The Soldier's Art - Anthony Powell [24]
Repeating the remark later, Widmerpool had indulged in one of his rare excursions into sarcasm.
“We all know Diplock’s a rascal,” he had remarked, “and also knows his job backwards. The question is – does he know it forwards? In my own view, Diplock is one of the major impediments to the dynamic improvement of this formation.”
Mr. Diplock (so styled from holding the rank of Warrant Officer, Class One) was a Regular Army Reservist, recalled to the colours at the outbreak of war. As indicating status bordering on the brink of a commissioned officer’s (more highly paid than a subaltern), he was entitled to service dress of officer-type cloth (though high-collared) and shoes instead of boots. His woolly grey hair, short thick body, air of perpetual busyness, suggested an industrious gnome conscripted into the service of the army; a gnome who also liked to practise considerable malice against the race of men with whom he mingled, by making as complicated as possible every transaction they had to execute through himself. Diplock was totally encased in military obscurantism. Barker-Shaw, the F.S.O. – as Bithel mentioned, a don in civil life – had cried out, in a moment of exasperation, that Diplock, with education behind him, could have taken on the whole of the Civil Service, collectively and individually, in manipulation of red tape; and emerged victorious. He would have outdone them all, Barker-Shaw said, in pedantic observance of regulation for its own sake to the detriment of practical requirement. Diplock’s answer to such criticism was always the same: that no other way of handling the matter existed. Filling in forms, rendering “states,” the whole process of documentation, seemed to take the place of religion in his inner life. The skill he possessed in wielding army lore reached a pitch at which he could sabotage, or at least indefinitely protract, almost any matter that might have earned the disapproval of himself or any superior of whom he happened to be the partisan – in practice, Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson – while at the same time, if something administratively unusual had to be arranged, Diplock always said he knew how to arrange it. This self-confidence, on the whole justified, was perhaps the main reason why Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson was so well affected towards his chief clerk. The other was no doubt the parade of deference – of a deeper, better understood sort than Cocksidge’s – that Diplock, in return, offered to Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson. Diplock’s methods had always irritated Widmerpool, although himself no enemy to formal routine as a rule.
“I told Hogbourne-Johnson in so many words this morning that we should never get anything done here so long as we had a chief clerk who was such an old woman. Do you know what he said?”
Although Widmerpool prided himself on his own grasp of army life, he had not been able wholly to jettison the more civilian approach, that you are paid to give advice to your superiors in whatever happens to be a specialised aspect of your particular job; that such advice should be presented in the plainest, most forceful terms. He never quite became accustomed to a tradition that aims at total self-effacement in the subordinate, more especially when his professional recommendations are controversial.
“What was the answer?”
“‘Diplock wasn’t an old woman when he won the Military Medal’.”
“How does he know? – some old women are very tough.”
“I replied in the most respectful manner that Diplock won the M.M. a long time ago,” said Widmerpool, ignoring this facetiousness. “That I was only referring to his present fumbling about with A.C.I.s, Ten-Ninety-Eights, every other bit of bumph he can lay his hands on, especially when something is needed in a hurry. I suppose Hogbourne-Johnson thought he was snubbing me. He gave that curious snarling laugh of his.”
This slight brush had taken place before Widmerpool’s more disastrous encounter with the Colonel. It illustrated not only Widmerpool’s retention, in certain respects, of civilian values, but also his occasional