Put Out More Flags Page 5

  Basil had been leader writer on the Daily Beast, he had served in the personal entourage of Lord Monomark, he had sold champagne on commission, composed dialogue for the Cinema and given the first of what was intended to be a series of talks for the B.B.C. Sinking lower in the social scale he had been press agent for a female contortionist and had once conducted a party of tourists to the Italian lakes; (he dined out for some time on the story of that tour which had, after a crescendo of minor vexations, culminated in Basil making a bundle of all the tickets and all the passports and sinking them in Lake Garda. He had then travelled home alone by an early train, leaving fifty penniless Britons, none of whom spoke a word of any foreign language, to the care of whatever deity takes charge of forsaken strangers; for all Basil knew, they were still there).

  From time to time he disappeared from the civilized area and returned with tales to which no one attached much credence—of having worked for the secret police in Bolivia and advised the Emperor of Azania on the modernization of his country. Basil was in the habit, as it were, of conducting his own campaigns, issuing his own ultimatums, disseminating his own propaganda, erecting about himself his own blackout; he was an obstreperous minority of one in a world of otiose civilians. He was used, in his own life, to a system of push, appeasement, agitation and blackmail, which, except that it had no more distant aim than his own immediate amusement, ran parallel to Nazi diplomacy.

  Like Nazi diplomacy it postulated for success a peace-loving, orderly and honorable world in which to operate. In the new, busy, secretive, chaotic world which developed during the first days of the war, Basil for the first time in his life felt himself at a disadvantage. It was like being in Latin America at a time of upheaval, and, instead of being an Englishman, being oneself a Latin American.

  The end of September found Basil in a somewhat fretful mood. The air-raid scare seemed to be over for the time and those who had voluntarily fled from London were beginning to return, pretending that they had only been to the country to see that everything was all right there. The women and children of the poor, too, were flocking home to their evacuated streets. The newspapers said that the Poles were holding out; that their cavalry was penetrating deep into Germany; that the enemy was already short of motor oil; that Saarbrucken would fall to the French within a day or two; air-raid wardens roamed the remote hamlets of the kingdom, persecuting yokels who walked home from the inn with glowing pipes. Londoners who were slow to acquire the habit of the domestic hearth groped their way in darkness from one place of amusement to another, learning their destination by feeling the buttons on the commissionaires” uniforms; revolving, black glass doors gave access to a fairy land; it was as though, when children, they had been led blindfold into the room with the lighted Christmas tree. The casualty list of street accidents became formidable and there were terrifying tales of footpads who leaped on the shoulders of old gentlemen on the very steps of their clubs, or beat them to jelly on Hay Hill.

  Everyone whom Basil met was busy getting a job. Some consciously or unconsciously had taken out an insurance policy against unemployment by joining some military unit in the past; there were those like Peter, who in early youth had gratified a parental whim by spending a few expensive years in the regular army, and those like Freddy who had gone into the yeomanry as they sat on the Bench and the county council as part of the normal obligations of rural life. These were now in uniform with their problems solved. In later months, as they sat idle in the Middle East, they were to think enviously of those who had made a more deliberate and judicious choice of service, but at the moment their minds were enviably at rest. The remainder were possessed with a passion to enroll in some form of public service, however uncongenial. Some formed ambulance parties and sat long hours at their posts waiting for air-raid victims; some became firemen, some minor civil servants. None of these honorable occupations made much appeal to Basil.

  He was exactly the type of man who, if English life had run as it did in books of adventure, should at this turn in world affairs have been sent for. He should have been led to an obscure address in Maida Vale and there presented to a lean, scarred man with hard grey eyes; one of the men behind the scenes; one of the men whose names were unknown to the public and the newspapers, who passed unnoticed in the street, a name known only to the inner circle of the Cabinet and to the XXX heads of the secret police of the world…” Sit down, Seal. We’ve followed your movements with interest ever since that affair in La Paz in ’32. You’re a rascal, but I’m inclined to think you’re the kind of rascal the country needs at this moment. I take it you’re game for anything?”

  “I’m game.”

  “That’s what I expected you to say. These are your orders. You will go to Uxbridge aerodrome at 4.30 this afternoon where a man will meet you and give you your passport. You will travel under the name of Blenkinsop. You are a tobacco grower from Latakia. A civil aeroplane will take you by various stages to Smyrna where you will register at the Miramar Hotel and await orders. Is that clear…?”

  It was clear, and Basil, whose life up to the present had been more like an adventure story than most people’s, did half expect some such summons. None came. Instead he was invited to luncheon by Sir Joseph Mainwaring at the Travelers’ Club.

  Basil’s luncheons at the Travelers’ with Sir Joseph Mainwaring had for years formed a series of monuments in his downward path. There had been the luncheons of his four major debt settlements, the luncheon of his political candidature, the luncheons of his two respectable professions, the luncheon of the threatened divorce of Angela Lyne, the Luncheon of the Stolen Emeralds, the Luncheon of the Knuckledusters, the Luncheon of Freddy’s Last Check—each would provide both theme and title for a work of popular fiction.

  Hitherto these feasts had taken place à deux in a secluded corner. The Luncheon of the Commission in the Guards was altogether a more honorable affair and its purpose was to introduce Basil to the Lieutenant-Colonel of the Bombadiers—an officer whom Sir Joseph wrongly believed to have a liking for him.

  The Lieutenant-Colonel did not know Sir Joseph well and was surprised and slightly alarmed by the invitation, for his distrust was based not, as might have been expected, on any just estimate of his capabilities, but, paradoxically, on the fear of him as a politician and man of affairs. All politicians were, to the Lieutenant-Colonel, not so much boobies as bogies. He saw them all, even Sir Joseph, as figures of renaissance subtlety and intrigue. It was by being in with them that the great professional advances were achieved; but it was by falling foul of them that one fell into ignominy. For a simple soldier—and if ever anyone did, the Lieutenant-Colonel qualified for that honorable title—the only safe course was to avoid men like Sir Joseph. When met with, they should be treated with bluff and uncompromising reserve. Sir Joseph thus found himself, through his loyal friendship with Cynthia Seal, in the equivocal position of introducing, with a view to his advancement, a man for whom he had a deep seated horror to a man who had something of the same emotion towards himself. It was not a concurrence which, on the face of it, seemed hopeful of good results.

  Basil, like “Lord Monmouth,” “never condescended to the artifice of the toilet,” and the Lieutenant-Colonel studied him with distaste. Together the ill-assorted trio went to their table.

  Soldier and statesman spread their napkins on their knees and in the interest of ordering their luncheon allowed a silence to fall between them into which Basil cheerfully plunged.

  “We ought to do something about Liberia, Colonel,” he said.

  The Lieutenant-Colonel turned on him the outraged gaze with which a good regimental soldier always regards the discussion of war in its larger aspects.

  “I expect those whose business it is have the question in hand,” he said.

  “Don’t you believe it,” said Basil. “I don’t expect they’ve given it a thought,” and for some twenty minutes he explained why and how Liberia should be immediately annexed.

  The two elder men ate in silence. At length a chance reference to Russia gave Sir Joseph the chance to interpose an opinion.

  “I always distrust prophecy in any form,” he said. “But there is one thing of which I am certain. Russia will come in against us before the end of the year. That will put Italy and Japan on our side. Then it is simply a question of time before our blockade makes itself felt. All kinds of things that you and I have never heard of, like manganese and bauxite, will win the war for us.”

  “And infantry.”

  “And infantry.”

  “Teach a man to march and shoot. Give him the right type of officer. Leave the rest to him.”

  This seemed to Basil a suitable moment to introduce his own problems. “What do you think is the right type of officer?”

  “The officer-type.”

  “It’s an odd thing,” Basil began, “that people always expect the upper class to be good leaders of men. That was all right in the old days when most of them were brought up with tenantry to look after. But now three-quarters of your officer-type live in towns. I haven’t any tenantry.”

  The Lieutenant-Colonel looked at Basil with detestation. “No, no. I suppose not.”

  “Well, have you any tenantry?”

  “I? No. My brother sold the old place years ago.”

  “Well, there you are.”

  It was crystal-clear to Sir Joseph, and faintly perceptible to Basil, that the Lieutenant-Colonel did not take this well.

  “Seal was for a time conservative candidate down in the West,” said Sir Joseph, anxious to remove one possible source of prejudice.

  “Some pretty funny people have been calling themselves conservatives in the last year or two. Cause of half the trouble if you ask me.” Then, feeling he might have been impolite, he added graciously: “No offence to you. Daresay you were all right. Don’t know anything about you.”

  Basil’s political candidature was not an episode to be enlarged upon. Sir Joseph turned the conversation. “Of course, the French will have to make some concessions to bring Italy in. Give up Djibouti or something like that.”

  “Why the devil should they?” asked the Lieutenant-Colonel petulantly. “Who wants Italy in?”

  “To counterbalance Russia.”

  “How? Why? Where? I don’t see it at all.”

  “Nor do I,” said Basil.

  Threatened with support from so unwelcome a quarter, the Lieutenant-Colonel immediately abandoned his position. “Oh, don’t you?” he said. “Well, I’ve no doubt Mainwaring knows best. His job to know these things.”

  Warmed by these words Sir Joseph proceeded for the rest of luncheon to suggest some of the concessions which he thought France might reasonably make to Italy—Tunisia, French Somaliland, the Suez Canal. “Corsica, Nice, Savoy?” asked Basil. Sir Joseph thought not.

  Rather than ally himself with Basil the Lieutenant-Colonel listened to these proposals to dismember an ally in silence and fury. He had not wanted to come out to luncheon. It would be absurd to say that he was busy, but he was busier than he had ever been in his life before and he looked on the two hours or so which he allowed himself in the middle of the day as a time for general recuperation. He liked to spend them among people to whom he could relate all that he had done in the morning; to people who would appreciate the importance and rarity of such work; either that, or with a handsome woman. He left the Travelers’ as early as he decently could and returned to his mess. His mind was painfully agitated by all he had heard and particularly by the presence of that seedy-looking young radical whose name he had not caught. That at least, he thought, he might have hoped to be spared at Sir Joseph’s table.

  “Well, Jo, is everything arranged?”

  “Nothing is exactly arranged yet, Cynthia, but I’ve set the ball rolling.”

  “I hope Basil made a good impression.”

  “I hope he did, too. I’m afraid he said some rather unfortunate things.”

  “Oh, dear. Well, what is the next step?”

  Sir Joseph would have liked to say that there was no next step in that direction; that the best Basil could hope for was oblivion; perhaps in a month or so, when the luncheon was forgotten…”It’s up to Basil now, Cynthia. I have introduced him. He must follow it up himself if he really wants to get into that regiment. But I have been wondering since you first mentioned the matter, do you really think it is quite suitable…”

  “I’m told he could not do better,” said Lady Seal proudly.

  “No, that is so. In one way he could not do better.”

  “Then he shall follow up the introduction,” said that unimaginative mother.

  The Lieutenant-Colonel was simmering quietly in his office; an officer—not a young officer but a mature reservist—had just been to see him without gloves, wearing suede shoes; the consequent outburst had been a great relief; the simmering was an expression of content, a kind of mental purr; it was a mood which his subordinates recognized as a good mood. He was feeling that as long as there was someone like himself at the head of the regiment, nothing much could go wrong with it (a feeling which, oddly enough, was shared by the delinquent officer). To the Lieutenant-Colonel, in this mood, it was announced that a civilian gentleman, Mr. Seal, wanted to see him. The name was unfamiliar; so, for the moment, was Basil’s appearance, for Angela had been at pains and expense to fit him up suitably for the interview. His hair was newly cut, he wore a stiff white collar, a bowler hat, a thin gold watch-chain and other marks of respectability and he carried a new umbrella. Angela had also schooled him in the first words of his interview. “I know you are very busy, Colonel, but I hoped you would spare me a few minutes to ask your advice…”

  All this went fairly well. “Want to go into the army?” said the Lieutenant-Colonel. “Well, I suppose we must expect a lot of people coming in from outside nowadays. Lot of new battalions being formed, even in the Brigade. I presume you’ll join the infantry. No point in going into the cavalry nowadays. All these machines. Might just as well be an engine driver and have done with it. There’s a lot of damn fool talk about this being a mechanized war and an air war and a commercial war. All wars are infantry wars. Always have been.”

  “Yes, it was infantry I was thinking of.”

  “Quite right. I hear some of the line regiments are very short of officers. I don’t imagine you want to go through the ranks, ha! ha! There’s been a lot of nonsense about that lately. Not that it would do any harm to some of the young gentlemen I’ve seen about the place. But for a fellow of your age the thing to do is to join the Supplementary Reserve, put down the regiment you want to join—there are a number of line regiments who do very useful work in their way—and get the commanding officer to apply for you.”

  “Exactly, sir, that’s what I came to see you about. I was hoping that you—”

  “That I…?” Slowly to that slow mind there came the realization that Basil, this dissolute-looking young man who had so grossly upset his lunch interval the day before, this radical who had impugned the efficiency of the officer-type, was actually proposing to join the Bombadier Guards.

  “I’ve always felt,” said Basil, “that if I had to join the Foot Guards, I’d soonest join yours. You aren’t as stuffy as the Grenadiers and you haven’t got any of those bogus regional connections like the Scots and Irish and Welsh.”

  Had there been no other cause of offence; had Basil come to him with the most prepossessing appearance, the most glittering sporting record, a manner in which deference to age was most perfectly allied with social equality, had he been lord of a thousand loyal tenants, had he been the nephew of the Colonel-in-Chief, the use by a civilian of such words as “stuffy” and “bogus” about the Brigade of Guards would have damned him utterly.

  “So what I suggest,” Basil continued, “is that I sign up for this Supplementary Reserve and put you down as my choice of regiment. Will that be O.K.?”

  The Lieutenant-Colonel found his voice; it was not a voice of which he had full control; it might have been the voice of a man who had been suspended for a few seconds from a gibbet and then cut down. He fingered his collar as though, indeed, expecting to find the hangman’s noose there. He said: “That would not be O.K. We do not take our officers from the Supplementary Reserve.”

  “Well, how do I join you?”

  “I’m afraid I must have misled you in some way. I have no vacancy for you in the regiment. I’m looking for platoon commanders. As it is I’ve got six or seven ensigns of over thirty. Can you imagine yourself leading a platoon in action?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact I can, but that’s the last thing I want. In fact that’s why I want to keep away from the line regiments. After all there is always a number of interesting staff jobs going for anyone in the Guards, isn’t there? What I thought of doing was to sign up with you and then look round for something more interesting. I should be frightfully bored with regimental life you know but everyone tells me it’s a great help to start in a decent regiment.”