Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (11 page)

“Again, any man is entitled to interview the Company Commander,
privately, about any matter. But he can’t just walk in bolo and——”

“What’s Bolo?”

“Cockeyed; anything not correct in the Coldstream Guards is Bolo. You don’t just walk in and say ‘Oi.’ You see Sergeant in Waiting, and write out an Application for an Interview, and then, if the Captain is free to see you, which he always is, you’re stood at ease outside the office, then, when your name’s called you spring to attention and march in with your hands to your sides; mark time, halt; left turn, and, as your name’s called again, take a smart pace forward and wait till you’re spoken to. When the interview is over, you receive the order
Fall
In,
and take a smart pace backward, left turn again, and out you go, fast, keeping your hands still. It’s dead easy. A baby in arms could do it. If the officer says anything to you and you just want to say Yes, say ‘Yes, sir’; not just ‘sir.’ The Billy Browns, or Grenadiers, say ‘sir’; the
Lilywhites
say ‘Yes, sir.’

“Another thing. Every week or two you’ll have a Kit Inspection. That is to teach you to take proper care of the property entrusted to you. You have to show boots, battledress, both hats, one pair of socks clean, one shirt clean, sweater, gym vests, shorts, tin of black polish, tin of brown polish, tin of blanco, tin of metal polish, oil bottle, pullthrough, mess tins and cover, housewife complete with needles and et ceteras, knife, fork and spoon, steel helmet, respirator and respirator-haversack, slippers, button-stick, all your brushes sandpapered clean, and other odds and ends, all laid out in perfect order on a clean towel on your bed. Everything has to be marked with your number. They’re ’ot on numbers round ’ere. And when the officer comes to your bed you stand smartly to attention, and say this: 2663141 (or whatever your number is)
Recruit
Smith.
Two
Weeks
Squadded
(or however long it is.)
Kit
Present,
sir.
If anything is missing … it might be a pair of socks … you say
One
Pair
Socks
Missing
Otherwise
Kit
Present,
sir.

“I’ve got the numbering kit here, ink pad, stamps, and doodahs. You’ve got to get yourselves a pennorth of tape each; stamp your
number
on a lot o’ bits o’ tape and sew ’em on everything you can lay your hands on. ’Cause things have a way of disappearing.

“Failure to comply with all this ’ere is a very serious offence, and I don’t mind telling you that they’re ’ot on serious offences in this mob.”

“Hot means Good, doesn’t it?” asks Dale.

“Yes. But not necessary. Frinstance, if I say ‘Your boots is Hot,’ I mean, they’re good. But if I say “The Drill Pig is Hot,’ that means ’e’s pretty savage.”

“And what’s a Drill Pig?”

“A Drill Pig is a Drill Sergeant. A Drill Sergeant is a sort of
super-sergeant
-major, an assistant to the Regimental Sergeant Major.”

“But why
Pig?”
asks a lad from the Elephant and Castle.

“You’ll soon find out,” says Trained Soldier Brand.

The same lad asks: “And wot’s a Regimental Sergeant Major do?”

“Well, ’e’s a kind of link between the officers and the other ranks. ’E’s a sort of an Archbishop.”

“And the Commandant?”

“’E’s sort of a Gawd.”

As seven strikes we rise from our beds like men in a fairy tale released from a spell. “If you’re going anywhere at all, even to the Lat,” says Brand, “you’re supposed to take your respirators, tin hats, and
gas-capes
with you. This is to get you into the ’abit of carrying ’em wherever you go. And so you’d better. Say you’re out one day on leave and the Gestapo sees you without your tin bowler and mask, you’ll go in the moosh.”

“Gestapo?”

“Another name for military police.”

“Are they noice?” asks Bates.

Trained Soldier Brand says that while the Military Police are
inoffensive
to law-abiding soldiers, they can nevertheless be People Of Dubious Ancestry if they wish. “We got to ’ave ’em. I suppose,” he says, “to keep law and order. If you pay rates and taxes you got to ’ave law and order. Personally, I don’t pay no rates and taxes, and I don’t want no law and order. But there it is. There’s military policemen in every town. They got the right to arrest anybody in uniform. They’re the Army’s C.I.D., kind o’ style. They’re coppers. They ain’t popular, therefore. Nobody really loves a Gestapo man. It’s unreasonable, but there it is. There ain’t a soldier living that’s never broke a rule—with the possible exception of Freddie Archer, R.S.M. of Scots Guards—the most regimental man in the British Army. Once, being two minutes late off leave, he put himself in the report and marched himself in to be punished. When talking to an officer on the telephone he salutes and stands stiffly to attention. But what was I saying? Gestapo.
Personall
y
I dislike ’em. That’s a matter of opinion. The beauty of this ’ere Democracy is, you can hate policemen and say so. But I ought to tell you that a Gestapo man is serving his country same as a sewer-man or a dustman. He’s essential. And even if he wasn’t, don’t you go and get yourselves into no trouble, just for the sake of being properly dressed or anything.

“They sell beer in the Naffy. I, personally, have never met a man who could get drunk on it, though I have known many that tried. Wind pudden, that’s what it is. All the same, it is alleged to be alcoholic, and if you bring any back with you you will have committed a terribly serious offence. They’re ’ot on alcohol in barrack rooms in this mob, I don’t mind telling you. Red-’ot. Boiling-’ot. This is a military depot of the Brigade of Guards, so you don’t go round bathing chorus girls in champagne. A cup of chocolate, yes. A nice packet o’ wine gums, yes. But beer? Beer is a serious offence.”

We hurry to the Naffy.

In an immense room with an interminable counter, endless queues of
Guards recruits, Lilywhites, Grenadiers, Jocks, Micks, and Taffies, writhe and mutter while a few frantic girls in blue cotton overalls dash out cups of tea, great jammy wads of cake, tins of boot-polish, bootlaces, vaseline, fruit-salts, pies, biscuits, pencils, chocolate, dusters, writing pads, beans on toast, beer, cider, ink, cigarettes and sausages.

We wait in a queue. Everything is smoky and strange. A vociferous recruit with a brass leek on his cap is shouting: “That is unfair you are, look, to get a man in front to buy things for you, look! That is unjust it is!” And a dark recruit with a Cross of Saint Andrew worked into his Guards’ Star says, in a fantastic combination of American and Glaswegian: “So hwhit?” A man on a remote platform singing a song about one Danny Boy is more unheard than a goldfish: he simply opens and closes his mouth. The uproar of the Naffy swallows his song, but he neither knows nor cares. There is some clapping. A
sharp-starred
Irish Guards’ recruit near us says:

“There’s a song that goes:

“I wish they’d sing that and cheer us up a bit.”

But the singer, shoving his sharp tenor voice through a chink in the din, begins
Bless
’em
all.

Spencer the salesman recognizes a jar of the product he sells, and is cheered and saddened at the same time. Johnson, the fly Brummagem boy, says with sudden vehemence: “Oi bet Oi’ll be a sergeant insoide six months.” A dozen of our squad have arrived to swell the
slow-moving
queue. Old Silence comes out of his taciturnity and says: “Will
you all have a beer?” We all say we will, if we can get it; for there seem enough men before us to drink all that was ever brewed. “Why are these places so short-staffed?” somebody asks; and somebody else
replies
: “They’re short-staffed because they haven’t got enough people working for ’em.” “Oh, is that it?” asks the interrogator.

A querulous voice says: “So I says to the Sarnt In Waiting, ‘I wanna go sick.’ So I goes sick. So I sees the M.O. So the M.O. says: ‘Now what’s your trouble?’ I says: ‘Me foot, sir.’ He says: ‘Your foot isn’t trouble. Say what you mean. What’s wrong with your foot?’ I says: ‘It’s swole.’ ‘Let’s see,’ he says. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘merely a blister,’ ‘Blister?’ I says. ‘Blister,’ he says, and he sticks a ruddy great needle in that ruddy great blister and he got enough water out of that ruddy great blister—may I never get out of this here Naffy alive—enough water to fill a reservoy. And he sends me back to duty. Cruelty!”

“I wonder how we’ll like it here?”

“Somebody told me it’s horrible.”

“The Training Battalion is worse.”

“The Holding Battalion is worse still.”

“The First is supposed to be worst of all.”

“The Second is hell, somebody told me.”

“Whether we like it or not we’ve got to stay here, so the thing to do is, get used to it quickly.”

Suddenly a dreadful silence falls.
Jerry
in
the
Sky!
cries the bugle. We run out. Thurstan pauses to curse and stamp his foot.
Understandably
: for, having waited twenty minutes, he found himself right against the counter. And then Red blew. Barker looks as if he has suddenly been smitten with all the miseries of Job, and has not been left with even a bit of pot to scrape his boils with.

*

From the back of the night comes the melancholy note of a siren. It gathers volume; shrieks, fades, and shrieks again. The distance is now full of something like muffled drums. “Lousy with stars,” says Barker, referring to the sky, which is clear and beautiful. We hop down
into our trench. The guns mutter loud now. We hear the queer,
pulsating
drone of raiders. Antiaircraft guns bang. The night is full of steel.

Bates, in the middle of a story, will not be interrupted:

“… When Brummy Joe chucked this feller out o’ that winder, ’e landed on ’is ’ead and split it open. ’E was proper frit o’ Brummy after that, this feller was. Brummy could of showed yow some fight-ing. I see Brummy put ’is fist through a oak door. What?
’Urt
’im? What,
Brummy?
A oak
door?
Don’t be silly. Yow could a bashed Brummy wi’ the door edgeways and not ’urt
’im,
not
Brummy!
Well, another noice feller from Ull as we called Tyke——”

The ground seems to heave like a wrestler’s back. The raider is
weaving
among the shell splinters, dropping his bombs. The searchlights make strange patterns: shifting triangles, sprawling rhomboids, fabulous outlines that look like letters out of some half-formed alphabet. One great beam squirting up like a hose catches a silver speck and holds it. The batteries go mad. The sky twinkles with shell bursts like a spangled skirt in a spotlight. “By God we got him!” somebody says.

“…So this feller asks Brummy for his two bob back. ‘Yow want yow’re two bob back?’ says Brummy? ‘Ah, Oi want moi two bob back.’ ‘Yow do, do yow?’ ‘Ah.’ ‘Oh?’ ‘Ah.’ ‘Roight yow are,’ says Brummy, and picks up a eight-inch crowbar——”

The pulse of the raider has stopped. The searchlights wave uncannily.
“
Look!
”
There is something like a dust mote in a moonbeam. It is a man, falling with a parachute. There is something pitifully insignificant about this little thing, this bit of life drifting down out of the darkness suspended on threads from the edges of a bit of silk, caught in a net of light. He comes down slowly. The great beam circles, bumping against a little cluster of clouds. Through it, flashing electric lights, passes a Hurricane, roaring. Another siren sounds, miles away. Then our own siren, fifty feet from us, revolves and fills the world with a terrific whoop of triumph, so loud that you cannot hear it, but feel it in your bones.

We smile as we go back. It couldn’t have worked out better if the
Commandant had arranged it. In that little half-hour, we have begun to feel like soldiers.

“… Seventeen stitches over one of ’is eyes,” Bates is saying. “Oi tell yaw, seventeen stitches.”

“Sleep and refresh your pretty little selves,” says Sergeant Nelson. “Because tomorrow I’m really going to start in on you. Definitely, I’m going to chase you tomorrow. I got a liver. And when I got a liver I’d tear my own grandmother’s tripes out and trample them underfoot. I’d definitely do all that and much more. Woho, am I going to chase you tomorrow! Any idle man here can make his last lousy little will and testament. Any chancer can go to the Ablutions and cut his scraggy little throat from ear to ear into a washbasin. Sleep! It’s an order!
Hi-de-Hi!”

We roar at the top of our voices: “HO-DE-HO!”

We have suddenly become cheerful. We are getting the hang of things.

*

Quickly but smoothly, week after week, Sergeant Nelson drives his stuff into us; tireless, patient, with legs of steel and a throat of brass. Step by step he teaches us to march and drill. Slap by slap he instructs us in the handling of arms. Screw by screw he uncovers the mysteries of the Short Lee Enfield, Mark Three. Lunge by lunge he divulges the secrets of the bayonet, from High Port to Butt-Stroke and Kill. We pass our second-, fourth-, and sixth-week inspections. The Company
Commander
says that we are doing tolerably well. Sergeant Nelson informs us that, in a long and varied life spent mostly among half-wits and the offscourings of the lunatic asylums of the earth, he has seen worse squads than us: which pleases us more than anything else. Like all Guards recruits, we have been working at concert pitch.