and to be judged, Charlie is right enough. He might say to Jock what Muriel Spark’s Sandy Stranger said to Jean Brodie: “if you did not betray us it is impossible that you could have been betrayed by us. The word betrayal does not apply.” Jock’s act of folly is itself a betrayal of all that the military code represents; it threatens to destroy the respect for hierarchy which makes the institution function.
Kennaway understands this, and shows that Charlie Scott is justified within the terms of la vie militaire. I put that in French, not as a flourish, but in the hope that the French phrase will suggest that this novel—and Charlie Scott’s betrayal—would be more comprehensible to continental nations that have made a cult of the Army than they have been to most English critics.
Nevertheless these critics have a point too, and Kennaway sympathizes with them. He lets us see that other standards of judgement are possible, that indeed the code by which the regiment lives is in some way defective: it excludes the humane virtues, it denies imaginative understanding. Such exclusion and such denial breaks Barrow; the recognition that sympathy and imagination have their value breaks Jock in his turn.
Kennaway is a moralist and an ironist; there is judgement even in his descriptive prose. Throughout his fiction he is intensely concerned to place his characters, and he does so in order to evaluate them. His writing is exact, lapidary, appraising; he belongs to a Scottish tradition at the head of which stands Stevenson. He resembles Stevenson in another characteristic too; both writers are able to see virtue in energy, to extend their sympathies to characters very unlike themselves, men who swagger and act by instinct. Stevenson offers us Alan Breck Stewart, and Kennaway answers with Jock Sinclair. He is, I think, an equally remarkable creation.
There is a sense in which Tunes of Glory had no successor. Peter Quennell had suggested that Kennaway would become ‘one of the finest story-tellers of his time’. He didn not. Though he never neglected narrative, and was always aware of its importance, he moved away from the straightforward style of which he had shown himself a master in his first book. He experimented with the indirect approach, seeking to explore the complexity of human beings by varying the angle from which he viewed them. Indeed, he came to dislike Tunes of Glory: it had been too easy, it was a novel which had been ‘given to him’, which he had not been obliged to quarry. This was natural. Just as a mother may favour the child who has given her most trouble, so an author may set most value on the book which has caused him the greatest difficulty. It does not mean however that it is his best.
In fact, though Kennaway was to write novels which treated individuals in society with more subtlety and discri- mination, Tunes of Glory has remained his most popular work. There is good reason for this: he achieved here a perfect marriage of matter and manner. It is not however quite true to say that it had no successor. In his last work, the posthumously-published novella, Silence, he recaptured the rapidity which he had displayed in his first novel. That little book is remarkable; intense drama contained within pure narrative.
It was a tragedy for literature that he died, at the age of forty, just when he had succeeded in bringing the two sides of his talent together in the most complex and ironical work he had yet achieved.
Allan Massie
BOOK ONE
ONE
There is a high wall that surrounds Campbell Barracks, and in the winter there is often a layer of crusted snow on top of it. No civilian rightly knows what happens behind that grey wall but everybody is always curious, and people were more than ever curious one January a year or two ago.
The north wind had blown most of the snow to the side of the barrack square, and not a soul walked there; not a canteen cat. In the guardroom the corporal commanding the picket was warming his fingers on a mug of hot tea, and the metalwork on the sentry’s rifle was sticky with frost. In the bathhouse the Battalion plumber was using a blow-lamp on the pipes, and he had reached the stage of swearing with enjoyment. The sergeants were in their Mess, singing to keep themselves warm, and drinking to keep themselves singing. National Servicemen wished they were home in their villas, and horn-nailed Regulars talked of Suez; even the bandboys wished they were back at borstal. In the Married Quarters, the Regimental Sergeant-Major, Mr Riddick, was sandwiched between his fire and his television set.
But it was warm in the Officers’ Mess. Dinner was over, and the Queen had had her due. The long dining-room with the low ceiling was thick with tobacco smoke. The regimental silver cups, bowls and goblets shone in the blaze of the lights above the table, and from the shadows past colonels, portrayed in black and white, looked down at the table with glassy eyes. Two pipers, splendid in their scarlet, marched round and round the table playing the tunes of glory. The noise of the music was deafening, but on a dinner night this was to be expected.
The officers who owned ‘Number Ones’ were in their blue tunics and tartan trews. Sitting back from the table they crossed their legs and admired their thighs and calves. They moved their feet and felt the comfort of the leather Wellingtons that fitted closely to the ankle. Only one or two of the subalterns who could not rise to Number Ones were wearing khaki tunics and kilts. But, drunk to the stage of excited physical consciousness, they too crossed their legs and glanced with anxious pride at their knees. They had folded their stockings to make the most of the muscles of their legs, and they wore nothing under their kilts. Some were anxious that the dinner should finish early giving them time to visit their women. Others of a more philosophic turn of mind had resigned themselves by now. They had ruled out the idea of visiting a woman and they were now falling into a slow stupor. Both sets of officers would in the end return to their bunks, thoroughly dispirited, and breathless with the cold of three o’clock in the morning. The lover as likely as not, if he were still a subaltern, would be disappointed to the point of pain, and the philosopher, bowing patiently and bowing low to the inevitable, would be sick. And both would live to fight another day.
But it was at this point in the evening, when the pipers played, that the officers could see most clearly how the night would end. Their fate lay in the hands of the man sitting half way up the table, and in spite of the Mess President at the head, nobody could deny that the table was commanded by the unforgettable figure of Acting Lieutenant-Colonel Jock Sinclair, D.S.O. (and bar).
The Colonel’s face was big and smooth and red and thick. He had blue eyes – they were a little bloodshot now – and his voice was a sergeant’s. His hair, which was thin, was brushed straight back with brilliantine. It was not a bit grey. The Colonel did not look broad because he was also deep, and had the buttons on his tunic been fastened there would have been little creases running across his chest and stomach. But at times such as this he was inclined to unfasten his buttons. He had even unfastened the top two buttons of his trews this evening and his striped shirt protruded through the gap in the tartan. His trews were skin tight and it looked as if he need only brace his muscles to tear the seams apart. In his lap he nursed a very large tumbler of whisky, and he tapped his foot on the ground as the pipers played. He did not seem to find the music too loud.
From time to time he glanced round the table, and other officers when they caught his eye quickly turned away while he continued to stare. The look in his eye was as flat as the sole of his polished boot.
He had already made the pipers play three extra tunes that night, and as they played The Green Hills for the second time he hummed, and the music comforted him. He put his glass on the table when the room was silent again.
‘Get away with you,’ he said, surprisingly kindly, to the Corporal-Piper and as the pipers marched out of the room the officers applauded in their usual way: they banged their fists on the table and stamped their feet on the floor-boards. Jock sent orders that the pipers should be given double whiskies, then he leant back in his chair and groaned, while his officers talked.
