First published in 1964 (London: Heinemann, New York: Little, Brown)
The Valley of Bones begins the “war trilogy” within the series of A Dance to the Music of Time. For the next almost six years, we will follow Nick Jenkins through a series of postings within the British Army for which he is never well-suited — but then neither are many of the other officers and men he will serve with. Competence is a quality he will rarely encounter and that in a few NCOs and even fewer officers. He will not engage in combat, though he will witness devastation and bloodshed in the same manner he would have had he remained a civilian: through the German bombing attacks on Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Much of his time will be spent in tedious routines as much designed to keep men occupied as prepared.
To this extent, the three volumes of the war trilogy are far more realistic than its most obvious counterpart, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy. Waugh’s protagonist becomes a member of the Commandos and serves in several operations which, if less than successful, expose him to combat and frontline conditions in unique and specialized circumstances far from those experienced by most who served in the Army. Even in infantry units like the battalion Nick joins at the start of the book, far more time was spent out of combat than in. The mind-numbing boredom Nick endures through much of The Valley of Bones is closer to the norm for line units up to the time of the D-Day invasion. Which is one reason why this kind of experience is relatively unknown in many war novels and another why Powell is to be saluted (no pun intended) for not skirting it in a rush to get to the “exciting bits” of Nick’s war experience.
Although — spoiler alert, if such things matter to you — there are no exciting bits in Nick Jenkins’s war experience. Having no aptitude for command, as becomes clear early on, he is shifted to a series of staff postings, none of them critical to his unit’s functions. Neither of the more popular ways of dealing with the monotony of garrison duty — drinking (Bithel) and administrative chicanery (Widmerpool) — suits his temperament or character. He refers to Isobel’s letters as “the only residuum of a world occupied by other matters than platoon training or turning out the guard.” The one thing he can look forward to, given that he takes no professional interest in the occasional ineptly-organized and run exercises like the one depicted in Chapter Two, is escape.
Fortunately for Nick (and the reader), escape, if only brief, arrives in Chapter Three, with his temporary assignment to a training course at Aldershot, which not only introduces several characters — David Pennistone, Odo Stevens — who will play more significant roles later in his time in the Army, but a chance to reunite with Isobel and others we remember from earlier volumes. An indication of Nick’s reticence when it comes to talking about himself is the fact that he barely mentions becoming a father. All we get are two sentences at the start of Chapter Four in which his son is referred to as “the baby” and “the child.” We never learn the names of either of Nick and Isobel’s children, who don’t even rate the status of “noises offstage,” so to speak.
Chapter Four serves up a buffet of incompetence, both professional and personal, foremost with the failures and humiliations of Roland Gwatkin, Nick’s company commander, and his roommate, Bithel. It’s a reminder that not all military casualties result from combat. If, however, Nick hopes to move on from his battalion to a posting with more promise of interesting work, such hopes are certainly dashed when, at the close of the book, he’s dispatched to division headquarters to become an assistant to the dreaded Major Widmerpool.
The Valley of Bones follows Powell’s usual four-chapter structure:
- Chapter 1. Early in 1940. Nick joins a Welsh regiment and is assigned to a company commanded by Roland Gwatkin, a Welshman with an unrealistically high opinion of his abilities. Soon after his arrival, he’s joined by Bithel, an odd fellow subaltern (2nd lieutenant in US terms) who seems to think his brief time as a cinema doorman qualifies as experience in show business. We learn Powell’s reason for his title when the regimental chaplain, Revered Popkiss, delivers a sermon taken from Ezekial 37:1-2: “The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley: and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?'”
- Chapter 2. A week later (February to April 1940). Nick and his unit deploy to a barracks housed in a former linen factory in Northern Ireland. Many of the soldiers suffer from seasickness on the passage across the Irish Sea. Gwatkin takes a dislike to Bithel and confides in Jenkins as they sit at nights in the company office listening to Lord Haw-Haw’s broadcasts from “Chairmany.” Gwatkin proves himself unfit in a divisional field exercise as well as in taking the measure of his men, failing to reform Private Sayce and unknowingly driving Sergeant Pendry deeper into depression and likely enabling his suicide.
- Chapter 3. April 1940 Nick travels to attend a course at Aldershot, meeting David Pennistone, a clearly highly intelligent and sophisticated man, on a train, an acquaintance that will prove useful in The Military Philosophers. He also meets Odo Stevens, a self-confident if less than disciplined lieutenant from Birmingham, as well as Jimmy Brent, who shares unwelcome details of his affair with Jean Templer (conducted roughly simultaneously with Nick’s own). Nick manages to reunite with Isobel, within days of delivering, as well as other members of the Tolland family, including Priscilla, to whom Odo Stevens shows decided interest.
- Chapter 4. May – June 1940. Back in Northern Ireland, Nick finds that matters have only gotten worse in Gwatkins’s company. Roland’s feelings toward Bithel have grown into deep hatred and he has Bithel arrested for allegedly kissing a private. He tells Nick that he’s having an affair with Maureen, the local barmaid, but Nick can see it’s almost entirely one-sided (and not hers). An error in responding to a codeword instruction leads to Gwatkins being relieved of his command and Nick departs for a new posting at divisional headquarters.
If the tedium of Nick’s Army garrison duty in The Valley of Bones parallels England’s experience during the “Phony War” of Autumn 1939 – Spring 1940, then his experiences in the next book, The Soldier’s Art, can certainly be said to parallel the dark years between the fall of France and the “Turn of the Tide” of 1942-1943.