Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (19 page)

“Dust of a million years,” says Barker, who has come in meanwhile. “Let’s get this swabbing over ’n’ done with.”

Beds crash back. Buckets clank down. Brooms clatter. Corporal
Bearsbreath
begins to shout: “C’mon! Thirty of you! This hut ought to be dug out and finished in thirty minutes! Get a rift on! Get a jazz on those scrubbers! Johnson, don’t let me catch you skiving!”

The lad from the Elephant, in mad enthusiasm, hurls down a bucket of water and runs amok with a long scrubber.

In forty-five minutes, the hut is damply clean. Later it will rain.
Tomorrow
the hut will be dirty again. For the next seven days we will conduct a sort of Lucknow against the detritus of the earth which the rain will turn to mud, and the warmth of the hut will turn back to dust … against the dust and ashes which always lie in wait.

“In the East,” says Sergeant Hands, “there’s whole cities buried under yards and yards of muck. That’s what comes of not getting the place properly dug out. So be warned! Dirt buries you alive if you let it.
Furthermore, as senior N.C.O. in this hut, I get the blame if the place is in tripe. And that,” Sergeant Hands mutters, “is worst of all.”

Barker says: “My mum’s been digging aht our ’ouse for forty-two years and a quarter. It’s still as dirty as it was when she started …”

“You’ll find,” says Crowne, “that even this little bit o’ dampness will get into your rifle barrels. Watch out for your barrels. They’re sensitive as a young girl’s cheeks. And you’re going to fire your course. So nurse them barrels.”

*

And so the course is fired. Those of us who flinched a little at first (when, on the thirty-yard range at the Depot, the noise of a .303 rifle shot seemed to smash and reverberate like a cannon) find a strange exhilaration in the clear, crisp bang of rifles in the open air. A nice sound, accompanied by a pleasant nudge which hints of huge power, and a clean, keen antiseptic smell of burnt explosive. Those good, noisy, bleak-looking ranges, muttering with echoes! We fire gravely, and with concentration. We lie down with bucko sergeants and fire our
Bren-gun
course, and see the sand splashing brown on the butts, and the black or white discs hovering, oscillating and coming to rest where our bursts have punctured the targets.

We are becoming soldiers. The first strange excitement wears off; and so does the first uneasiness. The Depot seems very far away. We swore we’d never forget Sergeant Nelson, and yet we have already begun to forget him. He, at this moment, is hammering the crude stuff of brand new recruits … working, as on us, with frenzy and patience; pleading, roaring, urging, damning, dropping rare hints of praise;
manufacturing
more of us. But we, seeing new squads coming into the
Training
Battalion, stand, in our baggy canvas suits, and comment upon the manner of their marching. “Not bad,” we say; and “Likely-looking rookies”; and “They’re not getting too bad a mob of kids at Caterham these days.”

A C.O.’s Parade has no terrors for us. In the ancient days, seven or eight weeks ago, we dressed for our last inspection with the tremulous,
dewy-eyed anxiety of brides on the last dawn of virginity. Now, rushing back five minutes late from P.T., and having fifteen minutes in which to change before the Quarter blows, we curse hideously but are not in the least dismayed, and turn out smarter than we ever turned out at the Depot, to march with something resembling the proper swing, the subtle swagger … “As if you owned this ground you march on! And if you owned the ea-hearth!” the R.S.M. roars, in his voice which shakes a little from its decades of thunder.

We are acquiring experience in field training. We begin to get the diagnostic intuition of the soldier looking for cover. We can keep an Arrowhead Formation without looking. Night and the open heath have rustled to our crawling, when we started to pick up the secrets of prowling on patrol. Any one of us can clean a Mills grenade, and put the fuse in it, and screw it tight, and throw it so that it bursts in a mean spray of jagged iron at thirty or forty yards. They have given us Bren until we are slightly sick of Bren; but we can handle that invaluable light machine gun with the slightly bored accuracy of
mechanics
with familiar tools. Night, dark midnight, has seen us
marching
away to the shadow-lands behind the golf course, where, in black invisibility, we have dug weapon pits. And we know all about trenches, because we have dug them: buck navvies in uniform have sighed with a strange joy at the feel of picks and shovels; and sedentary men among us, puffing and grunting, have learned the technique of making holes and paid for their learning with little coin-shaped bits of skin.

Some of us, who would have shrunk like tickled oysters at a hint of punishment, have committed crimes and paid them off with carefree laughter. Yes, the serious Dale, the good clerk whom a rough word depressed, got three days C.B. for missing a parade. He said he didn’t know: the Company Commander said he ought to have known, and so Dale had to answer Defaulters three days running, and did some drill that would have reduced him to a gibbering heap six months before. And he said: “What the hell, anyway”; to which Sergeant
Dagwood
said: “That’s the spirit.”

There is no getting away from the fact that we are changing.
Shorrocks
is down to eleven stone ten, and there is, so to speak, meat-juice in the dumpling of his face. What is more, he argues less frequently, and lays down less law. He is the same Shorrocks. But he has seen something of the world; of the wide and varied world that is England. He’d never spoken to a Devon man before, for example. To him,
Rockbottom
still represents all that is brightest and best in England, but his contempt for the rest of the world is tempered a little. He has had to listen to people telling him things, for the first time since he left Rockbottom Wesleyan School. He has mixed with new men. He despises the Cockney, but concedes to him certain virtues; which he didn’t before the war. He has acquired patience. He has lost flesh and gained outlook; narrowed physically, and broadened mentally. “There is no Rockbottom but Rockbottom, and Shorrocks is its Prophet.” This will hold good until the Pennine Chain is down to its last link; but the dogma has softened, admitting the moderation of inter-county tolerance. Shorrocks, meanwhile, having decided that he has a genius for driving, and being attracted by the sturdy little caterpillar-wheeled Bren Carrier (which somehow resembles himself) has gone into a Carrier Platoon.

Hodge, the giant, the man impregnable; Hodge, of huge thews and rock-founded faith, never changed. There was never anything in Hodge that needed to change. Hodge is an elemental force. If ever Hodge struck down an enemy, he would be striking not a man but a
wickedness
: not that the man, as representative of wickedness, could hope to be spared! He has gone into a Suicide Squad. A man in a Suicide Squad does not want to commit suicide: his career in it is a denial of the possibility of death. The Suicide Squad man is a man with a mission. He, personally, discounts death as a possibility while his mission is unfulfilled. In the canal, Hodge swam like a fish and dived like a seal. On land, he was indefatigable. He was immense, but proportionate; could run like a hare, perform unheard-of leaps, and hurl things to uncalculated distances. To Unarmed Combat he applied a certain grave,
sober concentration. Imagine a statue of the Farnese Hercules endowed with a will. Even Corporal Ball was clay in his stupendous clutch. Yet Hodge is gentle. His fingers, large as a baby’s arms, have a strange delicacy of touch. The lad from the Elephant and Castle will tell you how Hodge took a splinter out of his finger, which no tweezers could reach. Hodge yearned to come to handgrips with the Devil. It was natural that he should go into a training-place for parachute troops. By now, his training completed and his vast arm embellished with a pale blue winged parachute badge, he will have been called back to get in the harvest; and that being done with, he will return to fight the good fight with all his terrible might—the old, elemental
Anglo-Saxon
.

Dale, as I indicated, has toughened. He always had everything in him that a man needs, but it took the rough society of soldiers to peel from his essential self the pale sheath of the city. A certain
primness
has dropped from him like a cloak, and there has come into his face a look of confidence. His shoulders seem to have set, as a boy’s shoulders do when he loses puppy fat. It happens—I tell you, it
happens
! Dale was a man (pardon the expression) seated on his bottom. He has learned to use his hands and feet—and behold, the riddle of Samson is reversed! Out of the meat comes forth the eater, and out of sweetness comes forth strength. The Schoolmaster has gone to his Officer Cadet Training Unit. But that gentle soul has got himself a certain physical resolution which nothing in his life before could ever have given him. Nothing could ever make that man less than a
gentleman
: but he has got something more than a theory of manual labour, and something deeper than a bookish sympathy with the thing he calls The People. He has come across the units that go to make up the strange, docile, cantankerous, trusting, suspicious, colourful English Masses. He will be a better officer for that, and a wiser man.

Certain people, of course, don’t change, and never will. Barker is the same. So is Bullock, his bosom friend. They remain the same for different reasons. Barker, the eternal Cockney, is supple. He is bamboo.
He is many-jointed, but straight and tough. He will bend with every wind that blows, because that is how he is constructed for the stern business of survival. He has only one real shape and attitude, and springs back to it. The hurricane thinks it has levelled Barker to the ground; but the wind grows tired, and Barker stands upright. Bullock is unchangeable because nothing but death will ever move him. He stands stiff, and will break before he bends. Dour, solemn,
narrow-minded
, cautiously good-hearted, his great flame of indomitability
always
burns hot and strong. He is intransigent; a gnarled tree. He met that smashing fighter, Ack-Ack Ackerman, and they fought a draw. A poor boxer, but a dreadful man to fight: that is Bullock. If he changed, there would be the end of him. We ought to thank God that such men do not change.

Widnes, the boy who used to have wire hair, has taken to the Army. You have seen, perhaps, a new-hatched waterhen slipping into a pond and instantly swimming? Widnes, as soon as he felt his way among the back alleys of Army procedure, found himself in his element. He has put on weight, and will put on more. He took a Corporal’s Class, and, having triumphantly come through the hell that the drill sergeants hand out to prospective N.C.O.s in the Coldstream Guards, went On Orders and was told that he had been awarded the rank of Acting
Unpaid
Lance-Corporal. He is making the Army his career. Soon, he will be a Corporal, then a Lance-Sergeant, then a Full Sergeant, then
Company
Quartermaster Sergeant, then Company Sergeant-Major, then Drill Sergeant, then Regimental Sergeant-Major; and then an aged man, erect as a telegraph pole, with a voice like a football fan’s rattle and an impermeable respectability—a man like the great Charlie
Yardley
of the Training Battalion, or Britton, whose voice still paralyses men at eight hundred and fifty yards. Wars may come and go. Widnes will perform his duty, and take world calamity in his stride. It is feared, in certain quarters, that he may turn out to be heartless; but Sergeant Dagwood says that this kind of thing passes, like the gloom of
adolescence
;
severity in a Young Corporal, he says, like wildness in a Recruit, is not necessarily a bad sign.

But John Johnson changed. He, fundamentally, is the Brummagem Fly Boy. But the Army has dealt with Fly Boys, since time immemorial. When dogs bring forth cats, then Fly Boys will get away with things in the Guards. There was one incident which, I think, undermined Johnson’s confidence in the fly technique. There is a shambling,
big-boned
man from the wildest moors of Yorkshire, a sort of peasant who falls down rather than sits, and has to get words up out of himself with a conscious effort. This man is called Old Jeddup, because Sergeants are always saying to him: “Hold yer head up. C’mon! Old Jeddup!” He weighs sixteen stone. A young subaltern, on a night stunt, tried to teach him how to move silently. Old Jeddup melted into the heather like a weasel and came back with a buck rabbit: he used to be a poacher. We have thousands of such healthily law-breaking sons of the soil in this Army. Old Jeddup, bar by bar, bought five shillingsworth of chocolate to send to his little son. He packed it in a small box. He fumbled and tangled himself with the string in the presence of the Fly Boy, and ultimately got the box tied up and tucked away in his tin of personal effects. Then he took it out again, and looked at it. John Johnson winked at us all and asked him how much he wanted for it. Old Jeddup said: “What’s it worth?” Johnson, being as fly as they come, said: “Quick! Half a dollar!” Old Jeddup said “Cash?” “Cash,” said Johnson; and Jeddup said “Done.” He handed over the box, and took the half-crown. But the box he handed over was empty; he had prepared a duplicate in advance. Then he told Johnson how this was the oldest of all confidence tricks, and gave him back one shilling. It undermined John Johnson, who, thinking thereafter before he
demonstrated
, automatically became more wise and less fly.

Johnson, with all his false ideals, makes a good soldier, if only out of vanity; for he would die a thousand deaths rather than look silly. Bates, that simple man, has the profoundest admiration for him. But Bates is basically the simpleton. He has nothing in his nature more
complex than a punch in the mouth. He is beloved. Bates is affectionate. He has a childish ingenuity. If somebody sends him for a left-handed monkey wrench he assumes that such a thing must be procurable, and won’t go away until he gets it. He believes what he is told, and the more firmly a thing is said, the deeper his belief in it. Then if a
mob-orator
shrieked Fascism at Bates, would he swallow that, too? He might repeat as gospel what he had heard, but he is the last man on earth who could live in the state of affairs that would come out of it, because he sets a vast value upon his personal liberties. A bit of a fool, Bates: but never, if you value your profile, never push him around; unless you happen to be his wife. And even then, not beyond a certain point. But what happened to Thurstan?