The Soldier's Art - Anthony Powell [6]
“Strictly speaking, one experienced raids – coming under fire, if you like – when still reading the Boy’s Own Paper. During the earlier war, I mean.”
“Oh, I didn’t,” said Bithel. “The Zeppelins never came near any of the places we lived when I was a kid. That’s just why I was surprised not to mind this sort of thing more. I’m the nervy type, you see. I once had to give evidence in court, rather a nasty case – nothing to do with me, I’m glad to say, just a witness – and I thought my legs were going to give way under me. But this business we’re listening to now really doesn’t worry me. Worst moment’s when the Warning goes, don’t you think?”
The question of fear inevitably propounds itself from time to time if a state of war exists. Will circumstances arise when its operation on the senses might become uncomfortably hard to control? Like Bithel, I, too, had thought a certain amount about that subject, reaching the very provisional conclusion that fear itself was less immediately related to unavoidable danger than might at first be supposed; although no doubt that danger, more or less indefinitely increased in motive power, might – indeed certainly would – cause the graph to rise steeply. In bed at night, months before the blitz struck the locality, I would occasionally feel something like abject fear, turning this way and that in my sleeping-bag, for no special reason except that life seemed so utterly out of joint. That was a kind of nervous condition – as Bithel had said of himself – perfectly imaginable in time of peace; perhaps even experienced then, now forgotten, like so much else of that lost world. In the same way, I would sometimes lie awake enduring torments of thwarted desire, depraved fantasies hovering about the camp-bed, reveries of concupiscence that seemed specifically generated by unprepossessing military surroundings. Indeed, it was often necessary to remind oneself that low spirits, disturbed moods, sense of persecution, were not necessarily the consequence of serving in the army, or being part of a nation at war, with which all-inclusive framework depressive mental states now seemed automatically linked.
The raid in progress at that moment was, as Bithel had indicated, more spectacular than alarming, even a trifle stimulating now one was fully awake and dressed; so long as the mind did not dwell on the tedium of a three-day exercise the following day, undertaken after a missed night’s sleep. On the other hand, if bombs began to fall in the sports field, such light-hearted impressions might easily deteriorate, especially if the bren were knocked out, removing chance of retaliation. (It might be added that all sense of excitement was to evaporate from air-raids three or four years later.) However, Bithel had ceased to require comment on his own meditations about “baptism of fire.” He now returned to those personal worries, predominantly financial, which were never far from his mind.
“I do hope things will be O.K. about that cheque,” he said. “It all started with the Pay Department being late that month in paying Field Allowance into my banking account.”
This situation did, indeed, arise from time to time, owing to absence of method, possibly downright incompetence, on the part of the Financial Branch of the War Office concerned; possibly due to economic ineptitudes, or ingrained malice, of what Pennistone used later to call the “cluster of highly educated apes” ultimately in charge of such matters at the Treasury. Whatever the cause, the army from time to time had to forego its wages; sometimes such individual disasters as Bithel’s resulting.
“I can see there’ll be a fuss,” he said, “but with any luck it won’t come to a court-martial.”
Two or three lesser reports, each thunderous enough, had followed the last big explosion. Now noise was diminishing, the barrage