The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [88]
I checked the Allied military attachés as they arrived. They were punctual, on the whole well behaved, whispering together with the air of children at a village Sunday school, a little overawed at the promised visit of the bishop of the diocese, glancing uneasily at the enigmatic sculptural scenes looming above them on the tombs. Among them, as I have said, were many absences and new faces. One regretted Van der Voort. A churchly background would have enhanced his pristine Netherlandish countenance. Colonel Hlava had returned to Prague. ‘Russia is our Big Brother,’ (the phrase had not yet developed Orwellian overtones) he had remarked to me some weeks before he left; even so, when the moment came to shake hands for the last time, he said: ‘We can only hope.’ Hlava was promoted major-general when he got home. Then, a year or two later, he was put under house arrest. He was still under house arrest when he died of heart failure; a flying ace and man one greatly liked.
Kucherman had gone back to a ministerial portfolio in the Belgian Government, his place taken by Bruylant, a quiet professional soldier, with musical leanings, though less marked than Hlava’s and not of the sort to be expressed actively by playing duets with Dempster, had Dempster still been with the Section, not returned to his Norwegian timber. In place of Marinko – out of a job like the rest of his countrymen who had supported Mihailovich’s Resistance Movement, rather than Tito’s – was a newly arrived, long haired, jack-booted young ‘Partisan’ colonel, who talked a little French and, although possessing a Polish-sounding name, designated himself as ‘Macedoin’. Macedonia was perhaps where Szymanski had come from too. One wondered what had happened to him.
Examining the neighbouring monuments more closely, I was delighted to find among them more than one of those celebrated in The Ingoldsby Legends, a favourite book of mine about the time when we lived at Stonehurst. There, for example, only a few feet away from where the military attachés sat, several figures far larger than life were enacting a battle scene in which a general had been struck from the saddle by a cannon ball, as his charger bore him at a furious gallop across the path of a kilted private from some Highland regiment. There could be no doubt whatever this was:
‘… Sir Ralph Abercrombie going to tumble
With a thump that alone were enough to dispatch him
If the Scotchman in front shouldn’t happen to catch him.’
Stendhal had seen these monuments when he visited London.
‘Style lourd,’ he noted. ‘Celui d’Abercromby bien ridicule.’
Nevertheless, one felt glad it remained there. It put on record what was then officially felt about death in battle, begging all that large question of why the depiction of action in the graphic arts had fallen in our own day almost entirely into the hands of the Surrealists.
‘La jolie figure de Moore rend son tombeau meilleur,’ Stendhal thought.
This was against the wall by the side door through which we had entered the Cathedral, at right angles to the Abercrombie memorial. Less enormously vehement, this group too had its own exuberance of style, though in quite another mood. Here a sinister charade was being enacted by several figures not so gigantic in size. What they were doing was not immediately clear, until Barham’s lines threw light on them too:
‘Where the man and the Angel have got Sir John Moore,
And are quietly letting him down through the floor.
I looked about for ‘that queer-looking horse that is rolling on Ponsonby’, but disappointingly failed to identify either man or beast in the immediate vicinity of the recess. The field of vision was too limited, only a short length of the nave to be viewed, where it joined the more or less circular area under the dome. However, recognition of these other episodes, so often pictured imaginatively in the past when the book had been read aloud by my mother