by John Harris
Someone began to cheer and the noise brought more people running to the doors of the little houses in Hendrick Lane. A girl in an apron and mop-cap came out of a passage to watch, still holding in her hands a fruit tart she’d been on the point of putting on the table, and in a flood of emotion she handed it at once to someone a few files ahead of me. There were cheers and calls for more and a man standing in front of a pub with a pint in his hand offered it to Tom Creak, who drank it as he marched and solemnly handed the pot back to someone else farther along. A fat woman tried to kiss Sergeant-Major Bold, but she picked the wrong man and he brushed her aside without even faltering in his step.
‘Ep! Ri! Ep! Ri! Keep up, there! Git back in the ranks, that man!’
The gates of the Rovers’ ground were already open and we swung inside and across the green turf, watched by curious groundsmen, and came to an untidy stop that made Sergeant-Major Bold wince.
As we shuffled into a ballooning line, heads craning to see what was happening and where the marker was, he stalked towards us, his face fierce, the bony whiteness of his chin gleaming in the sunshine.
‘That was a bloody fine exhibition,’ he snarled. ‘I don’t think. Pies! Beer! Shaving every other day!’ the words exploded like grenades. ‘What a rotten sloppy lot you are. I don’t know whether you ’ope to frighten the Germans but, by God, you certainly frighten me. You’ve been too long in offices. That’s what you’ve been. You’ve been too long on your mums’ knees and in your nurses’ arms. From this minute – this very minute – you’ll realise you’re in the Army. Got that? What you did before don’t matter. What you do when we let you go don’t matter. It’s now that matters. Now that I’ve arrived – me, Patrick Bold, late of the Grenadiers – you don’t eat tripe-and-onions and pea-and-pie suppers on the march. See? You’re in the Army. And to prove same, you will now learn such intricate movements as right wheel, about turn and form fours. Very difficult for tiny minds like yourn, what’s only been used to grappling with how to sell a yard of ribbon or ’ow many beans make five in a ledger.’
He paused and walked along the front rank, his eyes darting from face to face, cold, sneering and full of contempt. ‘You will nevertheless learn to perform these movements proper,’ he went on. ‘Because they are the sacred war dance of the soldier. Mysterious, complicated and unamusing to all but the trained man, who looks on the correct performance of ’em as the right and proper reward of ’is labour on the parade ground. If you learn to do ’em proper, it might save a battle. It might save England. It might even save your useless little lives. So take them coats off. I’m going to make you sweat. Get ’em off. Quick! No!’ he roared as there was a concerted rush for the fence. ‘Stay where you are! I didn’t tell you to break ranks, did I? Drop ’em at your feet. I’ll git you clear of ’em without you gitting ’em all round your silly little ankles.’
As I dropped my coat in the dust, Kaiser Bill had already been replaced in my mind as Public Enemy Number One by Sergeant-Major Bold. His high snarling voice was like a knife twisting in a wound and there wasn’t one of us who didn’t nervously try to make his eyes click in their sockets when Bold called ‘Eyes front’.
The squad drill wasn’t hard at first, and curiously enough, in spite of Bold, for the first hour or two it seemed fun. Even with Corker barking at our heels and Bold watching with lordly disdain from the touchline. But after a while, after lunch – when they dismissed us and told us to find something to eat in the little pie-and-brawn shops and pubs round Hendrick Lane, where those with money paid for those without and Eph Lott’s ill-gotten gains supplied beer and pies for Tom Creak and the Mandys and a few more from out of town – by the end of the afternoon, when we were growing hot and tired, it became boring and wearisome from sheer repetition.
‘There’s a ’ell of a lot of you blokes’ – Bold came up from where he’d been supervising another squad and eyed us disgustedly – ‘what ’ave never noticed your right side’s different from your left.’
He walked up and down in front of us, sneering and icy, his expression jarring like a blistered heel against our weariness. We stared sullenly back at him, seething with anger. It had been galling to discover that people like Corker and Bold, Regular soldiers who we’d been in the habit hitherto of looking down on as men who couldn’t hang on to a job in Civvy Street, could perform with ease the evolutions that were now causing us so much heartache. It was humiliating to discover that our better education didn’t help us at all, and the humiliation made us mutinous. I hadn’t joined the Army to be pushed around by ill-natured boors like Bold, I was thinking savagely. I’d joined up to go and fight the Germans, and Bold’s snarling sarcasm had no place in that plan.
‘Your right side,’ he went on, rubbing salt in the wound ‘in case your tiny little minds ain’t yet grasped the fact, is the one you shake ’ands with.’
‘I never shake hands,’ Spring said in a low vicious voice, his sweating face furious under the boater he still wore. ‘I always say “What ho, old boy!”’
Spring was on my right and I saw Bold’s bony face draw nearer, unmoved by the hatred in the faces of at least a hundred and fifty of the two hundred-odd men in front of him.
‘Ho, you do, do you?’ he said. ‘Well, you don’t say “What ho, old boy!” round here. I’ll tell you that for nothing. You stand to attention, see? And if it’s an officer, you salute. Any of you lot know when to salute?’
‘When I see the whites of their eyes,’ I muttered, sarcastically. I was as hot and tired and bored as Spring and already full of ideas of waylaying Bold one dark night somewhere in the back streets round the Drill Hall and getting my own back.
There was an appreciative snigger from several other sufferers that made me feel better, but Bold heard, too, and came closer, quite unperturbed by the show of dislike around him.
‘Aha,’ he said, staring at me with a disconcerting peer. ‘Another little man with wit and ’umour who thinks he knows more about soldierin’ than Sergeant-Major Bold! Another little man who thinks that, because Sergeant-Major Bold was only a Regular soldier while he was earning big money in an office, he knows how to fight a war. Mentioning no names, of course, but following the direction of my eyes.’
He paused and surveyed us all cheerfully. ‘You all hate my guts, don’t you?’ he went on. ‘Good! Well, I’ll tell you something now, free, gratis and for nothing. There’s too many of you blokes who think you’re the lords of creation, just because you’ve generously offered your services at a time of crisis. Well, you ain’t, see? You shoulda stayed civilians if you want to go your own sweet way. But you didn’t and you ain’t managers and under-managers and chief dustbin-emptiers no more. You’re in the Army now and you’ve got a job to do, and the sooner you learn it the more use you’ll be to your King and Country and the more I’ll like you.
‘For the moment, you’re the lowest form of animal life ever thought of – untrained soldiers. You speak only when you’re spoke to. You don’t answer sergeant-majors back. And you salute an officer whenever you see one, and sometimes when you don’t. You salute him riding a bicycle or astride an elephant, standing still or flying through the air. See? And when you salute, you salute like a soldier, not like a drunken ostler touching ’is ’at to the gentry. Before I’ve finished with you, I’ll ’ave you saluting postmen, station-masters and commissionaires. I’ll make you realise the Regular Army wasn’t just full of loafers and bloody ’alf-wits, and that there ’ave been from time immemorial men who enjoyed soldiering – curious as it seems – and who took a pride in serving their country. Men like me, for instance. Men like them in France, what have been ’olding the Empire together while you rotten lot skulked in Civvy Street, and will go on holding it together till you lot are ready. See?’
He gave us one more glare and stalked away.
‘Right,’ Corker shouted as he vanished, his voice faintly apologetic, as though he considered Bold’s energy was going to play havoc with what he’d hoped wou
ld be a cushy billet among friends. ‘Let’s ’ave yer! Body erect, ’ead up, feet at an angle of forty-five degrees, chests out, shoulders back, arms ’angin’ loosely by the sides. Chests, I said, not the bit Napoleon said you marched on! Squa-a-a-ad – right – turn!’
‘I’ve managed for years,’ Locky panted, secure in the knowledge that Bold was now beyond hearing, ‘to turn to right or left quite easily, regardless of any scientific rules on the subject.’
‘Silence, that man, or I’ll crime yer,’ Corker bawled. ‘Let’s ’ave it again. Both knees straight. Body erect. Swing on the right heel and left toe. And stamp yer feet! For Gawd’s sake, stamp yer feet!’
‘It still seems simpler the way I did it before.’
Corker glared, infuriated. ‘Stop that talking, Mr ’Addo,’ he shouted. ‘Please! You ain’t so bleeden ’ot at it you can afford to waste your breath gassin’. Let’s ’ave another go. Heads up. Chests out – not that, Murray! It looks indecent. Your chest.’
While Antwerp was captured, and with it the naval brigades who’d gone into battle without water-bottles or bandoliers and had carried their ammunition in their pockets and their bayonets in their gaiters; while the French, still in the red trousers and long blue capotes of the Second Empire, were led to the Marne by officers in epaulettes and white gloves; while the Russians were smashed at Tannenberg, and the remains of the British Army squared up to meet the Germans and their own final destruction at First Ypres – we wore the grass completely off the turf at Hendrick Lane. By the time the summer broke, and the evenings began to grow misty with autumn, the field had turned into a quagmire and the directors were looking anxiously into the possibility of governmental recompense.
So we moved back to Edward Road and the police closed the street outside the Drill Hall with barriers, and we performed ignominiously in front of a perpetual crowd, floundering in the roadway while the buffer girls from the works around came to shout catcalls in their dinner hour; falling off the parallel bars to the great delight of the kids on their way to school; lying in the dust of the gutter and performing Swedish drill until we were exhausted with exercise and fresh air. The battalion horses and waggons which had arrived at last – a gift from the Corporation – were parked around us, and great piles of fodder had appeared in the street, much to the joy of the householders who kept chickens and pigs in the allotments on the railwayside behind their houses.
We’d got all our officers now. FitzJimmy had thankfully retired and we’d got a new colonel. The second-in-command was a dug-out who’d been retired to Gloucestershire for ten years and who, if he’d stayed long enough with us, which fortunately he didn’t, would have discouraged the easily discouraged by sheer negation. Ashton was already a captain and in command of D Company, but the junior officers, in spite of their keenness, had no more idea of soldiering than we had and had to be led by the hand almost by people like Bold and Corker.
Most of the faded NCOs who’d appeared on the first day, with their dyed hair and the hidden medals which gave away their age, had vanished into the stores or to other cushy jobs, and newcomers had taken their places. Mason had been one of the first to be picked out for a stripe and we’d all cheered him and told him to ‘treat the men kindly’ and ‘not to forget he’d been in the ranks himself’, and had pretended for days to snap to attention whenever he approached.
‘How many pints did you have to buy?’ Locky had asked him. ‘I’m told Quartermaster-Sergeant Twining sells stripes at a fiver a time.’
They’d vaccinated us and inoculated us, and Bold had at last begun to make us realise that, in spite of the civilian clothes we still wore, we could no longer regard ourselves as fit to hire or fire others and that we no longer had the backing of trades unions or friendly societies. In spite of our knickerbockers, and the clean white collars we put on dutifully each morning out of sheer habit, we were expected to stand stiffly to attention in front of the humblest NCO and salute people like Ashton who not long before had been in the habit of drinking with us. We were not Territorials but Regulars, and Bold never let us forget it.
‘My God,’ Mason said bitterly, after a particularly trying morning, ‘if that’s what the Regular Army’s made up of, no wonder they retreated from Mons. That man would worry rats.’
Locky grinned. ‘God made him,’ he said, untouched by the general surliness. ‘In his own image, too.’
‘It must have been one of his off-days, then,’ Mason growled. ‘He’s the sort of bloody man who’d stand to attention to speak to the CO on the telephone. It’d be kinder to have him quietly put away. We could have him shot,’ he suggested cheerfully. ‘He’d like that. He could arrange the ceremony himself.’
‘Ten rounds rapid and one up the tarara for anyone who misses,’ Murray chirruped.
‘And bury him at the crossroads with a stake through his heart so he can’t come up again.’
When it rained, they taught us musketry without muskets and bayonet-fighting without bayonets. They showed us pictures of the Lee-Enfield rifle and the Vickers machine gun and we had to make do with those until we could get the real thing. Once – a great day – they produced a genuine rifle and placed it on a tripod in front of us, an object of veneration and interest we weren’t allowed to touch.
‘That’s a rifle,’ Bold said. ‘What’s it for, Fenner?’
‘To protect my life, Sergeant-Major,’ I said.
Bold sneered. ‘Your life?’ His eyebrows shot up. ‘Who’s worried about your potty little life, you silly little man? The rifle’s given to you for the destruction of the King’s enemies and nothing else, see?’
Often, I’m sure, he ran out of ideas of what to do with us. When he’d exhausted us with drilling, he gave us lectures on regimental history, Boer War battles and tactics, on military law and organisation, and every bugle call he could think of. He taught us rank badges, for none of us had yet seen enough to be familiar with them, and most of us couldn’t tell a colonel from a company sergeant-major.
‘This ’ere star means a second lieutenant,’ he told us with the aid of a blackboard. ‘That means ’e knows nothin’, so don’t take no notice of ’im. A dog’s leg or skater means a lance-jack and three stripes and a crown’s a company sergeant-major. ’E’s the man to watch. I’m a company sergeant-major.’
I acquired a thousand and one unimportant items of military information – why, for instance, soldiers always break step when crossing a bridge and why you never put your hands over the muzzle of your rifle – when you had a rifle.
‘You get perspiration into the muzzle, see?’ Bold said. ‘And if you do you’ll have the armourer-sergeant after you.’
We were told never – even in fun – to point rifles at each other and why it was a court-martial offence to whistle the Dead March in barracks.
We learned it was improper to address a Guardsman as ‘Private’ – according to Bold it would be sheer brazen impudence for us to address a Guardsman at all, but if there were no alternative it had to be with ‘Guardsman’. Cavalrymen were ‘troopers’; engineers ‘sappers’; signallers ‘signalmen’; men from the rifle regiments, ‘riflemen’; and artillerymen, ‘gunners’. I learned that all fusilier regiments had a bomb in their badges and all light-infantry regiments a bugle, and all units raised in India before the mutiny a tiger.
From time to time they sat us down in rows on the floor of the Edward Road Drill Hall and brought some elderly politician along to tell us stories of German atrocities, probably in the pious hope of producing blood-lust in us. Nobody believed them, of course.
There were lectures on discipline, with examples from Waterloo, Omdurman and the Crimea to fortify the claims for its necessity. They even brought in the Church to give us lectures on how to behave ourselves, but somehow most of these became invocations to fight like devils ‘for God and the Mother Country’.
No one ever alluded to the fact that we might at some point in our career be killed.
When the city Council had
assembled enough tools for us to make it worthwhile, we were marched to Suffolk Park to learn how to dig trenches. To the surprise of everyone in France, particularly the generals, the war had settled down to a curious sort of stalemate which failed to include all the expected cavalry charges and infantry actions – just a queer mole-like combat where soldiers sat in holes in the ground and waited for the enemy to stick his head up so they could blow it off – and digging trenches had suddenly become an important part of recruit training.
With all the drilling and lectures we’d endured, a day out in Suffolk Park looked like making a pleasant change. Most of us had memories of picnics there, or visits with girls, and we set off joyously, in spite of the damp, behind Sergeant Corker, followed as usual by waving flags and crowds as the city turned out to see us go.
We had a band by this time – most of the instruments still privately owned – but Corker was late starting and we lost touch with the music before we’d reached the first corner. It didn’t worry us much, though, and we bowled along making enough racket with our silly little songs to wake the dead.
Murray was inclined to favour ‘Boys of the Bulldog Breed’ and choruses full of patriotism and dedication, but most of us were content to settle for ‘Ilkla Moor Baht ’At’ or ‘Tipperary’ or ridiculous little ditties that enabled us to give a sheepish guffaw at ourselves. The things they never appealed to were honour and glory. We could leave that sort of nonsense to the French, we thought. Our songs were irreverent, banal and occasionally obscene, but never passionate or patriotic. Mostly they were merely music hall ditties you could march to and had nothing at all to do with the war.
