Soldier No More

'RIP, old boy? 'Rest in Peace'— Requiescat-in-bloody-pace for evermore.' But Bill Ballance knew, because he always did know.

'I don't mean that, Bill. I mean—'

'I know what you mean. But that's what I mean too—dead and buried, never to rise again, more's the pity! Our dummy5

unknown top secret warriors . . . your glass is empty, old boy.

Fill it up and we'll drink to them. . . That's the spirit! So now

—to our unknown warriors—the men who got the right answer to the wrong question—RIP!'

'RIP, Bill? I can't toast a set of fucking initials.'

'No? But they were fucking good, David—bloody incredible, when you think about 'em . . . everyone else was getting their sums wrong, and they were absolutely spot on right down the line—alpha double-plus . . . bloody miracle!'

'RIP, Bill?'

' 'Russian Intentions and Policy', for short. And if they'd only put 'em on to the Americans instead of the Russians, we wouldn't be drowning our sorrows here alone tonight like lepers . . . have you heard the story about Eden?'

'Which story?'

'When the telegram from Krushchev arrived. I was here in Paris ... I suppose poor old Mollet got the same message, more or less, but he was cool as a cucumber too—of course he'd got the same intelligence report as Eden had, so it's not to be wondered at, is it!'

'What telegram, Bill?'

'The one in which Kruschchev said if we attacked Egypt he'd bomb us all back to the stone age—that was when the second wave of our chaps was just landing, and the jolly old Fleet Air Arm was clobbering the Gyppo defences to hell. . . and when Ike got the news in Washingtom he wet his pants—or went to dummy5

church and prayed, or played a round of golf, according to which version you believe—'

'Bill—'

'—but Eden ... he just read the telegram once, and tore it in two, and went off muttering 'nonsense' to have his mug of Horlicks without turning a hair, same as Mollet—only he wouldn't have drunk Horlicks—don't you see?'

'No, I don't see at all—'

' Requiescat—or requiescant, to be exact... or should it be requiescaverunt? My Latin's a bit shaky nowadays . . . But no matter—the point is that everyone gives the two of them, Eden and Mollet, the credit for getting that right at least, even if they got everything else wrong—that the Russians were just bluffing ... Of course the Russians were bloody well blurring, with a few million angry Hungarians, and half the Hungarian army, shooting at them, so they wouldn't have cared less if we'd tarred and feathered Nasser and run him out of Suez on a rail, for all they could do about it except make loud threatening noises... but the point, dear boy, is that Eden and Mollet knew that for a fact, because the jolly old Joint Anglo-French Russian Intentions and Policy Intelligence Sub-Committee had told them so—that they could Rest in Peace so far as the Russians were concerned.

Which is what I've been saying all along—and which is really the whole tragedy, old boy, because what Eden really needed to know was not what the Russians would do, but what the Americans would do—our friends and allies—not Mr K., but dummy5

John Foster Dulles and Dwight D. Eisenhower, eh?'

Oh—ah—'

' Oh-ah indeed! Though maybe the RIP chaps might not have worked out what Ike was going to do, since Ike probably didn't know himself, so it might not have done us any good to have an inside man in the White House, like we did in the Kremlin—'

An inside man?'

'Stands to reason. You don't get one hundred per cent certainty by studying your navel and trusting to luck— you only get it when someone gives you the answers in the back of the book. RIP— quod erat demonstrandum, dear boy. And I think the French had him, because we certainly didn't—and don't, more's the pity. But I'd like to have been a fly on the wall when they met, all the same!'

Who was 'they'?'

'Lord knows! None of our people here, that's for sure . . . I thought you might have been one of them, young David—you weren't in circulation at the time, and you're a bit of a dark horse, writing all those non-event reports of yours all the time, to no possible purpose. . . . They came and they went, and but for one of 'em—that stuffed shirt Avery—Useless Eustace—I've no idea .... But it was the French who produced the information, Avery just took the credit. And we shall not look upon their like again, I fear—because the French will never speak up again, after what we've done to them, and I dummy5

can't say that I blame them. Have another drink—to your next report on the incidence of scurvy in the French Mediterranean Fleet, say—?'

RIP.

He had known that Jean-Paul would already have all that, even before he passed it on, and that he would not earn his keep with Bill Ballance's carefully indiscreet ramblings, just as he knew that it would be dangerous to push Bill further, beyond Bill's suspicion that his Christmas drinking might be the subject of an internal security check by the dark horse.

But that had been the last whisper he had been able to overhear about the near-legendary Joint Anglo-French Russian Intentions and Policy Sub-Committee, from Bill or anyone else. So he had never had a useful name to give