So despite the scaremongering things were looking up for Worst Encounter.
And really, how difficult can digging a hole be?
I’m not sure if the coach driver got lost, but the exercise started on the hard shoulder of a main road, while Monday morning rush-hour traffic sped past. As we got off the bus, Captain Trunchbull, who unfortunately we hadn’t left behind in Old College, was busy shouting at us in her usual nettling manner while CSgt Bicknell tentatively chivvied us along, still finding his feet with his new brood. Once again we hauled all our heavy kit onto our backs, shovels and picks poking from the top of our bergens like prospecting miners, and steadied ourselves for the evil bergen carry onto the area.
Once we arrived at the pre-agreed ‘X’ on the map, our trenches were marked out on the grass with white tape and we began mentally preparing ourselves for the ‘big dig’. Except digging a trench isn’t as straightforward as simply putting spade to soil; first a demoralizing de-turfing process has to be completed, which involved ripping innocuous clumps of grass from the topsoil around the planned hole. There were two trenches per section and with me I had Allinson, Rhodes and Lea. The four of us worked uninterrupted, fuelled by beginning-of-exercise zeal, but this disheartening de-turfing still took us twelve hours. Twelve whole plucking hours. We started at lunchtime on day one and it was deep into the first night before we were even ready to scrape the surface and put shovel to ground.
And the exercise was covert too, so we now found ourselves digging in complete darkness, unable to switch on our head torches in case the enemy were alerted. It was a particularly calm night on the first night. The air around us felt heavy and still, damp with the smell of the day’s rain. Trees stood motionless on the horizon, not a rustle from their branches. Occasionally I could hear the hoot of an owl, but otherwise there were just the gentle sounds of spades tucking into the earth and the odd whisper. With the grass removed, we made good progress and after an hour were a foot deep. In our trench we developed an efficient routine in which I swung a pick to loosen the soil and Allinson and Rhodes cleared it away with their shovels, forming small piles of earth around the trench. As I dug, we found the sandy ground was pocked with sporadic flinty stones that we discarded as they were dug up, continuing on with our mission to get six feet down. In the early hours of what was now the second day, sparks began to fly as I brandished my pick and it struck hard against a particularly large flint rock. A couple more arches of the pick and I began to think it unusual. It was certainly larger than those we’d been finding and not loosening in the ground as I hit it. I stopped and reached down to feel with my hands, hoping to find a corner to lever it out with, but the moment my bare hand I touched it I realized straight away that it wasn’t a rock. It was clearly metallic and man-made. As I explored with my hands, groping at the dirt, I could discern the obvious fluke of a tail at the top, leading into a rusty body. A rusty unexploded body. I quickly fumbled in my pocket for a torch and shone a small light at it, unmindful of the light discipline we were supposed to be digging by. There unmistakably before me was an unexploded bomb. A rusty Second World War relic, now with a couple of clean scratches along the metal shell where I had chipped away with my pick. If I hadn’t previously given much consideration to the dangers of war, I had certainly given no consideration to the dangers of training. I would have preferred a pot of gold.
Despite the distraction of unearthing a bomb, we continued to work straight through that first night and into the following morning, slowly deepening the trench (which was relocated two metres west until the bomb could be destroyed), and by dawn word reached us that the first of the boys’ platoons were complete. The sooner you finished the sooner you could rest and we weren’t even halfway there. As the sun rose and burned off the morning mist, tiredness started to take its toll. With helmet and body armour on, it was exhausting work. We had had no sleep. Not a wink. The big swinging arches of my pick had become small scrabbling hiccups, while the spades full of excavated earth dwindled to tiny handfuls. As time wore on, our pace slowed further, and the slower we worked the longer it was going to take us to complete and the more time wore on. But fatigue wasn’t our only problem, because back at Sandhurst ‘rations-gate’ was unfolding and CSgt Bicknell was about to get an important insight into the female psyche.
While at Sandhurst strict rules are applied to using only the military-issued kit and equipment. While not the best money can buy, it does the job and we had to learn how to live with it, if only to be able to sympathize with the private soldiers’ whose salaries couldn’t supplement them in Millets or Blacks. For example, the army-issued sleeping bags we had all been given were just as effective as expensively bought non-issued ones from camping shops, except they took up three times as much space in our bergens and added precious more weight. On our feet we had to wear only the issued leather boots despite their blister-giving properties and through the freezing cold nights we were limited to just the issued thermal clothing. On Worst Encounter we had all stuck religiously to these rules and our bergens were conformingly packed with issued sleeping bags and clothing that we were barely even going to get to use over the course of the week. But where we had bastardized the rulebook was in its application to food. On the Sunday before deployment, after Chapel, we had enterprisingly driven to Tesco and stocked up, stacking the trolley full of more appealing alternatives to corned-beef hash. Then that night, before departing for Thetford, we had opened up our ration packs and emptied them into the bin, stuffing our bergens instead with Pot Noodles (‘Fuel of Britain’), peperamis, malt loaf, Haribo and lots and lots of chocolate.
Remembering that an army marches on its stomach.
Our error in this deceit was that the following morning as we boarded the coaches to Norfolk, these bins remained unemptied. The evidence of our crime left us exposed. Laid bare and waiting. Waiting for the Academy commandant, a major general, accompanied by a delegation of foreign dignitaries touring the Academy, to happen upon them, like parents finding a squirrelled stash of pornography as they came into our rooms. Landing us in a whole mountain of trouble that would see us grounded for the rest of our lives.
Rations-gate was something that simply wouldn’t have occurred in a boys’ platoon. Boys are not precious or fussy about food. CSgt Bicknell had contentedly eaten boil-in-the-bag horrors for his entire military career and would never have contemplated our rejection of them. So when our actions surfaced he was livid. Livid because we’d cheated. Livid because he hadn’t thought to check. And livid because he’d received a monumental bollocking for it, so we were going to get an even bigger one. He called us all in, gathering us together under a tree, lined up to attention, leaving shovels and picks in our half-trenches. He paced back and forth in front of us, pulling his hair out. He raged at us: ‘You fucking idiots, what did you think you were doing? You will bloody well eat what you are given to eat. If you are issued ration packs, then you bloody well pack them and eat them. I don’t care if you don’t like them. In war you don’t get Pot Noodles and sweets. Do you think I had Haribo in Iraq? Do you? No, I didn’t. I spent six months in the desert eating fucking ration packs and I’m telling you that the shitters there were not a place to spend more time than necessary. But I ate them. I didn’t go into downtown Basra to buy peperami and Mars bars. You lot need to learn to stop being so fucking pampered.’ He stopped and took a deep breath, putting his hands on his hips, his face now red with fury.
‘You’ve made yourselves look like fucking fools, you have. Not just to me, not just to the commandant but the whole fucking Academy. I don’t ever want to have to remind you of this again. You are a fucking disgrace. The lot of you. When I’ve finished with you here,’ he said, his rant nearing a febrile crescendo, ‘I want you to go back to your fucking trenches and dig as though your lives depend on it. Because I’m going to make sure this is a lesson you never fucking forget.’
He was angry, very, very angry, but anger was not the answer. And with this ran
ting rage he had got it hugely wrong, because girls do not respond to maddened shouting. As he finished with piqued conclusion, he looked to us for some sort of confirmation, a reassurance that we’d heard and understood. Instead he received a blank response as we flounced off in a girly huff, heading back to our trenches to bitch about him, metaphorically stomping upstairs and slamming the bedroom door. We walked away from him and brooded, turning our backs to avoid him. Some cried. His words had upset us, but not taught us a lesson.
That was the one and only time CSgt Bicknell bollocked us. With this one incident he realized that girls required a different, more measured approach. Girls respond to a ‘you’ve-let-me-down’ emotional message not the rage of men. And eventually with Eleven Platoon CSgt Bicknell embraced the new angle to army life girls brought. After twenty testosterone-filled years, he relished his role as the guiding father figure in our lives. He took us under his wing and became defender of our honour, agony aunt and opener-of-jars.
The trench-digging continued through Tuesday and into the second night, bringing with it extreme tiredness. There had been no let-up. We hadn’t stopped to rest or sleep since arriving and, now suffering from chronic fatigue, everything we did became slow and measured like the movements of a drunken tramp. We stumbled about in our trenches, breaking occasionally to join the growing queue of people outside the Portaloos, where inside people had fallen asleep. My bloodshot eyes stung as I battled hopelessly to keep them open; my head lolled heavy on my neck. As my consciousness waned my awareness clouded. That night, in the cathedral calm of darkness, I became hazy and confused, having an almost out-of-body experience I was so tired. I felt nearer death than life. And my capacity for clear coherent thought became lost in the piles of excavated dirt. I have never been more tired than I was at 5 a.m. on that Wednesday morning, when finally my will to sleep was consented. I had been awake for over 48 hours. We eventually downed tools and I unfurled my sleeping bag on the bare grass and climbed straight in, as I was, sandy boots still on, sleeping on the damp earth under the night stars, catatonic with the eventual release of sleep.
And then a miracle happened.
As I lay unconscious in the grass an angel appeared, haloed by the dawn sun. The angel shook me from my slumber and guided me to a Land Rover, its waiting engine growling in the morning mist. Blundering blearily, I was too tired to comprehend what was happening and blindly followed the angel’s lead. On the hard seats in the back of the Land Rover I slept again as we bounced through the fields and along muddy tracks. Eventually, behind the barbed wire of a military camp, I was transferred into a white minibus and onto the main road. We sped south, along A roads to the motorway. Intermittently in my sleep I got a sense of traffic slowing with rush hour, stopping at traffic lights or the bus swinging around a roundabout, but I remained oblivious to my surroundings, wrapped in the soporific sounds of the engine. All my body could do was sleep, my brain had shut down, my eyelids clamped firmly shut.
Eventually we reached our destination – Aldershot in Surrey, 135 miles from my unfinished trench. The minibus parked in a car park and as the engine was switched off I stirred, waking in civilization. Still wearing the same clothes I had been in for more than two days, I was unwashed; the sweat of digging had dried to my body, sand and mud clung to my boots and I stank. A foul putrid unforgiving stench, that lingered in the nostrils of the freshly bathed like a ripe French cheese. My hands were blistered raw and clenched from wielding the pick and my eyes had withdrawn to dark pinpricks in my skull, like an addict at the end of a high. Ours wasn’t the only minibus in the Aldershot car park that morning. Around us others were disgorging groups of people in coordinated team tracksuits and trainers, with sports bags slung over their shoulders looking fit and competitive. We were all gathering here for the Army Swimming Championships. My race preparation could have been a little better.
Before I joined the army, a sage infantry officer had given me much valued advice on the emotional extremes of military life. He had warned me that in the army ‘the highs are higher but the lows are lower too’. And there, in Aldershot, standing stiff in the car park this maxim could not have been truer. Hours earlier I had been scrabbling around at the bottom of a hole, sick with fatigue, blistered, sore and stinking a rotting stench. But now my swimming had saved me. While the rest of Eleven Platoon was still trapped in the Worst Encounter nightmare, I was living a dream. I headed straight for the shower, plugging the drain with matted hair, filth and grass. I slept. I showered again and then slept. I curled up on the poolside and slept between races, oblivious to the rowdy competition goings-on, shaken awake for each of my races. I hauled myself up from under my towel, put on my hat and goggles and made my way to the starting blocks, and stood there gazing at the fifty metres of crystal clear water ahead of me, as the other competitors limbered up. Stretching their limbs and standing tall, while my shoulders hung. I was knackered. The last thing I wanted to do now was thrash myself in a swimming pool in front of a large crowd. But as the starter buzzer bleeped, I was in and it felt incredible. The cool water rushed over me, the crowd cheered and the adrenaline kicked in to power me through the water.
As lunchtime arrived, I ordered Domino’s pizza to the poolside, gorging on the fatty cheesy slices, and even sought out somewhere to launder the mud from my crusty combats. All the while back in Norfolk the big dig continued. Guilt did pass over me. As I bit into another slice of pizza, savouring the salami juiciness, I was forced to consider the boil-in-a-bag alternatives. As I stood under a hot shower for the fourth time, soaping away ingrained grime, I spared a thought for the grubby less fortunate. It was intensely selfish, but I challenge anyone to behave differently in the circumstances.
Back in Thetford, the rest of Eleven Platoon was suffering in the deep throes of serious sleep deprivation, and knowledge of my privilege would not have been greeted warmly. So that night, when I finally returned, clean, rested and fed, a gold medal tucked into my pocket, I kept my mouth shut. I paraded a sullen face, trying not to give away traces of the adultery I had committed. Not that anyone would have noticed. Because as I arrived back at my trench, smelling of shampoo and fabric softener, total lunacy had taken hold.
In my absence the platoon had been given just one more hour of sleep and were now delirious with fatigue. I became the only sober person at the party as hallucinations and disorientated mumblings set in. People were falling asleep standing up, mid-sentence and while eating. Someone had even conducted their own assault on an invisible enemy. But somehow through this mental imbalance the trenches had now been finished, complete with corrugated-iron reinforcement and the grassy turf replaced around them. But at six-foot deep, they proved difficult to get in and out of, especially when laden with kit, in the dark. That night our position came under a brief enemy mortar attack and my section were dispatched to investigate. Over the radio I was ordered to get One Section out and conduct a clearance patrol to our east. I roused everyone in our two trenches to get ready and looked carefully at my map. I was still adjusting the helmet on my head when the Platoon Donkey declared she was ready to go. Already out of the trench, she whispered down to me, ‘Which way are we going, Héloïse?’
Goodness, maybe people weren’t as unhinged as I had estimated, if the Platoon Donkey was still compos mentis. The rest of us got ready and clambered awkwardly out of the trench. I adjusted the settings on my radio and sent a message through to Platoon HQ to let them know we were departing. As I closed the cover on the radio pouch, I looked down at the Platoon Donkey’s feet. They were bare. She wasn’t wearing any boots. I looked up and realized she didn’t have her body armour or helmet on either and her rifle was missing from the picture too. She seemed completely oblivious to these deficiencies. We didn’t have time to now start doing up her shoelaces. We couldn’t leave her behind either, she had to come with us. This was going to have to be quick.
So we hurried out of the trenched harbour, the Platoon Donkey following at the back in her socks
. We disappeared off into the darkness between the trees and out of sight, hoping not to bump into any real enemy. Conducting the bare minimum patrol, we returned twenty minutes later, eager to get back into our trench and the Platoon Donkey out of potential sight. I set the bearing on my compass and headed through the darkness to where our trench should be, except when I got there it wasn’t there. I paced left and then right but couldn’t find it. I whispered out loudly hoping to catch the attention of someone in another trench. Then suddenly behind me the Platoon Donkey disappeared. I heard a muffled yelp and small crumpled commotion as she tumbled headlong into our trench, collapsing in a dishevelled heap at the bottom.
We grew quite attached to our trenches. They briefly became home. We cooked, ate, slept and lived our lives in them, like scenes out of Blackadder, with Baldrick making tea and cunning plans. It was saddening on the final day to have to rip them apart and fill them back in. We stripped out the corrugated iron and sandbags, collapsed in the carefully cut walls and bulldozed all the dirt back over, leaving just a small scar on the surface as evidence of our occupation. On the final day, we clambered onto the magic bus, which whisked us back to Sandhurst, skeletons of the cadets we had been five days earlier. I was a mess. My hair had matted into a thick sandy knot with sweat and ground around my head by my helmet. My palms were blistered and chafed, my nails brittle and cracked. There was nothing whatsoever feminine about the way I looked, but in just twenty-four hours I had to become a girl again. I had to wash the war away because in just twenty-four hours Imjin Company were throwing a party.
1 ‘Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die’ Alfred Lord Tennyson in the poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’.
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WOMEN AT WAR
An Officer and a Gentlewoman Page 16
