by Gerald Kersh
We dress with care. Debutantes flutter less than we do, as we put on our best battledress, with its cut-throat creases; and our best boots, glistening with quarts of spit and tins of polish; and our gaiters blancoed to a perfect pallor, and our brasses blindingly burnished. We help each other to dress. We pull each other’s trousers over the web gaiters, and produce the proper blouse effect in our coats. We touch things at their edges. One thumbprint may destroy everything. We pull down the great cheese-cutter peaks of our best hats. Trained Soldier Brand follows us to the Square, and, when we have formed up, inspects us, and runs about us flicking with a duster, like a harassed housewife expecting overwhelming company. Then the Sergeant, the terrific Nelson, inspects us. Then the Superintendent Sergeant looks us over, with an eye from which all hope has long departed. He comes, a sturdy figure with a resolute stride. “Sergeant Nelson’s Squad, eight weeks squadded, and ready for your inspection, sir.” We stand frozen, stiff as overwound clockwork. We don’t see the Commandant. We are staring straight to our front. We feel him as he passes … a Presence, an Eye. Seven or eight years pass. His voice is heard saying that our turnout is, on the whole, quite good. Sergeant Nelson’s lone eye seems to heave a little sigh all on its own. The buttons on his S.D. jacket rise several inches, and then sink luxuriously. Then comes his voice. We thought we had heard him shout. We never did. He is shouting now. He is using his best Parade voice—a voice of Stentor at a Stannoy Sound System. He roars like a lion at a water hole. “Squa-ha-haaaaaaaaaaaAAAD …!”
We stamp and wheel, right form and left form, salute to the left, the right, the front, and as improperly dressed. We take up arms, and slope, and order, and trail, and present them. We feel that we are doing all right. The Commandant questions us. We have swotted up everything he is likely to ask us, and, in fact, everything a Guardsman can possibly know. He asks us all that and a lot more. The autumn goes, winter comes and goes, more summers come and fade. Years pass. Our beards are long and grizzled. Our eyes are rheumy with advanced old age. He will dismiss us, and then we may lie down and die.
We are dismissed. It took about an hour and a half.
We drag ourselves away. “How were we, Sergeant?” And Sergeant Nelson says: “You were not like Guardsmen. You were like a lousy crowd of wild, undisciplined Soudanese bloody Fuzzy-Wuzzies trained by illegitimate Wog corporals in a stinking pothouse in Tel Aviv in 1890. You were awful. I can never look myself in the face again. But all the same, you have passed out.”
We raise a wild cheer.
“I daresay you’ll leave for the Training Battalion on Tuesday,” he says.
Cookhouse sounds. We laugh, if only to relax our stomachs.
“He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off,” says Hodge, the Bible-reader. “Job, 39, 25.”
“Who do?” asks Bates.
“The horse.”
“I never heard a horse say ‘Ha, ha,’” says Bates. “’Ave yow?”
*
Kitbag, big valise, little valise: Change of Quarters Order. We form in the road. Rather sadly, Sergeant Nelson cries “Hi-de-Hi!” We sadly reply: “Ho-de-Ho!” We are ready.
“Kill some Jerries,” says Sergeant Nelson. “And Hi-de-Hi! for the last time, mugs.”
“HO-DE-HO, Sergeant Nelson!”
“As for me,” he says, “I got another squad coming today.”
The order comes. Our left feet hit the dust.
We are on the march.
III
The Tempering
SOMETHING STUTTERS over on the Ranges. Five bangs on one string: that is the Bren gun burst. A squad is firing at three hundred yards. There is always one man who fires before all the rest: tu-tu-tu-tu-tut! Then the rest open fire. The air rattles like a dice box for sixty seconds or so. Then, tu-tut!—there is always one man who has a couple of rounds unfired. Hidden hands in the butts pull the targets down. A silence comes. Soon, somebody, somewhere, will make something go off bang. It might be a Mills bomb, or a mortar bomb; or in the distance the Artillery may fire a gun; or an N.C.O. may shoot fifty fat forty-five bullets out of a Tommy gun; or a learner may squeeze six hoarse and hesitant explosions out of a revolver. Only night, or fog, quiets the Ranges. This, say some, is why it rains so often. A military policeman from Gloucester, who talks and talks in a voice like the monotonous scrape and squeak of a rusty pump, breathlessly assures all who will listen that the everlasting banging shakes the clouds. “D’you yurr it? Bang, bang, bang. It shakes all the water out o’ them clouds, experts reckon.”
For here, when it is not raining, it looks as if it is going to rain; except in the hottest part of the summer, when one fears that it will never rain again. There is a perversity about the climate. It will pour all day. But when a Night Stunt takes place, which rain might cancel, then the sky clears and a calm falls, the Dipper hangs empty in a lucid heaven, and a fat-faced moon sneers down at the men who wallow in the mire that the day’s rain has left behind it. The feet of innumerable Guardsmen have kicked the ground to powder. The earth, when wet, is of the consistency of clotted cream. When dry it flies about. It is Passchendaele in the winter, and Oklahoma in the summer. One makes fantastic detours as the Quarter blows for C.O.’s Parade, to avoid puddles of unknown depth. But when the sun comes out, the very dandelions seem to blink in the dust. So say the old soldiers. From October to July, they groan, the place is like the countryside beyond the Malamute Saloon in “Dangerous Dan M’Grew” … it takes an Amundsen to get from the Post Office to the Y.M.C.A. From July to October, well, you might as well be in the Foreign Legion. And the flies, they say, are unnatural. The military policeman from Gloucester says that the flies are caused by the dust. “Dust creates flies, the experts reckon,” he says, “just as earth creates wurrrums or shirts create fleas if you’re not careful. It’s a proof that thur’s a God, the experts reckon …”
It is true that there are too many flies here in the warm weather; flies of exceptional intelligence, that might have come out of a Silly Symphony … flies that tickle and flies that drone; flies that bite, and flies that simply look threatening; dragon-flies, hover-flies, greenflies, even butterflies. On every side there stretches the decent, amiable Surrey countryside, full of gracious gardens behind trimmed green slabs of hedge. But the Camp itself is a shanty-town of huts. The adjacent villages are made up of skimpy little Edwardian villas, and look like little bits of Lewisham or Shepherd’s Bush. The local barber complains that they know what you do in the village before you know it yourself: the other day his nose began to bleed; he hurried home, but his wife met him halfway with a wet towel—the news had preceded him, but only God knew how.
Some of the inhabitants complain of the soldiers: they dig trenches on the Common…. “Can’t they make believe to be at war without digging holes?” The villagers are familiar with the bugle calls, which sound from dawn to dark and are audible for miles around: they hear Lights Out and adjust their clocks. All day long, manœuvring squads march out and back: Coldstreamers, singing You’ll Be Far Better Off in the Moosh, or Scots Guards preceded by skirling bagpipes. They go out on Stunts, sometimes in the dead of night behind dim and sinister lamps; sometimes in column of route through spitting rain; sometimes armed with picks and shovels in the wake of a lorry-load of revetting hurdles and barbed wire. There is a coming and going of dispatch-riders, travelling like projectiles. All roads lead to the Camp. You get to it over a bridge that is all ready for blowing up. You pass a languid canal, brilliantly scummed with green algæ.
To the right of the road, going into Camp, lie the huts and the squares. To the left, the Messes of the gods and demigods; officers and sergeants. The road runs on, past the Y.M.C.A., past the Camp Theatre and the bright new huts that the Scots Guards live in … into a woodland of silver birch trees, and away to the unknown distance. To the right of the Guardroom, in the middle of a trampled desolation of clayey dirt, away from the jungles of gorse and bracken and bramble, lies a flat patch of beauti
ful turf. Day in and day out, in war or peace, a very ancient warrior strokes and caresses this turf, watering and anointing it, rolling it and smoothing it, clipping it and fertilising it, indignantly uprooting superfluous daisies with the forceful gentleness of a beautician depilating a lady’s lip. This is the Cricket Field. Football is played at the back of the B. Lines Naffy, on rougher grass scattered with bits of metal—base plugs, springs, and scraps of cast iron that have come yipping and whining over from the little No Man’s Land where live grenades are thrown.
By night, the Camp is labyrinthine and mysterious, more baffling than Pimlico in the similarity of its buildings and company areas. He who steps aside from the road is lost in the maze of the Black Huts. The newcomer must develop something of the cat’s sense of orientation: if he steps out of his hut after dark upon a harmless, hygienic mission, he is not unlikely to find himself wandering, groping in an enchanted midnight on the downtrodden grass at the back of the lavatories. Newcomers from the Depot sometimes fall into a state of despondency at the sight of the Black Huts. The huts at the Depot are brand new: the Black Huts have a sombre air of extreme age; the curses and grouses of innumerable Old Sweats have soaked into their wooden walls. Some of them are said to contain mice. On one occasion, at least, three huge Sergeants were seen, pursuing with drawn bayonets and slashing coal shovels a miserable rodent no bigger than your thumbnail. The mouse got away, incidentally, but returned to forage that night, and caused Sergeant Hitchens of Wigan to shriek in his sleep by falling off a shelf on to his face. There is a rumour that two mice, bride and groom, consummated their union and brought up three families of baby mice in a suitcase in which a Guardsman known as Old Meanie used to hoard fruitcake. Meanie (says the legend) was in the habit of waiting until his comrades were asleep before regaling himself on handfuls of cake and pie; but one night lie put the father mouse into his furtive mouth, and thereafter was a changed man. The legend is particular about the sex of the mouse.
Here, where recruits become Guardsmen, one is permitted to exhibit over one’s bed photographs of wives, relatives, fiancées, or close friends. Bed heads break out in patchworks of snapshots. Men seize new arrivals by the arms, and, pointing to the blurred outlines of some non descript form, say: “Isn’t she a beauty?” or “Ain’t she a smasher?” The correct reply to such questions is a sound which may be transcribed thus: “Mmmmmmmmm-mum!” One N.C.O., who keeps three cabinet photos of his pretty wife on his bit of wall, takes them down in the evening, for he considers it indecent that these pictures should look down on the spectacle of thirty men undressing. Regular Guardsmen always exhibit postcard snaps of themselves in scarlet tunics and bearskins. One man displays portraits of Loretta Young, Ann Sheridan, and Frances Day, on which he has written loving messages to himself in assumed hands. Another sometimes talks to a small snap of a big woman, saying: “If you’re carrying on with anybody while I’m away …”
Soldiers, here, have responsibilities. They must “make themselves acquainted with the Detail.” That is to say, nobody tells them what they are going to have to do. No Sergeant leads them from place to place. The blowing of the Quarter alone warns them that the hour of a Parade is drawing near. Baths and haircuts become, once again, the personal responsibility of the individual soldier. A hairy neck means trouble. “Dirty Flesh” is a serious offence. Men have got away with murder, but never with a rusty rifle. Beyond such matters as cleanliness, subordination, and punctuality, which are taken for granted, the Detail Boards are the Tablets of the Law. In the frames which hang on the walls outside the Company office, the Sergeant-Major pins the mimeographed will of the C.O., whose every word is an ultimatum. There one may read how it has come to the notice of the powers that Gambling is taking place, and the statement that this practice must cease forthwith; the game of Loto, or Housie-Housie, being the only indoor game officially sanctioned in the huts…. And it was there that the N.C.O.’s and men of the Guards learned that, in future, when rushing the enemy with bayonets, they must shout not “Hurray,” but “Hurrah”; at which everybody danced round everybody else, making savage points with imaginary bayonets and mincing “Oh, HurrAH, Duckie, HurrAH, HurrAH!”
But the Detail is The Word. Your destiny is written, not on your forehead, but on the Detail. Man disposes: the Commanding Officer details him.
And in this place many things are learned.
The handling, cleaning, and use of rifles, Bren guns, Tommy guns, mortars, and hand grenades, together with the firing, or throwing of same; tactics; marching; invisibility; trench-digging and revetting; cooking, if necessary and desirable; signalling; the manipulation of Bren carriers; wiring; moving silently; moving at night; how to be a corporal; how to avoid gas; how to put out fires, together with the handling of fire engines; map reading; the Army Act; how to be a military policeman; speed; presence of mind; falling down; getting up; swimming; marching in formation; reading and writing if illiterate; foreign languages; how to be a C.Q.M.S.; the selection of position in action; observation as a fine art; the laying of aims; the giving of fire orders; how to lead a section; how to mount guard; the whole mystery and art of sentry; the inner meaning and philosophic significance of applied discipline; how to drive military transport vehicles; how to crawl over enemy territory; how to attack; how to defend; how to fight, and when, and when not to fight; the timing of an attack, as it might be a punch to the jaw; how to harden the feet; what to do with bayonets, and when, and where to stick them; how to endure thirty-five miles on foot in rain or heat, with full fighting order; how to fire at aircraft; what to do when anything on earth happens, in any imaginable circumstances, in the teeth of any conceivable opposition … all these things are taught in official syllabuses. Above all, discipline; eternally and inevitably, discipline. Discipline is the screw, the nail, the cement, the glue, the nut, the bolt, the rivet that holds everything tight. Discipline is the wire, the connecting rod, the chain, that co-ordinates. Discipline is the oil that makes the machine run fast, and the oil that makes the parts slide smooth, as well as the oil that makes the metal bright. They know things about discipline, here. They have seen the Prussians with it, and the Arabs without it. Somewhere between those poles lies the ideal. The principle of discipline here is divinely simple: you lay it on thick and fast, all the time; the Englishman takes it to heart and then adjusts it to the national character. The result is the type of Sergeant Nelson, disciplinarian of ferocity and patience and infinite humour, who, if he told you to go to Hell, would be perfectly willing to lead you there; who might run you into the spud hole on Tuesday, but who would not fail to buy you a drink, and be damned to the regulations, if he met you outside on Saturday. Law and Order make the world go round: the stars of infinite space couldn’t move without the parade-ground discipline of the heavens; and without the severe regimentation of the organs, no heart would beat. But there’s a time and a place for everything. So says Sergeant Nelson, type and pattern of the N.C.O. He, above all men, knows the inner mystery of discipline and the value of the unbroken line.
Nelson on Discipline:
“You seen an old lawn. Have you or have you not? Rolled flat, smooth as a billiard table. Well, once upon a time, so a Yank tourist says to a gardener: ‘Say, Buddy’—you know how Yanks talk—‘how the gawdam hell do you gawdamwell get these ’ere gawdam lawns so gawdam smashing?’ And the gardener says: ‘You waters ’em and you rolls ’em, and then you rolls ’em and you waters ’em, and you goes on rolling and watering ’em for two or three ’undred years, and there you are.’
“It’s the same thing with an Army. You work on it for hundreds and hundreds of years till you get a sort of foundation. That’s tradition. That’s the stuff that’s got to be sort of lived up to, kind of style. Discipline sort of comes out of that. Definitely, English discipline comes from English tradition. Have you got that? Before you make an English soldier, you got to make an English man. And then, when you lay the groundwork, you see how an English soldier will sort of discipl
ine himself. That’s proper discipline.
“You treat the rookie a bit severe at first. But as soon as he gets the hang of things, you don’t have to chase him. He takes everything in good part, and still stays a man. He fits into the machinery. On parade, he obeys an order like clockwork. Off parade, he’ll argue the toss. That’s what I like to see. But discipline, first of all, has got to be taught. You learn the ABC of it at the Depot. You pick up the grammar at the Training Battalion. Get it?”
The idea is, that by the time you leave the Camp you will be capable of translating things on your own, if need be.
And where is this Camp?
A balloonist found himself in this place, early in the nineteenth century. An old lady, looking out of her bedroom window into a pale pink sunset, saw a great white bubble drifting down on to the Common. Hastily putting on her bonnet, she ran out. A hundred yards away a billowing mass of silk rippled among the gorse. As she watched, a man struggled out of a basket. He said:
“Where am I, my good woman?”
Falling on her knees and whispering in a voice compounded of joy and terror, the old lady replied:
“Pirbright, please you, God Almighty.”
A century later, an Austrian refugee in Pirbright village, hearing a thunder of engines shaking the sky, ran into his landlady’s sitting-room and cried: “Listen, please!”
Ancient and frail as rare porcelain, the landlady quavered:
“Why, don’t you recognise them engines, sir? Don’t upset yourself; they’re only Hurricanes.”
It is still the same old Pirbright. Only times have changed.
*
Here, N.C.O.s sleep in the same huts as the men. The beds are of iron: like Antæus, they are strong while they stand on their own feet; but lift them, and they disintegrate. The coir-fibre mattresses look exactly like what they are called, biscuits. There are three biscuits to a bed. At night, they are laid end-to-end upon the wire bedframe, which, like the true-blue British institution that it is, has never bent or broken, or given way an inch under pressure. Hut No. 40, Z Company, contains thirty such beds, with their full complement of ninety biscuits; two six-foot benches of scrubbed deal; a galvanised iron coalbox, a tub, four galvanised iron basins, buckets zinc and buckets fire, a bass broom, two hair brooms, two scrubbing brushes, one long scrubber, a slab of yellow soap as cold-looking and uninviting as imported Cheddar cheese, and a stove. No luxury here; none of your Depot pampering. When you rise in the morning, you grab yourself an iron basin and rush out to the washhouse with it. One man who keeps his own little enamel basin is greeted, every morning, with derisive yells: “Where’s your water jug, Darling? Where’s your soap dish and slop pail? Ain’t you forgot somethink? Where’s your wardrobe and Jerry?” Sergeant Crowne fills a basin before he goes to sleep, so that he may shave in nice cold water the moment he gets up. He shaves with scrubbing soap. “Cold water, good rough soap and a bluntish blade,” he says, “and you know you’ve ’ad a shave.” Sergeant Hands, however, goes in for brushless cream, and washes in a bucket, so that Crowne calls him Ramon Novarro.