It was a penance whose austerities, such as they were, admitted of relaxation.
After the stand-easy they fell in for platoon training. Alastair’s platoon commander was away that morning. He was sitting on a Court of Enquiry. For three hours he and two other officers heard evidence, and recorded it at length, on the loss of a swill tub from H.Q. lines. At length it was clear that there was a conspiracy of perjury on the part of all the witnesses, or that the tub had disappeared by some supernatural means independent of human agency; the Court therefore entered a verdict that no negligence was attributable to anyone in the matter and recommended that the loss be made good out of public funds. The President said, “I don’t expect the C.O. will approve that verdict. He’ll send the papers back for fresh evidence to be taken.”
Meanwhile the platoon, left in charge of the Sergeant, split up into sections and practised immediate action on the Bren gun.
“Gun fires two rounds and stops again. What do you look at now, Trumpington?”
“Gas regulator.”…Off with the magazine. Press, pull back, press… “Number Two gun clear.”
“What’s he forgotten?”
A chorus, “Butt strap.”
One man said, “Barrel-locking nut.” He had said it once, one splendid day, when asked a question, and he had been right when everyone else was stumped, and he had been commended. So now he always said it, like a gambler obstinately backing the same colour against a long run of bad luck; it was bound to turn up again one day.
The Corporal ignored him. “Quite right, he’s forgotten the butt strap. Down again, Trumpington.”
It was Saturday. Work ended at twelve o’clock; as the platoon commander was away, they knocked off ten minutes earlier and got all the gear stowed so that as soon as the call was sounded off on the bugle they could run straight for their quarters. Alastair had his leave pass for reveille on Monday. He had no need to fetch luggage. He kept everything he needed at home. Sonia was waiting in the car outside the guardroom; they did not go away for weekends but spent them, mostly in bed, in the furnished house which they had taken near by.
“I was pretty good with the Bren this morning,” said Alastair. “Only one mistake.”
“Darling, you are clever.”
“And I managed to shirk P.T.”
They had packed up ten minutes early too; altogether it had been a very satisfactory morning. And now he could look forward to a day and a half of privacy and leisure.
“I’ve been shopping in Woking,” said Sonia, “and I’ve got all kinds of delicious food and all the weekly papers. There’s a film there we might go and see.”
“We might,” said Alastair doubtfully. “It will probably be full of a lot of––soldiers.”
“Darling, I’ve never before heard words like that spoken. I thought they only came in print, in novels.”
Alastair had a bath and changed into tweeds. (It was chiefly in order that he might wear civilian clothes that he stayed indoors during weekends; for that and the cold outside and the ubiquitous military.) Then he took a whisky-and-soda and watched Sonia cooking; they had fried eggs, sausages, bacon, and cold plum pudding; after luncheon he lit a large cigar; it was snowing again, piling up round the steel-framed windows, shutting out the view of the golf course; there was a huge fire and at tea-time they toasted crumpets.
“There’s all this evening, and all tomorrow,” said Sonia. “Isn’t it lovely? You know, Alastair, you and I always seem to manage to have fun, don’t we, wherever we are?”
This was February 1940, in that strangely cozy interlude between peace and war, when there was leave every weekend and plenty to eat and drink and plenty to smoke, when France stood firm on the Maginot Line and the Finns stood firm in Finland, and everyone said what a cruel winter they must be having in Germany. During one of these weekends Sonia conceived a child.
As Mr. Bentley had foretold, it was not long before Ambrose found himself enrolled on the staff of the Ministry of Information. He was in fact one of the reforms introduced at the first of the many purges. Questions had been asked about the Ministry in the House of Commons; the Press, hampered in so much else, was free to exploit its own grievances. Redress was promised and after a week of intrigue the new appointments were made. Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers went to the Folk-dancing Department; Mr. Pauling went to Woodcuts and Weaving; Mr. Digby-Smith was given the Arctic Circle; Mr. Bentley himself, after a dizzy period in which, for a day, he directed a film about postmen, for another day filed press-cuttings from Istanbul, and for the rest of the week supervised the staff catering, found himself at length back beside his busts in charge of the men of letters. Thirty or forty officials retired thankfully into competitive commercial life, and forty or fifty new men and women appeared to take their places; among them, he never quite knew how, Ambrose. The Press, though sceptical of good results, congratulated the public upon maintaining a system of government in which the will of the people was given such speedy effect. The lesson of the muddle at the Ministry of Information for muddle there undoubtedly was is not that such things occur under a democracy, but that they are susceptible to remedy, they wrote; the wind of democratic criticism has blown, clear and fresh, through the departments of the Ministry; charges have been frankly made and frankly answered. Our enemies may ponder this portent. Ambrose’s post as sole representative of Atheism in the Religious Department was not, at this stage of the war, one of great importance. He was in no position, had he wished it, to introduce statuary into his quarters. He had for his use a single table and a single chair. He shared a room and a secretary with a fanatical young Roman Catholic layman who never tired of exposing discrepancies between Mein Kampf and the encyclical Quadragesimo anno, a bland nonconformist minister, and a Church of England clergyman who had been brought in to succeed the importer of the mahogany prie-dieu. “We must reorientate ourselves to Geneva,” this cleric said; “the first false step was taken when the Lytton report was shelved.” He argued long and gently, the Roman Catholic argued long and fiercely, while the nonconformists sat as a bemused umpire between them. Ambrose’s task consisted in representing to British and colonial atheists that Nazism was at heart agnostic with a strong tinge of religious superstition; he envied the lot of his colleagues who had at their finger-tips long authentic summaries of suppressed Sunday Schools, persecuted monks, and pagan Nordic rites. His was uphill work; he served a small and critical public; but whenever he discovered in the pile of foreign newspapers which passed from desk to desk any reference to German church-going, he circulated it to the two or three magazines devoted to his cause. He counted up the number of times the word “God” appeared in Hitler’s speeches and found the sum impressive; he wrote a pointed little article to show that Jew-baiting was religious in origin. He did his best, but time lay heavy on his hands and, more and more, as the winter wore on, he found himself slipping away from his rancorous colleagues, to the more human companionship of Mr. Bentley.