Esprit de Corps Read Online Free Page B

course.”
    â€œFor him England is peppered with fantastic place-names which he can only have got from the Herald. He says he enjoyed visiting Henleg Regatta and Wetminster Abbey; furthermore, he was present at the drooping of the colour; he further adds that the noise of Big Bun striking filled him with emotion; and that he saw a film about Florence Nightingale called ‘The Lade With the Lump’. No, no, old man, say what you will the Herald has much to answer for. It is due to sinister influences like the Gropes and Topes of this world that the British Council’s struggle is such an uphill one. Care for another?”

4
    Jots and Tittles
    â€œIn Diplomacy,” said Antrobus, “quite small things can be One’s Undoing; things which in themselves may be Purely Inadvertent. The Seasoned Diplomat keeps a sharp eye out for these moments of Doom and does what he can to avert them. Sometimes he succeeds, but sometimes he fails utterly—and then Irreparable Harm ensues.
    â€œForeigners are apt to be preternaturally touchy in small ways and I remember important negotiations being spoilt sometimes by a slip of the tongue or an imagined slight. I remember an Italian personage, for example (let us call him the Minister for Howls and Smells), who with the temerity of ignorance swarmed up the wrong side of the C.-in-C. Med.’s Flagship in Naples harbour with a bunch of violets and a bottle of Strega as a gift from the Civil Servants of Naples. He was not only ordered off in rather stringent fashion but passes were made at him with a brass-shod boathook. This indignity cost us dear and we practically had to resort to massage to set things right.
    â€œThen there was the Finnish Ambassador’s wife in Paris who slimmed so rigorously that her stomach took to rumbling quite audibly at receptions. I suppose she was hungry. But no sooner did she walk into a room with a buffet in it than her stomach set up growls of protest. She tried to pass it off by staring hard at other people but it didn’t work. Of course, people not in the know simply thought that someone upstairs was moving furniture about. But at private dinner parties this characteristic was impossible to disguise; she would sit rumbling at her guests who in a frenzy of politeness tried to raise their voices above the noise. She soon lost ground in the Corps. Silences would fall at her parties—the one thing that Diplomats fear more than anything else. When silences begin to fall, broken only by the rumblings of a lady’s entrails, it is The Beginning of the End.
    â€œBut quite the most illuminating example of this sort of thing occurred on the evening when Polk-Mowbray swallowed a moth. I don’t think I ever told you about it before. It is the sort of thing one only talks about in the strictest confidence. It was at a dinner party given to the Communist People’s Serbian Trade and Timber Guild sometime during Christmas week back in ’49. Yugoslavia at that time had just broken with Stalin and was beginning to feel that the West was not entirely populated by ‘capitalist hyenas’ as the press said. They were still wildly suspicious of us, of course, and it was a very hot and embarrassed little group of peasants dressed in dark suits who accepted Polk-Mowbray’s invitation to dinner at the Embassy. Most of them spoke only their mother tongue. Comrade Bobok, however, the leader of the delegation, spoke a gnarled embryonic English. He was a huge sweating Bosnian peasant with a bald head. His number two, Pepic, spoke the sort of French that one imagines is learned in mission houses in Polynesia. From a diplomatist’s point of view they were Heavy Going.
    â€œI shall say nothing about their messy food habits; Drage the butler kept circling the table and staring at them as if he had gone out of his senses. We were all pretty sweaty and constrained by the time the soup plates were removed. The conversation