Dear Illusion Page 4

  Suddenly the laughing and fighting stopped and the men assumed an unnatural sobriety. The reason for this was provided by the immediate emergence into view of the Colonel and the Adjutant, moving across Thurston’s front.

  They saw him at once; he hastily saluted and the Adjutant, as usual, returned the salute. His gaze met Thurston’s under lowered brows and his lips were gathered in the fiercest scowl they were capable of.

  Thurston waited till they were out of sight and hurried to the door of the line-maintenance billet. The place was deserted. Except in illustrations to Army manuals and the like, he had never seen such perfection of order and cleanliness. It was obviously the result of hours of devoted labour.

  He leant against the door-post and began to laugh.

  V

  ‘I gather the plot against our pal Dally misfired somewhat,’ Bentham said in the Mess dining-room later that day.

  Thurston looked up rather wearily. His jeep had broken down on the way back from the divorce expert and his return had been delayed for some hours. He had made part of the journey on the back of a motor-bike. Further, he had just read a unit order requiring him to make the jeep available at the Orderly Room the next morning. It wasn’t his turn yet. The Adjutant had struck again.

  ‘You know, I’m quite pleased,’ Bentham went on, lighting a cigarette and moving towards the stove where Thurston stood.

  ‘Oh, so am I.’

  ‘You are? Now that’s rather interesting. Surprising, even. I should have thought you’d be downcast.’

  Something in his tone made Thurston glance at him sharply and put down the unit order. Bentham was standing with his feet apart in an intent attitude. ‘Why should you think that, Ben?’

  ‘I’ll tell you. Glad of the opportunity. First of all I’ll tell you why it misfired, if you don’t already know. Because I tipped Dally off. Lent him some of my blokes and all, to get the place spick and span.’

  Thurston nodded, thinking of the two men he had seen outside the billet that morning. ‘I see.’

  ‘You do, do you? Good. Now I’ll tell you why I did it. First of all, the Army’s not the place for this kind of plotting and scheming. The job’s too important. Secondly, I did it because I don’t like seeing an able man taken down by a bunch of ignorant jumped-up so-called bloody gentlemen from the Territorial Army. Not that I hold any brief for Dalessio outside his technical abilities. As you know, I’m a Regular soldier and I disapprove most strongly of anything damn slovenly. It’s part of my nature now and I don’t mind either. But one glance at the Adj.’s face when he was telling me the form for this morning and I knew where my duty lay. I hope I always do. I do my best to play it his way as a rule for the sake of peace and quiet. But this business was different. Wasn’t it?’

  Thurston had lowered his gaze. ‘Yes, Ben.’

  ‘It came as a bit of a shock to me, you know, to find that Dalessio needed tipping off.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that I’d have expected someone else to have told him already. I only heard about this last night. I was the only one here later on and I suppose the Adj. felt he had to tell someone. I should have thought by that time someone else would have let the cat out of the bag to Dally. You, for instance. You were in on this from the start, weren’t you?’

  Thurston said nothing.

  ‘I’ve no doubt you have your excuses for not letting on. In spite of the fact that I’ve always understood you were the great one for pouring scorn on the Adj. and Rowney and Cleaver and the rest of that crowd. Yes, you could talk about them till you were black in the face, but when it came to doing something, talking where it would do some good, you kept your mouth shut. And, if I remember rightly, you were the one who used to stick up for Dally when the others were laying into him behind his back. You know what I think? I don’t think you care tuppence. You don’t care beyond talking, any road. I think you’re really quite sold on the Adj.’s crowd, never mind what you say about them. Chew that over. And chew this over and all: I think you’re a bastard, just like the rest of ’em. Tell that to your friend the Adjutant, Captain bloody Thurston.’

  Thurston stood there for some time after Bentham had gone, tearing up the unit order and throwing the pieces into the stove.

  COURT OF INQUIRY

  I

  ‘You free for a bit this afternoon, Jock?’ Major Raleigh asked me in the Mess ante-room one lunch-time in 1944.

  ‘I think so, Major,’ I said. ‘Provided I can get away about half-three. I’ve got some line-tests laid on for then. What do you want me for, anyway?’

  ‘Here, let me top that up for you, old boy.’ Raleigh seized a passing second-lieutenant by the elbow. ‘Ken, run and get my batman to bring me one of my bottles of Scotch, will you? Oh, and incidentally what’s become of your vehicle tool-kit deficiency return? It was supposed to be on my desk by ten-hundred this morning. Explanation?’

  During this and what followed it, I first briefly congratulated myself on being directly responsible to the CO (the most incurious officer in the whole unit) rather than coming under Raleigh’s command. Then I wondered what was in store for me after lunch. Perhaps a visit to another binoculars establishment or camera warehouse the major had discovered. My alleged technical proficiency had made me in some demand for such expeditions. Finally I looked about me. The Mess occupied a Belgian provincial hotel and this was its lounge, a square room lined with burst leather-padded benches. Officers sat on them reading magazines. Only the fact that two or three of them were also drinking stopped the place looking like a barber’s waiting-room. Outside it was raining a little.

  The major returned, smiling deprecatingly and resembling more than ever a moustached choirboy in battledress. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got to keep them on their toes. Now about this business this afternoon. Young Archer’s made another nonsense.’

  ‘What’s he done this time?’

  ‘Lost a charging-engine. Left it behind on the last move, and naturally when he sent a party back the natives had removed it. Or so the story goes. I reckon that sergeant of his – Parnell, isn’t it? – held a wayside auction and flogged it for a case of brandy. Anyway, it’s gone.’

  ‘Wait a minute, Major – wouldn’t it have been one of those wee 1,260-watt affairs that take about a fortnight to charge half a dozen batteries? The ones nobody ever uses?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go all the way with you there, old boy.’ The major rarely went all the way with anyone anywhere. Very often he went no distance at all.

  ‘Aren’t they obsolete?’ I persisted. ‘And wouldn’t I be right in thinking they’re surplus too?’

  ‘That’s not the point. This one was on young Archer’s charge. The Quartermaster has his signature. Ah, here we are. Give me your glass, Jock.’

  ‘Thanks . . . Well, where do I come into this, sir? Do I hold Archer for you while you beat him up, or what?’

  The major smiled again, fixedly this time. ‘Good idea. Seriously, though, I’ve had just about enough of young Archer. I want you to serve on the Court of Inquiry with me and Jack Rowney, if you will. In my Office. I’ll take you over after lunch.’

  The major’s modes of operation within his Company were often inventive to the point of romanticism. But even for him this was a far-fetched creation. ‘Court of Inquiry? But couldn’t we get this thing written off? There’s surely no need . . .’

  ‘I’d get someone else if I could, but everybody’s got their hands full except you.’ He looked me in the eye, and since I knew him well I could see he was wondering whether to add something like: ‘How nice it must feel to be a mathematical wizard and live a life of leisure.’ Instead, he waved to someone behind me, called: ‘Hallo, Bill, you old chiseller’, and went to greet the Adjutant, just arrived, presumably, on a goodwill mission from Unit HQ. There was much I wanted to ask Raleigh, but now it would have to keep.

  II

  Lunch in the heavily panelled dining-room was served by three B
elgian waitresses wearing grey dresses and starched aprons. Their ugliness was too extreme to be an effect of chance. Perhaps they had been selected by a burgomagisterial committee as proof against the most licentious of soldiery. Such efforts would have been wasted. Libido burnt feebly in Raleigh’s domain.

  The meal was stew and diced vegetables followed by duff full of grape-pips. While he ate it the Adjutant, resplendent in a new Canadian battledress, chaffed Raleigh in the quacking voice which Archer was so good at imitating. I thought about Archer and one or two of his nonsenses.

  The trailer nonsense had been a good instance of the bad luck he seemed to attract. The trailer had had a puncture on a long road convoy led by him and, since trailers carried no spare wheel, had clearly been unable to proceed farther. But if General Coles, commanding the 11th/17th Army Corps Group, was going to be able to communicate with his lower formations that evening it was as clearly essential that the convoy should proceed farther, and soon. With rather uncharacteristic acumen, Archer had had the trailer unloaded and then jacked up with both its wheels removed, reasoning that it would take very energetic intervention to steal the thing in that state. But someone did.

  Then there had been the telephone-exchange-vehicle nonsense. On another convoy Archer had gone off without it, an action threatening similarly grave disservice to General Coles. Fortunately one of my sergeants, happening to watch Archer’s wagon-train lumbering out, had gone and kicked out of bed the driver of the exchange vehicle, promising violence if his wheels were not turning inside ten minutes. A message by motor-bike to the head of the convoy, recommending a short halt, had done the rest. Taxing Archer with this afterwards, I wrung from him the admission that the dipsomaniacal Sergeant Parnell had been the culprit. He had been ordered to warn all drivers overnight, but half a bottle of calvados, plus the thought of the other half waiting in his tent, had impaired his efficiency.

  ‘Why don’t you sack that horrible lush of yours?’ I had asked Archer in exasperation. ‘You must expect things like that to happen while he’s around. Raleigh would get him posted for you like a shot.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ Archer had moaned, accentuating his habitual lost look. ‘Couldn’t run the section without him.’

  ‘To hell, man; better have no sergeant at all than him. All he ever does is talk about India and cock things up.’

  ‘I’m not competent, Jock. He knows how to handle the blokes, you see.’

  That was typical. Archer was no less competent, or no more incompetent, than most of us, though with Raleigh, the Adjutant and Captain Rowney (the second-in-command of the Company) taking turns to dispute this with him, his chronic lack of confidence was hardly surprising. And it was obvious to me that his men loathed their sergeant, whereas Archer himself, thanks merely to his undeviating politeness to them on all occasions, was the only one of their immediate superiors whom they had any time for. Without their desire to give him personal support in return, anything might have happened every other day to General Coles’s communications, even, conceivably, to the campaign as a whole. According to Raleigh and the Adjutant, that was perhaps the most wonderful thing of all about Signals: junior officers got as much responsibility as the red-tab boys. But not as much pay, I used to mutter, nor as much power.

  III

  The afternoon had turned out fine, and I said as much to the Adjutant as, his goodwill mission evidently completed, he passed me on the wooden veranda of the hotel and got into his jeep without a word. Soon Raleigh, carrying a short leather-covered cane and a pair of string-and-leather gloves, turned up and walked me across the cobbled street to his office, pausing only to exhort a driver, supine under the differential of a three-tonner, to get his hair cut.

  Raleigh’s office had the distinction of being housed in an Office. Pitted gilt lettering on the window advertised an anonymous society of mutual assurances. Archer had told me the other day how moved he had been, arriving there to be handed some distasteful errand or comradely rebuke, at the thought of the previous occupants in session, grouped blindfolded round a baize-covered table telling one another what good chaps they were.

  He was in the outer room of the place now, sitting silently with the appalling Parnell among the clerks and orderlies. He looked more lost than usual, and younger than his twenty-one years, much too young to be deemed a competent officer. He was yawning a lot. I went up to him when the sergeant clerk called the major over to sign something.

  ‘Look, Frank,’ I said in an undertone: ‘don’t worry about this. This Court has no standing at all. Raleigh hasn’t the powers to convene it; the Company’s not on detachment. It’s a complete farce – just a bit of sabre-rattling.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘Can I see you afterwards, Jock?’

  ‘I’ll come over to your section.’ The line-tests could wait.

  I went into the inner room, a long low affair lit by a single window and an unshaded bulb that pulsed slowly. Rowney stood up and swept me a bow. ‘Ah, Captain D.A. Watson, Royal Signals, in person,’ he fluted. ‘Nice of you to look us up.’

  ‘I always like to see how you administrators live.’

  ‘Better than you long-haired scientists, I’ll be bound.’

  ‘Materially, perhaps. Spiritually, no.’ It was hard not to talk like this to Rowney.

  ‘Och aye, mon, ye’re maybe nae sae far frae the truth.’

  ‘Shall we get on, chaps?’ the major asked in his on-parade voice. ‘Don’t want to be all night over this.’ He opened a file and nodded to me. ‘Get Parnell in, will you?’

  I got Parnell in. He smelt hardly at all of drink. He proceeded to give an oral rendering of his earlier written report: Raleigh had passed me a copy. At the relevant time he, Parnell, had been explaining the convoy’s route to the drivers. Then he had got into the cab of his usual lorry (the one carrying the cookhouse stuff, no doubt). Then they had moved off. Soon after arrival at the other end, Mr Archer had said the charging-engine was missing and he, Parnell, must go back for it. Going back for it and returning empty-handed had taken eleven hours. In reply to questions, Parnell said yes, he had looked in the right place; no, nobody had been hanging about there; no, neither he nor, as far as he knew, anyone else had been detailed to look after the charging-engine; and yes, he would wait outside.

  Archer came in and probably did his best to salute the Court smartly. The effort forced you to notice how badly he did it. He started on a rigmarole similar to Parnell’s, then stopped abruptly and gazed at the major. ‘Look, sir,’ he said, biting his lips. ‘Can I put this quite simply?’

  Raleigh frowned. ‘How do you mean, Frank?’

  ‘I mean I lost the charging-engine and that’s all there is to it. I should have made sure it was put on board and didn’t. I just forgot. I should have gone round afterwards and had a look to make sure we’d left nothing behind. But I forgot. It’s as simple as that. Just a plain, straightforward case of negligence and inefficiency. And all I can say is I’m very sorry.’

  Rowney started to ask a question, but the major restrained him. ‘Go on, Frank,’ he said softly.

  Archer seemed to be trembling. He said: ‘What makes me so ashamed is that I’ve let the Company down. Completely. And I don’t see what I can do about it. There just isn’t any way of putting it right. I don’t know what to do. It’s no use saying I’m sorry, I know that. I’ll pay for the thing, if you like. So much a month. Would that help at all? God, I am a fool.’

  By this time he was shaking a good deal and throwing his hands about. I wondered very much whether he was going to cry. When he paused, blushing violently, I glanced at the other members of the Court. The head of the second-in-command was bent over the paper-fastener he was playing with, but Raleigh was staring hard at Archer, and on his face was a blush that seemed to answer Archer’s own. At that moment they looked, despite Raleigh’s farcical moustache, equally young and very alike. I felt my eyes widen. Was that it? Did Raleigh enjoy humiliating Archer for looking young and unsure
of himself because he too at one time had been humiliated for the same reason? Hardly, for Raleigh was not enjoying himself now; of that I was certain.

  Still holding his gaze, Archer burst out: ‘I’m so sorry to have let you down personally, Major Raleigh. That’s what gets me, failing in my duty by you, sir. When you’ve always been so decent to me about everything, and backed me up, and . . . and encouraged me.’

  This last, at any rate, was a flagrant lie. Had it not been, Archer would not have been where he was now. And surely he must know he had lied.

  The major turned his head away. ‘Any questions, Jack?’

  ‘No thank you, Major.’

  ‘You, Jock?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  The major nodded. With his head still averted, he said: ‘All right, thank you, Frank. Hang on a moment outside, will you? You can tell Parnell to get back to the section.’

  Archer saluted and was gone.

  ‘Well, thanks a million for inviting me along to your little show, Major,’ Rowney said, stretching. ‘Plenty of the old drama, what? Strong supporting cast. And very ably produced, if I may say so.’

  Ignoring him, Raleigh turned to me. ‘Well, Jock, what do you think?’

  ‘About what exactly, sir?’

  ‘Come on, man, we want to get this thing wrapped up. What finding? You’re the junior member and you give your views first.’