First published in 1968 (London: Heinemann, New York: Little, Brown)
With The Military Philosophers, Nick Jenkins’s time in Purgatory ends, both in terms of status and geography. No longer Widmerpool’s underling, lacking even the dignity of a formal position, dealing with the minutiae of a divisional headquarters in garrison and with no foreseeable operational deployment. No longer in Northern Ireland, a sea away from the London he loves. Still in the Army, but with duties far more suited to his character and interests: a liaison officer between the War Office (the headquarters of the British Army in London) and the headquarters of the Polish Army in exile in London. He has escaped the tedium of the line Army, the company of dull fellow officers in the mess, the emphasis on obedience over original thought (“Ours is not to reason why…”).
The Military Philosophers also returns to the relative timescale of the pre-War volumes in A Dance. We cover nearly three-and-a-half years, from the spring of 1942 to Nick’s imminent demobilization in the fall of 1945. Powell deliberately skips roughly nine months from the end of The Soldier’s Art, opening in media res as Nick sits as the night duty officer in his section’s offices somewhere along Whitehall, hearing the ring of a teletype with an urgent incoming message about the evacuation of Polish troops from the Soviet Union into Iran.
This was the start of a massive initiative, agreed between Stalin and Władysław Sikorski, the head of the Polish government in exile, with the consent of the British. Over 77,000 Polish soldiers, many of who had spent years as prisoners in gulags, were moved from camps in Soviet Central Asia to Iran, where they would eventually form the Polish Second Corps under General Władysław Anders. As mentioned in subsequent discussions, a chief British concern was with the accommodation of the over 40,000 civilians, mostly family members, accompanying the evacuees—though, as Anders later put it bluntly in his memoirs, “There was no time for long explanations and arguments by telegram: either I could save the civilian population or leave it to its fate. Evacuation might mean that some would die in Persia, but if they stayed in Russia they would soon all be dead.”
This is the sort of thing for which Widmerpool, now a lieutenant colonel assigned to the Cabinet Office and working closely with “the Minister”—which, if it refers to the Minister of Defence would mean Churchill himself, since he served both as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. Churchill had created the post, in fact, upon taking office in May 1940, to address the problems he’d seen between the War Office (Army) and the Admiralty (Navy) during World War One. So, Widmerpool is operating at a very high level, indeed, even if his relative rank is still low. As Nick observes in the meeting Widmerpool chairs in what are clearly the Cabinet War Rooms, it’s a position he’s quite comfortable and confident in handling. His relentless dedication to work and attention to detail now has a point.
If only Widmerpool’s dedication weren’t overshadowed by his thirst not just to be at the center of action but to influence those actions. Nick quickly sees, for example, that Widmerpool’s sympathies lie not with the Poles but with the Soviets, a fact that will shape his choices and fate in the years to come. Nick gets a taste of this in an exchange regarding General Anders:
“The Russians kept him in close confinement for two years.
“So we are aware.” [Note the royal we.]
“Sometimes in atrocious conditions.”
“Yes, yes.”
Later, when news that the bodies of thousands of executed Polish officers in the Katyn Forest reaches London, Widmerpool has only grown more callous. “One would really have thought someone at the top of the Polish set-up would have grasped this is not the time to make trouble,” he sniffs, suggesting that even if the Soviets had been responsible (as they were), it was excused by bad behavior and bad attitudes on the part of the Poles. And as Nick learns towards the end of the book, Widmerpool’s sympathies for the Soviets over other Allies also led to the death of Peter Templer while on a covert assignment in Prince Theodoric’s country, a fictional counterpart to Yugoslavia.
Nick learns this when he finds himself in the middle of a fight between Widmerpool and his new fiancée, Pamela Flitton, at an embassy party near the end of the book:
“Do you know what happened?”
“About what?”
“About Peter Templer. This man persuaded them to leave Peter to die. The nicest man I ever knew. He just had him killed.”
The Military Philosophers introduces us to the character who plays a central role in the novel and comes to have a dominating position in the next two books of A Dance, often consuming our entire field of view like an outsized member of the audience sitting in front us at a theater. Yes, she appears briefly as a child who throws up at Charles Stringham’s wedding in A Buyer’s Market, but her unstable mixture of sex and rage makes her the focus of every scene from the moment she materializes as the ATS (Army Transport Service) driver assigned to Nick’s office. Still in her early twenties, Pamela is already legendary—for both her sexuality and her anger. Nick is one of the few of his male acquaintances not to have slept with her, and only the bulletproof Odo Stevens manages to bear the brunt of her fury in stride. There are even rumors that London’s dockworkers threatened a strike over her mesmerizing powers.
Just what force brings Pamela and Widmerpool together remains something of a mystery. Yet one cannot consider the question very long without winding up in a dark psychosexual territory. Widmerpool, we know from his treatment of Stringham, Templer, the Poles, is a sadist. So, it seems, is Pamela. Yet these two negative magnets attract as well as repel. Is it because Pamela is ultimately the dominant power in their relationship? We will have ample opportunity to watch and wonder in the next two volumes.
The Military Philosophers ends with Nick running into an old acquaintance, Archie Gilbert, as the two of them are picking out the civilian outfits issued to them upon demobilization. The scene recalls that at the opening of The Soldier’s Art, in which the clerk in the costume store where Nick buys his Army greatcoat mistakes “the war” for a play called The War. “Have you decided what you’re going to take from the stuff here?” Archie asks. “It might be much worse. I think everything myself.” “Except the underclothes,” Nick replies. For almost six years, he’s been playing a role he’s never felt fully comfortable in. Now, he can return to the camouflage of an English writer and gentleman.
Given its timespan, The Military Philosophers is among the more complex novels in A Dance, with five event-filled chapters:
- Chapter 1. A period of a few weeks between mid-March and mid-April 1942.
- News of the movement of Polish troops from the Soviet Union into Iran and David Pennistone’s temporary duty in Scotland lead to Nick’s attendance at a committee meeting at the Cabinet Offices, where he meets Widmerpool, as well as Sunny Farebrother and Peter Templer. Templer is noticeably depressed and looking for a new opportunity. In dealing with Polish Army issues, Nick seeks help from Blackhead, a civil servant with Machiavellian skills of deflection and obstruction. Nick witnesses Field Marshal Alan Brooke, the CIGS (Chief of the Imperial General Staff) enter his building: “He had just burst from a flagged staff-car almost before it had drawn up by the kerb. Now he tore up the steps of the building at the charge, exploding through the inner door into the hall. An extraordinary current of physical energy, almost of electricity, suddenly pervaded the place.” An errand to the Polish Army in exile’s headquarters reunites him with Pamela Flitton, Charles Stringham’s niece, now a driver with the ATS as well as a striking beauty. And the Polish HQ turns out to be his Uncle Giles’s old haunt, the Ufford hotel.
- Chapter 2. January 1943.
- Nick is now a captain and has moved as liaison from the Poles to the Belgians and the Czechs. He hears of Pamela Flitton’s growing reputation as a seductress of tremendous power and destructiveness. He also hears of the mysterious Szymanski, an ambiguously Central European character whose rackety affairs manage to both frustrate and enable British interests for the rest of the book. Oh, and he’s also one of Pamela’s lovers, although keeping track of them is pointless. Nick and Isobel attend a performance of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride at which he sees Widmerpool in the company of Prince Theodoric—as well as of Pamela, who appears to have tangled with both. In an encounter in Widmerpool’s office, Nick hears him disparage the Polish response to the news of the Katyn massacre.
- Chapter 3. June 1944, following the D-Day landings.
- Nick runs into Sunny Farebrother on the street in Whitehall, and the two run into Widmerpool, now a full colonel. Later, heading to his apartment house’s bomb shelter during a V1 attack—perhaps the first—Nick runs into Pamela with Odo Stevens, her latest conquest, as well as Mrs. Erdleigh. She reads both their palms and Pamela flies into a rage that ends with her slapping Odo and storming out of the building. The invasion raises issues that Nick has to address with General Philidor, a French military attaché, and Major Kucherman, a Belgian whose civilian responsibilities as a businessman far outweigh his military ones.
- Chapter 4. November 1944.
- Nick is part of a group of Allied attachés escorted to liberated areas of northern France and Belgium by Colonel Finn, the head of his section. There is an awkward scene on their first night, when Major Prasad, a Hindu attaché from an independent Indian state, insists on having the only room with a restroom in their small auberge for religious reasons, forcing Nick to cajole a Norwegian general into giving it up. The next morning, as their convoy departs the town, Nick realizes they’ve been staying in Cabourg, the Balbec of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In Belgium, their paths cross with Nick’s old Welsh army unit, then the group visits the field headquarters of Field Marshal Montgomery, who poses for photos and hands out precious bottles of brandy. While the group stops in Brussels, Nick runs into Bob Duport, who tells him of Peter Templer’s death. Major Kucherman asks Nick to arrange to have the members of the Belgian resistance army train in England, a seemingly impossible request that is then almost immediately granted by Churchill thanks to the intervention of Sir Magnus Donners.
- Chapter 5. August 1945.
- Nick reads of Widmerpool’s engagement to Pamela. At a party hosted by Major Prasad’s state, Nick meets Sunny Farebrother, who joyfully announces his engagement to Miss Weedon, now General Conyers’s widow. Nick meets Moreland’s ex-wife Matilda, now married to Donners. Widmerpool arrives, anxious to find Pamela so he can then leave for dinner with “the Minister,” but she turns up late and in a black mood, publicly accusing him of leaving Peter Templer to die. We then move forward a few weeks, to a service of thanksgiving held in St. Paul’s cathedral and attended by the King and hundreds of Allied dignitaries. A Colonel Flores, a newly-assigned attaché from a South American country, shows up unexpectedly and Nick finds him a seat. Afterward, Flores offers him a ride back to Whitehall and introduces him to his wife, who turns out to be the former Jean Templer. At the stores where departing officers receive their civilian clothing kits, Nick runs into Archie Gilbert, once a popular plus-one in London society now happily married to a woman from northern London.