Sergeant Nelson of the Guards

by Gerald Kersh

  “It’ll come easy in time. Squahaad … Shun!” roars Sergeant Nelson. “Speed. Speed is the word. Smooth speed. Definitely smooth speed. And let me see one of you not keeping his head up. I’ll make him wish he’d died ten years before he was born. I’ll have him running round this square like Mister Nurmi the Flying Finn. I’ll hare him up and chase him down so that his plates of meat don’t touch the ground once in five hundred yards. Stone me definitely blind! Stand at Hoooease! Now, when I says Stand Easy, stay where you are but let all your muscles relax. Stand … easy! And when I say Squad, tense up again, stand properly at ease. Squad. As you were! Squad! Just tense yourselves back to the At Ease. All right, stand easy and rest for a minute.”

  “Please, Sergeant, a dog is instinctive,” says Bates.

  “Shullup! Are you out of your mind? Whaddaya mean, a dog? Who asked anything about dogs? Insubordination, eh? Insolence, eh? Shullup! …” Sergeant Nelson looks to Heaven and says: “All these years have I lived, and it seems like a thousand years; and never, definitely never, have I heard such a load of Sweet Fanny Adams as this horrible man comes out with. Gord forgive him. He’s mental…. Now, about saluting. They’re pretty hot on saluting in the Brigade of Guards. I don’t care what they do in the Boy Scouts or the Church Lads’ Brigade or the W.A.A.C.S. or the A.T.S., or the Salvation Army. Here, saluting being a matter of discipline and proper courtesy and respect, they are hot on it, and rightly so. Thus, whenever you see an officer approaching you, you will salute … head up, chin in, shoulders back, hand in line with the forearm, thumb pressed close against the edge of the hand, fingers all close together; the whole to come up like a steel spring, so that the right forefinger rests one inch above the right eyebrow.

  “Now …”

  *

  A bugle sounds. “I’m going to dismiss you for now,” says Sergeant Nelson. “Just for fun, see if you can do me a right turn, like I showed you. On the command Dismiss, you turn smartly to your right, count three and then scram. Try it. Dis-miss!”

  He doesn’t call us back, or give us an “As you were.” It is, after all, our first hour on the Square. We walk back to the hut to change for P.T. The novelty of the thing has made this first Drill Parade quite pleasant.

  Bates catches up with the flying Sergeant Nelson, and says: “Please, Sergeant.”

  “What is it, son?”

  “When you whistle to a dog, ’e pricks ’is ears opp.”

  “Are you here again with your dogs?”

  “No, Sergeant. Yes, Sergeant. Oi mean, a dog is koind o’ instinctive.”

  “There’s a lunatic asylum next door to here,” says Sergeant Nelson. “Either you’ll go there pretty soon, or so help me, I will.”

  “Well, a cat, then,” says Bates, earnestly. “If you go pt-pt-pt”—he calls an imaginary cat—“it cooms running up to yow, because it knows what yow mean. But a cat’s got no sense. It’s instinctive. It don’t know what it does, or why it does it, but it does it, don’t it?”

  “Oh, definitely,” says Sergeant Nelson.

  He reaches the hut before we do. As we enter he cries: “Hi-de-Hi!”

  “Ho-de-Ho!”

  “Slippers, shorts, gym vests and sweaters, and a rolled towel under your arm. The muscle factory, you weeds! The muscle factory, you spineless gobs of calves’ feet jelly, you. It made me what I am today, and I’m a one-man wave o’ destruction! Hi-de-Hi!”

  “Ho-de-Ho!”

  “Trained Soldier Brand,” says Sergeant Nelson.

  “Sarnt?” says the Trained Soldier, leaping up.

  “I don’t want you,” says the Sergeant. “I just said ‘Trained Soldier Brand.’ Just like that. ‘Trained Soldier Brand.’ Just as you might say: ‘Blind O’Reilly.’ … Come on, come on, come ON! Ja wants valets! Ja want ladies’ maids? Ja want me to powder your little bottoms with talcum and put your little shorts on for you? Get out of it! Form up like I showed you just now, for P.T.”

  We march as best we can out to the hard green fields, where a Staff Sergeant waits for us—an Army Heavyweight Champion of practically everything, with the body of a boxer turned wrestler, the eye of a kind man embittered, and the face of an executioner who is kind to his children when off duty.

  He bites off jagged spikes of verbiage and spits them out like fishbones.

  “Come close. Listen to me. First of all I want to have. A few words. With you. Pay attention.”

  His grim grey eyes look us over; rest approvingly upon the huge thews of Hodge and the long, quick boxing muscles of Bullock; appraise the wiriness of Johnson, the sedentary slenderness of Old Silence, the stolid suet of Sherrocks, the ranginess of the wire-haired boy from Widnes, the neglected average torso of Dale. He rests a great dark hand for an instant on Thurstan’s shoulder. Thurstan bobs up and back like a hammer in a piano, tense and defensive. The Staff Sergeant glances at him and yawns. Then he says:

  “None of you are. Any good. Civilians. City-bred, some of you. Doughy. Sloppy. Unfit. Most of you’d be puffed after running. A mile. Hn. We’ll alter all that.” He clears his throat, and then goes on, in the voice of a lecturer, but with an undertone of weariness. (After all, he has been saying the same thing over and over again, day in and day out, for so very long.) He says:

  “It is my duty to make you fit and strong in order that you may serve your country to the full extent of your capacity. Some of you went in for sports and physical culture in peacetime. All the better for them that did. You all ought to have done so. A man who neglects the body God gave him is worse than a beast. And if you’ve neglected yourselves and let yourselves get short-winded and soft, well, you’ll suffer for that in the first week or two: it’ll come hard, very hard. You get a lot of P.T. here. You’ve got to be hammered into shape. I can’t show you any mercy, even if I wanted to … and I don’t.

  “I hope you enjoy the P.T. you get here. If you don’t, it makes no odds. So you’d better for your own sakes. It isn’t all arm-and-leg exercises. Now, we play a lot of games and do a lot of nice running. Above all, we teach a new kind of thing which we call Unarmed Combat.

  “What is Unarmed Combat? Well, it’s nothing more or less than dirty, roughhouse fighting … self-defence other than Queensberry method. Call it All-In Wrestling … a bit of Catch-As-Catch-Can, Ju-Jitsu, Judo, anything you like. The idea is this: you’re up against Jerry. Jerry is ruthless. Jerry won’t lead with his left in hand-to-hand fighting: he’ll more likely bite you in the face and kick. The principle is, that a break-hold, or a gouge, or a properly placed kick or twist, well applied, might save your life in an emergency. I teach you ruthless, unscrupulous, roughhouse tactics, to be used if and when occasion demands. And furthermore, Unarmed Combat gives you confidence in yourselves, and helps you to a proper co-ordination of eye and hand and foot. For instance …”

  The Staff Sergeant reaches out, casually, as one might reach for a cigarette; and almost as effortlessly picks up a great Sergeant Instructor in a blue-and-red striped sweater and a Sandow moustache.

  “This kind of thing,” says the Staff Sergeant, hurling the striped one to the earth and hauling his right hand back between his shoulder-blades, “is useful sometimes. But you have to be quick, not necessarily strong, but quick to do it, and speed is always useful, in every walk of life.”

  The striped Sergeant is black in the face and moaning. The Staff Sergeant releases him. “Sergeant Paul,” he says, “rush me.”

  “Must I, Staff? You’ve demonstrated on me twice already today.”

  “Yes, you must.”

  The striped one walks twenty feet away, and then makes a desperate rush upon the Staff Sergeant. He hopes to bear the grim one down by sheer weight and vigour. A second or so later he is spinning through the air. “Watch him fall,” says Staff. “If he didn’t know how to fall he’d break his neck. Or maybe an arm.” The striped Sergeant rolls over and over, and finally rises, covered with dry grass and somewhat angry.

  The Staff Sergeant turns back to us. He has
the calm, languid air of a man who has just thrown away an empty cigarette packet. “You might go a bit easy on these demonstrations,” says Sergeant Paul. “There was a stone where I fell.”

  “Well, the stone had no right to be there. All right. I just wanted to have a word with you. You can’t be good soldiers unless you’re fit. It’s up to me to make you fit, and up to you to help me.” And the Staff Sergeant repeats something we have heard before, and are destined to hear many times again:

  “Work with me, and I’ll be all right. Work against me, make things difficult, impede the progress of fitness and the war by any idleness, laziness, insubordination or funny business …” He grinds his teeth, leaving the rest unsaid but hideously implied.

  Then he hands us over to the striped Sergeant, Paul, who lines us up and says:

  “I’m the best fellow in the world if you treat me right. Work willingly and do your best, and I’m your pal. Play me up, and I don’t mind telling you I’ll make life a misery for you. I’ll soon get that paleness off your faces and put some zing into those limbs. Now, let’s see you run …”

  An hour later we go back to the hut.

  Sergeant Nelson grins at us.

  “Well? Grown any hair on your horrible little chests? Get back into battledress. I, I, do you hear me, I am going to tell you about the Short Lee-Enfield Rifle. Hi-de-Hi!”

  “Ho-de-Ho!”

  Bates says: “Please Sergeant Oi think Oi’ve got a torn muscle.”

  “So what d’you want me to do? Darn it? Get going.”

  *

  The little aches and pains of unaccustomed exercise affect different men in different ways. Some remember what their mothers told them about “overstraining” themselves, and fall into dismal panic. Others—heavy manual workers, and the like—consider them philosophically, without entirely ignoring them. Sedentary men, clerical fellows, black-coated workers like Dale, suffer considerably in the first weeks of Guards training, but suffer like heroes, saying nothing at all except an occasional “Owch,” like the parrot that laid square eggs.

  Months afterwards, Sergeant Nelson, speaking to the N.C.O. known as Corporal Bearsbreath, said:

  “Bearsbreath, I definitely admit that the wartime Guardsman is not the same as the peacetime Guardsman. In peacetime you can settle down to quiet training. You can chase your man into shape for months; and then again he’s come into the Army because he wants to make it his job for a few years to come. Definitely. In wartime, you get all sorts and shapes and sizes of Guardsmen, within the height limits. But you have to hand it to one or two of them, the way they take it.

  “There was a guy called Spencer, some sort of a salesman of some kind of biscuits or some such tack, that had spent his life sitting in a little motorcar driving from boozer to boozer hawking this here stuff. He come in at fourteen-stone-seven, puffy as pastry, carrying maybe three stone of superfluous fat, and dead out of condition. Oh definitely. Built to weigh eleven stone; carrying three stone extra: thinnish in the leg, softish about the thigh, not too good in the feet. Well, Bearsbreath, you know as well as I do that the chief trouble with Guardsmen is their feet. There’s practically a disease: ‘Guardsmen’s Heels,’ from excessive stamping. I thinks to myself: ‘With all the good will in the world,’ I thinks, ‘this here Salesman wallah is going to turn out pretty poor … yes, I’m afraid he’s going to be definitely steady.’

  “And I watches him. Well, Bearsbreath, you know as well as I do that the first week or two cracks up quite a few rookies, for the time being … ammo boots on their poor little feet, and stamp, stamp, stamp on the Square; and the Staff Sergeant in the muscle factory; and the change of grub, and so on. This here Spencer drops weight like a Wop dumping his pack on the run. You can see stones and stones dripping off of him on the Square. Millions of stones that rook lost; billions. And sometimes, coming in at night to see if everything was hunky-doke, I’d see this here biscuit, or potato-crisp salesman, sitting on his bed with a pair of feet on him—I swear to God, Bearsbreath, they was like barrage balloons painted red, only bigger. ‘Sore tootsies?’ I says, and he always says: ‘It’s all right, Sarnt.’ Conscientious? I never see such a conscientious rook. And I see him shape, and I say to myself: ‘This rook is a dead cert for the tapes, and pretty damn soon at that.’ What I mean to say is, I run into him the other day, and he’s a lance-jack. I would have sworn he couldn’t have stood the racket, and I wouldn’t have held it against him if he hadn’t, because there’s some fellers that aren’t cut out for it.

  “What I mean, Bearsbreath, is; for sheer sand in the belly, grit, spine, nerve, and guts, some o’ these soft-looking civvies take some beating. He went through hell, that rook did. He was over thirty, too. Definitely, Bearsbreath, the war brings out the what-d’you-call-it in some blokes. There’s big buck navvies would have laid down and had kittens at half what this here Spencer went through. Now my point is this: the Army helped to make a man of that geezer. He wouldn’t have known how good he was if it hadn’t been for the Army. But that’s neither here nor there. My point is this: the kid of eighteen has soft bones, and he’s young—he don’t feel the strain much because it’s helping him to grow. The working mug that’s shoved barrows, or handled a pick and shovel, he doesn’t notice it so much, because he’s been using his muscles all his life, more or less. But the clurk, Bearsbreath, the clurk, the shopwalker, the pen-pusher, the bloke that’s never used his muscles in his life—he’s the bloke I’m sorry for and take my hat off to at the same time. He sort of feels that he’s got to stand up to it as well as anybody else. And he does. And he won’t go sick unless he’s absolutely got to go sick. He’s ashamed to. Toughish; definitely toughish.”

  Bearsbreath said: “We was all Civvies once, Nelson.”

  “Were we?” said Sergeant Nelson. “To tell you the honest truth, I hardly remember.”

  *

  That evening, as we come back from tea, Trained Soldier Brand says:

  “No talking, singing, or whistling. No smoking. No eating. Shining Parade. Remember, every morning the Officer comes round to inspect this hut. I noticed one or two greatcoats with buttons like old halfpennies this morning. I’m responsible for you. You land me in the muck if you don’t watch out, and that is a serious offence. I want to see you fellers working till seven. Them gaiters have got to be blancoed every night. So’s your belt, and et cetera. Remember, brush the surface of the webbing with water, first, then brush your blanco in thinly and evenly. Take your belts to bits and work on them brasses. A thin smear of polish, let it dry, and then rub, damn it, rub. Above all, work on them boots. I don’t mind telling you, they’re ’ot on boots ’ere. You’ll be inspected soon. Say your boots is bad. What happens? The Company Commander hauls me in on Orders and says: ‘Trained Soldier Brand, why is them men’s daisy-roots in muck? Is this ’ere the way you maintain the high standards of the Brigade of Guards? Are you a Coldstreamer? Or what the lousy hell are you? Why, you twillip,’ he says. ‘Take three drills just for a warning.’ And if you think I’m going to rush round that Square with a pack just for you, you’re wrong. So let me tell you something—any idle skiver I catch will find himself with such a load o’ jankers he won’t know where he is.”

  “What is jankers, Trained Soldiers?” asked Johnson.

  “It’s a sort of general kind of word meaning punishment. You’ll get to know the call: Defaulters—You can be a Defaulter as long as you like, As long as you answer your name. It might be Show Boots Clean. It might be Extra Drill. It might be C.B.”

  “What is C.B., Trained Soldier?”

  “Confined to Barracks.”

  “But we’re confined to barracks now.”

  “Yes, but only while you’re Recruits. After you’re done here, you’re Guardsmen, and have the right to go out every night, duty permitting. You get a Permanent Pass, allowing you out of barracks from After Duty to Midnight. But if you get C.B., you can’t go out. Defaulters sounds five minutes after Reveille. You’ve got to hustle
to the Square and answer your name double time. During the day, Defaulters blows about Dinner Time, and every hour after about five, till ten-thirty. You’ve got to answer your name every time. If you don’t, you’re for it. Then there’s extra drills, in Fighting Order—small pack, with ground-sheet and mess-tins, pouches, braces, belt, rifle, bayonet, full water-bottle. And you’ve got to be spick-and-span, or you might get another few days. The drills, usually, are pretty tough, too. The game ain’t worth the candle. For instance, you’re very likely to get seven days or so for a dirty rifle. Well, a dust over and a pull-through’ll save you all that. Or being late for a parade: two minutes can land you seven days. Or over-staying your furlough, or being in possession of playing cards, or answering back, or not answering back (answering back is Insubordination: not answering back is Dumb Insolence), or not being properly dressed, or forgetting to salute an officer, or having a dirty cap star, or a dirty bayonet, or standing idle on parade, or being inattentive on parade, or speaking out of turn, or laughing, or crying, or using horrible—dirty words, or not walking properly, or not getting up at Reveille, or not putting out the lights at Lights Out, or skiving …”

  “What is Skiving?”

  “The same as Swinging It. Trying to get out of things; dodging a parade, wangling a fatigue, or otherwise chancing your arm. Slipping out for a tea ’n’a wad when on fatigue is, for instance, Skiving.”

  “What’s a Wad?”

  “Shiver-and-Shake. A Cake. (Get on with that shining!) There’s no need to go round bobbing: just keep calm and do your dooty, and you’ll keep out of trouble.”

  “What’s Bobbing?”

  “Oh … sort of bobbing; getting nerves, worrying. You, Dale, your boots are very steady.”