Who's Who on the Chessboard, Part Two: The Bishop

"So," your friends say. "You've interviewed the old bastard? Tell us: what's he really like?"
You want to tell them this: he is nothing like they imagined. For a start, he is astonishingly vain. For someone whose ugliness is legendary (every cartoonist knows the tiny biretta, the heavy jowls, the sour gash of a mouth), he takes uncommon pride in his appearance, which he considers "noble" and "warlike": how else do you explain the row of bishop statuettes lined up across his desk? The next thing you want to say about the bishop is that he's utterly charmless. Watching him in action on the board, dashing from the back row to the centre of the battle just to destroy an errant rook, you might imagine a keen old devil with a dash of the privateer; but in person the bishop is cold, peevish and dull. Worse still, he's clumsy. Sure, everyone admires the grace of his sidelong glides across the board, but truth to tell, the bishop doesn't even realise he's moving diagonally. He thinks that the board is diamond shaped, and that he alone is travelling in straight lines. In fact, you want to tell your friends, the bishop's most striking quality is his deep, unblinking idiocy. The only thing that matters to the bishop is the corridor of black squares that will ferry him around the board. He dreams of a clean, open pathway, down which he can glide unimpeded into the empty space between the massed armies. Out there, alone, he imagines he can dismiss the enemy with one shake of his noble, warlike head. But instead he's pegged down in the back row, hemmed in by a clutch of squabbling pawns, and by the time he's shooed them on, the battle has already started and the board is an awful, bloody mess. The bishop's pathways have been trampled on, his grand plan ruined; his wrath is the wrath of a caretaker. If a black piece blocks his way, he is vexed enough; but if a white piece strays onto one of his channels his fury is boundless. You watch, horrified, as he takes up his lance, bolts straight out and kills the poor fool on the spot. For a moment, you think you are watching the real bishop emerge; the merciless slayer of the tabloids and B-movies. But as soon as the act is finished, the bishop becomes gloomy and fretful once again- the board is more congested than ever, his paths will never be cleared in time, he has already spotted another trespasser further up the track. So he darts and hacks his way through the war, showing no interest in anything beyond his precious corridors. It is not clear if he even acknowledges the existence of white squares or the cargo they carry. This is perhaps the most pathetic thing about the bishop; that his death will come from nowhere, that there will be no remorse, no deathbed recantation, that he will die as he has lived: ignorant of everything beyond the narrow hygiene of his own particular vision.

You dream of writing an article that would show the bishop up as the tedious oaf he is. Yet, deep down, you know that your readers would never forgive you. They, like yourself, have been brought up to detest the bishop, to blame him for the worst atrocities of the war, to supply those ugly features with the ugliest of motives. How could they cope if they discovered that all their anger had been wasted on a dry husk of a man? Worse: what would they begin to say about her majesty the Queen? You decide it would be more sensible to create a bishop who is worthy of their hate. Once you make the choice, the piece almost writes itself. You work through the night on your monstrous bishop, gliding from one outrageous lie to another, you have never felt such facility with words, it is as if someone else were willing you along. The next morning you are shrill and voluble when talking to your friends.
"What's he like?" you say. "He's everything you imagined and more." And the laughter that follows contains an element of relief, as if an awkward obstacle has just been removed, and all the old, familiar pathways are open once again.

Who's Who on the Chessboard- Part One: The Pawn

The first real party since you got back home on R&R, and it’s just your luck to spend half the night at the buffet bar, deep in conversation with a pawn. Of course, you can’t ignore the pawns, they are everywhere tonight, and some of them no doubt play a useful role, serving drinks and opening doors and escorting knights onto the dancefloor and suchlike. This fellow introduces himself with a flourish, says he used to serve under your command, and at first you feel obliged to smile along and humour the old sod. But he only takes this as an invitation to tell you all about his goddamned war- the prolonged face off at KP4, the wiles and psychological tricks of his opposite number, his vital role in ensuring the King’s Gambit ran to plan. And when you try to broaden the scope of the conversation by asking his views on the course the war is taking, you are met by a blank stare. The object of the war, he tells you straight away, is to get to the other side of the board. Which is harder than it looks, what with your oafish opposite number mounting his obdurate blockade, and your fellow soldiers- your own brothers!- standing stupidly to his left or right, cutting out any chance you might have had of progressing forward through a good clean kill. And don’t think he had it easy out there waiting in the field. No, it was hellish, he felt totally exposed, he could have been swooped upon at any moment by those gangling freaks in the enemy’s back row. Not that he’s scared of death. Did he ever say that? No, whatever cause it’s in, he would always be proud to die a proper soldier’s death- the tap on the shoulder, the hand stifling his mouth, the swift knife in the guts. That’s what he was brought up to believe in, that’s what he respects. But how can he respect these arrivistes, who shoot across the chessboard on a whim, who have no compunctions about killing a man for positional purposes alone, just to claim the space he occupies? That sort of behaviour has no place on the chessboard. The safest thing would be to do away with the whole shower of them, no offence intended sir, and let the pawns conduct the matter after their own fashion. Then (and his voice is growing louder here; is it your imagination or has the party suddenly turned quiet?), then you would see a proper battle, with gambits carried out cleanly and efficiently, with epic stand-offs, where the slightest infelicity would set the whole board ablaze, where, after titanic struggles and unbelievable bloodshed, the single survivor, the strongest and smartest pawn of all, would move unopposed to the final square and receive his just reward.
“You mean yourself of course,” you say, scornfully. “So what's your reward? What do you think you could become? A knight? A queen? That's what they tell you in the barracks, sure enough. But did you ever think we'd let that happen?” You push past him without waiting for an answer and make straight for the dancefloor. As it turns out, what you see there shocks you so much that it is almost a relief to feel the tap upon your shoulder, the palm across your mouth, as the winning pawn, the last man standing in the room, slides forward to redeem his prize.