The Day Gone By (39 page)

I was given the odd and rather superfluous job of riding round our sentry posts on a bicycle in the middle of the night, so that I could be challenged and subsequently confirm that everyone had been where he ought to be. (I had no wireless, of course: no one had.)

It was only a week or two after midsummer and the nights were short. I remember, towards the end of one such night, wheeling my bicycle while I walked with two or three others along a country lane, on our way back to Wash Common and dismissal after the night's duty. It was still dark - or darkish.

‘Won't be long now, then, 'Arry,' said one of my companions to another. ‘There's th'old lark startin' up, 'ear 'un?'

It was indeed a skylark on the wing. I had not known before that they sense the dawn and make their first song-flight in the darkness shortly before light comes into the sky. This knowledge was my most valuable - indeed my only - gain from my short service in the L.D.V.

Now there was hardly a piece of my civilian life left. I'd said good-bye to Jennifer; and to the few people in and around Wash Common who might possibly notice I was no longer about, including Jim Spencer, publican of The Bell. Packing's not much of a problem to someone on his way to join up. Extra socks, ditto underclothes, handkerchiefs, pyjamas and a toothbrush and toothpaste were about the size of it. In those days, in theory at least, a man was supposed to be able to join the Army with nothing but what he stood up in and be completely ‘all found' by the quartermaster. Issue kit included a safety razor but, oddly, neither pyjamas nor a toothbrush. So a soldier was officially acceptable sleeping in his shirt and pants and never cleaning his teeth. Is he still, I wonder?

The thirteenth of July came. All in the hot, sunny afternoon my mother and father came down Wash Hill to see me off from Newbury station. I was to go by train to Reading and change for Aldershot. The train, when it arrived, was a little diesel more like a large motor-coach. I got in, waved good-bye and, as we departed, sat down. I made up a triolet, though not a very good one.

“With that he lit a cigarette

And sang to keep his spirits up.

He thought “It will get tougher yet.”

(With that he lit a cigarette.)

He said “The footlights flicker up,

The house-lights dim, the stage is set.”

With that he lit a cigarette

And sang to keep his spirits up.'

Although, as my sister was for ever telling me, I was too much addicted to self-dramatization, even I could hardly have over-dramatized, within myself, that summer afternoon departure from Newbury on the diesel train. It was carrying me away not only from my childhood and adolescence, never to return, but from an entire society and way of life, from everything I had experienced and come to know as familiar. The world would never be the same again.

Arrived at Aldershot, I got on a 'bus which seemed to be pointing in the right direction and, as we set off, asked the conductor where might be No. 1 R.A.S.C. Training Centre. ‘'Ow the 'ell d'you expect me to know?' he replied. This was my first experience of the ‘Ask a silly question' syndrome. I was no longer Dr Adams's son or a scholar of Worcester. I was a stranger mug who seriously expected civilians to know about military topography. But then, whom could I ask? A policeman, a soldier? What did other people do? I got out my papers to have another look at them. At this moment some kindly passenger said ‘What's the barracks, son?' They were called, I now saw, ‘Buller' (one of the more unsuccessful generals of the Boer War). I was told where to get off the 'bus and which way to go. I arrived, was directed to some building or other to check in and found others doing the same.

For those who have not had the pleasure of going to Aldershot, I had better try to describe it. Of course, this was fifty years ago, but it's all still there - or most of it. Before the nineteenth century, soldiers used to be accommodated by being billeted, in larger or smaller groups as practicable, in the homes of local civilians or anywhere else that was thought suitable. This was, of course, an untidy and unsatisfactory system in several respects - difficulty of transmitting orders, quarrelling with civilians, lack of discipline, robbery and so on. It was the Duke of Wellington who promoted the idea of barracks, so that soldiers could be concentrated and disciplined in places where military interests and values did not clash with civilian ones. In addition to barracks in most county towns, special concentrations grew up in what were judged to be suitable places, e.g., Aldershot, Bulford and Catterick. Bulford, of course, is on Salisbury Plain, where soldiers can train and manoeuvre without getting in too many people's way. It is easy to see why Aldershot was favoured. It is an easy journey to and from London and it is largely surrounded by land of no use for farming - heather, silver birch and pines, that sort of country. Some of the outlying barrack blocks are actually among the heather.

The barracks - I only got to know Buller, but no doubt they are all much the same – possess a uniquely bleak and dispiriting quality, something like workhouses or the precincts of old, Victorian hospitals. I would guess that they were built between about 1840 and 1880. You would not be terribly surprised to see Privates Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd come round the corner, with pillbox hats, swagger canes and big moustaches. The barracks are neither town nor country. Civilians have no haunts nor business there, and there are no trees, no flowers or grass, no shops and no pubs. Birds are restricted to sparrows. Between the red-brick barrack blocks, married quarters, guard-rooms, offices and training sheds lie bare, level areas of asphalt and featureless, straight roads. The centre of each barracks is the barrack square, about 40,000 square feet of open hard-standing, where people drill and drill and drill. The square is a sacred place. You cannot walk on it (assuming you wanted to) except in the way of duty. You may not smoke within about a mile of it. (I quote Corporal Edwards.) A barracks is like a naval ship; there is nothing there but what is necessary, utilitarian and practical. This, in my day, meant that there were no baths and no showers. The barrack blocks were all exactly the same, consisting of a large, rectangular room with a floor of polished (and that means polished slippery) boards, about thirty iron beds and lockers and a lavatory and some wash-basins at one end. To live in such an environment day in and day out, seldom going anywhere else, you have to adapt yourself, like an evolving animal, and become conformed to your surroundings.

In the 1914-18 war, as far as I can make out, people were frequently commissioned as officers straight out of civilian life. If you could pass as a gentleman you could pass as an officer. But as the casualties mounted, officers were often promoted from the ranks. R. C. Sheriff's
Journey's End
portrays what was no doubt a typical set-up in many companies. The company commander, Stanhope, is a gentleman and a veteran (though pathetically young). His second-in-command, Osborne, is an ex-schoolmaster, also a gentleman. Lieutenant Hibbert is a somewhat pseudo-gentleman, Lieutenant Trotter is a promoted Other Rank, not a gentleman, and 2nd Lieutenant Raleigh is a boy straight from his public school.

In Hitler's war the set-up was rather different. At the outset the
Daily Mirror
and other newspapers declared that all promotions to officer should be by merit from the ranks. Everyone should initially have to join up in the ranks. The Dean of Worcester, Colonel Wilkinson (who had been a Guards officer and an aide to General Plumer in the 1914-18 war), head of the Oxford University Officers Training Corps, maintained openly and stoutly that this was rubbish and a waste of time and money. If someone was obviously officer-material, he should be sent straight to an Officer Cadet Training Unit (O.C.T.U.). Colonel Wilkinson did not really get away with this and it did him little good, for it was much remarked upon that although he held his appointment as head of the Oxford O.T.C. all through the war, he never received any honour in recognition of his services.

However, Oxford, Cambridge and some other universities were enabled, as it were, to meet Colonel Wilkinson half-way. Undergraduates who joined the University O.T.C. had (as we have seen) a say in what they should be mobilized into and also had their calling-up date deferred so that they could take special examinations devised more or less
ad hoc.
What was more, although they were not called up as cadets, they joined the ranks as ‘potential cadets' and were put into special training squads with others like themselves. It was in such a squad - Brander Squad - that I found myself that mid-July. Who Brander may have been I am not at all sure, but it is of interest, though probably only a coincidence, that a ‘Brander' is mentioned by Kipling as a commanding officer in one of the Mulvaney-Ortheris stones.

In Evelyn Waugh's
Men at Arms,
Guy Crouchback joins the Royal Corps of Halberdiers as a ‘probationary officer', along with twenty others. Apart from the fact that we were not ‘probationary officers' but ‘potential cadets', Brander Squad's daily life and regime were very similar to Guy Crouchback's. I suppose there were about thirty of us. We lived in a barrack-room (though a few of us spilled over into unoccupied married quarters) and messed in the communal Other Ranks' mess-room. Apart from messing, however, we really had little or nothing to do with the other Other Ranks, except for our squad commander, Corporal Edwards, and the various N.C.O. instructors who took us for weapon training, P.T., anti-gas and so on. We lived among ourselves and this made all the difference.

Corporal Edwards was a regular, about twenty-five, I suppose. I think it is greatly to his credit that he was able to act naturally and be his rough self, yet impose his authority on us and command our liking and respect. He pushed us hard in those long summer days, when the asphalt turned sticky and the bonnet of a lorry became too hot to touch. After all, his own standing and promotion depended on whether we were a credit to him. But he was no bully and he never had recourse to any authority but his own. He had a sharp sense of humour, he talked with us off duty and got to know us and he shared with us the life of the barrack-room. He instructed us in how to get a high shine on a pair of army boots, how to iron battle-dress trousers until they had a knife-edge crease up to the top of the thigh, and all the rest of the bullshit. He had an impressive stock of regulars' catchwords and sayings, one or other of which could be applied to almost any situation. ‘By Jesus, you blokes want to get some service in.' ‘Get a grip of it!' ‘Don't touch 'im, 'e'll break.' ‘Well, fall down with it, then!' ‘Lot of bloomin' joskins!' (‘Joskin' is a regular soldiers' term for a recruit.) ‘That belt's bloody milo.' (No good at all.) ‘Jesus wants you for a sunbeam!' Initially, we were all a bit shocked by Edwards's casual taking of the name of Jesus, but the good fellow meant not the least harm by it, and after a few weeks we used to do it to each other, in inverted commas, as it were. ‘By Jesus, Dicky, you'll never get by with that rifle.' I started as ‘Dicky', but one day Edwards said we were all Goons, except me, and I was ‘The Jeep'.
²
After this everyone called me ‘Jeep'. I had never had a nickname before and liked it.

And what did we do for those two months, from July to September? We bashed the square. Crikey, did we bash that square? We did foot-drill and arms-drill and platoon drill, up and down and round and round the square and the adjacent drill-shed, while the sweat ran off us in streams. I can't remember that we ever did this in shirt-sleeve order. What I do remember is that we had to keep our battle-dress jackets buttoned to the neck and the two hooks-and-eyes, at the top, fastened all the time. You had thick khaki close round your throat from morning till night, and a thick khaki shirt underneath that. Off-duty, too, whether in barracks or going down-town, in shop or pub., all the time, you had to be clipped up to the throat. If one of the barracks N.C.O.s, who knew you, happened to see a clip undone, you might get away with no more than a roar of ‘Sun-bathing, eh? Do it up!' But out of barracks, a stranger red-cap (military police) would be quite likely to put you on a charge - or threaten to, anyway. This would not improve the prospects of a potential cadet.

In some ways it wasn't a bad life. You had no cares or responsibilities apart from your boots, clothes, rifle and bedspace; the food was quite good and as our drill and bullshit steadily improved, Edwards became positively avuncular. He was, at bottom, as contemptuous as we of the continual orders to ‘bump' the barrack-room floor till it shone, highly polish both our pairs of boots and so on. I remember him, one evening, giving way to an outburst. ‘'Ighly polished! 'Ighly polished! That's all they thinks about, 'ighly polished! 'Ere, I'll tell you what! If a bloody Messerschmitt come over, they'd want it 'ighly polished!' This took our fancy, and the highly polished Messerschmitt became part of Brander Squad's folklore.

We all got very fit on sunshine, plenty of food, no worries and vigorous work: but by jingo, it was a hard day we did and no mistake! Reveille sounded at five o'clock a.m. By ten past five - it didn't matter how you were dressed: shirt and trousers were enough — you had to be out on the asphalt to give your name to the N.C.O. taking roll-call. Then there would be various things to be done: shining the taps in the washroom and so on, bumping the barrack-room floor and folding the blankets (no sheets, of course) until they were entirely uniform. After breakfast, the first hour's drill of the day began at eight. Then would follow weapon training (Lewis gun, Bren gun, anti-tank rifle, bayonet, etc.) under Sergeant Tierney, a caustic but humorous Irishman with a biting tongue. There would be P.T. in the gym. - really arduous - followed by anti-gas instruction from Corporal Pryor, a Yorkshireman whose nickname was ‘Moosty ha-a-ay'. (‘Now phosgene 'as a pronounced odour of moosty 'a-a-ay.') More drill, followed by instructions on, perhaps, badges of rank, by Edwards. (‘You, Jeep, badger ranker brigadier.' ‘Three stars, corporal, in triangular formation, surmounted by a crown.' ‘Yeah, three piss-pots, eh, surmounted by - you, Anderson, badger ranker major-general.')