LXXXIV

There may well have been many clerks like Greene’s Conrad

Drover noting how ‘he might have been at the edge of a great

Army hidden by mist’, and the agents of this class war, each

Tied to their duty, not by principle but simply the accident

Of their position and the bureaucratic badge of lack-courage

To break ranks, as the Assistant Commissioner –Dover’s quarry–

A top civil servant grooming his smoky moustache in his

Office more like a beleaguered general in an artillery-rattled

Chateau ‘behind miles of torn country’, one crisscrossed

With cities acrawl with beetle-like black cabs and scuttling ‘trams’

That ‘screamed down the Embankment’, and buses that ‘circled

Trafalgar Square’, and this thoroughly modern Major General

Of respectful feelings and acutely recoiling conscience sat

And mused on the ‘peace of a Sunday in Pall Mall’ like that

Acrid atmosphere of waste and death that attaches itself

To spent battlefields, and thought of the poverty ‘successfully

Contested’ and the have-nots ‘driven back… to Vauxhall’ and

The ravages, himself, a chalk-striped mercenary, his heart not

In it really; but it was a battle that had to be fought because

The war was ‘already raging, two ignorant armies in a fog’;

And after the event he bitterly envied but also privately

Venerated those luckier men who might come after him and

‘Live to serve’ a cause which they actually believed in…

By 1934 there had evolved just such men, their abilities

To pursue what they felt to be the right causes enabled by

The calibration of public school education, the engine-grease

Of Oxbridge finishing and the lucre of well-oiled parents,

But take the more difficult path they did, when they didn’t

Have to, when they could have just as easily turned to speculation,

Parliamentary politics, drink –or a portly combination…