Over the turkey pie Baf gave the General a brief rundown on the contents of his Victorian knife box, and the General said he’d like to have a look at it, later, but Baf should be aware that purchasing decisions were in much loftier hands than his. ‘But you can recommend,’ said Baf.
‘Oh, I can recommend,’ said the General. ‘But who takes note of old soldiers these days? It’s politicians who rule the roost, not to mention accountants. No one’s in charge any more who’s actually seen battle.’
Well, it’s a common enough complaint, these days. The money men run everything, and they know nothing about the world, only about money.
Baf made the General the little speech he made to generals and War Departments everywhere, but preferably where English was either a first or second language. It tended to lose in the translation: or else it was that the non-English speaking nations were less interested in theory than in eliminating their enemies – or obliging them to talk. As well as his range of miniaturised weapons, Baf had a second line of torture instruments. He hadn’t told Muffin this: he felt vaguely ashamed of being in the business, although rationally there was nothing against it. If men chose to be enemies of the state, the state had a right to protect itself. Anyone, anywhere, who wanted a quiet life only had to choose it, by keeping their noses out of trouble and refraining from comment. And the export of these instruments made quite a useful bump in the national balance of payments. All the same Baf thought that Muffin, who, if out of doors, would stop in mid-lovemaking to rescue a woodlice which got in the way, would not be in sympathy with his new range of sensory deprivation hoods, electric vagina probes, and so on. Yet there was nothing brutal or brutish about them, Baf felt. The days of the rack and bottle dungeons were over: a good contemporary inquisitor leaves no mark on the body for soft-hearted and impractical liberals to complain about. And this was, after all, the age of information. Information, as people kept saying, was money, power. Those who chose to keep it inside their heads in defiance of the national interest had to expect to have it wrested from them, by hood, or probe, or whatever, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Baf’s speech went, in essence, like this:
‘Well now, General, look at it like this. New weapons get invented, leaving armies out of step and battles bloody and unfair. It happened when gunpowder came on the scene – one army had it, another didn’t – the same with the rifled musket, then with automatic weapons, high explosives and nuclear weapons – and presently there will be chemical weapons and coming up fast on the outside, miniaturised weapons. Those who get these latter first will have the advantage. The great thing about them is that they’re individual. Now the individual soldier has become increasingly independent in combat, he already has to be a technician: sheer muscle power, brawn, courage are no longer needed. A good modern soldier runs away when danger faces – he knows he’s too expensive to lose! Now since time began – or armies began, much the same thing, ha-ha! – there have always been new weapons just on the horizon, and a lot of money spent by the forward-looking on R and D – it’s been getting them accepted – the doctrinal assimilation of new weapons into tactical systems – has been the trouble. By the time any new weapon – whether a cannonball or a nuclear blast – gets assimilated, word’s got round and the enemy have learned how to disperse, run for cover, burrow underground. So the impact of that weapon, its destructive power, is lessened. In other words, General, move fast! Or you’ll miss out.
‘Now fortunately, the pace of military invention more or less keeps pace with what’s being developed in the outside world; though that’s certainly been hotting up lately. Look at those Russian probes burrowing into Venus in a temperature of 700°F! And the gap between invention and adoption of a new weapon gets shorter all the time.’
‘Wait a moment,’ said the General, who was no fool, though only listening with half an ear. With the other half he was listening to Shirley; he liked her voice. She was, he thought, rather pretty and gentle. There was something so sacred and unsmiling about Bella, so profane about his sexual relations with her, that the General felt quite restive and longed for something just somehow more ordinary and domestic. Fortunately he could keep his mind on two things at once. It’s a capacity generals have. They share it with mothers. ‘New weapons don’t normally appear in operations until twenty years or so after a major war,’ said the General to Baf. ‘It’s inevitable because of budgetary and stockpile considerations. The old ones have to be utilised, if only for face-saving reasons. Also because men like me, who made their name in a big war, see nothing wrong with simply going on using the old weapons, since they did them well enough in the past. You have to wait for me to grow old and the bright young men to come along. Try one of them. Leave me to eat my dinner in peace.’
‘Sir,’ said Baf, ‘if we take the criteria of judging a new weapon to be its consistently effective, flexible use in defensive warfare, permitting full exploitation of the advantages of superior leadership; if a decline in casualties for those who use it, combined with a capacity for inflicting disproportionately heavy losses on the enemy is what you’re after, then this new range of miniaturised weapons splendidly fits the bill! All that is lacking, until now, is the imaginative component, knowledgeable leadership, that you, sir, will provide, to your country’s eternal gratitude!’
‘Humph!’ said the General. ‘What’s missing, if you ask me, is any opportunity for evaluation and analysis on the battleground.’
‘If you don’t try it,’ said Baf, ‘you’ll never know.’
‘Young man,’ said the General, ‘there’s a time and place for this kind of thing, and it isn’t the dinner table.’
‘Don’t tell Joan Lumb,’ said Baf disarmingly, ‘that I’ve been pestering you, or she’ll never ask me here again. And I have to come here, to see Muffin.’
He smiled at the General, his soft brown eyes crinkling, and the General smiled back.
‘Is Muffin the one with the legs and the hair?’ he asked.
‘That’s her, sir.’
‘Wouldn’t want to stand between a man and his muffin,’ said the General. ‘Mum’s the word. We’ll talk after breakfast tomorrow. I’ll give you a name or two at the War Office which should help. You may be on to something here.’
Most deals are done at dinner. Would you oblige me by trying to envisage the Délice? It was in the form of a cannon. The muzzle was made of ice-cream wound round a chocolate stick and frozen hard. The hump of the Délice itself was made of whipped cream, blueberry puree and gelatine frozen hard. The words, THE SHRAPNEL ACADEMY, were written around its girth in icing sugar. It wasn’t very nice. Rosencrantz the pastry chef, a Mexican Indian, had added rather too much gelatine, in his fear of not sustaining the cannon’s shape and the result was, though spectacular to the eye, rubbery to the taste. Joan Lumb, actually, had very little palate, or she would never have devised anything so absurd as a Délice shaped like a cannon. It was impossible to serve fairly, and collapsed at the first spooned inroad. The plain fact of the matter is that army people are not really connoisseurs of life’s pleasures. Put them in an institution and the fault intensifies. Put them in an educational establishment and things are even worse. Wake me up in front of a plate, rather too small for its contents, on which are a dried-out baked chicken leg, a pool of grey gravy, an ice-cream scoop of mashed potato barely holding its shape, and a tumble of frozen peas and carrots mixed without favour of butter or seasoning, and I can tell at once I am in an educational institution and what is worse they are doing their very best and what is worst, is that this for them is a treat. A treat. This lack of reverence for the pleasures of the palate, this inability to discriminate between good and bad, helps no one, not the starving millions either, for the food is simply spoiled, not passed on to those who could use it for nourishment rather than ceremony – and is symptomatic, I suspect, of those who care little for life, their own or anyone else’s. This is why I go on about it, in what to you may seem a rather vulgar way. In my grandmother’s day, I know, it was bad form to talk about, discuss or mention food – the food was appalling, and the poor stumbled shoeless and starving in the gutters outside and nobody cared. I am just making a connection. If you wish to conclude anything, feel free.
With the coffee came the toast. Glasses were refilled. Joan Lumb responded to the toast ‘The Shrapnel Academy’. She said she was moved and inspired by the occasion. That she was honoured and gratified by the presence here that night of General Leo Makeshift. That from what he had been saying to her it was clear his annual lecture was going to be historic. All 200 of tomorrow’s tickets had been sold: there was a growing interest in the military ethos amongst young and old. The civil government was in disarray: strife and subversion were rampant in the world today: the traditions of the past were enshrined here in the Shrapnel Academy. Mew yawned. Joan Lumb noticed.
Joan Lumb said she wanted to take this opportunity to clear up a misconception. It was unfortunate that over the years all shell-fragment wounds had come to be called ‘shrapnel wounds’. This was in fact incorrect terminology. She explained. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century grapeshot was the principal anti-personnel ammunition. Grapeshot consisted of a packet of small iron balls held together by cloth, or netting, placed in a wooden case. This would then be fired from a cannon. But it had shortcomings – as all weapons do: hence the eternal search for improvement – it had a very short range and the advancing enemy could take advantage of undulating territory and take cover. It was Shrapnel’s stroke of genius to make the balls smaller than was usual for grapeshot, to make them of lead, not iron, and encase them in a long-fused cannonball shell. This completely overcame the disadvantages of grapeshot. It could be fired over a considerable distance, would explode in the air, and troops could not hide from pellets raining from the sky.
Still there were difficulties. A new set of problems had to be overcome. It required a highly trained gunner to combine range, direction and height of burst over the enemy formation. Sometimes the fuse didn’t work perfectly, and the cannonball exploded too early or too late to maximise the lethality index. So shrapnel was not at first recognised as the great discovery it was until the trench warfare of World War I. Then it really came into its own, as shrapnel pellets rained down so effectively on trenches and troops in the open. And fuses by then were more reliable. There was still trouble with the height of burst – too high and the pellets scattered over too wide an area – too low and the pellets were less lethal. But during the 1914–17 stalemate there was lots of time for gunners on both sides to perfect their skills, and unlimited ammunition, and shrapnel began to reach its proper projected lethality index.
Now, said Joan Lumb, and this was the point she had been reaching, later in that war, a high explosive shell was developed which also exploded in the air with a timed fuse. It was the pieces of shell which wounded, not the contents of the shell. It was terminologically inexact to refer to wounds made from the shell itself as ‘shrapnel wounds’, and an insult to Henry Shrapnel. This incorrect usage continued through World War II, and Joan Lumb wished to set the record straight. The press was there tonight, and she hoped it would stand up to its reputation as fair and unbiased, and make this very important point clear to the public.
Mew smiled and nodded. She thought Joan Lumb was mad, but seemed the only one around the table who did.
She asked Panza what a lethality index was. He explained that it was the number of deaths any one weapon could expect to bring about in its lifetime, if properly and effectively used. The index of an Assyrian spear was 23, a crossbow 33, a musket 19, a sixteenth-century cannon 43, a great step forward with the eighteenth-century Gaundeval cannon to 940, a howitzer 657,215—
That’s enough,’ said Mew. ‘I understand.’
He seemed sorry not to go on.