Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (9 page)

Before Thurstan can unload the insults which rise and fill his mouth, a bugle sounds, a siren moans, and Brand says:

“Jerry in the sky. Get in the trench.”

The Guards’ Depot exploits air-raids, and makes prompt action a part of Guards’ training. We run to cover, and it is then that Sergeant Nelson, who, for eight weeks, will never let us out of his sight, tells us about the Wogs, “light of ear, bloody of hand,” the Arabs; and tells tall stories in short sentences, of discipline and training in the Guards. “And if I make your blood run cold—don’t worry, because I’ll warm it for you when I get you on the Square tomorrow. Definitely.”

*

The Square is vast and flat; black-grey asphalt tickled by mysterious eddies of pale-brown dust. We have to pass a half-finished building to get to it. Bricklayers pause and look at us with some pity. One old man, splitting a speckled pink brick with one flick of a trowel, says: “Now you’re for it, my boys.” He is a little old man, incongruously got up in
soiled blue serge, with a stiff collar and a bright strip of medal-ribbons. “Ah well, I was at Mons.” To this, Barker, who is hiding his
nervousness
under a great froth of funny talk, says: “No wonder they retreated. Are you sure you don’t mean Water-bloody-loo?”

“Laugh, my cock-oh,” says the old man, “you’ll never see what I saw!”

Sergeant Nelson is there, waiting for us. “Sheep!” he says, in such a voice that the distant echoes answer
Eep.
“Sheep for the slaughter.
Hi-de-Hi!”

“Ho-de-Ho!”

“Now listen to me. I’m going to teach you some elementary drill movements. You don’t have to be a Bachelor of Science to do ’em. Millions have done ’em before. Millions will do ’em again. You don’t need a matriculation certificate to do it. Just be confident. Don’t be nervous. Keep calm, and do exactly as I tell you.
And
work!
By God! Work with me and I’m as mild as your mummy’s milk. But work against me and I’ll kill ya! Look at me. I’m poison! I’m a rattlesnake! I kill more men than Diphtheria! Now for the time you’re here, you’ll shout the time of your movements out as you move.

“For example. Look at me. I’m standing properly at attention. See? Heels together, feet at an angle of forty-five degrees, fingers curled up, head perfectly still, eyes straight to the front, chin in, back like a ruler, and thumbs in line with the seams of the trousers. (That’s what the seams of your trousers are for.) Now. I’m standing to attention. I get the order Left Turn.
Le-heft
…
Tyeeern!
The heel of my left foot be comes a pivot. I push with the toe of my right foot, and turn left. That’s
One.
I count a pause—
Two,
Three
—then raise my right knee smartly and bring my right foot down in the correct position at an angle of forty-five degrees with a smash that cracks the asphalt—
One!
One
…
two
…
three
….
One!
Get it? You’ll only shout out the time while you’re here. By that time, the correct pause will become instinctive. Now, you. What’s ‘Instinctive’? What’s it mean?”

He has picked on Bates. Bates grins. Then he says: “Loike a dog‚ Sergeant.”

“What d’you mean, like a dog?”

“Well, a dog’s instinctive, Sergeant.”

“Oh, so a dog’s instinctive, is it? I’ll dog you, you stuffed dummy, you. I’ll instinctive you, you sloppy great Dane, you! You horrible thing! The correct movement—for the benefit of any brainless lout that doesn’t know the meaning of the English language—will come to you without your having to think about it, and so will the correct time. Anybody here done any navvying? … Several of you. Well, do you have to think how to get hold of a pick or a shovel? No. That’s instinctive. Definitely. Well, your arms will come to you like that. So will the proper use of your feet. Now listen,” says Sergeant Nelson, dropping his voice to an ordinary, conversational tone. “Some of you guys may be sensitive. I dunno. Well, don’t
worry
if I shout at you a bit and call you names. It’s essential. It’s impossible to get along without it. I’ve got to get you fairly proficient in eight or nine weeks. Always be sure that I won’t dish you out more than you can take, and I won’t punish any man unless he asks for it. Take everything in good part, and you’ll be all right.” He bellows: “Now, then! Come here. Lemme arrange you, like flowers in a garden … oh, you pretty-pretty bunch o’ soppy-stalked shy pansy-wansies. God definitely blimey, blimey with thunderbolts, blimey with lightning! You, you rasher of wind!” He drags Old Silence into place. “Atcha, you great roasted ox.” He pushes Hodge into position. “C’mon, you parrot-faced son of a son, Barker, or whatever your name is…. You, you gorbellier Geordie … yes, you, Shorrocks. There’s enough of you there to start a sausage factory…. And you, Dopey … where are you from? Widnes? Get in there…. Gor damme and lumme! Why should England tremble, eh?
You
’ve
been in the Army before, eh? I can see you have. Well, you come up here. Now look. You’re in your positions. You’ll always keep in those positions while you’re here. Get it? When told to fall in, you will fall in in those same positions, one arm’s length apart. Have you got it? Are you sure?”

To our left, thirty men, followed by a shrieking Sergeant brandishing
a pace-stick, execute a left wheel which, to us, represents the ultimate perfection of military footwork.

“Gord milk the coconuts and stone me over the hurdles,” groans Sergeant Nelson, “look at ’em. Three weeks squadded, and when it comes to a left wheel some of ’em right wheel, some of ’em about turn, some of ’em turn handsprings, some of ’em pick their noses, and some stand still. Definitely horrible. Now you’re going to show ’em what you can do. To me, you look not too bad a squad. You might shape. Now look. Over there is a squad that came last week. I want you to do me a personal favour. I want you to beat them Things hollow. Your credit is my credit. I won’t let you down. Will you let me down?”

“No, Sergeant!”

“I’m sure you won’t. I like the look of you, you terrible-looking objects as you are. Now. You’ll be on this side of the Square punctual to time. That is to say, ten minutes too early, always. You will be clean and tidy, smart and attentive. Now, I want you to try and stand to attention like this…. No, no, head straight, eyes straight to your front, arms straight to your sides, backs straight…. Now, when I say
Stand
at
Ease,
raise your left knee, so, and bring your left foot down with a
stamp,
your heels twelve inches apart; and simultaneously, shoot your hands to your rear … like this … your thumbs crossed, fingers straight, right hand over the left. Now don’t worry if you can’t do it properly first time. I don’t expect you to. We’ve all got to learn. Now….
Stand
at Hooo
ease!”
He looks at us. “Keep still. In the Army, right or wrong—keep still!” He walks round us, pushing up a chin here, tapping down a head there, straightening fingers, adjusting heels.

With the possible exception of a man in love, no man in the world is so desperately eager to please as the new recruit in the Army. He has his back to the yardstick of regimental tradition. For the duration of his time, his value will depend upon nothing but his proficiency as a soldier. The muscles of a rookie doing his first Stand at Ease are as taut as those of a man clinging for his life to a breaking branch.

“It’ll come easy in time.
Squa
haad … Shun!” roars Sergeant Nelson.
“Speed. Speed is the word. Smooth speed. Definitely smooth speed. And let me see one of you not keeping his head up. I’ll make him wish he’d died ten years before he was born. I’ll have him running round this square like Mister Nurmi the Flying Finn. I’ll hare him up and chase him down so that his plates of meat don’t touch the ground once in five hundred yards. Stone me definitely blind!
Stand
at Hooo
ease!
Now, when I says
Stand
Easy,
stay where you are but let all your muscles relax. Stand … easy! And when I say
Squad,
tense up again, stand properly at ease.
Squad.
As you were!
Squad!
Just tense yourselves back to the At Ease. All right, stand easy and rest for a minute.”

“Please, Sergeant, a dog
is
instinctive,” says Bates.

“Shullup! Are you out of your mind? Whaddaya mean, a dog? Who asked anything about dogs? Insubordination, eh? Insolence, eh?
Shullup
! …” Sergeant Nelson looks to Heaven and says: “All these years have I lived, and it seems like a thousand years; and never, definitely never, have I heard such a load of Sweet Fanny Adams as this horrible man comes out with. Gord forgive him. He’s mental…. Now, about saluting. They’re pretty hot on saluting in the Brigade of Guards. I don’t care what they do in the Boy Scouts or the Church Lads’ Brigade or the W.A.A.C.S. or the A.T.S., or the Salvation Army. Here, saluting being a matter of discipline and proper courtesy and respect, they are hot on it, and rightly so. Thus, whenever you see an officer approaching you, you will salute … head up, chin in, shoulders back, hand in line with the forearm, thumb pressed close against the edge of the hand, fingers all close together; the whole to come up like a steel spring, so that the right forefinger rests one inch above the right eyebrow.

“Now …”

*

A bugle sounds. “I’m going to dismiss you for now,” says Sergeant Nelson. “Just for fun, see if you can do me a right turn, like I showed you. On the command Dismiss, you turn smartly to your right, count three and then scram. Try it. Dis
-miss!”

He doesn’t call us back, or give us an “As you were.” It is, after all,
our first hour on the Square. We walk back to the hut to change for P.T. The novelty of the thing has made this first Drill Parade quite pleasant.

Bates catches up with the flying Sergeant Nelson, and says: “Please, Sergeant.”

“What is it, son?”

“When you whistle to a dog, ’e pricks ’is ears opp.”

“Are you here again with your dogs?”

“No, Sergeant. Yes, Sergeant. Oi mean, a dog is koind o’ instinctive.”

“There’s a lunatic asylum next door to here,” says Sergeant Nelson. “Either you’ll go there pretty soon, or so help me, I will.”

“Well, a cat, then,” says Bates, earnestly. “If you go
pt-pt-pt”
—he calls an imaginary cat—“it cooms running up to yow, because it knows what yow mean. But a cat’s got no sense. It’s instinctive. It don’t
know
what it does, or
why
it does it, but it
does
it, don’t it?”

“Oh, definitely,” says Sergeant Nelson.

He reaches the hut before we do. As we enter he cries:
“Hi-de-Hi!”

“Ho-de-Ho!”

“Slippers, shorts, gym vests and sweaters, and a rolled towel under your arm. The muscle factory, you weeds! The muscle factory, you spineless gobs of calves’ feet jelly, you. It made me what I am today, and I’m a one-man wave o’ destruction!
Hi-de-Hi!”

“Ho-de-Ho!”

“Trained Soldier Brand,” says Sergeant Nelson.

“Sarnt?” says the Trained Soldier, leaping up.

“
I
don’t want you,” says the Sergeant. “I just said ‘Trained Soldier Brand.’ Just like that. ‘Trained Soldier Brand.’ Just as you might say: ‘Blind O’Reilly.’ … Come on,
come
on, come ON! Ja wants valets! Ja want ladies’ maids? Ja want me to powder your little bottoms with talcum and put your little shorts on for you? Get out of it! Form up like I showed you just now, for P.T.”

We march as best we can out to the hard green fields, where a Staff Sergeant waits for us—an Army Heavyweight Champion of practically
everything, with the body of a boxer turned wrestler, the eye of a kind man embittered, and the face of an executioner who is kind to his
children
when off duty.

He bites off jagged spikes of verbiage and spits them out like
fishbones
.

“Come close. Listen to me. First of all I want to have. A few words. With you. Pay attention.”

His grim grey eyes look us over; rest approvingly upon the huge thews of Hodge and the long, quick boxing muscles of Bullock;
appraise
the wiriness of Johnson, the sedentary slenderness of Old Silence, the stolid suet of Sherrocks, the ranginess of the wire-haired boy from Widnes, the neglected average torso of Dale. He rests a great dark hand for an instant on Thurstan’s shoulder. Thurstan bobs up and back like a hammer in a piano, tense and defensive. The Staff Sergeant glances at him and yawns. Then he says:

“None of you are. Any good. Civilians. City-bred, some of you. Doughy. Sloppy. Unfit. Most of you’d be puffed after running. A mile. Hn. We’ll alter all that.” He clears his throat, and then goes on, in the voice of a lecturer, but with an undertone of weariness. (After all, he has been saying the same thing over and over again, day in and day out, for so very long.) He says:

“It is my duty to make you fit and strong in order that you may serve your country to the full extent of your capacity. Some of you went in for sports and physical culture in peacetime. All the better for them that did. You all ought to have done so. A man who neglects the body God gave him is worse than a beast. And if you’ve neglected yourselves and let yourselves get short-winded and soft, well, you’ll suffer for that in the first week or two: it’ll come hard, very hard. You get a lot of P.T. here. You’ve got to be hammered into shape. I can’t show you any mercy, even if I wanted to … and I don’t.

“I hope you enjoy the P.T. you get here. If you don’t, it makes no odds. So you’d better for your own sakes. It isn’t all arm-and-leg exercises.
Now, we play a lot of games and do a lot of nice running. Above all, we teach a new kind of thing which we call Unarmed Combat.

“What is Unarmed Combat? Well, it’s nothing more or less than dirty, roughhouse fighting … self-defence other than Queensberry method. Call it All-In Wrestling … a bit of Catch-As-Catch-Can, Ju-Jitsu, Judo, anything you like. The idea is this: you’re up against Jerry. Jerry is ruthless. Jerry won’t lead with his left in hand-to-hand fighting: he’ll more likely bite you in the face and kick. The principle is, that a break-hold, or a gouge, or a properly placed kick or twist, well applied, might save your life in an emergency. I teach you ruthless, unscrupulous, roughhouse tactics, to be used if and when occasion demands. And furthermore, Unarmed Combat gives you confidence in yourselves, and helps you to a proper co-ordination of eye and hand and foot. For instance …”