by Gerald Kersh
“Thanks, Trained Soldier,” says Dale, gratified; for to this good man “Steady” is the highest possible praise of a man or his job.
“Thanks? Thanks for what? In the Guards, son, ‘Steady’ means ‘Absolutely lousy.’ If you want to sort of spit in a man’s eye, call him Steady. If, on the other hand, you want to give him a bit o’ praise, then says he’s Hot. ‘Steady’ means Awful, so get working. I know you’re not used to it yet: don’t get down’earted. Rub your polish well in, then spit nice clear spit, and rub it in with a circular motion. If you’re using a bone, then bone your boots with a kind of smooth, stroking movement. … D’you hear that bugle-call? That’s ‘Yellow’ … there’s enemy planes about, so be on the alert. ‘Red’—There’s a Jerry in the sky”—he sings it—“means, go to the shelter with your tin hat and respirator. You also take your rifle and bayonet, to get you used to the feel of ’em. There’s hundreds of calls: you’ve got to know them, from Reveille to Lights Out. There’s little pomes to ’em. Frinstance: Picquet:
“Come an’ do a Picquet, Boys,
Come an’ do a Guard,
You think it’s ruddy easy
But you’ll find it ruddy hard.
“Or Officers’ Mess:
“Officers’ wives eat pudden and pies
But soldiers’ wives eat skilly.
“Or Letters:
“Letters from Lousy Lou, Boys,
Letters from Lousy Lou.
“Or Commandant’s Orders: After the Brigade Call:
“Justice will be done!
“or
“Cri-ime does not Pay!
“You’ll learn, you’ll learn in time. And what is Commandant’s Orders, you ask? Well. If the Commandant wants to say something to you, he orders you to attend Orders, and you’re marched in, first to Company Orders, and ordered to attend Commandant’s Orders, and then you’re marched into the Commandant’s office, and get what’s coming to you. Or say you’ve committed some crime, like being late, or absent. The Company Commander might not want to deal with the case himself. He might send you to the Adjutant for sentence, and the Adjutant might send you to the Commandant. So don’t go and commit no crimes.
“Again, any man is entitled to interview the Company Commander, privately, about any matter. But he can’t just walk in bolo and——”
“What’s Bolo?”
“Cockeyed; anything not correct in the Coldstream Guards is Bolo. You don’t just walk in and say ‘Oi.’ You see Sergeant in Waiting, and write out an Application for an Interview, and then, if the Captain is free to see you, which he always is, you’re stood at ease outside the office, then, when your name’s called you spring to attention and march in with your hands to your sides; mark time, halt; left turn, and, as your name’s called again, take a smart pace forward and wait till you’re spoken to. When the interview is over, you receive the order Fall In, and take a smart pace backward, left turn again, and out you go, fast, keeping your hands still. It’s dead easy. A baby in arms could do it. If the officer says anything to you and you just want to say Yes, say ‘Yes, sir’; not just ‘sir.’ The Billy Browns, or Grenadiers, say ‘sir’; the Lilywhites say ‘Yes, sir.’
“Another thing. Every week or two you’ll have a Kit Inspection. That is to teach you to take proper care of the property entrusted to you. You have to show boots, battledress, both hats, one pair of socks clean, one shirt clean, sweater, gym vests, shorts, tin of black polish, tin of brown polish, tin of blanco, tin of metal polish, oil bottle, pullthrough, mess tins and cover, housewife complete with needles and et ceteras, knife, fork and spoon, steel helmet, respirator and respirator-haversack, slippers, button-stick, all your brushes sandpapered clean, and other odds and ends, all laid out in perfect order on a clean towel on your bed. Everything has to be marked with your number. They’re ’ot on numbers round ’ere. And when the officer comes to your bed you stand smartly to attention, and say this: 2663141 (or whatever your number is) Recruit Smith. Two Weeks Squadded (or however long it is.) Kit Present, sir. If anything is missing … it might be a pair of socks … you say One Pair Socks Missing Otherwise Kit Present, sir.
“I’ve got the numbering kit here, ink pad, stamps, and doodahs. You’ve got to get yourselves a pennorth of tape each; stamp your number on a lot o’ bits o’ tape and sew ’em on everything you can lay your hands on. ’Cause things have a way of disappearing.
“Failure to comply with all this ’ere is a very serious offence, and I don’t mind telling you that they’re ’ot on serious offences in this mob.”
“Hot means Good, doesn’t it?” asks Dale.
“Yes. But not necessary. Frinstance, if I say ‘Your boots is Hot,’ I mean, they’re good. But if I say “The Drill Pig is Hot,’ that means ’e’s pretty savage.”
“And what’s a Drill Pig?”
“A Drill Pig is a Drill Sergeant. A Drill Sergeant is a sort of super-sergeant-major, an assistant to the Regimental Sergeant Major.”
“But why Pig?” asks a lad from the Elephant and Castle.
“You’ll soon find out,” says Trained Soldier Brand.
The same lad asks: “And wot’s a Regimental Sergeant Major do?”
“Well, ’e’s a kind of link between the officers and the other ranks. ’E’s a sort of an Archbishop.”
“And the Commandant?”
“’E’s sort of a Gawd.”
The wire-haired boy from Widnes, having stared for nearly fifteen minutes at a photograph of a peacetime Coldstreamer on a Buckingham Palace Guard, says to the Trained Soldier:
“I wanna sign on for twenty-one years.”
As seven strikes we rise from our beds like men in a fairy tale released from a spell. “If you’re going anywhere at all, even to the Lat,” says Brand, “you’re supposed to take your respirators, tin hats, and gas-capes with you. This is to get you into the ’abit of carrying ’em wherever you go. And so you’d better. Say you’re out one day on leave and the Gestapo sees you without your tin bowler and mask, you’ll go in the moosh.”
“Gestapo?”
“Another name for military police.”
“Are they noice?” asks Bates.
Trained Soldier Brand says that while the Military Police are inoffensive to law-abiding soldiers, they can nevertheless be People Of Dubious Ancestry if they wish. “We got to ’ave ’em. I suppose,” he says, “to keep law and order. If you pay rates and taxes you got to ’ave law and order. Personally, I don’t pay no rates and taxes, and I don’t want no law and order. But there it is. There’s military policemen in every town. They got the right to arrest anybody in uniform. They’re the Army’s C.I.D., kind o’ style. They’re coppers. They ain’t popular, therefore. Nobody really loves a Gestapo man. It’s unreasonable, but there it is. There ain’t a soldier living that’s never broke a rule—with the possible exception of Freddie Archer, R.S.M. of Scots Guards—the most regimental man in the British Army. Once, being two minutes late off leave, he put himself in the report and marched himself in to be punished. When talking to an officer on the telephone he salutes and stands stiffly to attention. But what was I saying? Gestapo. Personally I dislike ’em. That’s a matter of opinion. The beauty of this ’ere Democracy is, you can hate policemen and say so. But I ought to tell you that a Gestapo man is serving his country same as a sewer-man or a dustman. He’s essential. And even if he wasn’t, don’t you go and get yourselves into no trouble, just for the sake of being properly dressed or anything.
“They sell beer in the Naffy. I, personally, have never met a man who could get drunk on it, though I have known many that tried. Wind pudden, that’s what it is. All the same, it is alleged to be alcoholic, and if you bring any back with you you will have committed a terribly serious offence. They’re ’ot on alcohol in barrack rooms in this mob, I don’t mind telling you. Red-’ot. Boiling-’ot. This is a military depot of the Brigade of Guards, so you don’t go round bathing chorus girls in champagne. A cup of chocolate, yes. A nice packet o�
�� wine gums, yes. But beer? Beer is a serious offence.”
We hurry to the Naffy.
In an immense room with an interminable counter, endless queues of Guards recruits, Lilywhites, Grenadiers, Jocks, Micks, and Taffies, writhe and mutter while a few frantic girls in blue cotton overalls dash out cups of tea, great jammy wads of cake, tins of boot-polish, bootlaces, vaseline, fruit-salts, pies, biscuits, pencils, chocolate, dusters, writing pads, beans on toast, beer, cider, ink, cigarettes and sausages.
We wait in a queue. Everything is smoky and strange. A vociferous recruit with a brass leek on his cap is shouting: “That is unfair you are, look, to get a man in front to buy things for you, look! That is unjust it is!” And a dark recruit with a Cross of Saint Andrew worked into his Guards’ Star says, in a fantastic combination of American and Glaswegian: “So hwhit?” A man on a remote platform singing a song about one Danny Boy is more unheard than a goldfish: he simply opens and closes his mouth. The uproar of the Naffy swallows his song, but he neither knows nor cares. There is some clapping. A sharp-starred Irish Guards’ recruit near us says:
“There’s a song that goes:
“You’ve lost an arm and you’ve lost a leg,
You’re an eyeless, noseless, spiritless egg,
You’ll have to be put in a bowl to beg—
Johnny I hardly knew you.
“I wish they’d sing that and cheer us up a bit.”
But the singer, shoving his sharp tenor voice through a chink in the din, begins Bless ’em all.
Bless ’em all, Bless ’em all,
The long and the short and the tall,
There’ll be no promotion, This side of the ocean,
So cheer up me lads, Bless ’em all….
Spencer the salesman recognizes a jar of the product he sells, and is cheered and saddened at the same time. Johnson, the fly Brummagem boy, says with sudden vehemence: “Oi bet Oi’ll be a sergeant insoide six months.” A dozen of our squad have arrived to swell the slow-moving queue. Old Silence comes out of his taciturnity and says: “Will you all have a beer?” We all say we will, if we can get it; for there seem enough men before us to drink all that was ever brewed. “Why are these places so short-staffed?” somebody asks; and somebody else replies: “They’re short-staffed because they haven’t got enough people working for ’em.” “Oh, is that it?” asks the interrogator.
A querulous voice says: “So I says to the Sarnt In Waiting, ‘I wanna go sick.’ So I goes sick. So I sees the M.O. So the M.O. says: ‘Now what’s your trouble?’ I says: ‘Me foot, sir.’ He says: ‘Your foot isn’t trouble. Say what you mean. What’s wrong with your foot?’ I says: ‘It’s swole.’ ‘Let’s see,’ he says. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘merely a blister,’ ‘Blister?’ I says. ‘Blister,’ he says, and he sticks a ruddy great needle in that ruddy great blister and he got enough water out of that ruddy great blister—may I never get out of this here Naffy alive—enough water to fill a reservoy. And he sends me back to duty. Cruelty!”
“I wonder how we’ll like it here?”
“Somebody told me it’s horrible.”
“The Training Battalion is worse.”
“The Holding Battalion is worse still.”
“The First is supposed to be worst of all.”
“The Second is hell, somebody told me.”
“Whether we like it or not we’ve got to stay here, so the thing to do is, get used to it quickly.”
Suddenly a dreadful silence falls. Jerry in the Sky! cries the bugle. We run out. Thurstan pauses to curse and stamp his foot. Understandably: for, having waited twenty minutes, he found himself right against the counter. And then Red blew. Barker looks as if he has suddenly been smitten with all the miseries of Job, and has not been left with even a bit of pot to scrape his boils with.
*
From the back of the night comes the melancholy note of a siren. It gathers volume; shrieks, fades, and shrieks again. The distance is now full of something like muffled drums. “Lousy with stars,” says Barker, referring to the sky, which is clear and beautiful. We hop down into our trench. The guns mutter loud now. We hear the queer, pulsating drone of raiders. Antiaircraft guns bang. The night is full of steel.
Bates, in the middle of a story, will not be interrupted:
“… When Brummy Joe chucked this feller out o’ that winder, ’e landed on ’is ’ead and split it open. ’E was proper frit o’ Brummy after that, this feller was. Brummy could of showed yow some fight-ing. I see Brummy put ’is fist through a oak door. What? ’Urt ’im? What, Brummy? A oak door? Don’t be silly. Yow could a bashed Brummy wi’ the door edgeways and not ’urt ’im, not Brummy! Well, another noice feller from Ull as we called Tyke——”
The ground seems to heave like a wrestler’s back. The raider is weaving among the shell splinters, dropping his bombs. The searchlights make strange patterns: shifting triangles, sprawling rhomboids, fabulous outlines that look like letters out of some half-formed alphabet. One great beam squirting up like a hose catches a silver speck and holds it. The batteries go mad. The sky twinkles with shell bursts like a spangled skirt in a spotlight. “By God we got him!” somebody says.
“…So this feller asks Brummy for his two bob back. ‘Yow want yow’re two bob back?’ says Brummy? ‘Ah, Oi want moi two bob back.’ ‘Yow do, do yow?’ ‘Ah.’ ‘Oh?’ ‘Ah.’ ‘Roight yow are,’ says Brummy, and picks up a eight-inch crowbar——”
The pulse of the raider has stopped. The searchlights wave uncannily. “Look!” There is something like a dust mote in a moonbeam. It is a man, falling with a parachute. There is something pitifully insignificant about this little thing, this bit of life drifting down out of the darkness suspended on threads from the edges of a bit of silk, caught in a net of light. He comes down slowly. The great beam circles, bumping against a little cluster of clouds. Through it, flashing electric lights, passes a Hurricane, roaring. Another siren sounds, miles away. Then our own siren, fifty feet from us, revolves and fills the world with a terrific whoop of triumph, so loud that you cannot hear it, but feel it in your bones.
We smile as we go back. It couldn’t have worked out better if the Commandant had arranged it. In that little half-hour, we have begun to feel like soldiers.
“… Seventeen stitches over one of ’is eyes,” Bates is saying. “Oi tell yaw, seventeen stitches.”
“Sleep and refresh your pretty little selves,” says Sergeant Nelson. “Because tomorrow I’m really going to start in on you. Definitely, I’m going to chase you tomorrow. I got a liver. And when I got a liver I’d tear my own grandmother’s tripes out and trample them underfoot. I’d definitely do all that and much more. Woho, am I going to chase you tomorrow! Any idle man here can make his last lousy little will and testament. Any chancer can go to the Ablutions and cut his scraggy little throat from ear to ear into a washbasin. Sleep! It’s an order! Hi-de-Hi!”
We roar at the top of our voices: “HO-DE-HO!”
We have suddenly become cheerful. We are getting the hang of things.
*
Quickly but smoothly, week after week, Sergeant Nelson drives his stuff into us; tireless, patient, with legs of steel and a throat of brass. Step by step he teaches us to march and drill. Slap by slap he instructs us in the handling of arms. Screw by screw he uncovers the mysteries of the Short Lee Enfield, Mark Three. Lunge by lunge he divulges the secrets of the bayonet, from High Port to Butt-Stroke and Kill. We pass our second-, fourth-, and sixth-week inspections. The Company Commander says that we are doing tolerably well. Sergeant Nelson informs us that, in a long and varied life spent mostly among half-wits and the offscourings of the lunatic asylums of the earth, he has seen worse squads than us: which pleases us more than anything else. Like all Guards recruits, we have been working at concert pitch.
We have lived in a state of tense activity. We have become accustomed to the food. We grumble, as always. Once, when they gave us biscuits instead of bread for tea, and the officer came round to ask
if there were any complaints, we all made barking noises; and the officer laughed, and we laughed to see him laugh, and even the Company Quartermaster Sergeant bared a terrible tooth in a bit of a smile. We have been lectured on gas, on regimental tradition, military law pertaining to the crimes of desertion, drunkenness, and neglect of duty. The Padre has had a few words with us. The Medical Officer has told us what every young Guardsman ought to know. The Staff Sergeant has been at us. The days in the beginning seem inexpressibly remote. We speak of recruits four weeks squaddled as Rookies. Eight haircuts have come and gone since the day we put off civilian clothes and looked at each other in brand-new khaki. Tactics are not altogether a sealed book to us. Our shoulders have experienced the pleasant kick of our rifles loaded with ·303 ammunition. We walk very straight: it was a psychological rather than a muscular operation which brought this about. After three weeks we were allowed out for an afternoon: it felt good to walk in a street on our own, slamming down our great boots and swinging our arms.
And now we prepare for our last Inspection; the Commandant’s Inspection.
If the Commandant approves of us, we will “pass out” to the Training Battalion, for another period of training. It doesn’t occur to us, yet, that we have acquired merely the groundwork of Guardsmanship. We have yet to get down to the hard stuff, that makes Guardsmen into soldiers. The time is coming when we will know the fatigue of a thirty-two-mile route march, or of a midnight stunt in damp darkness among the bracken of a blasted common … the feel of a Bren Gun, like the stupendous gulping of wine out of a bottle … the smallness of a six-foot target at five hundred yards … the misery of half-dug trenches in a thin drizzle three miles from camp and an hour and a half from, dinner … when there will be a C.O.’s parade every week, and other drill parades besides; and cross-country runs, and hardening exercises, and the tossing of live grenades, and the chance of seven days’ leave, and the responsibilities of the ordinary trained soldier.
