Writing in the Desert
Julian Symons
I.
FRONT OF ME,
coming a whole wall of the office, ;, a Mg board
covered with grey cloth. On this grey cloth, held between stretches of
white tape, are some hundreds of tickets with the names and numbers of
the men in my Squadron. The tickets are variously coloured-pink for
new recruits, pure white for potential officers, yellow for the permanent
staff, blue for men earmarked for posting to special places, orange for
men available for posting anywhere. The board has many subdivisions;
one batch of tickets for one squad of men is kept separate from the next
batch of tickets by the strips of tape. As the weeks pass tickets are moved
across the board from left to right, the colour of the tickets is changed
as men become potential officers, potential instructors or merely avail–
able for posting. The board shows in a moment the location of any
man in the squadron, the men in detention, the men on leave, the men
in hospital. To be responsible for it, to move the tickets along and finally
tear them up when men are posted away from here, is to feel disturb–
ingly the sensation of power: it is as though one were the chief character
in
a Kafka story. The weak winter sun shines through the window in the
afternoon, altering slightly the tickets' colour.
Another wall of the office is taken up by three large windows. Out–
side these windows appears the desolation of our camp; to the left new
roads being built, immediately in front of the football pitch and the
gaunt yellow posts for basketball; the huts in which we live, long and
low, atrocities in dark stone; a little further away the officers' mess,
equally ugly but made of red brick; in the distance the trackpins of the
tanks glitter as they crawl up to the moors. The whole scene is full of
symbolism: but like so much that is <Qbviously symbolic, it will bear
many interpretations ...
It
is quite true that serving soldiers know less of the conduct and
progress of the war than do most civilians. It is not possible to think
that this discouragement of independent, and especially generalized, dis–
cussion; is fortuitous: it is 'part of an always implied and sometimes
expressed belief of the army authorities that a good soldier is as much
as possible a specialist and as little as possible an intelligent human
being. Discipline is made as nearly as may be
automatic;
one obeys
orders which are essentially non-logical. Discussion of the war in official
ABCA talks
is
restricted to such subjects as the extent of German war
guilt, surveys of the Eighth Army's campaign or of the resources of Latin
America: there is positive depreciation of any attempt to discuss the
nature of Fascism and why we should fight it, the possible growth of
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