Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (16 page)

“Thus, at the battle of Fontenoy, the Coldstream Guards in the front line advanced for half a mile up a slope under a crossfire of artillery against the French who were in trenches at the top. They received the French musket-fire without replying. Then, when they were right on top of the enemy, and one Coldstreamer in three had fallen, we let fly and swept them off the earth in an absolute hailstorm of bullets. If they had fired at longer range with their first careful loads, and then hastily reloaded, about 50 per cent of the muskets would have misfired, and the attack would have lost half its effect.

“Now do you know what I think? Our Guards discipline, which is the best in the world, has its roots in the old-time need to conserve fire; to keep a line, stay unbroken, hold the trigger finger back until
the word of command, and then let loose one shattering volley. You see, the Coldstream Guards are the only survivors of the first
highly-trained
British Army. We have background. We have a start.”

John Johnson says: “Oi wouldn’t moind foighting in the Battle o’ Waterloo. It was ea-
sy
. They didn’t ’ave no shells and no bombs.”

“They did. Major Shrapnel had already invented his shell.”

“Ah, but nothing loike now. Them old cannon balls just bounced.”

“If you saw an eighteen-pound ball of iron ricocheting and flying over the ground towards you, what would you do?”

“Duck.”

“Do you realise that discipline was such that the British infantry were forbidden to step out of line, even in the face of round shot: and didn’t?”

The boy from Widnes says: “I wouldn’t like a bang on the head with an eighteen-pound ball of iron. As far as I’m concerned, it’d be just the same as a tank.”

Hacket, whose rifle sights, having a film of dust on them, were described as “being lousy with spiders and cobwebs and dirty filthy rust and verdigris,” says: “For my part, you can keep the Short Lee-
Enfield
.”

“You ought to have a matchlock,” says the Schoolmaster. “The first Coldstreamers lugged a thing about four feet long, firing a bullet
weighing
an ounce and a quarter. He had to pour a charge of coarse powder down the muzzle, spit in a bullet which he carried in his mouth, pour some finer powder on the priming pan, and set it all off with a match.”

“Did they ’ave matches?” asks Barker.

“A kind of smouldering rope about three feet long. He took one end of the match between the thumb and second finger of his right hand, and then—bang! A fire order wasn’t just ‘Fire!’ It was something like this: ‘Take up your musket and staff. Join your musket and staff. Blow your pan. Prime your pan. Shut your pan. Cast off your loose powder. Cast about your musket and staff. Charge your musket. Recover your musket in your right hand. Shoulder your musket and carry the staff
with it. Take our your match. Blow your match. Cock your match. Try your match. Guard your pan. Present blow your match upon your pan and give fire.’ All that to get a bullet out.”

“And now,” says the boy from Widnes, “a Bren gun, weighing, I bet, less than one o’ them thur things, can fire a hundred and twenty bullets a minute. I bet it took them about five minutes to fire. In five minutes, you or I could kill six ’undred men with a Bren gun.”

“Now that’s what I call civilisation,” says Hacket.

*

Alison, the glum blond man, suddenly says: “My old woman talks tripe. She says, why don’t Hitler and Churchill ’ave a set-to all by themselves and settle the war that way?”

“That wouldn’t be fur,” says Widnes. “’Itler’s the younger man. Old Winnie’s getting on in years.”

“Oh, I dunno,” says the lad from the Elephant and Castle. “Old Winnie’s got plenty of go in ’im. It’s the fighting spirit, see?”

“Winnie breathes ’eavy,” says the glum blond man.

“Don’t you believe it,” says Widnes. “’Itler breathes worse.”

“You know what?” says Bates. “If it come to that we could make Brummy Joe Prime Minister just for the toime being. Brummy Joe’s a terror—”

“Tommy Farr’d be better,” says Alison.

“’E could go over wiv ’is Foreign Minister,” says the Lad. “We could make Len ’Arvey Foreign Minister.”

“War Minister,” says Widnes.

“Nah, it couldn’t be done,” says Alison.

“Why not?” asks Widnes.

“Who’d do politics?”

“They could make an arrangement,” says Bates.

“’Itler wouldn’t fight,” says the Lad.

“’E’d ’ave to,” says the boy from Widnes. “It’d be a diplomatic arrangement.”

“’Itler’d fight dirty,” says the Lad.

“So would Brummy Joe,” insists Bates. “’E carries a foot o’ lead pipe covered wi’ rubber bands orf beer bottles. Brummy’d feel naked without it.”

“Would they charge an entrance fee?” asks Widnes.

“Bob a ’ead,” says the Lad. “Make a packet.”

“Oi bet yow there wouldn’t half be some excitement,” says Bates. “Wi’ us and the Jerries in the audience.”

“Proper rough’ouse,” says the Lad.

“We’d all ’ave to go,” says Widnes.

“It’d be just like a war,” says Alison.

“But we’re ’aving a war now,” says the Lad.

“Blimey, so we are,” says Widnes.

“It wouldn’t prove anything,” says Sergeant Hands. “Besides, all that kind o’ thing is out of date. It’d make you laugh, Crowney, the way they used to fight in the olden times. You’d meet your enemies, and you’d bow, and you’d scrape, and you’d say: ‘You fire first,’ and they’d say: ‘No, after you,’ and then you’d fire at each other a bit, and so on.”

“Don’t be silly,” says Sergeant Crowne. “War always was war, and when it come down to brass tacks, it was the same as it is now. You try and kill the other feller, and the other feller tries to kill you.”

“It’s true,” says the Schoolmaster. “What Sergeant Hands says is true. Look at what happened when the Coldstream Guards fought the French at Fontenoy. They came face to face with the French Guards. They halted fifty yards away. Lord Charles Hay of the 1st Guards took off his hat, and drank the enemy’s health. The Coldstream officers did likewise. The French Guards returned the salute. Then Lord Hay said: ‘I hope, gentlemen, that you are going to wait for us today, and not swim the Scheldt as you swam the Main at Dettingen.’

“So Lord Hay turned to his own men, and said: ‘Men of the King’s Company, these are the French Guards, and I hope you are going to beat them today. Gentlemen of the French Guards, fire!’

“The French Commander answered: ‘We never fire first; fire yourselves.’

“The English Guards then cheered the French, and the French Guards cheered back. They were thirty yards away from each other. The French Guards raised their muskets. A Coldstreamer said: ‘For what we are about to receive, Lord make us truly thankful.’ Then the French Guards fired. About nineteen Guards’ officers went down, and a large number of men. Then it was our turn. We opened fire. Our musketry was known and feared all over the world. The British officers were walking up and down, tapping down the musket barrels of the men to make sure that they aimed low. We kept up a running fire, wiped out the whole of the French front rank. And so we cut through to the French camp.”

“Well,” says Crowne, “I’d see myself damned before I’d invite any Jerry to fire at me first. ‘’It first. ’It ’ard. Keep on ’itting.’ That’s my motto.”

“It depends, though,” says Dale.

“Depends on what?”

“Who you’re fighting, Sergeant.”

“No it don’t. If you fight, fight to win, and get it over. If you got to fight, fight for keeps. If I
like
somebody, I don’t fight ’im, and so I don’t take my ’at off to ’im or ask ’im to ’it me first…. It makes a nice story, Schoolmaster, and if it’s in ’istory, then it must be true. But that sort o’ thing is a thing o’ the past. If I ’ad to pick ten men to lead in a bayonet charge, I’d pick men that ’ated Jerry’s guts and wanted to see the colour of ’em. I daresay there’s two sides to any argument, but for my part I don’t care a twopenny damn. My side’s the right side, or I wouldn’t be fighting on it.”

“I agree with you,” says Hands, “but you can’t get away from being English.”

“Who says you can?”

“Nobody says you can. You can’t get away from your breeding, that’s what I say. I’ve seen you myself, Crowne, with my own two eyes, during that bit of a riot. You were using your hands. In the heat of that fight, when there was a Wog coming at you with a knife, you
boxed, Crowney, you
boxed.
If there’d been a referee watching you you couldn’t have kept more above that Wog’s belt-line. It’s an instinct. It would have been all right for you to have used your feet. I used mine, I know. But it just didn’t occur to you not to fight Queensberry. My brother talked just like you. But once, when he found himself wounded, in the same shell hole with a wounded Jerry, last war, he shared his iodine and dressings with him. Though he would have killed him in a fight, any day, mind you. It’s drummed into your head as a kid. You can’t get away from it. But I don’t mind admitting that what the Schoolmaster told us about letting the Frenchman fire first is a bit too much of a good thing. Why, it’s a wonder they didn’t just come over and shake hands and call the war off, after that.
I
would of.”

“It’s good publicity,” says Hacket. “I bet those Frenchmen said to themselves: ‘What decent fellows these Englishmen are.’ And it helped to undermine ’em.”

Hands says: “English soldiers behave decent, instinctively; put Englishmen down anywhere and they’ll be decent. Just as Guardsmen automatically form a straight line and keep their heads up. It’s
in
them to do so. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be fighting for?”

The Schoolmaster says: “A war can be an affair of honour just as a duel can be.”

“You don’t fight no duels with murderers,” says Crowne.

“Hear, hear,” says Dale.

Hands looks at him. “What are
you
fighting for, Dale?”

“Well,” says Dale. “The Nazis have got to be stopped or they’ll be everywhere.”

“You, Widnes?”

“Because there’s a war on, Sarnt.”

“Hodge?”

“Hitler is bad. If you give in to un, you give in to wickedness. If you don’t fight wickedness, you encourage wickedness. It’d be wicked not to fight Hitler, don’t ee see?”

“Alison?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care, Sarnt. If the whole bloody country’s fighting, what d’you expect
me
to do? Read a book or somethink?”

“Shorrocks?”

“No Dictator tells
me
what to do.”

“Crowney?”

“I like what I like. I’m not satisfied with England, not by a long chalk, but it’s
my
country and I’m used to it. You can, at least, grouse round ’ere. Get me? I’d rather die grousing if I fancy grousing, than live bottled up. And there’s something about those soppy goose-stepping mugs that I ’ate the sight of. I don’t know what it is, but they set my teeth on edge. They get my goat. I wanna kill ’em.”

“And you, Schoolmaster?—and you don’t have to give us a song and dance about the Battle of Waterloo.”

“I’m fighting for the same as everybody else … to preserve what there is that’s decent and good in the world.”

“Barker?”

“Sarnt, shell I tell yer the honest truth?” Barker imitates the
portentous
tone of a politician. “I am fightin’ to make the sea free for the banana trade.”

“Bearsbreath?”

“Turn it up,” says Bearsbreath. “This sort of thing bores me.”

“Me too,” says Crowne. “Turn it up, Hands.”

“I’m trying to find out our War Aims,” says Hands.

“Let ’em keep their sights upright, ’old their bunbooks firm, and squeeze their triggers,” says Crowne, “and they’ll ’it whatever they’re aimin’ at.”

*

“Yuh,” says Dagwood, slicing his last, precious bit of twist with a jackknife. In this knife you may find clues to the character of the good Birkenhead sergeant: he has guarded it for a dozen years, using it constantly. The big blade is worn narrow towards the point. He never uses the small blade: that is for emergency; but both blades are honed to razor edges. If the need arose, he could mend his boots with
that knife, or cut his way out of a place with it, or pick a lock, or perform a minor surgical operation, or carve a doll for a small girl or a boat for a boy, or cut a man’s hair, or kill him. “Yuh. You’ve all got to learn to shoot. You do some revision on rifle and Bren. Then you fire your course, wearing fighting order. Like the Schoolmaster says, musketry is always useful.”

John Johnson of Brummagem says: “Oi want to get moi ’ands on a Tommy gun.” Quite unconsciously, he says this out of the corner of his mouth. One can see the filmic fantasy with which he is entertaining himself … gangsters … the roar of fast cars …
tupatupatup!
—and an enemy falls on his face.

“They’re handy little things,” says Dagwood, “at fifty yards or so, they’re handy.”

“Give me a Bren every time,” says Hands.

“A Lewis, for rough work,” says Crowne. “A Bren is too accurate, sometimes. You put too many rounds in the same place. You can’t miss with a Bren. Any mug ’ere could score well with a Bren. But say you’ve got a mob rushing you, why, then it’s just as well to spray ’em a bit, if you get what I mean.”

“The prettiest thing I ever saw in my life,” says Bearsbreath, “was a shot with an anti-tank rifle. In France. Did you ever come across Cocky Sinclair? He got a Jerry officer and seven Jerries with one shot. It was as pretty as a picture. And that was the only time I ever saw an anti-tank rifle fired from the shoulder. I didn’t know it was possible. It ain’t possible. But Cocky was as strong as a bullock. He’s a stronger man that Ack-Ack Ackerman, even: stocky, a neck like a damned tree. He hoisted that anti-tank rifle up to his shoulder and let fly. And down went eight Jerries, plugged as clean as a whistle. The recoil knocked him down. While he was sitting on his backside, a Jerry plane came swooping down. He reloaded, just like he was handling a short Lee-Enfield, and laid back, supporting the anti-tank on his foot, and fired at the plane. And so help me God he brought it down. I didn’t
learn till afterwards that the first shot broke Cocky’s collarbone. The whole point was, he was annoyed.”