Esprit de Corps Read Free Page A

But I never did. My classics have always been fluffy. I used to flash to my Pears Encyclopedia or my Brewer, swearing all the time.”
    â€œHe sacked young Pollit for attributing a remark in Tacitus to Suetonius.”
    â€œYes. It was very alarming. I’m glad those days are over.”
    â€œBut Nemesis. What form did he take?”
    â€œShe, old man. She. Nemesis is always a woman. Polk-Mowbray was sent on a brief mission to the States in the middle of the war.”
    â€œAh.”
    â€œHe saw her leading a parade wrapped in the Stars and Stripes and twirling a baton. Her name was Carrie Potts. She was what is known as a majorette. I know. Don’t wince. No, he didn’t marry her. But she was a Milestone, old fellow. From then on the change came about, very gradually, very insidiously. I noticed that he dropped the Latin tag in his drafts. Then he began to leave the ‘u’ out of words like ‘colour’ and ‘valour’. Finally, and this is highly significant, he sent out a staff circular saying that any of the secretaries caught using phrases like quid pro quo, sine qua non, ad hoc, ab initio, ab ovo and status quo would be transferred. This was a bombshell. We were deprived at a blow of practically our whole official vocabulary. Moreover as he read through the circular I distinctly heard him say under his breath: ‘This will pin their ears back.’ You can imagine, old fellow, I was stiff with horror. Of course, the poor fellow is not entirely to blame; he was fighting the disease gamely enough. It was just too much for him. I found a book by Damon Runyon in his desk-drawer one day. I admit that he had the good taste to blush when he saw I’d found it. But by this time he had begun to suffer from dreadful slips of the tongue. At a cocktail party for instance he referred to me as his ‘sidekick’. I was too polite to protest but I must admit it rankled. But there was a much more serious aspect to the business. His despatches began to take a marked transpontine turn. By God, you’ll never believe it but I kept coming across expressions like ‘set-up’, ‘frame-up’, ‘come-back’, and even ‘gimmick’. I ask you— gimmick. ” Antrobus blew out his breath in a cloud of horror. “As you can imagine,” he went on after a pause, “the F.O. was troubled by the change in his reporting. Worst of all, other Ministers and Ambassadors junior to him and easily influenced showed some disposition to copy this sort of thing. Finally it got to such a pitch that all despatches before being printed in Intel-summary form had to pass through a sieve: they established an office in the Rehabilitation section specially for deformed English. Then you remember the Commission on Official English and the book called Foreign Office Prose — How to Write It? ”
    â€œYes. One of the worst written books I’ve ever read.”
    â€œWell, be that as it may, it was the direct outcome of Polk-Mowbray’s activities. It was a last desperate attempt to stop the rot, old man. It was too late, of course, because by this time that dreadful Churchill chap was wandering all over the globe in a siren suit waving a Juliet at everyone. I need hardly add that Mowbray himself ordered a siren suit which he referred to as his ‘sneakers’. He used to potter round the Embassy grounds in them—a bit furtively, of course, but nevertheless … there it was.” Antrobus paused for a long moment as he sorted out these painful memories. Then he said grimly, under his breath, and with dark contempt: “Faucet, elevator, phoney. I ask you.”
    â€œYes,” I said.
    â€œHatchet-man … disc-jockey … torch-singer.”
    â€œYes. Yes. I follow you.”
    â€œI was terribly sad. Poor Polk-Mowbray. Do you know that he went to a Rotary meeting in a hand-painted tie depicting a nude blonde and referred to it