It wasn’t all inedible. Having lived under SSgt Cox’s chocolate ban for three weeks, the ration-pack chocolate bar was most welcome. I peeled back the silver-blue wrapper from the Nestlé Yorkie bar, rebranded for the military as NOT FOR CIVIS with disproportionate excitement and savoured the short-lived sugar rush. An even bigger sugar fix could be found in the small foil packet of boiled sweets, which proved a useful distraction when struggling to stay awake through the night. British rations would also be incomplete without tea bags; an army might march on its stomach but the British Army would come to a grinding halt without tea. After field cookery, we gathered in the forest for a Ray Mears-style shelter-building lesson.
I’m not really sure what I expected the sleeping arrangements on exercise to be – a tent maybe, or perhaps some sort of wooden shed or tin hut – but somehow through abject naivety I never actually expected to be sleeping in the field, in the open, on the cold hard ground, exposed to the unforgiving English climate. And as the reality sank in, I suddenly realized this was going to be nothing like my week of camping in Devon.
Using a large plastic-coated camouflage sheet called a poncho (not the sort tequila-slamming Mexicans wear) we erected a primitive shelter by tying the corners to nearby trees with elastic bungee chords and propping a stick up in the middle. The shelter had to be as low to the ground as possible, preventing the enemy from discovering it, leaving just enough room to lie down and watch the rain pool in sumps above my nose and think how pitiful a night’s sleep under there was going to be. I did wonder what you would do if there were no trees to tie the poncho to, say in the desert perhaps, somewhere maybe like Iraq or Afghanistan, but then I wasn’t being paid to think and piping up with stupid questions like that was baiting fate. The poncho shelter promised no protection from the piercing wintry weather whatsoever; its purpose more about hiding us from the enemy than affording a comfortable night’s rest. Not that there was going to be any rest anyway.
The heavy grey sky rained pathetically on us all morning and the dampness seeped through every seam of clothing and stitch of fabric straight to the bone. And on day one of five there was no early promise of drying out. The test of our resolve under adversity had begun and already I wished to be back at the Academy ironing and polishing with dry pants on.
And so, with this conditioning in place, it was time for us to play soldiers.
Daubing thick smears of waxy green and brown camouflage cream across our faces and sticking leaves and twigs to the helmets on our heads, we began to look more plausibly like soldiers, albeit more Dad’s Army than gritty professional warriors. The pouches on our webbing5 contained magazines filled with ammunition for the first time and we were excited at the prospect of finally using it.
But then out came ‘Willy-the-whistle’ and the crawling began.
On each blast from Willy we had to throw ourselves down in the mud and nettles and start to crawl. With rifle cradled and webbing on, we crawled. And crawled and crawled. SSgt Cox and Captain Trunchbull screamed murderously at us to stay down and move faster. We crawled across woods, along tracks, over fields and through bracken until our lungs were bursting and limbs bleeding. This wasn’t crawling like babies on hands and knees but lower, more stealthily, with belt buckles to the ground, like leopards stalking on the Serengeti. We dragged our tired defeated bodies through muddy puddles and undergrowth, over stones and to the summit of hills, until our limbs couldn’t ache any more.
Elbow-ripping, kneecap-grinding, lung-busting crawling.
One blast from Willy and we jumped up and ran forwards, another and we threw ourselves down in the dirt and started to crawl. Up, down, crawl, up, down, crawl; because through pain and Willy we were learning the most fundamental of infantry tactics – ‘fire and manoeuvre’.
Partnered up, one of us fired blank rounds of ammunition at an imaginary enemy while the other scurried forwards, dived down and crawled forwards to start shooting, then the other half of the pair did the same. Each running dash covered and protected by shooting fire from the other. A so foolproof simple technique, fire and manoeuvre is at the crux of what the infantry do. A soldier’s bread and butter, his gravy and potatoes, the daily grind of a section, platoon and company; two years later in Afghanistan I would watch images from a helicopter of Royal Marines doing exactly this when assaulting a Taliban compound. Their movements were no more complicated than ours were that afternoon as we dashed forth, dropped down, crawled forwards and fired. Dash-down-crawl-dash-down-crawl. Again and again, throwing ourselves down onto the soggy wet ground, panting, breathless and exhausted. Except we were in Sussex in January not Helmand in July and we weren’t wearing 35 lb of body armour like the Marines, nor carrying radios, counter-IED equipment, ammunition and all the other gubbins an infantryman is loaded up with. If I hadn’t been suffering so much personal pain at this point I may have even been humbled with appreciation for what it is infantry soldiers do.
As darkness fell, battered, bruised and exhausted, we moved into the woods to set up a platoon harbour. Here, tucked away in the thick of the forest, we would be spending the night, cooking up our gag-inducing boil-in-the-bag meals, changing socks and pants, and notionally rolling out our sleeping bags. The harbour was to be triangular, each of the three sides facing outwards ready to spot and fight the enemy. A thread of twine marking each edge of the triangle was meticulously tied around the trees, forcing military straight lines onto the beech and birch of Hundred Acre Wood. Around our triangle home ran a track for us to move along in the dark which had to be delicately cleared of leaves and twigs that could crackle and snap when walked on, alerting the enemy to our location. Perversely this was contrived to involve yet more crawling through mud, as we swept away branches and foliage until we were all thoroughly pissed off with scraping our knees and elbows along the ground.
The flimsy poncho shelters we’d learned to construct earlier were erected between the trees over shallow trenches as we basha’d6 up. Hollow ‘shell-scrapes’ were dug beneath these basha, each long enough for the tallest person to lie down and wide enough for two to lie side by side. With my limbs already fatigued from crawling, an entrenching tool (a spade: for some reason the army don’t call a spade a spade) was thrust into my hands and I started to scratch away at the dense soil, digging my own coffin hole. By now I was dead on my feet. All I wanted to do was stop, curl up on the cold, hard forest floor and let sleep take me away. My stomach was empty, my legs were weary, and I couldn’t care less if the enemy found us, if it brought an end to the agonizing crawling.
Then finally, as midnight approached, I rolled out my sleeping bag and wriggled in.
Once the crawling and digging stopped I became painfully cold. My damp clothing and sodden boots chilled my body to the core. People don’t realize quite how deadly the British climate is. That night, as the January air dipped below freezing, the day’s drizzle turned to snow and I shivered despairingly in my sleeping bag, worried that if I fell asleep I might wake up dead, frozen in my self-dug grave. But I need not have worried because someone had come up with a ridiculously complex sentry rota that ensured none of us would be getting any sleep that night anyway. And after less than an hour of trembling in my sleep, I was shaken awake by Allinson for my turn to lie in the numbing cold on stag.7 I lay shaking with cold on the sentry position next to Wheeler, our breath forming little clouds in the cold air, watching the snow settle around us, as the forest floor got whiter. With my head in my helmet propped against my rifle I stifled yawns and wriggled my legs back and forth, trying to keep as little of my body from touching the painfully frozen ground. From her pocket Wheeler produced a packet of ration-pack boiled sweets and we talked of food fantasies in a hushed whisper to keep ourselves awake (her dreaming of a home-made lasagne, me a Sunday roast with all the trimmings). After an hour of staring into the darkness like this our duty came to an end and we stood to reveal a clear untouched patch of brown earth in the snow for the next two to lie in, creeping back along t
he track plan to our shell-scrape and climbing back into our sleeping bags for another allotted ninety minutes’ rest.
On our second stag I saw two figures approach us through the blackness. I blinked to check, hoping that my eyes were deceiving me, wishing for an uneventful, peaceful hour watching the snow fall. But they were there and coming closer, walking straight towards us.
‘Stop. Who goes there?’ Wheeler called out the challenge to them.
‘SSgt Cox and Captain Trunchbull.’
‘Advance one and be recognized.’
The unmistakable misshapen onion-seller’s beret of Captain Trunchbull stepped forwards into view.
‘Evening, ma’am, staff sergeant,’ Wheeler greeted them.
They walked straight past us, disappearing off into the harbour area, emerging a few minutes later with two rifles and heading back in the direction from which they had come. They dissolved into the night.
‘Oh dear,’ Wheeler exclaimed.
‘What?’
We were supposed to sleep with our rifles uncomfortably inside our sleeping bags, so should the enemy creep up on us while we slept they couldn’t be stolen, which is exactly what Captain Trunchbull and SSgt Cox had meanly done, plucking them from beside our sleeping comrades. Indeed as morning arrived two of the platoon were missing weapons, and we all knew what was coming.
More from Willy.
With the first light of dawn, I forced down another boil-in-the-bag breakfast (burgers and beans) and had a wet-wipe shower, then joined the Platoon lining up in a forest clearing to await the arrival of SSgt Cox and Captain Trunchbull. One of the benefits of being in the field was supposed to be a separation from the theatre of morning room inspections; freedom from the ceaseless ironing, polishing and cleaning crap. So as dawn arrived we were all rather perturbed to be standing with mess tins, boots and those weapons remaining laid out on the ground ready for inspection. And were even more pissed off to subsequently be running up and down a hill, knees to chest, doing press-ups in the mud because we hadn’t passed. Captain Trunchbull and SSgt Cox screamed at our rancid ‘gopping’ ill-disciplined selves, teaching us another brutally delivered lesson. The lax discipline of a few had brought collective punishment to us all. Those who had failed to clean their mess tins, polish their boots or sleep with their rifle saw us all suffering, hounding home the need for us to stick together, if one person failed we all did. It didn’t matter if you couldn’t bear the person you were basha’d up with, you still had to work together to get through the hell of Self-Abuse.
Commanding soldiers under fire, in the heat of battle, is arguably the greatest leadership challenge. While the infantry accounts for less than a third of the army, the primary role of the remaining two-thirds is to support them. Whether it be providing radio communications, artillery fire, defusing bombs or flying helicopters, everyone in the army requires a basic understanding of what it is infantry soldiers on the ground do, and for this reason Sandhurst uses the infantry model to teach leadership.
Each of the three annual intakes to the Academy are split into three infantry-style rifle companies, each of these sub-divided into three platoons of around thirty and each of these platoons subsequently split into three infantry sections, consistent with real infantry rifle platoons.
In the army three really is the magic number.
On completion of their training the cadets from Sandhurst commissioning into the infantry would take command of a platoon. Though the army isn’t foolish enough to grant custody of thirty soldiers to a young man in his early twenties, who only a year earlier had most likely been a jaunty, carefree student, so a young second-lieutenant’s enthusiasm and naivety are reined in by a war-hardened platoon sergeant. Sergeants are hard-bitten experienced senior soldiers who have been promoted through the ranks from private to lance-corporal to corporal and then sergeant, toughened at each stage by arduous NCO8 leadership courses in Brecon. Although the second-lieutenant is officially in charge the sergeant can hold greater true authority, especially in the early months while the baby Platoon Commander is still wide-eyed and wet behind the ears. Sticking to the infantry model at Sandhurst we cadets made up the platoon’s number with Captain Trunchbull as the notional and uninspiring platoon commander while our real respect was for SSgt Cox. Over the year as we deployed on more horrific weeks like Self-Abuse and the exercises progressed we would each take it in turn to act as platoon commander and sergeant, being assessed for leadership ability in trying to command our friends and peers.
The manpower in an infantry section is further split into two four-man fire teams. At the lowest level these are the most basic building blocks in the British infantry. And on the second day of Self-Abuse we grouped into our own little fire teams, to build on the previous day’s fire and manoeuvre training. This time four of us would do the dash, down, crawl routine together. We practised all morning, a team at a time, firing rounds at imaginary enemy in the copse beyond an open field. The snow and rain had finally stopped and, as I sat on my daysack waiting my turn, the sun broke through the clouds to warm my tired muddy face. As the sky cleared the picture-perfect rolling hills of Winnie-the-Pooh country unfurled in front of me, the open heathland brightened by splashes of yellow gorse and purple moor grass.
There was something restful in that physical landscape that gave me a small moment to extract and ponder, a brief peaceful interlude in the shouting-shooting-crawling exercise melee. I smiled inwardly to myself. It was my birthday, and I would rather have been here on this hillside, with newfound friends in the fresh open air, feeling the warmth of the sun on my cheeks than cooped up behind a computer screen like a battery hen in an office. Next to me Wheeler leaned over and snapped off a chunk of her Yorkie bar and handed it to me. And in that brief moment, with the sun on my face, looking at open fields, I felt content and, for the first time, that I wanted to be here.
*
That night after sundown we were sent out on a navigation patrol to put our orienteering skills to the test and prove that the compasses we had been issued could be used as more than just a short ruler. So with map in hand, I stumbled around Christopher Robin’s playground in the dark on my own, finding my way from checkpoint to checkpoint through the night. For two hours, I crossed over forest streams, clambered stone walls, waded through tall deer grass and considered stopping for a snooze in an empty barn. By now the tiredness was dragging me down. It was only the second night of the exercise and I felt wretched. We would be getting minimal sleep again that night and I wondered how long my body could cope with the sleep deprivation until it packed up and I started to fall asleep on the march. Inside my head my brain had already slowed to mush and all I could think of was succumbing to the relief of sleep. My head grew heavy as I battled with my eyelids, forcing them open. I obsessed with thoughts of climbing into bed and surrendering to slumber. I fantasized about slipping between crisp clean sheets, laying my head on a plump pillow, inhaling Lenor Summer Meadows and letting the duvet envelop my drained body, taking it away to be renewed. But none of this could become a near reality, as the release of sleep was a long way off.
Two hours later, with all the checkpoints found, I eventually staggered to the finish point cold, wet and pissed off, then returned to the harbour area for another night of stag and half-sleep, shivering in my sleeping bag, desperately willing the ordeal of Self-Abuse to end. An hour later Wheeler and I were back at our sentry post together, sharing boiled sweets and discussing plans for our first weekend of freedom (she had a student party back in Cambridge to attend, I was going to Twickenham for Six Nations’ rugby). Strong friendships are quickly formed in these situations of adversity. People I had never met four weeks earlier now knew me better than lifelong friends. Thrown together on the first Sunday in January, we were all enduring the same bad dream together and were bonding through the misery and hardship of it all.
Some of us suffered more than others during those long cold wintry nights, and none more so than the overseas cadet
s. The overseas cadets had been plucked from the comfort and familiarity of their native lands and thrust into the British weather at its most raw and unwelcoming. Each year about fifty foreign cadets from all over the world attend Sandhurst, integrating fully with the commissioning course. Sandhurst is hard enough if English is your indigenous tongue, but deciphering the excited shouting of an apoplectic Glaswegian colour sergeant when your brain works in Dari, or understanding drill when orderly queuing isn’t even in your culture set additional challenges for the overseas cadets.
For some overseas cadets Sandhurst has become a rite of passage; a prestigious finishing school for Arab princes and future world leaders sent to learn the secrets of British leadership. All modern-day heirs to the Jordanian throne have attended Sandhurst, including the current King as well as the reigning Sultans of Oman and Brunei. Former Kings of Spain, Tonga and Thailand are all also among Sandhurst’s alumni. Others represent the cream of their home armies, chosen through vigorous selection while an unfortunate few, like Mahmoud, had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
An Officer and a Gentlewoman Page 8
