The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [60]
‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘I must insist that things are taking a very interesting turn from the news in this morning’s papers.’
‘Insist’ was a favourite word of Kucherman’s. He used it without the absolute imperative the verb usually implied in English. He was referring to what afterwards became known as the Officers’ Plot, the action of the group of German generals and others who had unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Hitler. They had failed, but even the fact that they had tried was encouraging.
‘Colonel von Stauffenberg sounds a brave man.’
‘I have met him several times,’ said Kucherman.
‘The right ideas?’
‘I should insist, certainly. We last talked at a shooting party in the Pripet marshes. Prince Theodoric was also staying in the house, as it happened. Our Polish host is now buried in a communal grave not so many miles north of our sport. The Prince is an exile whose chance of getting back to his own country looks very remote. I sit in Eaton Square wondering what is happening to my business affairs.’
‘You think Prince Theodoric’s situation is hopeless?’
‘Your people will have to make a decision soon between his Resistance elements and the Partisans.’
‘And we’ll come down on the side of the Partisans?’
‘That’s what it looks increasingly like.’
‘Not too pleasant an affair.’
‘There’s going to be a lot of unpleasantness before we’ve finished,’ said Kucherman. ‘Perhaps in my own country too.’
When we had done our business Kucherman came to the top of the stairs. The news had made him restless. Although quiet in manner, he gave the impression at the same time of having bottled up inside him immense reserves of nervous energy. It was, in any case, impossible not to feel excitement about the way events were moving.
‘This caving in of the German military caste – that is the significant thing. An attempt to assassinate the Head of the State on the part of a military group is a serious matter in any country – but in Germany how unthinkable. After all, the German army, its officer corps, is almost a family affair.’
Kucherman listened to this conventional enough summary of the situation, then suddenly became very serious.
‘That’s something you always exaggerate over here,’ he said.
‘What, Germans and the army? Surely there must be four or five hundred families, the members of which, whatever their individual potentialities, can only adopt the army as a career? Anyway that was true before the Treaty of Versailles. Where they might be successful, say at the Law or in business, they became soldiers. There was no question of the German army not getting the pick. At least that is what one was always told.’
Kucherman remained grave.
‘I don’t mean what you say isn’t true of the Germans,’ he said. ‘Of course it is – anyway up to a point, even in the last twenty years. What you underestimate is the same element in your own country.’
‘Not to any comparable degree.’
Kucherman remained obdurate.
‘I speak of something I have thought about and noticed,’ he said. ‘Your fathers were in the War Office too.’
For the moment – such are the pitfalls of an alien language and alien typifications, however familiar, for Kucherman spoke English and knew England well – it seemed he could only be facetious. I laughed, assuming he was teasing. He had not done so before, but so much optimism in the air may have made him feel a joke was required. He could scarcely be ignorant that nowhere – least of all within the professional army – was the phrase ‘War Office’ one for anything but raillery. Perhaps he had indeed known that and disregarded the fact, because a joke was certainly not intended. Kucherman was a man to make up his own mind. He did not take his ideas second-hand. Possibly, thinking it over that night on Fire Duty, there was even something to be said for his theory; only our incurable national levity made the remark at that moment sound satirical. A grain of truth, not necessarily derogatory, was to be traced in the opinion.
Fire Duty was something that came round at regular intervals. It meant hanging about the building all night, fully dressed, prepared to go on the roof, if the Warning sounded, with the object of extinguishing incendiary bombs that might fall there. These were said to be easily dealt with by use of sand and an instrument like a garden hoe, both of which were provided as equipment. On previous occasions, up to now, no raid had occurred, the hours passing not too unpleasantly with a book. Feeling I needed a change from the seventeenth century and Proust, I had brought Saltykov-Schredin