The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [64]
‘I believe you’ve been having a party with the girls, Colonel Ramos,’ said Van der Voort. ‘Staying up too late. Isn’t that true, old man?’
Ramos having, as already stated, no great command of the language, understood only that some enquiry, more or less kind, had been made about his health. He delighted Van der Voort by nodding his head vigorously in affirmation.
‘You’re new to London, but, my God, you haven’t taken long to make your way about,’ Van der Voort went on. ‘How do you find it? Do you like the place?’
‘Very good, very good,’ said Colonel Ramos.
‘Where have you been so far? Burlington Gardens? Have you seen the ladies there? Smeets and I always take a look on the way back from lunch. You ought to recce Burlington Gardens, Colonel.’
‘Yes, yes.’
Colonel Ramos nodded and smiled, laughing almost as much as Van der Voort himself. By this time we were all sitting on the floor of the plane, which was without any sort of interior furnishing. Finn and I had placed ourselves a little way from the rest, because he wanted to run through the programme again. Colonel Chu, who greatly enjoyed all forms of teasing, edged himself across to Ramos and Van der Voort, evidently wanting to join in. He was not in general very popular with his colleagues.
‘Like all his race, he’s dreadfully conceited,’ Kucherman had said. ‘Vaniteux – you never saw anything like them. I have been there more than once and insist they are the vainest people on earth.’
Chu was certainly pleased with himself. He began to finger the scarf Ramos was wearing. The Brazilian, for a man who looked as if he might vomit at any moment, took the broad witticisms of the other two in very good part. He probably understood very little of what was said. Watching the three of them, one saw what Chu had meant by saying he could ‘make himself young’. Probably he would have fitted in very tolerably as a boy at Eton, had he been able to persuade the school authorities to accept him for a while. He left his London appointment before the end of the War and returned to China, where he was promoted major-general. About three years later, so I was told, he was killed commanding one of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Divisions at Mukden. Chu must have been in his early forties then, no doubt still prepared to pass as a schoolboy. We floated out over a brilliant shining sea.
‘They’re not to be shown Pluto,’ said Finn. ‘I bet one and all of them make a bee-line for it. They’re as artful as a cartload of monkeys when it comes to breaking the rules.’
Pluto – Pipe Line Under The Ocean, appropriately recalling the Lord of the Underworld – was the system, an ingenious one, by which troops in a state of mobility were supplied with oil.
‘Not a hope they won’t see Pluto,’ repeated Finn gloomily.
That sort of thing sometimes got on his mind. He was still worrying about Pluto when we landed at the army airfield. Once more the military attachés were packed into cars. I was in the last one with Prasad, Al Sharqui and Gauthier de Graef. Kucherman, in his capacity as great industrial magnate, had been recalled to Brussels to confer with the new Government, so Gauthier had come on the tour in his place. The Belgians were heavily burdened with economic problems. They had had no Quisling figure to be taken seriously during the occupation, but their various Resistance movements were, some of them, inclined to be fractious. Gauthier was for taking a firm line with them. Prasad, next door to him, had only come with us owing to his own personal desire to do so. His creed and status at home made it doubtful whether it were permissible for him to take part in an expedition that would inevitably lead to eating in public. I had special instructions to see his requirements in the way of food and accommodation were strictly observed. Al Sharqui, rather shy in this hurly-burly of nationalities and generals, came from one of the Arab states. Like Prasad, he was a major.
‘This is like arriving on another planet,’ said Gauthier de Graef.
He was right. It was all very strange, incomparably strange. The company one was with certainly did not decrease this sense of fantasy. More personal sensations were harder to define, took time to resolve. I cannot remember whether it was the day we arrived or later that things crystallized. We were bowling along through Normandy and a region of fortified farms. Afterwards, in memory, the apple orchards were all in blossom, like isolated plantations on which snow for some unaccountable reason had fallen, light glinting between the tree trunks. But it was already November. There can have been no blossom. Blossom was a mirage. Autumnal sunshine, thin hard, penetrating, must have created that scenic illusion kindling white and silver sparkles in branches and foliage. What you see conditions feelings, not what is. For me the country was in blossom. At any season the dark ancientness of those massive granges, their stone walls loop-holed with arrow-slits, would have been mesmeric enough. Now, their mysterious aspect was rendered even more enigmatic by a surrounding wrack of armoured vehicles in multiform stages of dissolution. This residue was almost always concentrated within a comparatively small area, in fact where-ever, a month or two before, an engagement had been fought out. Then would come stretches of quite different country, fields, woodland, streams, to all intents untouched by war.