Free The Soldier's Art by Anthony Powell

comparatively
trivial exchange between them transformed Widmerpool from an adherent of
Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson – even if, in private, a condescending one – to
becoming the Colonel’s most implacable enemy. As it turned out, opportunity to
make himself awkward arose the day we returned from the exercise. In fact,
revenge was handed to Widmerpool, as it were, on a plate. This came about in
connection with Mr. Diplock, Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson’s chief clerk.
    “Diplock may
be an old rascal,” Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson himself had once commented, “but
he knows his job backwards.”
    Repeating the
remark later, Widmerpool had indulged in one of his rare excursions into
sarcasm.
    “We all know
Diplock’s a rascal,” he had remarked, “and also knows his job backwards. The
question is – does he know it forwards? In my own view, Diplock is one of the
major impediments to the dynamic improvement of this formation.”
    Mr. Diplock (so
styled from holding the rank of Warrant Officer, Class One) was a Regular Army
Reservist, recalled to the colours at the outbreak of war. As indicating status
bordering on the brink of a commissioned officer’s (more highly paid than a
subaltern), he was entitled to service dress of officer-type cloth (though
high-collared) and shoes instead of boots. His woolly grey hair, short thick
body, air of perpetual busyness, suggested an industrious gnome conscripted
into the service of the army; a gnome who also liked to practise considerable
malice against the race of men with whom he mingled, by making as complicated
as possible every transaction they had to execute through himself. Diplock was
totally encased in military obscurantism. Barker-Shaw, the F.S.O. – as Bithel
mentioned, a don in civil life – had cried out, in a moment of exasperation,
that Diplock, with education behind him, could have taken on the whole of the
Civil Service, collectively and individually, in manipulation of red tape; and
emerged victorious. He would have outdone them all, Barker-Shaw said, in
pedantic observance of regulation for its own sake to the detriment of
practical requirement. Diplock’s answer to such criticism was always the same:
that no other way of handling the matter existed. Filling in forms, rendering “states,”
the whole process of documentation, seemed to take the place of religion in his
inner life. The skill he possessed in wielding army lore reached a pitch at
which he could sabotage, or at least indefinitely protract, almost any matter
that might have earned the disapproval of himself or any superior of whom he
happened to be the partisan – in practice, Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson – while at
the same time, if something administratively unusual had to be arranged, Diplock always said
he knew how to arrange it.
This self-confidence,
on the
whole justified, was perhaps the main reason why Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson was so
well affected
towards his chief clerk. The other was no doubt the parade of deference
– of a deeper, better understood sort than Cocksidge’s – that Diplock,
in
return, offered to Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson.
Diplock’s methods had always irritated Widmerpool, although himself
no enemy to formal routine as a rule.
    “I told
Hogbourne-Johnson in so many words this morning that we should never get
anything done here so long as we had a chief clerk who was such an old woman.
Do you know what he said?”
    Although
Widmerpool prided himself on his own grasp of army life, he had not been able
wholly to jettison the more civilian approach, that you are paid to give advice
to your superiors in whatever happens to be a specialised aspect of your
particular job; that such advice should be presented in the plainest, most
forceful terms. He never quite became accustomed to a tradition that aims at
total self-effacement in the subordinate, more especially when his professional
recommendations are controversial.
    “What was the
answer?”
    “‘Diplock wasn’t
an old