Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (2 page)

I
T
WAS
a big, dim, grim, high, wide, unhandsome room, smelling
unpleasantly
of too much cleanliness. Discipline has an odour of its own—a smell of scrubbing soap and floor polish mixed with just a little too much fresh air. You sniff it in prisons, workhouses, and other places where men abandon hope: the smell of organised scouring; the smell to end smells.

Men were talking; not loud. A beardless boy with a pink face and a queer mop of hair like a copper-wire pot scourer had been smoking a cigarette. He was holding the butt of it between finger and thumb,
looking
anxiously from side to side. A crisis was approaching: soon, he wouldn’t be able to hold it; but how could he dare to throw it down and put his foot on it? A large plump man with a deep, round voice said: “Chuck it out t’ winder, lad.” The wire-haired boy said: “Ah, but say there’s a rule agin it …” He pinched out the glow, rolled the
remaining
crumbs of tobacco into a little pill which he poised in his hand like some undisposable, incriminating mass. At last he put it into the huge cold stove, slammed the door, and walked hastily to the other side of the room.

“Scared, lad?” asked the plump man, and the wire-haired boy replied: “What,
scared?
Who,
me?
Me
scared?
Not me.”

“Homesick, like?”

The wire-haired boy scowled. “No.”

Two men were trying to play billiards with a sawn-down cue and three odd balls on a table not much bigger than a tea tray. The boy watched them. One of the players, a long, saturnine man, addressed
the spot ball with elaborate care, and miscued. I heard the woody scrape, and saw the ball roll slowly away. The saturnine man swore briefly and bitterly, handing the cue to the other player, who took it, held it, stared blankly at it, and then said: “Ah dinna wanna play na more.”

“No more do I. Let’s turn it up.”

“Play draughts?”

“No.”

Somebody else asked the company in general what was going to
happen
to them now.

A glum blond man who had been turning over the pages of a bound volume of
Punch,
1893–1894, said: “We get another medical
examination
. First of all we get our hair cut off. Then, if we’re okay, we get injected.”

“Injected what with?” asked the wire-haired boy.

“Germs.”

“Oh, blimey.”

“Germs,” said the glum man. “Your arm swells up like a thigh. You throb like a damn great aeroplane. Your head aches fit to bust. A scab comes. Then it drops off. Then there’s a scar.”

“What’s that done for?”

“Because it’s healthy.”

“And what happens then?”

“A trained sweat is put in charge of you. You go and draw your kit.”

“Do we get rifles right away?”

“Yes. Then you’re put in a hut.”

“What kind of a hut?”

“A
hut.
Then you’re squadded. Then …”

“Ah?”

“God help you,” said the glum man.

“What d’you mean, God help you?”

“What I say. God help you. You’re here. You’re in the Guards. It’s like being in jail, only there’s one difference.”

“What’s that?”

“In jail you sometimes get a bit of time to yourself.”

“Oh, blimey. Do they give you hell?”

“Hell,” said the glum man, “hell. If they gave you hell, it wouldn’t be so bad. Hell is Paradise to what they give you here.”

“Can you go out?”

“After a few weeks they let you out maybe once, for an evening, every eight or ten days.”

“And where can you go?”

“Nowhere.”

“What’s the food like?”

“Horrible.”

“What are the officers like?”

“Terrible.”

“What beds do you get?”

“Planks.”

“What are the sergeants like?” asked the wire-haired boy.

“Son,” said the glum man, “did you ever see a picture called
Beau
Geste?”

“Um.”

“Remember the sergeant that put them dead men on the wall, and sent them blokes that was dying of thirst out into the desert without a drink o’ water?”

“Oh, ah!”

“He chased ’em in the sun till they fell down dead, didn’t ’e?”

“Ah!”

“Would you say he was tough, just a bit?”

“Not half he wasn’t tough!”

“Well,” said the glum man. “He was a Godfrey Winn compared to the sergeants here.”

“Oh, blimey,” said the wire-haired boy.

There is a silence; then a little outbreak of uneasy laughter.

“Join the Army to see the world,” says the glum man. “Join the Guards and scrub it.”

We look about us.

Each of us sees twenty or thirty other recruits, raw and inconsolable as new-born babies. The man with the volume of
Punch
is riffling the leaves, blackened at the edges by the fidgeting of countless uneasy thumbs.

This is one of those awful gaps of silence. You know such moments. Talk limps to the edge of a chasm and falls in. Ten thousand pounds couldn’t buy a spontaneous word. Men become suddenly engrossed in silly trivialities. A big Nottingham man sits scrutinising a razor-blade wrapper with the intentness of a merchant poring over a rare vase.

The purr of the pages is the only sound we can hear …
prrrut
…
prrrut
…
prrrut
….

The weather has got into us, also. The day has blown hot and cold, wet and dry, light and dark; and now, settling into a uniform dirty whiteness, threatens rain. The sky sags like a wet sheet.

From the asphalt below comes a
ka-rup, k
a-rup
of disciplined iron heels, and a great, strained voice shouts: “Get a hold of the step! Get a hold of it!
Eff—
ite!
Eff—
ite!
Eff…. Eff…. Eff…. EFF….
EFF!”
It is a squad of Grenadiers being marched to their baths. In this place no man walks. A recruit represents two feet on a brown caterpillar: his paces are measured; his movements are predestined; his day is divided into equal squares. “Eff…. Eff!” The voice and the footsteps fade … walking
en
masse;
a community-singing of boots….

From an unknown distance, a flat, sore-sounding bugle blows a melancholy call of unknown significance. From different distances other bugles pick it up. The notes blend. They combine in a strange, sad discord … a rich weeping of vibrant brass. Then, right under the window, a little grim boy puts a bugle to his lips, puffs his cheeks, and blows. The red, yellow, and blue tassels on his coppery bugle hardly stir. A gathered flush empties out of his neck and face, into the
mouthpiece
, round the coil, and out in a great trembling note. He sounds the call again. Two scared swallows flutter from the roof. Simultaneously,
a flat loud-mouthed bell in the clock tower clangs an hour; and sliding down a slanting wind comes a rattling volley of raindrops.

Somebody sighs. The man with
Punch
throws down the volume and yawns.

The bugle is our masters’ voice … and the swallows will go where the sun goes, and we shall be here under the treacherous English rain, kicking the soil into mud for our feet to slip in.

But all England is here.

*

We men in this Reception Station are unreserved, inessential.

Individually, we are necessary only to the tiny nooks and crannies of England into which life, like a wind carrying seed, has dropped us. We have our roots, of course, like all men. Pluck us up, and an empty space is left. But not for long. Without us things do not change. Only the appearance of things changes. Life moves differently, but still goes steadily on.

We lived our peacetime lives; worked, enjoyed things a little, suffered a little; built what we could, struggling, more often than not, for just enough bread and rest to give us strength to struggle with; made homes and supported them, turning sweat into milk for the babies. We were part of the mass of the British.

We are here. The things we lived for are behind us. All the personal importance of our own lives has been washed down in the gulf of the national emergency. Other hands were there to take up the tools we laid down. The machines still drone. The fires still roar. The potatoes still grow, and will be plucked when their time is ripe. Our work is behind us, still being done.

And we wait here, to be made into soldiers.

There is scarcely a man among us who did not volunteer.

How does this happen?

We come out of the period between 1904 and 1922—that wild waste of years, strewn with the rubble of smashed régimes. The oldest of us is thirty-six, Shorrocks of Rockbottom. The youngest is Bray, eighteen,
of London. Those of us who are not old enough to remember the
war-weariness
of the century in its ’teens, are children of the reaction of the nineteen-twenties—when “No More War” was the war cry; and the League of Nations seemed more solid than the pipe-of-peace-dream that it was; and the younger generation—our own generation—was sworn to eternal non-belligerence in the face of the futility of war. We haven’t forgotten that. If only our own propagandists took a little of the blood and thunder that the peace propagandists so effectively used to move us!

From page after laid-out page, the horrors of war gibbered at us … stripped men, dead in attitudes of horrible abandon … people (were they men or women?) spoiled like fruit, indescribably torn up …
shattered
walls that had enclosed homes, homes like ours, homes of men, men like us … cathedrals shattered; the loving work of generations of craftsmen demolished like condemned slum tenements … children starving; nothing left of them but bloated bellies and staring eyes … trenches full of dead heroes rotting to high heaven … long files of men with bandaged eyes, hand-on-shoulder like convicts, blind with gas … civilians cursing God and dying in the muck-heaps of blasted towns….

Oh yes. We saw all the pictures and heard all the gruesome stories, which we know were true. We were the rich culture-grounds of the peace propaganda that said:
If
war
was
like
this
then,
what
will
it
be
like
next
time,
with
all
the
sharpened
wits
of
the
death-chemists
working
on
new
poison
gas
and
explosives,
and
the
greatest
engineers
of
all
time
devoting
themselves
to
aeroplanes
that
can
come
down
screaming
like
bats
out
of
hell?

When we heard that first siren on the Sunday of the Declaration of War, things like damp spiders ran up and down our backs. We expected the worst.

And then came a flow of something hot and strong. We went out and begged to be allowed to fight Jerry. We insisted on our right to do so, and to hell with the age groups. Men of sixty, who had seen the things at the pictures of which we had lost our breakfasts, and who had spent
twenty post-war and pre-war years saying: “Never again,” declared on oath that they were forty and beseeched the authorities to give them rifles. There was a rush and a heave. Because it wouldn’t take us all at once, we cursed the War Office from hell to breakfast.

Men like Shorrocks, who had argued the futility of all war in his grocery shop in Rockbottom (cotton and coal; pop., 21,369; near Black-burn; finest town on earth), did a
volte-face
like the pirouette of a ballet-dancer. (I say nothing of his mulish insistence that Britain, being an island, had no concern in the affairs of Europe; nor of the imbecile satisfaction he seemed to suck out of the statement that there had always been an England and always would be. That Shorrocks, in his
fossil-ivory
tower!) He left the business to his wife, clapped on his durable bowler hat, and, arguing about nothing for fifteen minutes with an old sweat in the Recruiting Station, passed A1 and got his fifteen stone of maddening self-assertion into the Coldstream Guards.

It is what they call “Being there when the bugle blows.” He sits by the window on a little collapsible iron bed, filling a pipe with
Sidebotham’s
Unscented Cut Plug which, in the tone of a man who stands by some ultimate and glorious truth, he declares to be the finest tobacco on earth. Let his neighbour, Whitaker of the West Riding, swear that Sidebotham’s is manure and there is nothing in the universe to touch Cooper’s Fragrant Twist at one-and-five an ounce. Shorrocks stands firm. Jut Sidebotham’s label on old bootlaces, and Shorrocks will smoke them and die in defence of them.

He is a big man. Assume that three of his fifteen stone are so much fat, food for worms. They will get that off him here, it is grimly hinted.

Meanwhile it fills his waistcoat, the good waistcoat of his everyday suit, which still has a year of wear in it. (The best suit—five pounds; no guineas; worth fifteen; made by Joe Hindle of Rockbottom, greatest tailor in Great Britain, one-time cutter to Jim Leach, finest tailor in the world, also of Rockbottom—hangs full of moth balls, ready for his homecoming. He will be back in one year. Germany will capitulate next spring. Who says so? He says so. Why? Because.)

All right. He will admit he has a few ounces of weight to lose. The Shorrockses eat well. You could not get Jack Shorrocks’ Agatha’s potato pie for ten shillings a portion at the Savoy Hotel, London—no, nor even at the Rockbottom Commercial Hotel. And he will say that, though careful with the brass, he begrudges nothing when it comes to food.

He knows what it is to go without. He doesn’t mind admitting that he worked in the Mill. He saw Boom and Slump; knew Cotton as King and as Beggar. A man must not be ashamed of anything in the way of honest work. When circumstances demanded it, he got a job labouring, and happy to get it. The whole point is, the children ate, had shoes, and never had a day’s illness. That’s little enough to brag about, but at the same time it’s something, he reckons. Well, gentlemen, he got together a pound here and a pound there, by going without everything except potatoes and sleep. He likes his grub but can go without it. He took a little shop, starting with a few packets of stuff on tick. Now he owes no man a farthing. It is a good business. It took him five years to make it what it is. He had a vast scheme for a mail-order business, a fair and square one on new lines, which, in another five years, might make Shorrocks as big as Sainsbury. He hasn’t the slightest doubt that Agatha, though the finest lass in the world, will ruin everything. Well … happen she will, happen she won’t. He’ll still have his own two hands—