The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [11]
‘Good morning, Nick.’
‘You came down from Scotland last night?’
‘Got a sleeper by a bit of luck. I shared it with an air-commodore who snored. How did the Cabinet Office meeting go?’
‘All right – look, I’m just off night duty. What do you think? A message has come through that a few Poles are trickling over the Persian frontier.’
‘No?’
‘The Russians have released a driblet.’
‘This could mean a Second Polish Corps.’
Pennistone had fair hair with a high-bridged nose over which he could look exceeding severe at people who annoyed him, of whom there were likely to be quite a few in the course of a day’s business. Without possessing a conventionally military appearance, a kind of personal authority and physical ease of movement carried off in him the incisive demands of uniform. More basically, he could claim an almost uncanny instinctive grasp of what was required from a staff officer. Indeed, after months of dealing with him from day to day, General Bobrowski, when informed Pennistone was not a Regular, had exploded into a Polish ejaculation of utter astonishment, at the same time bursting into loud laughter, while executing in mid-air one of those snatching, clutching gestures of the fingers, so expressive of his own impatience with life. A major-general, Bobrowski, who was military attaché, had been with the Polish contingent in France at the beginning of the war, where, in contravention of the French Chief of Army Staff’s order that no Polish troops were to be evacuated to England, he had mounted brens on locomotives and brought the best part of two brigades to a port of embarkation.
‘Bobrowski began his military career in a Russian rifle regiment.’ Pennistone had told me. ‘He was praporschik – ensign, as usually translated – at the same time that Kielkiewicz was an aspirant – always a favourite rank of mine – in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry.’
Hanging his cap on one of the hooks by the door, Pennistone went upstairs at once to get orders from Finn about the news from Iran. Polish GHQ must have received the information simultaneously from their own sources – reports almost always comprehensive, if at times highly coloured – because Michalski, one of General Kielkiewicz’s ADCs, came through on the telephone just after Pennistone had left the room, seeking to arrange an interview with everyone from the Chief of the Imperial General Staff downwards. He was followed almost immediately on the line by Horaczko, one of Bobrowski’s assistants, with the same end in view for his master. We were on easy terms with both Michalski and Horaczko, so temporizing was not too difficult, though clearly fresh and more urgent solicitations would soon be on the way.
Michalski, now in his late thirties, had served like Bobrowski with the Polish contingent in France. Of large size, sceptical about most matters, he belonged to the world of industrial design – statuettes for radiator caps and such decorative items – working latterly in Berlin, which had left some mark on him of its bitter individual humour. In fact Pennistone always said talking to Michalski made him feel he was sitting in the Romanisches Café. His father had been a successful portrait painter, and his grandfather before him, stretching back to a long line of itinerant artists wandering over Poland and Saxony.
‘Painting pictures that are now being destroyed as quickly as possible,’ Michalski said.
He was accomplished at providing thumbnail sketches of the personalities at the Titian, the former hotel, subdued, Edwardian in tone, where headquarters of the Polish army in exile was established. Uncle Giles had once stayed there in days gone by, a moment when neither the Ufford nor the De Tabley had been able to accommodate him at short notice. ‘I’ll be bankrupt if I ever do it again,’ he had declared afterwards, a financial state all his relations in those days supposed him to be in anyway.
Horaczko had reached England in a different manner from Michalski, and only after a lot of adventures.