Читать книгу Unconditional Surrender онлайн

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His last two years had been as uneventful as Guy's.

After his rapid discharge from hospital he had been posted to the United Kingdom to be trained as an officer. At the board who interviewed him, he had expressed no preference for any arm of the service. He had no mechanical bent. They had posted him to the Intelligence Corps, then in process of formation and expansion. He had attended courses, learned to interpret air-photographs, to recognise enemy uniform, and compute an order of battle, to mark maps, to collate and summarise progress-reports from the field; all the rudimentary skills. At the end his early peacetime service as a trooper impressed the selection-board that he was a "quartermaster type" and an appointment was found for him far from the battle, far from the arcane departments whose existence was barely hinted at in the lecture room; in a secret place, indeed, but one where no secrets were disclosed to Ludovic. He was made commandant of a little establishment where men, and sometimes women, of all ages and nations, military and civilian, many with obviously assumed names, were trained at a neighbouring aerodrome to jump in parachutes.