“Right, sir,” he said.
He saluted, turned smartly on his heel (rather in the manner of one of Bithel’s boyhood heroes), and tramped out of the cowshed. Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson showered a hail of minor rebukes on several others present, then went off to raise hell elsewhere. In due course, not without delays, matters were sorted out. The dispatch-rider sent by Widmerpool returned with news that one of the field ambulances, skidding in mud churned up by the passing and repassing of tanks, had wedged its back wheels in a deep ditch. Meanwhile, the Light Aid Detachment, occupied some miles away with an infantry battalion’s damaged carrier tracks, was not allowed — as too heavy in weight — to cross the iron bridge mentioned by Widmerpool. The L.A.D. had therefore been forced to make a detour. The blocked road necessitated several other traffic diversions, which resulted in the temporary hold-up. That had already been cleared up by the time the D.R. reached the crossroads. No one was specially to blame, certainly not Widmerpool, such accidents as that of the ambulance representing normal wear-and-tear to be expected from movement of most of the available Command transport across country where roads were few and bad.
At the same time, to be unjustly hauled over the coals about such a matter is in the nature of things, certainly military things. Incidents like this must take place all the time in the army. In due course, I was to witness generals holding impressive appointments receiving a telling-off in the briskest manner imaginable, from generals of even greater eminence, all concerned astronomically removed from the humble world of Hogbourne-Johnson and Widmerpool. All the same, it was true Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson had been violent in his denunciation, conveying strictures on what he believed to be inefficiency with a kind of personal contempt that was unfitting, something over and above an official reprimand for supposed administrative mishandling. In addition, Hogbourne-Johnson, as a rule, seemed thoroughly satisfied with Widmerpool, as Widmerpool himself had often pointed out.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, Widmerpool was very sore about it. He took it as badly as my former Company Commander, Rowland Gwatkin, used to take his tickings-off from the adjutant, Maelgwyn-Jones. In fact this comparatively trivial exchange between them transformed Widmerpool from an adherent of Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson — even if, in private, a condescending one — to becoming the Colonel’s most implacable enemy. As it turned out, opportunity to make himself awkward arose the day we returned from the exercise. In fact, revenge was handed to Widmerpool, as it were, on a plate. This came about in connection with Mr. Diplock, Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson’s chief clerk.
“Diplock may be an old rascal,” Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson himself had once commented, “but he knows his job backwards.”
Repeating the remark later, Widmerpool had indulged in one of his rare excursions into sarcasm.
“We all know Diplock’s a rascal,” he had remarked, “and also knows his job backwards. The question is — does he know it forwards? In my own view, Diplock is one of the major impediments to the dynamic improvement of this formation.”
Mr. Diplock (so styled from holding the rank of Warrant Officer, Class One) was a Regular Army Reservist, recalled to the colours at the outbreak of war. As indicating status bordering on the brink of a commissioned officer’s (more highly paid than a subaltern), he was entitled to service dress of officer-type cloth (though high-collared) and shoes instead of boots. His woolly grey hair, short thick body, air of perpetual busyness, suggested an industrious gnome conscripted into the service of the army; a gnome who also liked to practise considerable malice against the race of men with whom he mingled, by making as complicated as possible every transaction they had to execute through himself. Diplock was totally encased in military obscurantism. Barker-Shaw, the F.S.O. — as Bithel mentioned, a don in civil life — had cried out, in a moment of exasperation, that Diplock, with education behind him, could have taken on the whole of the Civil Service, collectively and individually, in manipulation of red tape; and emerged victorious. He would have outdone them all, Barker-Shaw said, in pedantic observance of regulation for its own sake to the detriment of practical requirement. Diplock’s answer to such criticism was always the same: that no other way of handling the matter existed. Filling in forms, rendering “states,” the whole process of documentation, seemed to take the place of religion in his inner life. The skill he possessed in wielding army lore reached a pitch at which he could sabotage, or at least indefinitely protract, almost any matter that might have earned the disapproval of himself or any superior of whom he happened to be the partisan — in practice, Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson — while at the same time, if something administratively unusual had to be arranged, Diplock always said he knew how to arrange it. This self-confidence, on the whole justified, was perhaps the main reason why Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson was so well affected towards his chief clerk. The other was no doubt the parade of deference — of a deeper, better understood sort than Cocksidge’s — that Diplock, in return, offered to Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson. Diplock’s methods had always irritated Widmerpool, although himself no enemy to formal routine as a rule.
“I told Hogbourne-Johnson in so many words this morning that we should never get anything done here so long as we had a chief clerk who was such an old woman. Do you know what he said?”
Although Widmerpool prided himself on his own grasp of army life, he had not been able wholly to jettison the more civilian approach, that you are paid to give advice to your superiors in whatever happens to be a specialised aspect of your particular job; that such advice should be presented in the plainest, most forceful terms. He never quite became accustomed to a tradition that aims at total self-effacement in the subordinate, more especially when his professional recommendations are controversial.
“What was the answer?”
“‘Diplock wasn’t an old woman when he won the Military Medal’.”
“How does he know? — some old women are very tough.”
“I replied in the most respectful manner that Diplock won the M.M. a long time ago,” said Widmerpool, ignoring this facetiousness. “That I was only referring to his present fumbling about with A.C.I.s, Ten-Ninety-Eights, every other bit of bumph he can lay his hands on, especially when something is needed in a hurry. I suppose Hogbourne-Johnson thought he was snubbing me. He gave that curious snarling laugh of his.”
This slight brush had taken place before Widmerpool’s more disastrous encounter with the Colonel. It illustrated not only Widmerpool’s retention, in certain respects, of civilian values, but also his occasional lack of grasp of some quite obvious matter. Even in civilian life, a frontal attack would have been ill-judged in approaching a relationship in a business firm such as Hogbourne-Johnson’s with Diplock. It was not going to alter the stranglehold Diplock enjoyed on Hogbourne-Johnson. At the same time, the fact that Widmerpool felt it possible to offer that remark about Diplock at all, absolved him from any suggestion of later deliberately assailing the Colonel through insidious attack by way of his own chief clerk. Widmerpool had already decided Diplock was unsatisfactory. When the time came, of course, he was not blind to pleasure derived from that method, but he did not contrive it of sheer malice. Once the ball was rolling, as D.A.A.G., he had no alternative but to follow up suspicions aroused.