Unconditional surrender (19 page)

‘A woman’s only a woman but a good cigar is a smoke,’ said the major.

‘Which reminds me,’ said the Lieutenant, ‘that I have never written to congratulate you and Virginia. I read about you in
The Times
when I was staying with the Stitches in Algiers. It’s
very
good news.’

‘Thank you.’

The Halberdier major having accepted, bitten, and lit the cigar he was offered, felt obliged to say: ‘Bring up a pew. We haven’t met, but I’ve seen you with Joe Cattermole.’

‘Yes, he’s the most useful fellow here in my job.’

‘Would it be insecure to ask what that is?’

‘Not at all. Opera. We’re trying to get the opera going, you know.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘It’s the most certain way to the Italian heart. There’s not much difficulty about orchestras. The singers seem all to have gone off with the Germans.’ He spoke of the various opera houses of occupied Italy; some had been gutted by bombs, others had escaped with a little damage. Bari was unscathed. ‘But I must rejoin my hosts,’ he said, rising.

The major hesitated on the brink of so private a topic; then plunged: ‘Did I gather from what that fellow said that you’ve just got married?’

‘Yes.’

‘Rotten luck being posted abroad at once. I say, I’m afraid I was talking out of turn a bit, giving you advice about the local market.’

‘I don’t think my wife would mind.’

‘Wouldn’t she? Mine would – and I’ve been married eleven years.’ He paused, brooding over that long stretch of intermittent rapture, and added: ‘At least, I think she would.’ He paused again. ‘It’s a long time since I saw her. I dare say,’ he concluded with the resigned, cosmic melancholy that Guy had always associated with him, ‘that she wouldn’t really care a bit.’

They returned to the ante-room. The major’s spirits had sunk at the thought of the possibility of his wife’s indifference to his adventures with the WAAFs. He called for whisky. Then he said: ‘I say, do you believe that fellow’s really going round getting up operas? What does he mean about “the way to the Italian heart”? We’ve just beaten the bastards, haven’t we? What have they got to sing about? I don’t believe even the Yanks would be so wet as to lay on entertainments for them. If you ask me, it’s cover for something else. Once you leave regimental soldiering, you run up against a lot of rum things you didn’t know went on. This town’s full of them.’

In London at that moment there was being enacted a scene of traditional domesticity. Virginia was making her
layette
. It was a survival of the schoolroom, incongruous to much in her adult life, that she sewed neatly and happily. It was thus she had spent many evenings in Kenya working a quilt that was never finished. Uncle Peregrine was reading aloud from Trollope’s
Can You Forgive Her?
Presently she said: ‘I’ve finished my lessons, you know.’

‘Lessons?’

‘Instructions. Canon Weld says he’s ready to receive me any time now.’

‘I suppose he knows best,’ said Uncle Peregrine dubiously.

‘It’s all so easy,’ said Virginia. ‘I can’t think what those novelists make such a fuss over – about people “losing their faith”. The whole thing is clear as daylight to me. I wonder why no one ever told me before. I mean it’s all quite obvious really, isn’t it, when you come to think of it?’

‘It is to me,’ said Uncle Peregrine.

‘I want you to be my godfather, please. And that doesn’t mean a present – at least not anything expensive.’ She plied her needle assiduously showing her pretty hands. ‘It’s really you who have brought me into the Church, you know.’

‘I? Good heavens, how?’

‘Just by being such a dear,’ said Virginia. ‘You do like having me here, don’t you?’

‘Yes, of course, my dear.’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Virginia. ‘I should like to have the baby here.’

‘Here? In this flat?’

‘Yes. Do you mind?’

‘Won’t it be rather inconvenient for you?’

‘Not for me. I think it will be cosy.’

‘
Cosy
,’ said Peregrine aghast. ‘
Cosy
.’

‘You can be godfather to the baby too. Only, if you don’t mind, if he’s a boy I shouldn’t think I’ll call him Peregrine. I think Guy would like him to be called Gervase, don’t you?’

And Ludovic was writing. Since the middle of December he had without remission written 3,000 words a day; more than a hundred thousand words. His manner of composition was quite changed. Fowler and Roget lay unopened. He felt no need now to find the right word. All words were right. They poured from his pen in disordered confusion. He never paused; he never revised. He barely applied his mind to his task. He was possessed, the mere amanuensis of some power, not himself, making for – what? He did not question. He just wrote. His book grew as little Trimmer grew in Virginia’s womb without her conscious collaboration.

It was the aim of every Barinese to obtain employment under the occupying forces. Whole families in all their ramifications had insinuated themselves into the service of the  officers’ hotel. Six senile patriarchs supported themselves on long mops from dawn to dusk gently polishing the linoleum floor of the vestibule. They all stopped work as Guy passed between them next morning and then advanced crablike to expunge his foot-prints.

He walked to the office he had visited the evening before. The morning sunlight transformed the building. There had once been a fountain in the
cortile
, Guy now observed; perhaps it would one day play again. A stone triton stood there gaping, last poor descendant of grand forebears, amid spiky vegetation. The sentry was engaged in conversation with a dispatch-rider and let Guy pass without question. He met Gilpin on the stairs.

‘How did you get in?’

‘I’m attached here, don’t you remember?’

‘But you haven’t got a pass. How long will it take those men to learn that an officer’s uniform means nothing? They had no business to let you through without a pass.’

‘Where do I get one?’

‘From me.’

‘Well, perhaps it might save trouble if you gave me one.’

‘Have you got three photographs of yourself?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then I can’t make out a pass.’

At this moment a voice from above said: ‘What’s going on, Gilpin?’

‘An officer without a pass, sir.’

‘Who?’

‘Captain Crouchback.’

‘Well give him a pass and send him up.’

This was Brigadier Cape. The voice became a man on the landing; a lame, lean man, wearing the badges of a regiment of lancers. When Guy presented himself, he said: ‘Keen fellow, Gilpin. Takes his duties very seriously. Sorry I wasn’t here yesterday. I can’t see you at the moment. I’ve got some Jugs coming in with a complaint. The best thing you can do is to get Cattermole to put you in the picture. Then we’ll find where you fit in.’

Major Cattermole had the next room to Brigadier Cape. He was of the same age as Guy, tall, stooping, emaciated, totally unsoldierly, a Zurbarán ascetic with a joyous smile.

‘Balliol 1921-1924,’ he said.

‘Yes. Were we up together?’

‘You wouldn’t remember me. I led a very quiet life. I remember seeing you about with the bloods.’

‘I was never a blood.’

‘You seemed one to me. You were a friend of Sligger’s. He was always very nice to me but I was never in his set. I wasn’t in any set. I wasted my time as an undergraduate, working. I had to.’

‘I think you used to speak at the Union?’

‘I tried. I wasn’t any good. So you’re going across to Jugoslavia?’

‘Am I?’

‘That seems to be why you’re here. How I envy you. I came out in the new year and the doctors won’t let me go back. I was there for the Sixth Offensive but I crocked up. They had to carry me for the last two weeks. I was only an encumbrance. The partisans never leave their wounded. They know what the enemy would do to them. We had men of seventy and girls of fifteen in our column. A few hour’s halt and then “pokrit” – “forward”. I don’t know what my academic colleagues would have made of it. We ate all our donkeys in the first week. At the end we were eating roots and bark. But we got clean through and an aeroplane picked me up with the rest of the wounded. Didn’t you have a pretty hard crossing from Crete?’

‘Yes, how did you know?’

‘It was all in the dossier they sent us. Well, I don’t have to tell you what real exhaustion means. Did you get hallucinations?’

‘Yes.’

‘So did I. You’ve made a better recovery than I. They say I’ll never be fit to go into the field again. I’m stuck in an office, briefing other men. Let’s get to work.’

He unrolled a wall-map. ‘The position is fluid,’ he said, a curious official insincerity masking his easier, early manner. ‘This is as up to date as we can make it.’

And for twenty minutes he delivered what was plainly a set exposition. Here were the ‘liberated areas’; this was the route of one brigade, that of another; here was the headquarters of a division, there of a corps. A huge, intricately involved campaign of encirclements and counter-attacks took shape in Cattermole’s precise, donnish phrases.

‘I had no idea it was on this scale,’ said Guy.

‘No one has. No one will, as long as there’s a royalist government in exile squatting in London. The partisans are pinning down three times as many troops as the whole Italian campaign. Besides von Weich’s Army Group there are five or six divisions of Cetnics and Ustachi – perhaps those names are unfamiliar. They are the Serb and Croat Quislings. Bulgarians, too. There must be half a million enemy over there.’

There seem to be plenty of partisans,’ Guy observed, pointing to the multitude of high formations scored on the map.

‘Yes,’ said Major Cattermole, ‘yes. Of course not all the regiments are quite up to strength. It’s no good putting more men in the field than we can equip. And we’re short of almost everything – artillery, transport, aeroplanes, tanks. We had to arm ourselves with what we could capture. Until quite lately those men in Cairo were sending arms to Mihajlovic to be used against our own people. We’re doing a little better now. There’s a trickle of supplies, but it isn’t easy to arrange drops for forces on the move. And the Russians have at last sent in a mission – headed by a general. You can have no idea, until you’ve seen them, what that will mean to the partisans. It’s something I have to explain to all our liaison officers. The Jugoslavs accept us as allies but they look on the Russians as leaders. It is part of their history – well, I expect you know as well as I do about Pan-Slavism. You’ll find it still as strong as it was in the time of the Czars. Once, during the Sixth Offensive, we were being dive-bombed at a river crossing and one of my stretcher bearers – a boy from Zagreb University – said quite simply: “Every bomb that falls here is one less on Russia.” We are foreigners to them. They accept what we send them. They have no reason to feel particularly grateful. It is they who are fighting and dying. Some of our less sophisticated men get confused and think it is a matter of politics. I’m sure you won’t make that mistake but I deliver this little lecture to everyone. There are no politics in war-time; just love of country and love of race – and the partisans know we belong to a different country and a different race. That’s how misunderstandings sometimes arise.’

At this moment Brigadier Cape put his head in at the door and said: ‘Joe, can you come in for a minute?’

‘Study the map,’ said Major Cattermole to Guy. ‘Learn it. I’ll be back soon.’

Guy was well instructed in military map-reading. He did as he was told, wondering where in that complicated terrain his own future lay.

Next door Cape sat at his table staring resentfully at a gold hunter watch, handsomely engraved on the back with a crown and inscription. ‘You know all about this, of course, Joe?’

‘Yes, I told Major Cernic to report it to you.’

‘He was in a great state about it.’

‘Can you blame him?’

‘But what am I supposed to do?’

‘Report it to London.’

‘It’s the hell of a thing to have happened just when the Jugs were beginning to trust us.’

‘They’ll never trust us as long as they know there’s an emigré government in London. Properly handled this might be the opportunity for repudiating them.’

‘There’s no doubt it’s genuine, I suppose?’

‘None whatever.’

‘Not a political move?’

‘Not on our part. It’s exactly what it purports to be – a presentation watch inscribed in London to Mihajlovic as Minister of War. A Serb brought it out, who was ostensibly coming to the partisans. Fortunately he got drunk at Algiers and showed it to a young American I know, who was passing through. He tipped me off, so the partisans arrested the agent as soon as he arrived.’

‘He was going to have gone across? You know the odd thing about it is that it shows there must be a means of communication between Tito’s chaps and Mihajlovic’s.’

‘Only through the enemy.’

‘Damn,’ said Cape, ‘damn. I’d just as soon the fellow got his watch as have all this rumpus. What happened to the Serb?’

‘He was dealt with.’

‘This isn’t soldiering as I was taught it,’ said Cape.

Major Cattermole returned to Guy. ‘Sorry to leave you. Just a routine matter. I’d pretty well finished my tutorial and the Brigadier is free to see you. He’ll tell you where you are going and when.

‘You are in for a unique experience, whatever it is. The partisans are a revelation – literally.’

When Major Cattermole spoke of the enemy he did so with the impersonal, professional hostility with which a surgeon might regard a malignant, operable growth; when he spoke of his comrades in arms it was something keener than loyalty, equally impersonal, a counterfeit almost of mystical love as portrayed by the sensual artists of the high baroque.

‘Officers and men,’ he proclaimed exultantly, ‘share the same rations and quarters. And the women too. You may be surprised to find girls serving in the ranks beside their male comrades. Lying together, sometimes, for warmth, under the same blanket, but in absolute celibacy. Patriotic passion has entirely extruded sex. The girl partisans are something you will never have seen before. In fact, one of the medical officers told me that many of them had ceased to menstruate. Some were barely more than schoolchildren when they ran away to the mountains leaving their bourgeois families to collaborate with the enemy. I have seen spectacles of courage of which I should have been sceptical in the best authenticated classical text. Even when we have anaesthetics the girls often refuse to take them. I have seen them endure excruciating operations without flinching, sometimes breaking into song as the surgeon probed, in order to prove their manhood. Well, you will see for yourself. It is a transforming experience.’