The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [60]
Since time immemorial, Kernével, a Breton, like so many of the Free French, had worked at the military attaché’s office in London as chief clerk. By now he was a captain. At the moment of the fall of France, faced with the alternative of returning to his country or joining the Free French, he had at once decided to remain, his serial number in that organization – if not, like Abou Ben Adhem’s, leading all the rest – being very respectably high in order of acceptance. It was tempting to look for characteristics of my old Regiment in these specimens of Romano-Celtic stock emigrated to Gaul under pressure from Teutons, Scandinavians and non-Roman Celts.
‘I don’t think my mother could speak a word of French,’ said Kernével. ‘My father could – he spoke very good french – but I myself learnt the language as I learnt English.’
Under a severe, even priestly exterior, Kernével concealed a persuasive taste for conviviality – on the rare occasions when anything of the sort was to be enjoyed. From their earliest beginnings, the Free French possessed an advantage over the other Allies – and ourselves – of an issue of Algerian wine retailed at their canteens at a shilling a bottle. Everyone else, if lucky enough to find a bottle of Algerian, or any other wine, in a shop, had to pay nearly ten times that amount. So rare was wine, they were glad to give that, when available. This benefaction to the Free French, most acceptable to those in liaison with them, who sometimes lunched or dined at their messes, was no doubt owed to some figure in the higher echelons of our own army administration – almost certainly learned in an adventure story about the Foreign Legion – that French troops could only function on wine. In point of fact, so far as alcohol went, the Free French did not at all mind functioning on spirits, or drinks like Cap Corse, relatively exotic in England, of which they consumed a good deal. Their Headquarter mess in Pimlico was decorated with an enormous fresco, the subject of which I always forgot to enquire. Perhaps it was a Free French version of Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, brought up to date and depicting themselves as survivors from the wreck of German invasion.
They did not reject, as we sometimes did ourselves, Marshal Lyautey’s doctrine, quoted by Dicky Umfraville, that gaiety was the first essential in an officer, that some sort of light relief was required to get an army through a war. Perhaps, indeed, they too liberally interpreted that doctrine. If so, the red-tape they had to endure must have driven them to it; those terrible bordereaux – the very name recalling the Dreyfus case whenever they arrived – labyrinthine and ambiguous enough to extort admiration from a Diplock or even a Blackhead.
‘All is fixed for General Philidor’s interview?’ asked Kernével.
‘I shall be on duty myself.’
General Philidor, soon after his arrival in London, had to see a personage of very considerable importance, only a degree or so below the CIGS himself. It had taken a lot of arranging. Philidor was a lively little man with a permanently extinguished cigarette-end attached to his lower lip, which, under the peak of his general’s khaki kepi, gave his face the fierce intensity of a Paris taxi-driver. His rank was that, in practice, held by the commander of a Division. As a former Giraud officer, he was not necessarily an enthusiastic ‘Gaullist’. At our first meeting he had asked me how I liked being in liaison with the French, and, after speaking of the purely military aspects of the work, I had mentioned Algerian wine.
‘Believe me, mon commandant, before the ’14-’18 war many Frenchmen had never tasted wine.’
‘You surprise me, sir.’
‘It was conscription, serving in the army, that gave them the habit.’
‘It is a good one, sir.’
‘My father was a vigneron.’
‘Burgundy or Bordeaux, sir?’
‘At Chinon. You have heard of Rabelais, mon commandant?’
‘And drunk Chinon, sir – a faint taste of raspberries and to be served cold.’
‘The vineyard was not far from our cavalry school at Saumur, convenient when I was on,