The Soldier's Art

When, at the start of the whole
business, I bought an army greatcoat, it was at one of those places in the
neighbourhood of Shaftesbury Avenue, where, as well as officers’ kit and
outfits for sport, they hire or sell theatrical costume. The atmosphere within,
heavy with menace like an oriental bazaar, hinted at clandestine bargains,
furtive even if not unlawful commerce, heightening the tension of an already
novel undertaking. The deal was negotiated in an upper room, dark and
mysterious, draped with skiing gear and riding-breeches, in the background of
which, behind the glass windows of a high display case, two headless trunks
stood rigidly at attention. One of these effigies wore Harlequin’s diagonally
spangled tights; the other, scarlet full-dress uniform of some infantry
regiment, allegorical figures, so it seemed, symbolising dualisms of the
antithetical stock-in trade surrounding them …  Civil and Military … Work and
Play … Detachment and Involvement … Tragedy and Comedy … War and Peace … Life
and Death …

An assistant, bent, elderly, bearded,
with the congruous demeanour of a Levantine trader, bore the greatcoat out of a
secret recess in the shadows and reverently invested me within its
double-breasted, brass-buttoned, stiffly pleated khaki folds. He fastened the
front with rapid bony fingers, doing up the laps to the throat; then stepped
back a couple of paces to judge the effect. In a three-sided full-length
looking-glass nearby I, too, critically examined the back view of the coat’s
shot-at-dawn cut, aware at the same time that soon, like Alice, I was to pass,
as it were by virtue of these habiliments, through its panes into a world no
less enigmatic.

“How’s that, sir?”

“All right, I
think.”

“Might be made for
you.”

“Not a bad fit.”

Loosening now quite
slowly the buttons, one by one, he paused as if considering some matter, and
gazed intently.

“I believe I know your face,” he said.

“You do?”

“Was it
The Middle
Watch
?”

“Was what the middle watch?”

“The show I saw you in.”

I have absolutely no histrionic
talent, none at all, a constitutional handicap in almost all the undertakings
of life; but then, after all, plenty of actors possess little enough. There was
no reason why he should not suppose the Stage to be my profession as well as
any other. Identification with something a shade more profound than a farce of
yesteryear treating boisterously of gun-room life in the Royal Navy might have
been more gratifying to self-esteem, but too much personal definition at such a
point would have been ponderous, out of place. Accepting the classification,
however sobering, I did no more than deny having played in that particular
knockabout. He helped me out of the sleeves, gravely shaking straight their
creases.

“What’s this one for?” he asked.

“Which one?”

“The overcoat – if I might make bold
to enquire?”

“Just the war.”

“Ah,” he said attentively. “
The
War
…”

It was clear he had remained
unflustered by recent public events, at the age he had reached perhaps
disillusioned with the commonplaces of life; too keen a theatre-goer to spare
time for any but the columns of dramatic criticism, however indifferently
written, permitting no international crises from the news pages to cloud the
keenness of aesthetic consideration. That was an understandable outlook.

“I’ll bear the show in mind,” he said.

“Do, please.”

“And the address?”

“I’ll take it with me.”

Time was short. Now that the curtain
had gone up once more on this old favourite –
The War –
in
which, so it appeared, I had been cast for a walk on part, what days were left
before joining my unit would be required for dress rehearsal. Cues must not be
missed. The more one thought of it, the more apt seemed the metaphor. Besides,
clothes, if not the whole man, are a large part of him, especially when it
comes to uniform. In a minute or two the parcel, rather a bulky one, was in my
hands.-

“Tried to make a neat job of it,” he
said, “though I expect the theatre’s only round the corner from here.”

“The theatre of war?”

He looked puzzled for a second, then,
recognising a mummer’s obscure quip, nodded several times in appreciation.

“And I’ll wish you a good run,” he
said, clasping together his old lean hands, as if in applause.

“Thanks.”

“Good day, sir, and thank
you.”

I left the shop, allowing a final
glance to fall on the pair of flamboyantly liveried dummies presiding from
their glass prison over the sombre vistas of coat-hangers suspending tweed and
whipcord. On second thoughts, the headless figures were perhaps not
antithetical at all, on the contrary, represented “Honour and Wit, fore-damned
they sit,” to whom the Devil had referred in the poem. Here, it was true, they
stood rather than sat, but precise posture was a minor matter. The point was
that their clothes were just right; while headlessness – like depicting Love or
Justice blindfold – might well signify the inexorable preordination of twin
destinies that even war could not alter. Indeed, war, likely to offer both
attributes unlimited range of expression, would also intensify, rather than
abate, their ultimate fatality. Musing on this surmise in the pale, grudging
sunshine of London in December, a light wan yet intimate, I recognised the
off-licence ever memorable for the bottle of port – could the fluid be so
designated – that Moreland and I, centuries before, had bought with such high
hopes that Sunday afternoon, later so dismally failed to drink.

Looking back from a disturbed, though
at the same time monotonous present, those Moreland days seemed positively
Arcadian. Even the threatening arbitrament of war (the Prime Minister’s rather
ornate phrase in his broadcast) had lent a certain macabre excitement to the
weeks leading up to the purchase of the greatcoat. Now, some fourteen months
later, that day seemed scarcely less remote than the immolation of the port
bottle. The last heard of Moreland – from one of Isobel’s letters – was that a
musical job had taken him to Edinburgh. Even that information had been sent
long ago, soon after my own arrival at Division. Since then I had served a
million years at these Headquarters, come to possess no life but the army, no
master but Widmerpool, no table companions but Biggs and Soper.

Meanwhile, the war itself had passed
through various phases, some of them uncomfortable enough: France in defeat:
Europe overrun: invasion imminent: the blitz opened over London. In this last
aspect – more specifically – Isobel reported, too, a direct hit on Barnby’s
frescoes in the Donners-Brebner Building, a pictorial memory dim as Barnby
himself, now Camouflage Officer on some distant R.A.F. station. Latterly,
things had looked up a trifle, in the Western Desert, for example, but in
general the situation remained capable of considerable improvement before being
regarded as in the least satisfactory. F Mess – defined by Widmerpool as “low,
though not the final dregs of the Divisional Staff” – did not at all alter a
sense that much was wrong with the world.

After our first local blitz – when
they killed a thousand people, at that stage of the war regarded as quite a
large number for a provincial city in a single night – Major-General Liddament,
the Divisional Commander, ordered the Defence Platoon (of which I had temporary
charge) to mount brens within the billeting area between the sounding of
Air-raid Warning and All Clear. This was just a drill, in practice no shooting
envisaged, unless exceptional circumstances – dive-bombing, for example – were
to arise; Command, of course, operating normal anti-aircraft batteries.
Announced by the melancholy dirge of sirens, like ritual wailings at barbarous
obsequies, the German planes used to arrive shortly before midnight – it was a
long way to come – turning up in principle about half an hour after sleep had
descended. They would fly across the town at comparatively high altitude, then,
wheeling lower, hum fussily back on their tracks, sometimes dropping an
incendiary or two, for luck, in the immediate neighbourhood of the Mess, before
passing on to the more serious business of lodging high explosive on docks and
shipyards. These circlings over the harbour lasted until it was time to return.
On such nights, after weapons were back in the armoury, sections dismissed to
the barrack-room, not much residue of sleep was to be recaptured.

The last jerky, strangled notes of the
Warning, as it died away, always recalled some musical instrument inadequately
mastered; General Conyers, for example, rendering Gounod or Saint-Saëns on his
’cello, or that favourite of Moreland’s
(also inclined to play Saint-Saëns), the pirate-like man with an old-fashioned
wooden leg and patch over one eye, who used to scrape away at a fiddle in one
of the backstreets off Piccadilly Circus. Still sleepy, I began to dress in the
dark, since switching on the light in the curtain-less bedroom would entail the
trouble of rearranging the window’s blackout boards. Musical variations of
different forms of Air-raid Warning might repay study. Where Isobel was living
in the country, the vicar, as chief warden, issued the local Warning in person
by telephone. Either to instil the seriousness of the notification, or because
intoning came as second nature to one of his calling, he always enunciated the
words imitatively, ululating his voice from high to low in paraphrase of a
siren:

“… Air-raid Warning …
Air-raid Warning …
Air-raid Warning …
Air-raid Warning
… Air-raid Warning
…
Air-raid Warning …”

Such reveries floated out of the
shadows of the room, together with the hope that the Luftwaffe, bearing in mind
the duration of their return journey, would not protract with too much Teutonic
conscientiousness the night’s activities. To-morrow, a Command three-day
exercise opened, when, so far as the Defence Platoon was concerned, sleep might
be equally hard to come by. Outside in the street the air was sharp, although
by now meagre signs of the spring were appearing in the surrounding
countryside, the hedgeless fields partitioned one from another by tumbledown
stone walls. The moonlight had to compete with a rapidly increasing range of
artificial illumination that made blackout nugatory. Section posts were to be
inspected in turn. The guns were already setting up a good deal of noise. Once
a minute fragment of shrapnel pattered with a tinny rattle, like attack from a
pea-shooter, against the metal of my helmet. The bren section at the corner of
the sports field, last to be visited, had their weapon mounted for aircraft
action already and revealed, rather apologetically, they had just discharged a
burst.

“Got tired of hanging about watching
them drop those things,” said Corporal Mantle, “so we shot down a flare, for goodness’
sake.”

His spectacles gave him a learned,
scholarly air, out of keeping with such impatience and violent action. He was a
young, energetic N.C.O., whose name was to go in as candidate for a commission,
unless the process were thwarted by Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson, recently showing
signs of obstruction in that quarter.

“We’ll have to account for the rounds.”

“I’ll remember that, sir. Had a few in
hand, as a matter of fact. Always just as well, in case there’s one of those
snap inspections of ammo.”

A shapeless, dumpy figure in a
mackintosh came towards us out of the night, the garment so long it reached
almost to his heels. This turned out to be Bithel. It was impossible to guess
why he should be wandering about at this hour of the night in the middle of a raid.
As officer in charge of the Mobile Laundry, his duties could scarcely be
required at this moment. He came close to us.

“You can’t sleep with this noise going
on,” he said.

He spoke peevishly, as if remedy,
easily applicable, had been for some reason disregarded by the authority
responsible.

“I’ve run out of those pills of mine,”
he went on. “Not even sure I’ll be able to get them any longer. Gone off the
market, like so many other useful commodities these days. Thought it wiser to
put on a helmet. Regulation about that anyway, I expect. I didn’t know you or
any of the rest of Div. H.Q. were on duty on these occasions. Don’t Command
organise the pom-poms? That’s what they’re called, I believe. Then there’s a
Bofors gun. That’s ack-ack too, isn’t it? Swedish. I ought to know much more
about the Royal
Artillery and their functions. Don’t come your way as an infantryman, though I’ve
picked up a bit since being at Div.”