The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell [30]
‘The CO will have to get rid of him,’ Gwatkin said. ‘It can’t go on. He isn’t fit to hold a commission.’
‘I don’t see what old Bith could have done about it,’ said Breeze, ‘even though it was a bit irregular to send Deafy back on his own like that.’
‘It may not have been Bithel’s fault directly,’ said Gwatkin sternly, ‘but when something goes wrong under an officer’s command, the officer has to suffer. That may be unjust. He has to suffer all the same. In my opinion, there would be no injustice in this case. Why, I shouldn’t wonder if the Colonel himself was not superseded for this.’
That was true enough. Certainly the Commanding Officer was prepared for the worst, so far as his own appointment was concerned. He said so in the Mess more than once. However, in the end nothing so drastic took place. Deafy Morgan was courtmartialled, getting off with a reprimand, together with transfer to the Second Line and his nagging wife. He had put up some fight. In the circumstances, he could hardly be sent to detention for losing his weapon and failing to capture four youngish assailants for whom he had been wholly unprepared; having been certainly too deaf to hear either their approach, or, at an earlier stage, the substance of Maelgwyn-Jones’s security talk. The findings of the court-martial had just been promulgated, when the Battalion was ordered to prepare for a thirty-six-hour Divisional exercise, the first of its kind in which the unit had been concerned.
‘This is the new Divisional Commander making himself felt,’ said Kedward. ‘They say he is going to shake us up, right and proper.’
‘What’s he called?’
To those serving with a battalion, even brigadiers seem infinitely illustrious, the Divisional Commander, a remote, godlike figure.
‘Major-General Liddament,’ said Gwatkin. ‘He’s going to ginger things up, I hope.’
It was at the start of this thirty-six-hour exercise – reveille at 4.30 a.m., and the first occasion we were to use the new containers for hot food – that I noticed all was not well with Sergeant Pendry. He did not get the Platoon on parade at the right time. That was very unlike him. Pendry had, in fact, shown no sign of breaking down after a few weeks energetic work, in the manner of Breeze’s warning about NCOs who could not perform their promise. On the contrary, he continued to work hard, and his good temper had something of Corporal Gwylt’s liveliness about it. No one could be expected to look well at that hour of the morning, but Sergeant Pendry’s face was unreasonably greenish at breakfast, like Gwatkin’s after the crossing, something more than could be attributed to early rising. I thought he must have been drinking the night before, a foolish thing to do as he knew the early hour of reveille. On the whole, there was very little drinking throughout the Battalion – indeed, small opportunity for it with the pressure of training – but Pendry had some reputation in the Sergeants’ Mess for capacity in sinking a pint or two. I thought perhaps the moment had come when Breeze’s prediction was now going to be justified, that Pendry had suddenly reached the point when he could no longer sustain an earlier efficiency. The day therefore opened badly, Gwatkin justifiably angry that my Platoon’s unpunctuality left him insufficient time to inspect the Company as thoroughly as he wished, before parading with the rest of the Battalion. We were to travel by bus to an area some way from our base, where the exercise was to take place.
‘Oh, I do like to ride in a smart motor-car,’ said Corporal Gwylt. ‘A real pleasure it is to spin along.’
Sergeant Pendry, usually as noisy as any of them, sat silent at the back of the bus, looking as if he might vomit at any moment. Outside, it was raining as usual. We drove across a desolate plain set against a background of vast grey skies, arriving at our destination an hour or two later. Gwatkin had gone ahead in his Company Commander’s truck. He was waiting impatiently by the road when the platoons arrived.