His Second War

by Alec Waugh

“When I think of the difference between joining up in the last war,” the major said.

  He nodded. He recalled the excitement of that first autumn—the bands, the speeches, the recruiting posters, the white feathers. There was nothing dramatic about this. No bands, no speeches. A calling-up order as impersonal as a demand for income tax. A journey in a train with strangers. A corporal on a platform shouting out a general order, a straggling up the street with only a few unemployed to stare incuriously.

  “This may be the right kind of way to run this war,” the major was continuing. “But Kitchener himself was always against conscription. He believed in the volunteer system. He said that men fought best when they came of their own accord. I’ve heard it said, and by people that ought to know, that we shouldn’t have had one soldier less if we had stuck to the volunteer system. One soldier that was worth having, that’s to say.”

  He listened, but he did not answer. He was following his own thoughts. Was he envying or pitying these young men? Dedramatized, deglamourized though this war might be, joining up was even so a big adventure: a big chance for many of them: a chance to see the world, an escape from factories and office desks: from the fear, possibly from the fact, of unemployment; a release from narrow streets and draughty yet airless rooms, from undernourishing and scanty food. It was a clean and healthy life that they were entering, a life of opportunity. There was nowhere where a man might not get in war-time. When the high winds blow, the top and bottom branches of a tree can touch. Of these two hundred young men straggling now up the street, there was more than one who would be saying in fifteen years’ time: “The war gave me my chance. But for the war I’d never have got where I am.”

  Yes, but that was for the adventurous type of man, or rather for the young man who was adventurous in a particular kind of way. For many, this doffing of civilian clothes would be the loss of everything they cared for—not only of homes and families, of wives and sweethearts, but of careers and of ambitions, of everything they had worked for, everything they had planned for, everything that had been planned for them. For many this war would create opportunities that in the ordinary course of things would never have come to them. But for others, the studious ones, this war would entail the loss of whatever chance they had had of fighting their way out of the rut. He thought of all the young men who had spent their spare time studying to pass exams., of the sacrifices their parents had made for their education, of all the care and love and thought of twenty years. What would be their outcome now? Would these young men ever make up the ground they were now to lose, any more than their opposite numbers of 1914 had been able to make up during the nineteen-twenties the ground lost during those five years of war? Would the structure of competitive existence have been so reconstructed by 1950 that these young men would be able to enter into competition, unhandicapped, with those whose careers had not been cut across? What would they be able to make of their lives when the time came for them to wear their civilian clothes again—those, that was to say, who would be still here? Did he envy or pity these young men who were hurrying now to meet what was, however one looked at it, the big adventure of their lives? Did he wish that he were in their place, about to meet adventure in their way?

  As they hurried by him he glanced searchingly into their faces, trying to read their thoughts. What were they feeling about it all? The recruits who twenty years ago had marched behind martial music through this gate had come of their own free will. They had not merely accepted a lot. They had sought and welcomed it. Many of these fellows had no doubt come here grudgingly. There were communists among them and fascists and peace-pledge unionists. There were some possibly who were blaming themselves because they had lacked the courage to appeal against service on conscientious grounds as during the Pacifist, pre-Munich period they had vowed they would. A cross-section of humanity cut, as this had been, at hazard by the standard of age and age alone, must contain a hundred different conflicting points of view.

  It was one high hell of a responsibility, he thought, to be their officer.

  22

  RECRUITS’ FIRST MORNING

  They had straggled up from the station, anyhow, in twos and threes. But now that they had reached the Quartermaster’s stores they had been dragooned into some sort of cohesive order. Everything was going smoothly, like a drill; like the drill it was in fact. Two days earlier, the centre had been informed of the numbers due. It had been a simple question of having ready two hundred sets of everything. In one room there was the personal equipment: the shirts and towels, the socks and combs and razors. In another, boots; in another, battledress. By the evening they would be soldiers, on the surface.

  Standing by the wall he watched them filing past. Were they being impressed, he wondered, by the smoothness with which the machine was working. Was its smoothness making them feel that they were involved in an organization capable of looking after them. Kitchener’s recruits might have marched through the streets behind martial music. But the moment they had passed through the barrack gates they had found themselves in an atmosphere of chaos. Nothing had been prepared for them. There was no uniform. There was no equipment. There were no blankets. Rations were short. They were crowded into tents, ten of them in each: into leaking tents most likely: or they were huddled on to the bare boards of draughty barrack rooms. There had been no regular officers to train them: only a few “dug-out” colonels and sergeant-majors. The N.C.O.’s had been picked at hazard from the recruits. The officers had learnt their jobs simultaneously with the men. How many men in that atmosphere of muddle had not lost the enthusiasm with which they had enlisted.

  The last war had opened with cheers and waving flags. It had ended in apathy and resentment. The process might be reversed this time.

  23

  “STAR” RECRUIT

  He was obviously the pick of the new draft: he would have been the pick of any draft. He was a great blond giant of a man, fit and healthy, nearer to seven feet than six. The quarter-bloke eyed him with suspicion.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Nugent.”

  “Say ‘sir’ when you address a Warrant Officer.”

  “Nugent, sir. I’m sorry.”

  Nugent. The quarter-bloke smiled wryly. The officer standing by the wall could guess at his thoughts. How often would he not see, how often would he not hear that name during the next few months. Nugent was outsize, clearly. Look at his feet. There’d be nothing in the store to fit him. No, nor any uniform. Probably no hat. He might even want an outsize in respirators. With the experienced eye of vision, the quarter-bloke foresaw the stack of forms that he would have to fill in in triplicate while Nugent wore his civilian shoes through to the uppers. The hours of work that would be involved!

  “It’s not fair, sir,” he complained. “They oughtn’t to enlist men that aren’t standard size.”

  24

  THE FIRST MEAL

  He was not orderly officer, but he went over to the kitchens. They would always remember their first meal in camp. How clearly he could remember his, twenty-four years ago. It had been a wet and windy night; so wet that night operations had been postponed. It was not till he had actually taken his place at table that he realized he had left his knife behind him. He had been given a piece of very gristly meat. When he had tried to tear it apart with fork and spoon, the spoon had begun to crumple. He had felt shy of eating it with his fingers. There had been two potatoes and a wadge of suet pudding with a small dollop of jam. He had gone to bed cold and hungry.

  The stew that was prepared for the new draft was thick and odorous: so thick that a ladle would stand up in it. There were separate dixies of potatoes. Three to each. There were stewed figs and custard and a dixie of strong, sweet tea.

  “They’ll know anyhow that they’re not going to be starved,” he thought.

  25

  THE FIRST PARADE, OCTOBER 1939

  As he stood outside the platoon hut, collecting his final thoughts before making his first
address to his section of the new draft, he could hear the sergeant, a recalled reservist, giving his final exhortation to the men.

  “When the orficer comes into the room, I shall shout, ‘Room, atten-shun,’ and you will all leap to your feet and stand strictly to attention, eyes to your front, arms to your sides and don’t let me see any of your eyes wandering—do you hear that, Jenkins?—till you’ve heard the orficer say, ‘Stand easy.’”

  As he pushed through the room there was the shuffle of fifty pairs of feet, the crash of a form going backwards, but the one noise that cut clearly through the mush of noise was the click of the sergeant’s heels as he saluted.

  “All right,” he said, “stand easy. You can smoke.”

  Platoons in an I.T.C. were double size. There were some fifty of them, seated on forms, on their bedding, on the floor. They were wearing khaki. The high collars made them seem very young. Their uniforms had not taken yet the shape and impress of their bodies. The stiff creases of packing were still apparent. They looked like nothing on earth, any of them.

  He hesitated before he began to speak. Not out of nervousness. He was used to speaking. He had had twenty years of it. At college debating societies in England; in America to Women’s Clubs; in London after public dinners. He was not nervous. But he was conscious, as he had never been on any of those so many platforms on which so erroneously a novelist is supposed to build up his reputation, of a sense of responsibility towards his audience.

  On the faces that stared up at him there was a joint expression of puzzled curiosity. They had reached the end of a crowded day. They had woken on that morning in their homes, between sheets. They had breakfasted in civilian clothes. They were sitting now on hard benches or on the floor, in clumsily-fitting, prickly khaki. They had been ordered here, they had been ordered there. They had been issued with this package and with that. They had been fed two substantial meals, the second when they were still feeling slightly overeaten from the first. They had been nervous. They had felt cowed. They had felt lonely and felt lost. They were relieved in some ways that it was not worse. They were excited and they were apprehensive. They were wondering what it was all about. “Well,” he thought, “it’s up to me to tell them.”

  To tell them in the right way, too, so that they should start their army careers in the right mood, in the right spirit, so that they should feel happy inside themselves about this step that had been forced on them. They were not, after all, volunteers. They were not here of their own free will. They had been ordered here. They would have come, no doubt, the majority of them, whether or not there had been conscription. But the fact that they had been called up made a big difference psychologically. It was up to him to put it right for them. He had the novelist’s feeling for them as human beings. The officer’s feeling for them as “his men.” The soldier’s feeling that out of this rough material had to be trained the armies that would meet, hold and finally overthrow the greatest military machine in history. He had got to put it the right way for them.

  It was for that reason that he hesitated, that he spoke slowly when he began to speak, choosing his words carefully. “I’m not going to keep you long,” he said, “you’ve had a long, hard day. And I’m sure you’re all anxious to get away and sort things out, your clothes and kit and what you think about it all: and to finish off those letters that most of you have had time to start. It’s been a long day and a crowded one. Less than twelve hours ago you were breakfasting in your homes, here you are now as soldiers. So much has happened to you that you don’t quite know what has happened. You are wondering what it’s all about. You are wondering what is going to happen next. Well, that’s what I’m here to tell you.”

  He explained the programme that had been prepared for them, in terms of standardized instructions from the War Office. They would spend two months in this their present recruit company, learning the elements of soldiering. They would then be moved either to one of the advanced training companies or, if they had shown any particular aptitude, to the specialist’s company to be trained as drivers or signallers or for a Bren-gun carrier platoon.

  “By the time you’ve been here two months,” he told them, “we shall have begun to size you up. We shall have spotted the future N.C.Os., and we shall have spotted the future officers. For don’t forget that an I.T.C. is not only the first step to becoming a soldier, it’s the first step to becoming an officer. Commissions have to be earned through the ranks in war-time. During your four months here, we shall train you and sort you out. Then we shall transfer you to service units. When you leave here you will be ready to take your place in the line in France.

  “We have in fact to do here in four months what would have taken a year in peace-time in the regular army. In consequence we shall have to work you at a pressure that the peace-time army never knew. Nothing will be condensed, nothing will be skimped. Things won’t be done in half the time. We shall work on the contrary at treble time. Your training will be carried out under conditions of treble pressure and treble discipline. Because, without that discipline, it would be impossible to send you to France, as we shall send you, trained to obey orders under fire in the same automatic way that you obey them here on a parade ground. For that, you must remember, is the basis of all our training, the fact that in four months’ time you will be joining service units, that in five months’ time you may be under fire.”

  He paused. He had been talking for a quarter of an hour, which was long enough. He had said all he had to say. There remained only the final word.

  In business it was, he had always been told, a first rule of salesmanship to hold back one argument and a powerful argument until the deal has been actually completed; so that the customer is sent away reassured and happy, to be spared that feeling of regret that follows so often the taking of a decisive step, the feeling “I wish I hadn’t.”

  Had he been talking to peace-time recruits he would have finished a first talk with some reference to the history of the regiment. He would have attempted to give them a sense of pride in the buttons and badges that they wore, so that they should feel proud of their admittance into the long and honoured company of men who through three centuries had earned the regiment its battle honours.

  To-day any such appeal would be unavailing. This was not a depot. This was an I.T.C. These men did not really belong to the Wessex Regiment. In four months’ time, as likely as not, they would have been drafted into another unit, to wear different badges. It must be in a larger and on a broader level that he spoke to them. He must make them feel happy not just about being here in Dorchester, but being in the army at all; at having packed away their civilian clothes that evening. He had to make them feel that, by becoming soldiers, they had put their whole line of living on a higher level. He had to make them feel proud of being soldiers.

  “You have heard, all of you,” he said, “during these last years a great deal of talk about the evils of militarism. Militarism has been held up as the enemy of democracy. But there is all the difference in the world between militarism which is a political philosophy, a policy of the subjugation of weaker nations by their stronger neighbours, and the army, which is the most democratic system in the world.”

  He paused. He looked quickly over the watching faces. He was conscious of the stillness that implies a captured interest.

  It’s all right. I’m on the right track, he thought. I’ll go on with this.

  “In the army,” he went on, “everyone stands an equal chance. Class does not matter. Promotion goes by merit. Education matters, yes; it is an aid to merit. Just as trained skill matters, technical or administrative. The best man gets on. But there is room at the top for everyone. Everyone is anxious for you to get there. Everyone is trying to help you get there. Officers, instructors, N.C.Os, we have all of us one aim only, to get the best possible work out of you, so that the army machine may work at the highest level, at its fullest pressure.

  “In civilian life it’s everyone for himself. Which
means that everyone’s hand is against yours. Every business is in competition with every other business. Every man is afraid that the man below him is trying to get his job away. In the army that is not so. In the army the man immediately above you is so training you that you should be able to take his place if he became a casualty. You are, each one of you, the direct responsibility of the man immediately above you. If you are a private you turn to the corporal of your section, if a sergeant to your sergeantmajor, if a subaltern to your company commander. It is through that immediate superior that you make any complaint, any application. And if you are not satisfied, there is not anything to stop that complaint or that application from going up from higher to higher level till it reaches the Army Council. The army has only one concern, to see that the best use is made of the material at its disposal. That is the thing I want you to grasp, the essential difference between a civilian and army life. We are soldiers and we are here to fight. But we are not here to fight each other.

  “In a sense,” he said, “in becoming soldiers you have lost certain civic rights. You can no longer air your grievances in the press. You may no longer appeal to your Member of Parliament to redress your grievances. You have lost those rights, but only because you no longer need them. You have become the army’s direct responsibility. You have to-day joined an immense co-operative organization, in which every branch is working for the increased efficiency of every other branch, where the welfare of every individual is the concern of every other individual. The army, from the commander-in-chief to the newest joined recruit is one vast brotherhood. That is all. Thank you.”

  They had listened to him for the last two minutes with a gathering attention. As he turned to go, to his astonishment they began to clap. It was so utterly unexpected a performance that the clapping had continued for a full three seconds before the sergeant’s voice had shouted: “Silence, there—this is a parade. Room, atten-shun.”