Men at Arms Read Online Free Page A

you remember as I do the happy day when the Bradshawes brought you to my house at Santa Dulcina and we went out together in the boat and so ignominously failed to spear pulpi…’
    ‘Dear Colonel Glover. I am writing to you because I know you served with my brother Gervase and, were a friend of his …’
    ‘Dear Sam, Though we have not met since Downside I have followed your career with distant admiration and vicarious pride. ..’
    ‘Dear Molly, I am sure I ought not to know, but I
do
know that Alex is Someone Very Important and Secret at the Admiralty. I know that you have him completely under your thumb. So do you think you could possibly be an angel…’

     
    He had become a facile professional beggar.
    Usually there was an answer; a typewritten note or a telephone call from a secretary or aide-de-camp; an appointment or an invitation. Always there was the same polite discouragement. ‘We organized skeleton staffs at the time of Munich. I expect we shall expand as soon as we know just what our commitments are’ – from the civilians – ‘Our last directive was to go slow on personnel. I’ll put you in our list and see you are notified as soon as anything turns up.’
    ‘We don’t want cannon-fodder this time’ – from the Services – ‘we learned our lesson in 1914 when we threw away the pick of the nation. That’s what we’ve suffered from ever since.’
    ‘But I’m not the pick of the nation,’ said Guy. ‘I’m natural fodder. I’ve no dependants. I’ve no special skill in anything. What’s more I’m getting old. I’m ready for immediate consumption. You should take the 35s now and give the young men time to get sons.’
    ‘I’m afraid that’s not the official view. I’ll put you on our list and see you renotified as soon as anything turns up.’
    In the following days Guy’s name was put on many lists and his few qualifications summarized and filed in many confidential registers where they lay unexamined through all the long years ahead.
    England declared war but it made no change in Guy’s routine of appeals and interviews. No bombs fell. There was no rain of poison or fire. Bones were still broken after dark. That was all. At Bellamy’s he found himself one of a large depressed class of men older than himself who had served without glory in the First World War. Most of them had gone straight from school to the trenches and spent the rest of their lives forgetting the mud and lice and noise. They were under orders to await orders and spoke sadly of the various drab posts that awaited them at railway stations and docks and dumps. The balloon had gone up, leaving them on the ground.
    Russia invaded Poland. Guy found no sympathy among these old soldiers for his own hot indignation.
    ‘My dear fellow, we’ve quite enough on our hands as it is. We can’t go to war with the whole world.’
    ‘Then why go to war at all? If all we want is prosperity, the hardest bargain Hitler made would be preferable to victory. If we are concerned with justice the Russians are as guilty as the Germans.’
    ‘Justice?’ said the old soldiers. ‘Justice?’
    ‘Besides,’ said Box-Bender when Guy spoke to him of the matter which seemed in no one’s mind but his, ‘the country would never stand for it. The socialists have been crying blue murder against the Nazis for five years but they are all pacifists at heart. So far as they have any feeling of patriotism it’s for Russia. You’d have a general strike and the whole country in collapse if you set up to be just.’
    ‘Then what are we fighting for?’
    ‘Oh we had to do that, you know. The socialists always thought we were pro-Hitler, God knows why. It was quite a job in keeping neutral over Spain. You missed all that excitement living abroad. It was quite ticklish, I assure you. If we sat tight now there’d be chaos. What we have to do now is to limit and localize the war, not extend it.’
    The conclusion of all these discussions was