“Should be ready now,” he said, “should be ready. You don’t mind eating in the kitchen, do you? It saves a lot of mucking about.”
“No, I don’t mind at all,” I said.
We went into the kitchen and the Colonel laid the table; then he mashed some potatoes and heaped a great mound of steak and kidney pie onto them and put the plate in front of me.
“Have some more wine,” he said.
The steak and kidney was excellent. I inquired whether the Colonel had made it himself.
“Yes,” he said. “Had to learn to cook when my wife died. Quite simple, really, if you put your mind to it. It’s a wonder what you can do with a pinch of herbs here and there, and that sort of thing. Do you cook?”
“Well, in a rather vague sort of way,” I said. “My mother has taught me various things, but I’ve never done it very seriously. I like it.”
“So do I,” he said. “So do I. Relaxes the mind.”
After we had finished off the steak and kidney pie he got some ice-cream out of the fridge and we ate that.
“Ah,” said the Colonel, leaning back in his chair and patting his stomach, “that’s better. That’s better. I only have one meal a day and I like to make it a solid one. Now, how about a glass of port? I’ve got some rather good stuff here.”
We had a couple of glasses of port and the Colonel lit up a fine thin cheroot. When we had finished the port and he had stubbed his cheroot out, he screwed his monocle more firmly in. his eye and looked at me.
“What about going upstairs for a little game?” he asked.
“Um..., what sort of game?” I inquired cautiously, feeling that this was the moment when, if he was going to, he would start making advances.
“Power game,” said the Colonel. “ Battle of wits. Models. You like that sort of thing, don’t you?”
“Um..., yes,” I said.
“Come on, then,” he said. “Come on.”
He led me out into the hall again and then up a staircase, through a small room which was obviously a sort of workshop; there was a bench along one side with shelves upon which there were pots of paint, soldering irons, and various other mysterious things. Obviously the Colonel was a do-it-yourselfer in his spare time, I thought. Then he threw open a door and a most amazing sight met my gaze. The room I looked into ran the whole length of the house and was some seventy to eighty feet long. It was, in fact, all the top rooms knocked into one of the four mews houses that the Colonel owned. The floor was neatly parqueted. But it was not so much the size of die room that astonished me as what it contained. At each end of the room was a large fort made out of papier mâché. They must have been some three or four feet high and some four or five feet across. Ranged round them were hundreds upon hundreds of tin soldiers, glittering and gleaming in their bright uniforms, and amongst them there were tanks, armoured trucks, anti-aircraft guns and similar things. There, spread out before me, was the full panoply of war.
“Ah,” said the Colonel, rubbing his hands in glee, “surprised you!”
“Good Lord, yes!” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many toy soldiers.”
“It’s taken me years to amass them,” he said, “years. I get ’em from a factory, you know. I get ’em unpainted and paint ’em myself. Much better that way, Get a smoother, cleaner job... More realistic, too.”
I bent down and picked up one of the tiny soldiers. It was quite true, what the Colonel had said. Normally a tin soldier is a fairly botchy job of painting, but these were meticulously done. Even the faces appeared to have expression on them.
“Now,” said the Colonel. “Now. We’ll have a quick game — just a sort of run-through. Once you get the hang of it we can make it more complicated, of course. Now, I’ll explain the rules to you.”
The rules of the game, as explained by the Colonel, were fairly straightforward. You each had an army. You threw two dice and the one who got the highest score was the aggressor and it was his turn to start first. He threw his dice and from the number that came up he could move a battalion of his men in any direction that he pleased, and he was allowed to fire off a barrage from his field guns or anti-aircraft guns. These worked on a spring mechanism and you loaded them with matchsticks. The springs in these guns were surprisingly strong and projected the matchsticks with incredible velocity down the room. Where every matchstick landed, in a radius of some four inches around it, was taken to be destroyed. So if you could gain a direct hit on a column of troops you could do savage damage to the enemy. Each player had a little spring tape measure in his pocket for measuring the distance round the matchstick.
I was enchanted by the whole idea, but principally because it reminded me very much of a game that we had invented when we were in Greece. My brother Leslie, whose interest in guns and boats is insatiable, had collected a whole navy of toy battleships and cruisers and submarines. We used to range them out on the floor and play a game very similar to the Colonel’s, only we used to use marbles in order to score direct hits on the ships. Rolling a marble accurately over a bumpy floor in order to hit a destroyer an inch and a half long took a keen eye. It turned out, after we had thrown the first dice, that I was to be the aggressor.
“Hah!” said the Colonel. “Filthy Hun!”
I could see that he was working himself into a warlike mood.
“Is the object of the exercise to try and capture your fort?” I inquired.
“Well, you can do that,” he said. “Or you can knock it out, if you can.”
I soon discovered that the way to play the Colonel’s game was to distract his attention from one flank so that you could do some quick manoeuvring while he was not aware of it, so I kept up a constant barrage on his troops, the matches whistling down the room, and while doing this I moved a couple of battalions up close to his lines.
“Swine!” the Colonel would roar every time a matchstick fell and he had to measure the distance. “Dirty swine! Bloody Hun!” His face grew quite pink and his eyes watered copiously so that he had to keep removing his monocle and polishing it.
“You’re too bloody accurate,” he shouted.
“Well, it’s your fault,” I shouted back, “you’re keeping all your troops bunched together. They make an ideal target.”
“It’s part of me strategy. Don’t question me strategy. I’m older than you, and superior in rank.”
“How can you be superior in rank, when I’m in command of an army?”
“No lip out of you, you whippersnapper,” he roared.
So the game went on for about two hours, by which time I had successfully knocked out most of the Colonel’s troops and got a foothold at the bottom of his fort.
“Do you surrender?” I shouted.
“Never!” said the Colonel. “Never! Surrender to a bloody Hun? Never!”
“Well, in that case I’m going to bring my sappers in,” I said.
“What are you going to do with your sappers?”
“Blow up your fort,” I said.
“You can’t do that,” he said. “Against the articles of war.”
“Nonsense!” I said. “The Germans don’t care about articles of war, anyway.”
“That’s a filthy trick to play!” he roared, as I successfully detonated his fort.
“Now do you surrender?”
“No. I’ll fight you every inch of the way, you Hun!” he shouted, crawling rapidly across the floor on his hands and knees and moving his troops frantically. But all his efforts were of no avail; I had him pinned in a corner and I shot him to pieces.
“By George!” said the Colonel when it was all over, mopping his brow, “I’ve never seen anybody play that game like that. How did you manage to get so damned accurate when you haven’t played it before?”
“Well, I’ve played a similar game, only we used marbles for that,” I said. “But I think once you’ve got your eye in... it helps.”
“Gad!” said the Colonel, looking at the destruction of his army. “Still, it was a good game and a good fight. Shall we have another one?”