objection, it’s another. “You’re not young enough, old boy.” I’m always being told that nowadays. On top of it all, a bomb hit my flat the other night. I was on Fire Duty at the Ministry. Everybody said what a marvellous piece of luck. Not sure.’

  ‘Did it wreck the place completely?’

  Templer shook his head, indicating not so much lack of damage at the flat, as that he could not bring himself to recapitulate further a subject so utterly tedious and unrewarding.

  ‘You haven’t any good idea where I might go temporarily? I’m living from hand to mouth at the moment with anyone who will put me up.’

  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 d
o 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.

  Michalski, now in his late thirties, had served like Bobrowski with the Polish contingent in France. Of large size, sceptical about most matters, he belonged to the world of industrial design – statuettes for radiator caps and such decorative items – working latterly in Berlin, which had left some mark on him of its bitter individual humour. In fact Pennistone always said talking to Michalski made him feel he was sitting in the Romanisches Café. His father had been a successful portrait painter, and his grandfather before him, stretching back to a long line of itinerant artists wandering over Poland and Saxony.

  ‘Painting pictures that are now being destroyed as quickly as possible,’ Michalski said.

  He was accomplished at providing thumbnail sketches of the personalities at the Titian, the former hotel, subdued, Edwardian in tone, where headquarters of the Polish army in exile was established. Uncle Giles had once stayed there in days gone by, a moment when neither the Ufford nor the De Tabley had been able to accommodate him at short notice. ‘I’ll be bankrupt if I ever do it again,’ he had declared afterwards, a financial state all his relations in those days supposed him to be in anyway.

  Horaczko had reached England in a different manner from Michalski, and only after a lot of adventures. As an officer of the Reserve, he had begun the Eastern campaign on horseback, cantering about at the head of a troop of lancers, pennons flying, like one of the sequences of War and Peace, to intercept the advancing German armour. Executive in a Galician petroleum plant, he was younger than Michalski, having – as Pennistone and I agreed – some of the air of the junior lead in a drawing-room comedy, the young lover perhaps. When Poland was overrun on two fronts, Horaczko had avoided capture and internment, probably death, by escaping through Hungary. Both he and Michalski held the rank of second-lieutenant. While I was still speaking to Horaczko on the telephone, our clerk, Corporal Curtis, brought in a lot more stuff to be dealt with, additional, that is, to the formidable pile lying on the desk when I came in from breakfast

  ‘Good morning, Curtis.’

  ‘Good morning, sir.’

  ‘How are things?’

  Curtis, a studious-looking young man, whose military career had been handicapped by weak eyesight, was a henchman of notable efficiency and wide interests. He had once confessed to Pennistone that he had read through the whole of Grote’s History of Greece.

  ‘A rather disturbing letter from the Adjutant-General’s branch, sir.’

  ‘Oh, Lord.’

  ‘But not so bad as my first premonition on reading it. In fact, sir, I all but perpetrated a schoolboy howler in that connexion.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘On the subject of redundant Polish officers taking commissions in West African units of our own forces – Accra, sir – the AG. 10 clerk spoke indistinctly, as well as using what I understand to be an incorrect pronunciation, so that, to cut a long story short, sir, the place was first transcribed by me as Agra. The error did not take long to be righted, but it was a disturbing misconstruction.’

  By the time I had run through the new lot of papers Pennistone had returned. He reported that Finn – after a word with the more sagacious of the two brigadiers – had been told to consult the Major-General in charge of our Directorate. I reported that Michalski and Horaczko had telephoned.

  ‘Ring Horaczko back, otherwise Bobrowski will make him persecute us all day. Tell him we’ll let him know the very moment anything comes through that his general should have. Don’t worry about Michalski. I’ll be seeing him. I’m off to the Titian at once to get Kielkicwicz’s reactions.’

  ‘What were the Colonel’s?’

  ‘He’s in one of his flaps.’

  Sudden pressures of this kind always upset Finn, whose temperament unpredictably fused agitation with calm; violent inner antagonism of these warring characteristics having presumably motivated whatever he had done – killed goodness knows how many enemy machine-gunners with a bayonet? – to be awarded his VC. No doubt the comparative lack of precedent for the situation now arisen in Persia, its eccentric deficiency of warning at the diplomatic level, general departure from normal routine – even from official good manners so far as the Soviet was concerned – discomposed Finn, a man both systematic and courteous. Although not a professional soldier, he had, one way and another, seen a good deal of military service, having, like Dempster, stayed on for a while in the army after the Armistice in 1918; then been re-employed in the rank of major as early as 1938. In short, he had enjoyed plenty of opportunity to observe military problems, which on the whole he seemed to prefer to semi-political ones, like the evacuation of the Poles.

  ‘He’ll be all right when he’s used to the idea,’ said Pennistone. ‘At first he could consider nothing short of flying out there at once and arranging it all himself.’

  He reached for his cap again, unhooking it from the wall with the crook of a walking stick. Then he returned the watch to the breast pocket of his tunic.

  ‘Have a talk with Q (Ops.) Colonel,’ he said.

  Borrit, who looked after the Netherlands, passed on his way towards the door.

  ‘Borrit…’

  ‘Yes, Pennistone?’

  ‘You’re not making for the car?’

  Borrit’s small fair moustache was set in a serious melancholy face, deeply tanned, as if he had spent much of his life under a blazing sun. Perhaps he had. He had come to the Section from employment as one of the Intelligence Officers at Headquarters on the Gold Coast, owing his knowledge of Spanish – at first naturally steering him to duties with the Neutrals – to many years spent on the wholesale side of the fruit trade. Language as usual proving of less consequence than faci
lity for handling an ‘opposite number’ with tact, he had in due course gravitated to the more responsible job with an Ally. Stebbings, who took Borrit’s place with the Spaniards and Latin-Americans, was also, oddly enough, in the fruit business, though on the retail side, where he had a nervous breakdown when his firm went into bankruptcy at the outbreak of war. If addressed sharply, Stebbings’s left eyelid twitched, probably in consequence of that collapse. He remained always rather afraid of Finn. All the same, he tackled his duties with judgment. Stebbings was recently married to a Portuguese, a fact that continually worried the Security people. Borrit, on the other hand, was a widower. He must have been forty, perhaps a shade more, because he had seen action in the first war, though only as a result of having falsified his age to the recruiting authorities. During the occasional lulls of work Borrit and Stebbings would talk earnestly of fruit. Pennistone and Borrit had a standing rivalry over the Section’s car – a vehicle of inconceivably cramped seating accommodation – for the first use in the morning.

  ‘Wait a moment…’ said Pennistone.

  ‘I’ll drop you,’ said Borrit. ‘If you’re on the way to the Titian.’

  Pennistone turned to me again.

  ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Q (Ops.).’

  ‘Ah, yes – the point is there’s only the traditional one man and a boy at Meshed.’

  ‘That’s the key name?’

  ‘We shall be hearing a lot about Meshed – and resorts like Yangi-yul and Alma Ata. Some sort of a reception centre will have to be rigged up. There may be quite a party to deal with once they start.’

  ‘What am I to say to Q (Ops.)?’

  ‘Just ventilate the question. They may have other ideas to ours.’

  ‘They’re presumably prepared for this. They were on the distribution.’