The Military Philosophers

As the story opens, the reader learns narrator Nicholas Jenkins is an assistant to the Polish Liaison Office. Later Nick works with the Belgians and the Czechs. Kenneth Widmerpool, despised school friend, is now Colonel Widmerpool. Widmerpool's capacity for work is enormous. Sunny Farebrother, his opposite number, is famous for his charm. Peter Templer and Sir Magnus Donners appear on the scene to talk on economic warfare. They have remained civilians. Nick feels that Templer has acquired a new look, a hardness. After an hour long discussion on Polish generals, Nick and Peter Templer leave a meeting so that the other participants can proceed in a greater amount of secrecy. Widmerpool's dismissal of them is brusque. Hugh Moreland is on a government-sponsored musical tour of the provinces. Nick begins as a captain in this volume of the series. Farebrother and Finn are both colonels, Widmerpool's rank. Pamela Flitton, Charles Stringham's niece, is a driver. (Stringham has gone missing in Singapore.) Nick and Isobel are invited to attend a performance of THE BARTERED BRIDE. Wartime social functions are scheduled to raise morale. The bodies of Polish officers are found in the forest at Katyn. The Poles want the Red Cross to investigate. On the English side there is a hesitancy to rile the Russians. Farebrother must call upon all of his inner disciplines to deal with saluting Widmerpool. At his one room flat in Chelsea, Nick is reading REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST. Eventually Nick Jenkins receives a promotion to major. He accompanies the Allied military attaches to France following the Normandy Invasion. When Nick learns of the proposed marriage of two of his associates or friends, he considers the couple's plan a colossal folly. The book is colorful, portraying a series of characters in extremity as they assume roles foisted on them by the exigencies of war. This novel of social manners touches on tragedy where the fates of some actors turn on the particular forces driving a nation at war.