The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell [46]
to worry whether the platoon was better occupied digging themselves in or attacking a hill; whether Davies, G., should have a stripe or Davies, L., lose one; yet, by comparison, the shapes of Barnby and Pennistone were little more than figments of the imagination, shadows flickering on the slides of an old-fashioned magic-lantern. I had scarcely arrived in London, in any case, before it was time to leave for Aldershot. In the train on the way there, I reflected on the ideas Pennistone had put forward: the ‘occasional operational flights’ of Barnby. How would one feel on such aerial voyages? It might be like Dai and Shoni in their balloon. In the army, as up to now experienced, danger, although it might in due course make appearance, at present skulked out of sight in the background; the foreground for ever cluttered with those moral obligations outlined by Vigny. I envied Pennistone, who could turn from war to Descartes, and back again, without perceptible effort. I knew myself incapable of writing a line of a novel – by then I had written three or four – however long released from duty. Whatever inner processes are required for writing novels, so far as I myself was concerned, war now utterly inhibited. That was one of the many disagreeable aspects of war. It was not only physically inescapable, but morally inescapable too. Why did one envy Barnby his operational flights? That was an absorbing question. Certainly not because one wanted to be killed, nor yet because the qualities of those who excel in violent action were the qualities to which one had any claim. For that matter, such qualities were not specially Barnby’s. There was perhaps the point. Yet it was absurd to regard war as a kind of competition of just that sort between individuals. If that was the aim in war, why not in peace? No doubt there were plenty of individuals who felt that sort of emulation in peacetime too, but their preoccupations were not one’s own. Looked at calmly, war created a situation in which the individual – if he wished to be on the winning side – was of importance only in so much as he contributed to the requirements of the machine, not according to the picturesque figure he cut in the eyes of himself and others. It was no more reasonable, if you were not that sort of person, to aspire to lead a cavalry charge, than, without financial gifts, to dream of cornering the pepper market; without scientific training, split the atom. All the same, as Pennistone had said, these things are largely a matter of the will. I thought of Dr Trelawney, the magician, the night Duport and I had helped him to bed after his asthma attack, when he had quoted as all that was necessary: ‘To know to dare, to will, to be silent.’ Armed with those emblems of strength, one might, however out of character, lead a cavalry charge, perhaps even corner the pepper market and split the atom too. Anyway, I thought, it would be a dull world if no one ever had dreams of glory. Moreland was fond of quoting Nietzsche’s opinion that there is no action without illusion. Arrival at Aldershot brought an end to these reflections. Most of the train’s passengers turned out to be officers on their way to the same course as myself. After reporting to the Orderly Room, we were shown the lines where we were to sleep, a row of small redbrick houses built round a sort of square. Their interiors were uninviting.
‘Former married quarters,’ said the gloomy C.3 lance-corporal guiding my group. ‘Condemned in 1914, don’t half wonder.’
I did not wonder either. 1914 was, in fact, the year when, as a child, I had last set eyes on these weary red cantonments, my father’s regiment stationed at a hutted camp between here and Stonehurst, the remote and haunted bungalow where my parents lived at that time. I remembered how the Battalion, polished and blancoed, in scarlet and spiked helmets, had marched into Aldershot for some ceremonial parade, drums beating, colours cased, down dusty summer roads. Afterwards, my father had complained of a sore heel caused by the rub of his Wellington boot, an abrasion