British Army

The British Army enters the novel through Manfred Zakheim’s recollections of wartime service, rather than through an account of its command or operations. His five years in uniform took him across several countries, while the memories he shares with Alexander Gideon make the service significant as both a period of separation and a measure of their enduring attachment.

Wartime Service

Zakheim says he volunteered for the British Army in 1941 and served for five years. His account follows a wide geographical circuit: from Palestine to Cairo and Cyrenaica, onward to Italy, Germany, and Austria, then to The Hague and Birmingham. The narrative does not specify his duties throughout this service or describe particular battles; it presents the Army chiefly as the institution that carried him far from home during the war.

One episode gives a more precise glimpse of his work. In 1943, while still a second lieutenant, Zakheim was called in the middle of the night to Montgomery’s field headquarters in the Cyrenaica desert to translate a German document. He later invokes this encounter when trying to explain why Alexander Gideon’s presence makes him feel compelled to obey. The episode supplies a concrete wartime precedent for that comparison, but does not establish that the two men’s experiences were otherwise alike.

Separation and Correspondence

During Zakheim’s absence, his bond with the much younger Gideon continued through regular exchanges. Zakheim recalls receiving a package from Gideon every two or three weeks—not from Gideon’s father—with candy, woolen socks, Hebrew newspapers and magazines, letters, and sketches of imaginary weapons. Zakheim answered with postcards from the places he visited, as well as stamps and banknotes he had collected.

These exchanges make the Army years more than a biographical interval: distance becomes the setting for a continuing relationship. Zakheim’s account emphasizes Gideon’s initiative in maintaining the contact, while the returned postcards and collected objects record Zakheim’s response across the route of his service.

Return and Lasting Significance

Zakheim returned in 1946. Gideon vacated his room for him, and Gideon’s father later rented Zakheim his first apartment in Jerusalem. The remembered sequence links Zakheim’s return from military service to his renewed place in Gideon’s household and to the lasting friendship that shaped their adult lives.

The British Army’s narrative significance is therefore personal and structural rather than institutional: it separates the two men for years, but their correspondence preserves their closeness across that distance. In a later recollection, Zakheim uses his 1943 summons to Montgomery’s headquarters as an analogy for his own deferential response to Gideon, showing how a military memory remains available to describe the power their relationship holds over him.