The Soldier's Art - Anthony Powell [38]
Outside, on cornices and parapets of government buildings, starlings in thousands chattered and quarrelled. I was aware of that dazed feeling that is part of the impact of coming on leave. I read through the document again, trying to compose my mind to its meaning. This was like being “kept in” at school. “… the items under (i) are obtainable on indent (A.B.55) which is the ordinary requisition of supplies … the items under (iii) and other items required to supplement the ration so as to provide variety and admit of the purchase of seasonable produce, and which are paid for with money provided by the Commuted Ration Allowance and Cash Allowance (iii above) … the officer i/c Supplies renders a return (A. F. B. 179), which shows the quantities and prices of rations actually issued in kind to the unit during the month, from which their total value is calculated …”
The instruction covered a couple of foolscap pages. I remembered being told never to write “and which,” but the mere grammar used by the author was by no means just most formidable side. It was not the words that were difficult. The words, on the whole, were fairly familiar. Giving them some sort of conviction in translation was the problem; conveying that particular tone sounded in official manifestos. Through the backwoods of this bureaucratic jungle, or the like, Widmerpool was hunting down Mr. Diplock, in relentless safari. Such distracting thoughts had to be put from the mind. I chose la plume de ma tante in preference to the typewriter, typescript imparting an awful bareness to language of any kind, even one’s own. For a time I sweated away. Some sort of a version at last appeared. I read it through several times, making corrections. It did not sound ideally idiomatic. French; but then the original did not sound exactly idiomatic English. After embodying a few final improvements, I opened the door a crack.
“Come in, come in,” said the captain. “Have you finished? I thought you might have succumbed. It’s dreadfully stuffy in there.”
He was sitting with another officer, also a captain, tall, fair, rather elegant. A blue fore-and-aft cap lay beside him with the lion-and-unicorn General Service badge. I passed my translation across the desk to the I. Corps captain. He took it, and, rising from his chair, turned to the other man.
“I’ll be back in a moment, David,” he said – and to me: “Take a seat while I show this to Finn.”
He went out of the room. The other officer nodded to me and laughed. It was Pennistone. We had met on a train during an earlier leave of mine and had talked of Vigny. We had talked of all sorts of other things, too, that seemed to have passed out of my life for a long time. I remembered now Pennistone had insisted his own military employments were unusual. No doubt the Headquarters in which I now found myself represented the sort of world in which he habitually functioned.
“Splendid,” he said. “Of course we agreed to meet as an exercise of the will. I’m ashamed to say I’d forgotten until now. Your own moral determination does you credit. I congratulate you. Or is it just one of those eternal recurrences of Nietzsche, which one gets so used to? Have you come to work here?”
I explained the reason for my presence in the building,
“So you may be joining the Free Frogs.”
“And you?”
“I look after the Poles.”
“Do they have a place like this too?”
“Oh, no. The Poles are dealt with as a Power. They have an ambassador, a military attaché, all that. The point about France is that we still recognise the Vichy Government. The other Allied Governments are those in exile over here in London. That is why the Free French have their own special mission.”
“You’ve just come to see them?”
“To discuss some odds and ends of Polish affairs that overlap with Free French matters.”
We talked for a while. The other captain returned.
“Finn wants to see you,” he said.
I followed him along the passage into a room where an officer was sitting behind a desk covered with papers. The I. Corps captain announced my name and withdrew, I had left my cap in the other office, so, on entering, could not salute, but, with the formality that prevailed in the area where I was serving, came to attention. The major behind the desk seemed surprised at this. He rose very slowly from his desk, and, keeping his eye on me all the time, came round to the front and shook hands. He was small, cleanshaved, almost square in shape, with immensely broad shoulders, large head, ivory-coloured face, huge nose. His grey eyes were set deep back in their sockets. He looked like an enormous bird, an ornithological specimen very different from Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson, kindly but at the same time immensely more powerful. I judged him in his middle fifties. He wore an old leather-buttoned service-dress tunic, with a V.C., L