The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [91]
This day of General Thanksgiving had been fixed on a Sunday in the second half of August. Its weather seemed designed to emphasize complexities and low temperatures of Allied relationships. Summer, like one of the new regimes abroad, offered no warmth, but chilly, draughty, unwelcoming perspectives, under a grey and threatening sky. The London streets by this time were, in any case, far from cheerful: windows broken: paint peeling: jagged, ruined brickwork enclosing the shells of roofless houses. Acres of desolated buildings, the burnt and battered City lay about St Paul’s on all sides. Finn and I arrived early, entering by the south door. Within the vast cool interior, traces of war were as evident as outside, though on a less wholesale, less utterly ruthless scale. The Allied military attachés, as such, were to be segregated in the south transept, in a recess lined with huge marble monuments in pseudo-classical style. I had been put in charge of the Allied group, because Finn decided the Neutrals, some of whom could be unreliable in matters of discipline and procedure, required his undivided attention. The Neutrals were to occupy a block of seats nearer the choir, the wooden carving of its stalls still showing signs of bomb damage.
‘I’m glad to say no difficulties have been made about Theodoric,’ said Finn. ‘He’s been asked to the Service in a perfectly correct manner. It’s not a large return for a life-time of being pro-British – and accepting exile – but that’s all they can do, I suppose. He’d be even worse off if he’d plumped for the other side. By the way, an ambulance party has been provided in the crypt, should any of your boys come over faint. I shall probably need medical attention myself before the day is over.’
I checked the Allied military attachés as they arrived. They were punctual, on the whole well behaved, whispering together with the air of children at a village Sunday school, a little overawed at the promised visit of the bishop of the diocese, glancing uneasily at the enigmatic sculptural scenes looming above them on the tombs. Among them, as I have said, were many absences and new faces. One regretted Van der Voort. A churchly background would have enhanced his pristine Netherlandish countenance. Colonel Hlava had returned to Prague. ‘Russia is our Big Brother,’ (the phrase had not yet developed Orwellian overtones) he had remarked to me some weeks before he left; even so, when the moment came to shake hands for the last time, he said: ‘We can only hope.’ Hlava was promoted major-general when he got home. Then, a year or two later, he was put under house arrest. He was still under house arrest when he died of heart failure; a flying ace and man one greatly liked.
Kucherman had gone back to a ministerial portfolio in the Belgian Government, his place taken by Bruylant, a quiet professional soldier, with musical leanings, though less marked than Hlava’s and not of the sort to be expressed actively by playing duets with Dempster, had Dempster still been with the Section, not returned to his Norwegian timber. In place of Marinko – out of a job like the rest of his countrymen who had supported Mihailovich’s Resistance Movement, rather than Tito’s – was a newly arrived, long haired, jack-booted young ‘Partisan’ colonel, who talked a little