by David Lodge
‘I wish they’d hurry up,’ he said.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘The longer it takes, the less drill we have this afternoon.’
‘I don’t mind drill,’ he replied. ‘But waiting makes me nervous.’
Our conversation was cut short by the appearance of the R.S.M., who brought us to attention and treated us to his professional, ill-tempered glare. We were marched in, one by one, to the usual accompaniment of rapidly-shouted orders, the Army’s technique for instilling a sense of inferiority and insecurity in the private soldier when he appears before his commanding officer.
Eventually my turn came—before Mike’s. I marched into the room, turned and saluted. Lieutenant-Colonel Lancing sat behind his desk, flanked by Captain James from the P.O. Wing, the Personnel Officer, and the Second-in-Command, reclining in chairs in indolent attitudes.
‘Good afternoon, Browne,’ said the C.O. civilly. ‘Take a seat there.’ I sat down on the seat he indicated.
‘Uncross your legs, Browne,’ said James. I did so. The C.O. grinned at James.
‘Just a small point, Browne,’ he said to me. ‘But small points are important if you want to be an officer. Now I want you to tell me why you want to be an officer.’ He smiled encouragingly.
‘I feel in rather a false position at the moment, sir,’ I replied. ‘Because the fact is I don’t want to be an officer.’ The C.O.’s smile vanished abruptly. I continued: ‘I told Lieutenant Booth-Henderson last week, but my name appeared on Orders for this interview, and Corporal Baker told me I should attend it.’
The C.O. turned to James.
‘Did you know anything about this, Ronny?’ he asked.
‘No, sir,’ said James,—and, to me: ‘Why didn’t you come and see me about this, Browne?’
‘No one told me I should, sir.’
The C.O. turned to the Personnel Officer: ‘This man is a P.O. I take it?’
‘Yes, sir. He asked me to put him down as a P.O. when I interviewed him.’
This little exchange amused me. Confronted with the unexpected and possibly embarrassing situation, Lancing instinctively tried to detach himself from it, and to put the onus on his subordinates. However he recovered his self-possession quickly. I suppose he thought he would demonstrate the absurdity of my attitude.
‘Well now, Browne, suppose you tell me why you have changed your mind?’
I thought I might as well enjoy myself while I was there.
‘Well, sir, I’ll be quite frank with you. I don’t like the Army. I know I’m stuck with it for two years, but I’m sure I shall continue to dislike it. I don’t see how I could possibly be an officer with that point of view. Don’t you agree, sir?’
‘What don’t you like about the Army?’
‘Almost everything, sir.’
The 2 IC smiled slightly, and looked at his shoes. The C.O. began to look rather angry.
‘Now look here, I’ve been in the Army for twenty-five years. You’ve been in it for four weeks. I think you’ve got a lot of nerve to sit there and say the Army’s all wrong.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to be impertinent. I quite understand that my position must seem inexplicable to you.’ I began to get into my stride. ‘I suppose it’s my education. I’ve been encouraged to question everything, to form an independent judgment. In the Army one has to accept orders without questioning them. I feel that if I were to hope to become an officer I would have to give up too many principles.’
‘When you’re older, Browne, you’ll discover that there must be some sort of authority which is obeyed without question. But this is all beside the point. The point is that whether you like it or not you have been called up to serve your country for two years. I don’t think you’ve got any reason to grumble about that. Your country has been pretty good to you up till now. It’s given you a damn’ fine education for one thing. Now are you, or are you not, going to make the best of it?’
‘I don’t think I’ve been given the opportunity of making the best of it,’ I replied. ‘I applied to go in the Education Corps, where I think I might have been of some use to the Army and to myself. In the R.A.C. I feel I’m wasting my time and the Army’s.’
‘Is there any chance of getting this man transferred to the Education Corps?’ the 2 IC asked the Personnel Officer.
‘None at all. I told you that before, Browne.’
‘Well, Browne,’ resumed the C.O., ‘there’s obviously no point in arguing with you, though I think you’re making a great mistake. What do you want to do now. Train as a Signaller/Gunner? If you work hard you might become a tank-commander in time.’
He obviously hadn’t understood a word I’d said.
‘No, sir, I think I’d rather be a clerk.’
‘Is that all right, Harold?’
The Personnel Officer nodded sourly.
‘All right then. That’s all, Browne.’
‘Go over to the P.O. Wing and wait for me,’ said Captain James. ‘You’ll have to sign a non-desirous statement.’
I saluted and left the room. Outside Mike was still waiting for his turn. I winked at him, and strolled over to the P.O. Wing. A little later he joined me.
‘You were lucky to go in first,’ he said. ‘They were hopping mad. The C.O. said: “What is this, a conspiracy?”’
I laughed elatedly.
‘We’ve got them worried, boy!’ Then, ‘Did you say you wanted to be a clerk?’ I asked anxiously.
‘Yes. No alternative,’ he replied glumly.
The prospect of a warm. easy, sedentary occupation appealed to me, but filled Mike with dismay, Fortunately for me, he had no alternative. For Mike suffered from claustrophobia. On the afternoon when we had been taken to the tank park and allowed to clamber over the muddy monsters, he had emerged pale and trembling from the cabin. Therefore the tank trades were out of the question for him. I was never tempted by them. Tanks seemed to me to be ugly, noisy, dangerous, and quite absurdly obsolete in terms of modern war. Anyway, I was delighted by his news.
‘Good. That means we’ll do our Clerks’ training together,’ I said.
At this moment Captain James stalked past us into his office. We heard the clatter of a typewriter.
‘This must be a rare case,’ I murmured to Mike. ‘He’s having to type out a pro-forma.’
We were called in to sign the statements.
‘I think you’re a couple of insolent young fools,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re satisfied. That’s all.’
After the dramatic little scene on the barrack square, Baker perceptibly restrained his language. But unlike most N.C.O.s he did not rely exclusively on blasphemy or obscenity for his invective, and Percy’s life was still a misery. Baker frequently threatened to back-squad him. I believe now that this was never a real possibility, for Baker prided himself on his ability to make a soldier of the most unpromising material. But with an Inquisitor’s subtle cruelty he kept the threat dangling over Percy’s head. Percy’s dread of being back-squadded did not seem exaggerated to us. We were in a more or less permanent state of physical exhaustion and mental depression, and we longed for the end of Basic Training with an indescribable longing. We did not know what our Trade Training or our regimental life would be like, but we felt that it could not possibly be worse than Basic Training. To forfeit the precious seventy-two after the passing-out parade, and to begin Basic Training all over again, was unthinkable.
Two images rose persistently to the surface of one’s mind during Basic Training at Catterick: one was prison, and the other was hell. The sense of being in prison was created by an accumulation of factors: the confinement to barracks, the bad food, the warder-like attitude of the N.C.O.s, the ugly denims, the shaved heads, the pervasive dreariness and discomfort of daily life. The photograph on my identity card, the haggard face and the cropped hair, with my Army number across my chest, irresistibly recalled a convict’s dossier. The evening bull-sessions seemed as pointless and soul-destroying as sewing mailbags. Our week
ly pay of one pound always seemed curiously unwarranted and unexpected when it was issued: one had no sense of earning money by service, only of being punished.
The feeling of being in prison was perhaps the dominant one, but there were times when life was touched by a quality of surrealism, of nightmarish unreason, and the prison-image gave way to one of hell. Not a real hell of course, but a kind of opéra bouffe hell, a macabre farce, one’s response to which oscillated between hysterical laughter and a metaphysical despair.
An occasion when this impression was most forcefully made was when we were first ordered to prepare a full kit lay-out. With practice this becomes a relatively simple, though always tiresome operation. But to us the task seemed gigantic. Every single item of equipment had to be cleaned, polished or blancoed. All clothing had to be pressed to regulation measurements until it was no longer recognizable as clothing, but only as a number of flat, oblong shapes. There was one iron between fifteen of us. The official lights-out time was ignored by the N.C.O.s for, as they well knew, the task took us long into the night, and the early hours of the morning. I did not get to sleep until 3 a.m., and several others did not go to bed at all. When my travelling alarum clock woke me at five, they were still bent, red-eyed, over their boots as the grey light of dawn competed with the feeble electric light bulbs. I woke myself at five because to arrange the kit according to the complex regulation lay-out was itself a lengthy process. Little Barnes in fact laid out his kit at 2.45 a.m., and, wrapping himself in a blanket, lay down to sleep on the cold stone floor beside his bed. No one else adopted quite such a Spartan expedient, but several slept on the bare wire mesh of their bed-frames, their kit laid out on the mattress beside them, to be lifted on to the bed in the morning.
Everyone grumbled and swore, of course, but still we did it. And I can’t really understand why we drove ourselves to such lengths. Fear of punishment? Perhaps, in some cases, but I doubt it. The punishment would only be abuse, and that would come however hard one worked. In any case, no punishment could be worse than the task itself. Pride in the work? There are a few chronic bullshitters in every squad, but this certainly didn’t apply to most of us. Perhaps one has to admit, however grudgingly, that the Army’s despotic authority does make itself felt on the most rebellious temperament, that very quickly one does become conditioned to respond automatically to any order, however absurd. Once you acknowledge this, it is very difficult to forgive the Army for it, and even more difficult to forgive yourself. It was with some half-conscious realization of this that Mike and I, while we flogged ourselves as remorselessly as the rest of the squad through that seemingly interminable night, tried to maintain an attitude of ironic detachment from the whole absurd affair. But it was not easy.
The rhythm of activity varied in tempo as the night dragged on. At about 10.30 a general melancholy fell upon the occupants of the hut. Someone began to hum Unchained Melody, a pop-song much in favour at that time, and the rest took it up, humming and singing. The tune was a plangent, melancholy series of cadences in a curiously repetitive form which, I suppose, accounted for its title. The words went something like this:
Oh, my love
My darling,
I’ve hungered for your kiss
A long,
Lonely
Time.
Time
Goes by
So slowly
And time can do so much,
Though you’re
Still mine.
I need your love,
God speed your love,
To me.
It is difficult, and embarrassing, to believe that one was ever moved by words so trite and meaningless. But at certain moments life out-manœuvres the defences of sophistication, lays one open to a shrewd flanking attack of cheap and vulgar sentiment.
It was not long before this mood of quiet melancholy was dispersed by Norman, starting up a rousing bawdy ballad, in his hoarse, dissonant voice:
Mary the maid of the mountain glen,
Shagged herself with a fountain pen,
They called the bastard Stephen,
They called the bastard Stephen
They called the bastard Stephen,
For that was the name of the ink!
Percy looked at us reproachfully, as Mike and I chuckled. I was constantly surprised by the wit and intelligence which obscenity seemed to reveal in the lower ranks of the Army who otherwise seemed scarcely literate. In the course of my service I was often handed a grubby piece of paper on which was typed some scurrilous doggerel, of stomach-turning obscenity, yet possessing an ingenuity and wit which Rochester would not have been ashamed to own.
As the night wore on, and p.m. changed unbelievably to a.m., weariness and desperation combined to produce a mood of hysteria in the hut. Instead of finishing off the task as quickly as possible, we snatched eagerly at every distraction and interruption. Brief, spontaneous fights broke out. Norman and his friends indulged in several ‘riding’ sorties against each other. One lad, who had abandoned his kit and was trying to sleep, cursed them for the noise they were making, and they retaliated by lifting the bed with its occupant into the air and carrying it round the hut shoulder high, finally tipping the unfortunate youth on to the ground in a heap of blankets.
At about 2 a.m. Norman decided to sweep his end of the hut. The floor was made of stone flags. Several were cracked and pieces were missing, leaving open cavities. Norman swept the refuse into the largest cavity to save the trouble of dumping it outside.
‘Yer can’t leave all that shit there, Norman,’ protested someone. ‘Pox and Faker’ll ’ave somethink to say about that.’ (Sergeant Box and Corporal Baker were known familiarly as ‘Pox and Faker’, ‘Faker’ lending itself to a further, obvious distortion.)
‘Fuggit, I’ll burn it then,’ retorted Norman, and applied a match to the rubbish. There was quite a lot of newspaper and brown paper in the cavity, and the flames leapt up alarmingly, igniting a gleam of wicked, infantile pleasure in the eyes of the spectators. A few ran to feed the fire with more paper and rags.
Little Barnes sniffed the smell of burning in his sleep, and sat up bolt upright in his bed screaming ‘Fire!’ We howled with laughter at his panic, eyes running with tears, tears of laughter, tears provoked by the stinging smoke, tears that were at the same time lachrymae rerum.
Norman and two of his cronies commenced a grotesque ritual dance around the fire, roaring and whooping at the tops of their voices. Others drummed on their lockers with knives and forks. A demonic frenzy seemed to have seized everyone. and though I was only a spectator, I was completely absorbed in the spectacle, until I caught sight of Percy, crouched on his bed, his hands over his ears, white-faced and shivering as if in the grip of an ague.
‘What’s the matter, Percy?’ I yelled to him; but he just looked at me and shook his head.
The flames quickly died away. but the density of the smoke increased. Someone shouted: ‘For fugg’s sake, Norman, put the fire out.’
‘Give us some water then,’ he growled hoarsely, lurching towards the ironing table where Joe Matthews, a sharp little Cockney, had a mug of water for pressing. Joe snatched up his mug.
‘Get your own bleeding water, Norman.’
‘Come on youth,’ said Norman. ‘Ah haven’t got time to get any water. The whole bloody hut’ll go up in flames in a minute.’
‘Then piss on it.’
The suggestion appealed to Norman, and ripping open his flies, he emptied his capacious bladder on to the smouldering remnants of the fire.
‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ I said to Mike, and he grinned in acknowledgement of the reference. His grin faded as he inhaled the foul-smelling steam which now mingled with the acrid smoke. Laughing and cursing, the others struggled to open the windows, or stampeded to the door, which parted from its one remaining hinge and fell outwards on to the ground. They stood on it, hooting and shouting into the hut, where Norman was trying to stamp out the fire.
‘Y
ou vile bastard, Norman!’
‘You silly c——t, Norman!’
‘Wrap up or I’ll ride ya!’ he retorted.
Eventually the smoke cleared, the temporary exaltation faded, and we returned to our tasks, more exhausted than ever. Percy came over and sat at the end of my bed, prodding ineffectually at a boot.
‘I can’t get this toe-cap to shine,’ he said hopelessly.
I inspected the boot. The toe-cap was marked by hundreds of minute scratches.
‘The first thing you want is a new duster,’ I said. ‘That one must have some grit in it which is scratching the surface.’
‘Here, borrow mine,’ said Mike, tossing over his duster from the next bed. ‘I’ve had enough for tonight.’ He took off his boots and, without undressing further, got between the blankets, where he smoked his customary nicotine night-cap.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it won’t be long before we’ve finished square-bashing.’
‘It’s all right for you,’ said Percy. ‘But I’ll probably be back-squadded.’
‘Baker won’t back-squad you, Percy,’ I said.
‘Oh yes he will. He’ll wait till the day before passing out, and then he’ll tell me.’
‘Well, if the worst comes to the worst,’ I argued, trying to console him. ‘At least you won’t have Baker in charge of your new squad.’
‘It’s not just Baker,’ he replied vehemently. ‘Do you think I could bear to go through this again?’ He swept out his arm, embracing the whole scene, the bleak, badly-lit hut, the glum soldiers hunched over their boots or groaning in their sleep, the lingering fumes of the fire and of Norman’s urine. ‘I’d rather die,’ said Percy.
In fact Percy died on the Tuesday of the last week of Basic Training. That day we went out to the rifle range. It was raining, a fine, persistent drizzle, but there was a holiday atmosphere in the coach that took us out to the moors. We were tired, because the day before we had been doing various physical fitness tests. The standards required were not exacting, but since all the tests were held on one afternoon—the mile, the hundred yards, the high jump, the long jump, rope-climbing and several other items—the total expenditure of energy was pretty considerable. However, all that was behind us; passing-out and the seventy-two were before us; and the present, the expedition to the moors, was at least a novelty. The inside of the coach was warm and smoky; the radio was playing ‘Housewives’ Choice’; even Baker, sitting with the driver, seemed in a better humour than usual, and did not check the exuberance of the passengers, except to say ‘Pipe down, c——t-struck,’ when Norman bellowed like a bull in June at a couple of girls we passed.