The Day Gone By (40 page)

About every third night we would have to provide four men for guard duty, under an N.C.O. who might or might not be Edwards. Three men, each in turn, were sentries outside the guard-room, with two spells each of two hours on duty. When the guard were inspected at guard-mounting at quarter to six in the evening, the smartest man of the four was appointed ‘stick man'; the softest job. He had to go to the cook-house for the cocoa, wash up the supper, carry messages (if any) and so on. The trouble with guard duty, apart from the boredom of four hours as sentry, was that you never got any sleep. You might manage to doze, but somebody or something was always bumping about, or clattering or talking in the guard-room. You went sleepless back to the following day's square-bashing.

Whenever we sat down during the day - for a gas lecture, or a talk from the Padre or the M.O. (on V.D.) - most of us simply could not help falling asleep, and the N.C.O.s were relatively easy on this. I learned how to sleep while looking as though you weren't, but very often the N.C.O.s were in almost as bad a case as we were. Sleep in the barrack-room tended to be fitful, too, on account of interruptions. If you could get six hours in, you were darned lucky.

The interesting feature of this regime was that it included scarcely anything that a regular recruit's training would not have included in, say, 1935. We knew nothing of the course of the war and hardly ever saw a newspaper, much less an officer. We learned nothing about the Germans or about motorized transport (although we were R.A.S.C.). We did have, I think, two days on the rifle ranges, where, we were told, we had acquitted ourselves well. Otherwise we lived an almost barrack-enclosed life, among instructors whose way of doing things had remained virtually unaffected by the war. It was, as I say, an easy life after the intellectual demands of Oxford, and at least all hardships were shared in common. We were lucky, too, in that we had no one objectionable in the squad. No one was malicious and no one was hated.

One day I found myself on some sort of coal fatigue with an old sweat, a regular. (I say ‘old': I suppose he may have been forty.) Whatever we had been told to do - I can't remember what it was, now - was plainly silly and ill considered, involving about twice as much work as was necessary. After a while the old soldier said to me I'll tell yer what, lad. This is a right balls-up.' I said I heartily agreed and we toiled on. About five minutes later he remarked ‘This is the biggest balls-up since Calonso.' ‘Why,' I asked, ‘what was Calonso?' ‘Well, I don't rightly know,' said he, ‘but that was the biggest balls-up there ever was.'

This intrigued me, and later on - much later on - when opportunity offered, I put in a bit of research. The result was interesting. Colenso (
sic
), according to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
is a village in Natal, about sixteen miles from Ladysmith. It was the scene of an action fought between the Boers and the British under Sir Redvers Buller on 15 December 1899. The British lost. I suppose my old sweat might have joined up in 1920 or thereabouts. He must have acquired the name orally, as a proverbial term in the regular army for a military fiasco.

For part of the time - quite a few weeks, as I recall - that we were at Aldershot, there was a prisoner in the guard-room. We would come across him when we were on guard duty at night, and sometimes by day on the square. What he had done I never heard - probably overstayed his leave, I expect - but my Lord, was he atoning for it? He appeared a very ordinary sort of man, medium height with sandy hair, and he was always, or nearly always, in a state of desperate exhaustion, gasping, glassy-eyed and half-oblivious. He was taken out on the square in full equipment (no rifle) and drilled - often at the double - from morning till night by the regimental police. It was terrible to see, for he was being tortured, in effect. Even now I can hear the N.C.O.'s voice sounding through the guard-room window: ‘Left-right-left-right-left-right-left-right-left-turn, double march, left-right-left-right, mark time. Come on, pick ‘em up!' Eventually the man would be marched back into the guard-room and would collapse, panting and pouring with sweat, on one of the cots. He never spoke. I have never seen anyone in a similarly dreadful state of suffering and exhaustion: and while he was still trembling and huddled, the time would come for the next spell outside. His life can only have been a nightmare that never stopped.

In the end, he broke a bone in his foot, marking time, and they took him away, to be seen no more - by Brander Squad, anyway.

We had one day out from the barracks about once a week, when we were put in a ‘bus and taken out to the Tank Obstacle. Hitler was still expected at any time and part of the plan of defence was to dig a ditch across the whole of southern England deep enough and wide enough to constitute an effective anti-tank obstacle. All available personnel worked one day a week on this job. Here we
were
allowed to strip: we stripped to the waist and worked in pairs, shovelling aside the already dug earth. It was a notable sight, the long line of the great ditch and the stripped, toiling men stretching away into the sun-haze, glistening with sweat.

By this time enemy aircraft (including highly polished Messerschmitts) had begun to appear over England, and every platoon or squad on the Tank Trap had to detail two men for anti-aircraft duty, sitting and waiting beside a Lewis light machine gun mounted on a tall tripod, pointing upwards and capable of being turned in a full circle. Except that the sun was hot, and you had no shade, this really was a soft option, and I was delighted to find myself detailed for it one August morning. I took with me on the 'bus my
Complete Works of Shakespeare in one volume -
the same that I had been given under Hiscocks at Bradfield. (I still have it, though coverless.) I spent the long, hot day reading
As You Like It,
which I had never read before. That play still recalls the tank trap, the dirt flying and the clink and glitter of the shovels in the sun. No enemy aircraft ever came.

I said there were no baths or showers in barracks. There weren't; and by this time, reader, you may have inferred that this deficiency was rather boring. It was; but there was one mighty solace and refuge, may God bless her eternally, Miss Daniels' Home. Who Miss Daniels was I don't know, but to her everlasting credit she established her Home in Aldershot for the comfort of the brutal soldiery. Here you could have a hot bath, even if you did have to queue for it; and, I think, it was free. And you could follow it with eggs and bacon for about one shilling and sixpence - for in those early days of the war, rationing had not yet begun to bite, and there were still plenty of eggs, bacon, bananas and chocolate. Many a comforting hour of an evening did I spend at Miss Daniels' Home, clean, replete and ready to appreciate the interesting variety of Victorian religious pictures on the walls. Is it still functioning, I wonder? I hope so.

I think I know how starlings must feel. One retained, of course, some sense of individuality, but at bottom you genuinely felt yourself to be primarily a particle of a group. Brander Squad's luck or good or bad treatment were yours, and even letters from home didn't really dilute this feeling much.

Like Guy Crouchback and his fellows, we used to chant aloud,
en masse,
the rhythms of obedience to drill orders. ‘
Ow
-pen Or-der:
March!'
Edwards would shout, and the squad, responding, would yell: ‘One, one-two, stop:
up,
two, three, shuffle!'

Once, half the squad disappeared, quite literally, for about five days. It happened in this way. Our normal daily training routine was always liable to interruption on account of ‘the exigencies of the service', which during that summer meant flap in one form or another; in other words, an emergency due to the real or supposed activities of the enemy. It was usually some form of nocturnal stand-to, but this particular jamboree went several times better than that.

One fine morning, Company Sergeant-Major Byrne told the good Corporal Edwards that Brander Squad were required to provide a guard for a train full of ammunition parked on a siding somewhere in the locality. We weren't told where: nobody was ever told where anything was in those days, and all place names on roads, stations and signposts had been obliterated or removed. Something between twelve and sixteen of us altogether were detailed off. Edwards stayed behind with the remainder (which included me) while the guard embussed — rifles, bayonets, gasmasks, tin hats and full equipment - and departed for their unknown destination. They would be gone, we were told, for at least twenty-four hours.

They were: and for longer; and yet longer. After two days we began to speculate and wonder. The rumour was that the train had vanished, taking the guard with it; and apparently — or so it was whispered - no one in Buller Barracks, not even that distant and lofty presence, the rarely glimpsed Captain Cousmaker, knew where.

Three days passed. Brander Squad now had a distinct sense of amputation. Our hard-won, supple, homogeneous flexibility had been dislocated. We continued, as best as we could, drilling and stripping down the Lewis gun, but the truth was that the N.C.O.s didn't really know what to do with us. For all sorts of purposes, half a squad is like half a novel; viable in a way (e.g.,
Weir of Hermiston; Edwin Drood),
but essentially deficient and dissatisfying. There came to be longer and longer spells of ‘Fall out for a smoke' or of bumping the barrack-room floor.

One blazing afternoon, as we were bumping away on boards already as bright as a mirror and slippery as a skating rink, there sounded a trampling of boots in the entrance up by the washroom, and in came the guard, trudging in ones, twos and threes, greeting no one and looking at nobody, like people who have had more than enough and can't really believe it's over. I remember Frank Espley and Bob Young walking boot by boot past my bedspace without a glance or a word; and Frank leaning his rifle against the wall, sitting down on his bed and beginning to unlace his boots with an air of distance and detachment from everyone. Their unforced aloofness, the guard, conferred on them a kind of authority (‘Much too good to tell to you brutes,' said Stalky), and it was only after a while, and that by means of patient questioning, that we learned the full story.

You must understand, for a start, that any guard — even a single night's guard - is a great bore and no joke. As I've said, you never really got any sleep beyond a light doze. You can't take off your equipment or sit down to a meal. The two-hour spells of sentry-go – two hours out of every six - are tedious and wearisome. Frank Espley & Co. had had four or five days of this, all day and all night. Why had they vanished, none knew where, not even their company commander? The answer lies in the bitter disposition of the time. In that war, the entire public was conditioned to become security-mad, and in all earnest did so. Lovers did not tell their girls where they were stationed. Every vicar, waiter and tea-lady was under suspicion as a possible fifth columnist.
*
Invasion was an imminent reality which everyone expected as surely as rain. ‘Not
may -
they
will
come!'

Now in these circumstances an ammunition train is no fun at all; and as the time passed, the R.E. officer commanding that particular train became more and more conscious of the fact. He felt sure the Germans must know its whereabouts. That kindly old girl who had brought a tray-full of cups of tea for the lads down her garden: how much did she know? Come to think of it, her wireless aerial looked odd. Probably by this time the entire neighbourhood knew it was an ammunition train. What if a Dornier, escorted by two 'ighly polished Messerschmitts, were to come blazing and bombing down the railway track so plainly visible from the air? Enemy aircraft were over England every day now. A train stationary for several days in a siding, with sentries all round it, was asking for trouble; a natural sitter. And if it went up?

Eventually the officer determined that action was no more than his plain duty. He went to see the local Rail Transport Officer (or R.T.O. - also an R.E.), and succeeded in getting a movement order for the train. As few people as possible should know where it went. The R.A.S.C. guard need not know; they could just as easily go on guarding without knowing. Of course, Buller Barracks should have been told, but somehow that got overlooked. The train departed westward by night, taking the guard with it. They never knew where it stopped, although Frank Espley told me later that he thought it was some lonely spot in east Dorset. All they really knew was that long before they were relieved, they had had more than enough. What struck them as the last straw was that in addition to sentry duty, two people were required continuously on the ack-ack Lewis gun. No enemy aircraft came, however.

We ended those thrill-packed two months with a passing-out parade like you never saw. A new colonel, Colonel Bolton, had just taken over the barracks and this dignitary actually had the gall to send Brander Squad — Brander Squad! — off parade to make themselves smarter, saying he would see us again at three o'clock that afternoon. Edwards was incensed; his Brander Squad, whose glitter shone from beyond the horizon like the aurora borealis! Angry and resentful, we got down to work again in the barrack-room, Brasso, boot-polish, flat-iron and bianco. ‘'Ere, Jeep,' said Edwards, ‘give me them trousers
. I'll
put a crease in ‘em such as 'e'll
never
check.' And so he did. I think it was Idwal Pugh who asked Edwards, very dead-pan, if he thought we should commandeer a couple of stretchers and four members of another squad to carry us severally onto the square.

Well, we did pass out, and learned that about three-fifths of us had been selected to go on to the O.C.T.U. at Boscombe. I was one of the lucky ones, but somehow (I felt without being told) only just. In those days I looked so slight and thin, with blue eyes and very fair hair — anything but a soldier. Still, this was not the Army, but the nation in arms. I felt sorry for Brander friends left behind. They remained potential cadets, but had to go back to square one and do another two months. In the event, however, they nearly all got to O.C.T.U. and ended up as officers; a decidedly mixed blessing, as I was to learn.