Esprit de Corps Read Free

sorry for the Brothers Karamazov and the Liberation-Celebration Machine. God knows, one did not wish them ill. But I must confess I was not surprised to read in the paper a week later that this latest triumph of the Yugoslav Heavy Industry had jumped the points at Slopsy Blob and finished the good work it had begun by carrying away most of the station buildings. No one was hurt. No one ever is in Serbia. Just badly shaken and frightened out of one’s wits. It is all, when you come to think of it, part of the Serbian Way of Life.…”

2
    Case History
    Last week, Polk-Mowbray’s name came up again—we had read of his retirement that morning, in The Times . We had both served under him in Madrid and Moscow, while Antrobus himself had been on several missions headed by him—Sir Claud Polk-Mowbray, O.M., K.C.M.G., and all that sort of thing.
    Talking of him, Antrobus did his usual set of facial jerks culminating in an expression like a leaky flowerpot, and said: “You know, old man, thinking of Polk-Mowbray today and all the different places we’ve served, I suddenly thought ‘My God, in Polk-Mowbray we have witnessed the gradual destruction of an Ambassador’s soul’.”
    I was startled by this observation.
    â€œI mean,” went on Antrobus, “that gradually, insidiously, the Americans got him.”
    â€œHow do you mean, ‘the Americans got him’?”
    Antrobus clicked his tongue and lofted his gaze.
    â€œPerhaps you didn’t know, perhaps you were not a Silent Witness as I was.”
    â€œI don’t honestly think I was.”
    â€œDo you remember Athens ’37, when I was first secretary?”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œPolk-Mowbray was a perfectly normal well-balanced Englishman then. He had all the fashionable weaknesses of the eighteenth-century gentleman. He fenced, he played the recorder.”
    â€œI remember all that.”
    â€œBut something else too. Think back.”
    â€œI’m thinking.…”
    Antrobus leaned forward and said with portentous triumph: “He wrote good English in those days.” Then he sat back and stared impressively at me down the long bony incline of his nose. He allowed the idea to soak in.
    Of course what he meant by good English was the vaguely orotund and ornamental eighteenth-century stuff which was then so much in vogue. A sort of mental copperplate prose.
    â€œI remember now,” I said, “committing the terrible sin of using the phrase ‘the present set-up’ in a draft despatch on economics.” (It came back gashed right through with the scarlet pencil which only Governors and Ambassadors are allowed to wield—and with something nasty written in the margin.)
    â€œAh,” said Antrobus, “so you remember that. What did he write?”
    â€œâ€˜The thought that members of my staff are beginning to introject American forms into the Mother Tongue has given me great pain. I am ordering Head of Chancery to instruct staff that no despatches to the Foreign Secretary should contain phrases of this nature.’”
    â€œPhew.”
    â€œAs you say—phew.”
    â€œBut Nemesis”, said Antrobus, “was lying in wait for him, old chap. Mind you,” he added in the sort of tone which always sounds massively hypocritical to foreigners simply because it is, “mind you I’m not anti-American myself—never was, never will be. And there were some things about the old Foreign Office Prose Style—the early Nicolson type.”
    â€œIt was practically Middle English.”
    â€œNo, what I objected to was the Latin tag. Polk-Mowbray was always working one in. If possible he liked to slip one in at the beginning of a despatch. ‘Hominibus plenum, amicis vacuum as Cato says’, he would kick off. The damnable thing was that at times he would forget whether it was Cato who said it. I was supposed to know, as Head of Chancery.