Dear Illusion: Collected Stories Page 5

  I gave the more militarily relevant of my views and Rowney did the same. Within the next twenty seconds the Court had found that engine, charging, 1,260-watt, one, on charge to Lieutenant F. N. Archer, Royal Signals, had been lost by that Officer in circumstances indicating negligence. Lieutenant F. N. Archer, Royal Signals, was hereby reprimanded. So that was that.

  After an expressionless Archer had been acquainted with the findings and had left, I stopped at the door to chat to Rowney. I had never much cared for him but I was grateful to him this afternoon for having, in his own way, given his opinion of the major’s little show. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Raleigh crumple up the Court of Inquiry documents and stuff them into his trouser-pocket.

  Outside in the thin sunshine the three of us halted for a moment before dispersing. Raleigh’s face took on a summarizing expression, with raised eyebrows and lifted lower lip. ‘If only he’d pull himself together,’ he said. ‘But . . .’

  IV

  In Archer’s section office and store, surrounded by piles of camouflage nets and anti-gas clothing, I apologized to him for having been a member of the Court. He sat inattentively on a crate containing a spare teleprinter, finally rousing himself to take a cigarette off me and to say: ‘Funny thing about that charging-engine, you know. One of the things about it was that it wouldn’t go. It never had gone in living memory. And then the tool-kit was missing. And no spare parts. And it was obsolete anyway, so it was no use indenting for spares. So it never would have gone.’

  ‘Did you tell Raleigh that?’

  ‘Yes. He said it was irrelevant.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Another funny thing was that the Quartermaster’s got one nobody wants in his store. Surplus. In running order. With tools. And a complete set of spares. The QM offered it me.’

  ‘Did Raleigh say that was irrelevant, too?’

  ‘Yes. It wasn’t the one I’d lost, you see. Oh, thanks very much, Corporal Martin, that’s extremely kind of you.’

  This was said to a member of Archer’s section who had carried in a mug of tea for him, though not, I noticed aggrievedly, one for me.

  Somewhere overhead aircraft could be heard flying eastward. Archer sipped his tea for some time. Then he said: ‘Not a bad act I put on, I thought, in front of that rag-time bloody Court of Inquiry. Sorry, I know you couldn’t help being on it.’

  ‘An act, then, was it?’

  ‘Of course, you owl. You didn’t need to tell me the thing had no standing. But I had to pretend that I thought it had, don’t you see? – and behave like a hysterical schoolgirl.’

  Archer was a good mimic, I reflected, but it was perhaps questionable whether any amount of ordinary acting talent could have produced the blushes I had seen. On the other hand, I had no way of knowing how deeply he had thrown himself into the part.

  ‘That was what Raleigh wanted,’ he went on. ‘If I’d stood up for my rights or anything, he’d just have decided to step up his little war of nerves in other ways. As it was I think I even made him feel he’d gone too far. That crack about him always backing me up was rich, I thought. Well, we live and learn.’

  Archer no longer looked lost. Nor did he look particularly young. It was true, I thought, that the Army would lick anyone into shape. You could even say that it made a man of you.

  I SPY STRANGERS

  I

  ‘Doing what’s right, that’s going to be the keynote of our policy. Honouring our obligations. Loyalty before self-interest. None of this letting our friends down when we think it’s going to serve our turn. Not that it ever does in the end, of course, that type of thing. We can all see that from what happened pre-war. It was greed and selfishness got us into that mess. Anyway, coming down to details a bit now. First, Europe.’

  The Foreign Secretary, a tall young man whose schoolmasterly and rather slovenly air did not rob him of a certain impressiveness, glanced over at the tanned, neatly moustached face of the Opposition’s spokesman on Defence questions. It was from this quarter that real difficulty was to be expected, not from the Foreign Affairs spokesman, let alone from the Leader of the Opposition. For a moment the Foreign Secretary quailed. More than one member of the Government, he knew, found his policies absurd or extravagant rather than extremist and would gladly see him humiliated. He knew too that other, less overtly political reasons for this attitude were widespread on both sides of the House (and in the Visitors’ Gallery). The temptation to play safe was strong. But he must resist it. He could not have it said that he had covered up his real programme with comfortable platitude. That was what They had always done.

  ‘In Europe,’ he went steadily on, ‘we’re going to go all out for co-operation and friendship with the Soviet Union. France too, naturally, but the state France is in these days, it’ll be a long time before she’s ready to play her full part in world affairs. It’s obvious the lead’s got to come from ourselves and the Russians. So first of all we have a system of guarantees of small countries, done between us. That is, Britain and the Soviet Union get together and say they’ll clobber anyone who tries to walk into Austria and Czechoslovakia and Poland and Greece and Albania and all those places. And really clobber him, not just notes and protests and sanctions. We’re not going to have it like it was last time.

  ‘Then there’s self-determination. That means everybody’s got to have their own country and their own government. Nobody under foreign domination. Now I’ll just take one example and show the type of thing I have in mind.’

  He took his one example. It was Poland, not because he thought it was an example, good or bad, of anything in particular, but because he had not long ago read a short book on recent Polish history and, as was his habit, made notes on it. These supplied him now with many an unfamiliar name and obscure fact, made him sound like a bit of an expert on Poland, and by implication, he hoped, on politics in general. After an account of post-1918 events in Eastern Europe, he leant heavily on Poland’s outmoded system of land tenure, the anti-democratic utterances of its government in exile and the Warsaw workers’ resistance in 1939 and since.

  He had got a lot of this off by heart and was able to look round the debating chamber. Two Opposition back-benchers were ostentatiously playing cards, conversations were muttering away here and there, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was apparently asleep, but on the whole there seemed to be the right kind of semi-attentiveness. At least two people were taking everything in. They were the Speaker, whom the Foreign Secretary instinctively distrusted but of whose basic progressivism there could be little real doubt, and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Home Office, whose brilliant brown eyes stared disconcertingly into his.

  Did anything ever happen as it should? For months he had been wishing with all his heart that the Under-Secretary would look at him like that one day. But now that it seemed to have come about he felt none of the sudden joy and confidence he had expected. All he got was a jolt in the nerves which caused his mind to skip a groove or two, so that he found himself implying pretty unambiguously, in the next sentence he uttered, that the building of the Roznów Dam had been an act of irresponsible provocation justifying to the hilt the Russian invasion of Finland.

  This evidently went unnoticed. The Foreign Secretary, judging his audience to be adequately softened up by abstruse information, modulated to an account, statistically supported, of German atrocities in Poland. This led to a more lyrical passage on the theme of Russo-Polish brotherhood in arms, followed by a carefully worded suggestion that Russia had earned the right to get things set up her way at her end of Europe. Next, a designedly short paragraph on the Americans, in which protestations of admiring gratitude – meant to fool nobody – introduced the message that to have fought for the liberation of a continent brought with it no automatic right to a say in its future, and that the sooner the Yanks realized this and cleared off back to their own half of the world the better for everyone.

  There was some show of applause here on both side
s of the House, and a voice from the Visitors’ Gallery was heard to say that the fellow was talking a bit of sense at last. Mildly encouraged, trying not to look at the Under-Secretary to the Home Office, the Foreign Secretary turned to a fresh page of his notes. ‘Next, the Middle East,’ he said.

  Immediate uproar broke out in all parts of the chamber. Those who had managed without apparent protest to sit through a deluge of information about the Silesian coalfields found they could not contemplate further lessons on the break-up of the Ottoman Empire or, it might be, the average weekly take-home pay of the Egyptian fellaheen. The Prime Minister felt it his duty to intervene. ‘Turn it up, Hargy,’ he called. ‘You’ve had nearly twenty minutes now. Give the other lot a go, eh?’

  The Foreign Secretary addressed the Speaker. ‘What do you say, Mr Archer?’

  ‘Well,’ – the Speaker glanced to and fro – ‘I think we might split this up a bit, don’t you? Sort of debate parts of it at a time? How much more stuff have you got there?’

  ‘About as much again, sir.’

  There was a general groan and some shouts of ‘Shame!’

  ‘Order, order,’ the Speaker said, blushing slightly. ‘I think if you don’t mind, Hargreaves, we might hold the rest of your speech for now. Let’s hear from Sergeant – sorry: I now call upon the Leader of the Opposition.’

  This personage, the left breast of whose uniform bore several campaign-medal ribbons, turned and exchanged energetic whispers with his colleagues. After a time he stopped shaking his head violently and started nodding it feebly.

  Like many another political leader, he owed his position less to talent or even ambition than to a group of deficiencies: lack of general unpopularity, of immoderate enthusiasms, of firm views about anything. Sergeant Fleming helped his officers without taking their part in their absence, fiddled the stores inventory but not the leave roster, never stood the Company Quartermaster-Sergeant more than one extra drink an evening, helped to carry his passed-out mates to their billets and then dropped them on the floor. A natural middle-of-the-road man, Fleming, and equally naturally a Tory through and through, or perhaps just through. Nobody had thought of questioning his nomination as titular head of the alternative to a Government that extended, Popular Front fashion, from the Trotskyist at the Colonial Office to the Moral Rearmament International Christian Democrat who had found himself Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

  Fleming’s head was nodding faster now, though no less feebly, in fact slightly more so. He got up and said loudly and indistinctly: ‘Well, we’ve heard what my learned friend, that is the Foreign Secretary, what he’s had to say about what he thinks ought to be done about foreign countries and that. And I must say I’ve never heard such a load of rubbish in all my born days. It beats me that a so-called educated man with all his intelligence can talk all that rubbish. What do we care about all these Poles and French? They let us down, didn’t they? No, we’ve got to look after ourselves because there’s nobody else will. Break them all up into small states so’s they can’t start anything, that’s the only way. Eh? All right, Bert. Well, I’m going to give you our military expert now because you’ve got to keep the peace, haven’t you? That’s the first thing, so I’ll hand you over now to Sergeant Doll.’

  The military expert’s military aspect was half misleading. He was in the Army all right, but the shape and condition of his moustache, the unnecessary presence round his waist of a splendidly furbished webbing belt, the very knot of his khaki necktie suggested the Officers’ Mess at some exclusive armoured-car regiment of incessantly invoked lancer or hussar ancestry, rather than the Orderly Room at an unemployed half-unit of the Royal Corps of Signals. Doll’s extreme efficiency behind the sergeant’s desk in that Orderly Room was perhaps what had led him, in compensation, to adopt this heavily martial persona. If so, he would only have been acting out on an individual and more symbolic scale the compulsion (born of the inferiority feelings common to all technical troops) that had afflicted his superiors during the period of training in England. All present could very well remember the cross-country runs, the musketry competitions, the three-day infantry-tactics schemes with smoke-bombs and a real barrage, the twelve-mile route-marches in respirators which had seemed in retrospect to show such a curious power of inverted prophecy when the unit finally completed its role in the European theatre of war without having had to walk a step or fire a shot.

  One of the most convinced proponents of these early rehearsals for death or glory was at the moment sitting in the Visitors’ Gallery with a hard expression on his soft face. He was Major R. W. Raleigh, the commander of a communications company until just after the German surrender, and now, the bulk of the unit having departed to help furnish signal facilities at the Pots-dam Conference, the overlord of a sort of dispirited rump. This, originally comprising most of his old company with the addition of a spare section from the cable-laying company, had been swollen by successive injections administered by higher authority. In the chaos of disbandments, postings, re-formations and moves to the United Kingdom that characterized the aftermath of the campaign, a command like the major’s represented a handy point of stabilization, a nucleus for any sort of drifting particle.

  Expansion, once begun, had been rapid. Daily erosions took place as a corporal with one set of qualifications or three signalmen with another suffered removal for eventual use in the Far East, but these were far more than redressed by reinforcements. At one time or another, and with or without warning, there had arrived a further cable-laying section that had proved superfluous at Potsdam, most of the small but variegated Signals formation lately serving a now demolished independent parachute regiment, half a Base company without any officers or sergeants, an entire technical-maintenance section without any transport or stores, and two or three dozen teleprinter-operators, lineman-mechanics, drivers, electricians and fitters who had turned up individually or in little groups. All this amounted to a ration strength of something like twelve officers and four hundred other ranks, a total quite impressive enough to justify such gestures as renaming the original company office the Orderly Room and starting to refer to Sergeant Doll, the chief clerk in that office, as the Orderly Room Sergeant.

  The major thought of Doll as a useful lad, and never more so than this evening. A certain amount of undisciplined behaviour, of affected intellectual nonsense, even of actual hints of disloyalty to the country – these were to be expected of a mock parliament, but there was surely no need for the thing to turn out quite so mock as it had. The blokes seemed to think that they could simply get up and say whatever they liked. Where that sort of attitude got you had been made all too clear at the previous sitting, when the bunch of jokers who called themselves the Government had brought in their Nationalization Bill. This meant, apparently, that they were in favour of collaring the coalmines, the steel industry, transport, public services – everything that created wealth and employment – and running them as they saw fit. That could never happen in the real world, in England, but the major could not agree with his friends in the Officers’ Mess that the passing of that Bill merely showed how idiotic the whole issue had become – he wished he could. No, it was far more serious than that: the indication of a really ugly mood. He had too much sense of responsibility not to have come along tonight to keep an eye on things, use his influence to stop them getting out of hand. He hoped he would not have to intervene. It would not be necessary if Doll did his stuff properly, and Doll surely would. Reliable fellow, Doll, even if he was a bit of a puzzle. That perpetual parade-ground appearance and manner – what was it all in aid of?

  Whatever the complications of Doll’s internal drives, he was not a middle-of-the-road man; indeed, to extend the image a trifle, he was brushing up against the wall on the right-hand side. In the melodious voice that had served him so well as Complaints Supervisor at a large store in Leeds, he was saying: ‘I shan’t waste much time in destroying the dangerous nonsense we’ve just been exposed to. Russia has
always been an aggressive power and always will be unless we stop her. All that restrained the Reds until 1939 was weakness. Then they went for the Baltic republics, Poland, Finland, plus various Balkan adventures. Their only interest in self-determination is to prevent it. Desertions to the Nazis included . . . I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Facts!’ the Foreign Secretary was shouting above the Speaker’s half-hearted appeals for order. ‘This is all just . . . insinuation. You haven’t—’

  ‘Facts?’ The spokesman on Defence questions brought out his own notebook, then went on as mellifluously as before: ‘All right, facts. From The Times of June 29th. Czechoslovakia signed Ruthenia over to Russia. Why? Because the Czechs wanted to get rid of it? From a BBC broadcast this morning. Russia is putting pressure on Turkey to revise their Black Sea Straits treaty and cede two territories to her. Why? Because the Turks are planning to blockade her? From another broadcast. Three hundred more Poles shot by the order of People’s—’

  ‘They were traitors, collaborators, there’ve been—’

  ‘I’ve no doubt many of them were. But we shall never know now, shall we? These people should have been tried by an international court, as we’ve said we—’

  ‘It was the heat of the moment. You always get—’

  ‘As I started to tell you, these were executions carried out under sentences passed by People’s Courts, there wasn’t just a mob blazing away in the streets. But I really must appeal to you, Mr Speaker, to quell these interruptions. I managed to keep quiet while all that Red propaganda was going on, so I don’t see why—’

  ‘All right, Sergeant Doll. Hargreaves, I must warn you to keep quiet.’ There was reluctance and a half-buried sympathy in the Speaker’s tone.

  ‘Sorry, sir. But I’ve simply got to ask him about the Polish elections. Surely that proves—’