An Officer and a Gentlewoman

by Heloise Goodley

  And it was torturous.

  The boys had cleverly worked out that if they slipped a small tin of boot polish into their right trouser pocket they could rest the butt of the rifle against it as they stood to attention, taking up the strain, but in Eleven Platoon we wore skirts and couldn’t exploit such cunning tricks.

  The very worst part of rifle drill however was the agonizing struggle of the ‘present arms’: standing motionless to attention with our arms extended forwards, holding the heavy rifle vertically out in front of us for inspection. This stress position could go on for tens of minutes, as we stood still under the burning glare of the sun, feeling beads of sweat trickling down our backs, pooling into a damp patch on our shirts, under the heavy woollen Blues jackets. The possibility of fainting loomed ever near.

  Each time the rifle was part of a drill move it had to be grasped with an audible ‘STRIKE’ as we slapped it hard in unison. The CSgts wanted to see bloodstains on the white gloves we wore as we struck the weapon forcefully with our palms. And CSgt Bicknell joked that if anyone hit their rifle hard enough to break it, he would give them the rest of the day off.

  CSgt Bicknell would stand out in front of the platoon, as we lined up in three ranks before him. Then when we were all ready, he would puff out his chest, angle his chin high into the air and, with his pace stick tucked under his right arm, he would bark out the first commands: ‘Eleven Platoon. Eleven Platooooooon. Shun!’ And his voice would peak an octave higher on the ‘shun’ as in front of him thirty cadets stamped to attention, followed by a flutter of movement as we all tried to gain control of the rifles at our sides. More than once someone dropped their rifle to the ground with an exaggeratedly loud clatter and CSgt Bicknell would go berserk.

  ‘Come on, ladies. Come on. Stand still. When you come to attention I expect you to stand completely still, I don’t want to see a flicker of movement over there. Nothing. You are to just freeze as you are.’

  Then he would puff his chest out once more and give the next command: ‘Eleven Platoon. Slooooooope arms!’ And on the clipped shout of ‘arms’ there would be a ripple of clanging metal as we repositioned the rifle from down at our right side to resting against our shoulders, slapping hard at the weapon’s side as we went, creating the audible strike CSgt Bicknell so desired.

  ‘Come on, ladies. More strike. More strike. Let me hear some aggression in there.’

  CSgt Bicknell loved drill. He was a proud guardsman and drill was in his blood. His heart pounded to the beat of the parade square drum, and he was in his absolute element on the drill square, spruced up in ceremonial dress with a brass band and expectant audience. Nowhere was he happier than out at the front, in command of a polished drill squad.

  Except, unfortunately, Eleven Platoon was not yet a polished drill squad. In skirts it was harder to hide our drill errors, and the curve of our feminine figures prevented the robotic straight lines expected of marching troops. Hips swayed and their roundness prevented our arms from pinning straight at our sides, which frustrated CSgt Bicknell wildly.

  For rifle drill we attached bayonets to the muzzle of the rifle, and their steely edges would glisten in the sunshine as we switched the rifle around, from ‘slope’ to ‘shoulder’ to ‘present’. The clean, polished metal would catch the sunlight and remind any spectators that although we might look daftly unthreatening dressed in our formal uniforms, the rifles in our arms had a far more serious and sombre use. The sight of a parade square filled with over 200 cadets armed with rifles and this iconic blade must have presented a frightening proposition as one poor unfortunate discovered on a summer’s afternoon after I commissioned.

  On that day the entire Intermediate intake were on the parade square in front of New College being put through their paces by their respective CSgts when a coach slowly drove behind them and came to a stop at the college entrance. The coach was carrying a party of officers returning from a battlefield tour in northern France and, unbeknownst to anyone on board at the time, an Afghan refugee hiding in the coach’s toilet. As the coach came to a stop for the first time since it had crossed the English Channel, the hydraulic hiss signalled the opening of the doors, and the Afghan stowaway spotted his chance, bursting free from the confines of his locked toilet. As he absconded onto the parade square, making a dash for freedom, he must have cursed his rotten luck when choosing his mode of passage at Sangatte, as he was confronted with the sight of over 200 armed cadets.

  We had to get to grips with this new dimension to drill because in the Intermediate term there was another drill examination, and this time it was competitive.

  Winning the Drill Competition was an accolade CSgt Bicknell so very desperately wanted. Drill was his thing, and while his brood of girls may not have been able to compete against the boys on the assault course or on exercise, the drill square was an equalizer. CSgt Bicknell believed that drill was about style and panache. That it was about putting on a show, and he felt that the girls would be best placed to do this. He was also a friend of the inspecting officer. So with a bit of dedicated practice our chances looked good.

  But first, before CSgt Bicknell could have any crowning moment of glory on the drill square, we had something of more unfortunate relevance to attend to.

  There is no doubt that the British Army produces among the best officers in the world. But now, over halfway through the commissioning course, I still couldn’t see how. The stuff we were being taught still felt largely irrelevant to what we would be doing in Afghanistan or Iraq, which for some of us was less than a year away. The marching, the polishing, room inspections and water parades, digging trenches, assaulting East German villages and putting up bashas in woodblocks – I knew none of this was going on in Bastion or Basra, so why were we doing it?

  My concern wasn’t that Sandhurst was teaching us skills for all eventualities, but that so far it seemed these eventualities were not the Afghan and Iraqi realities. And while lessons from the past should not be ignored, the current wars staring us hard in the face were hard to ignore too.

  Sandhurst justifies this lack of contemporary relevance in its training by pointing out that it is a leadership academy and that the mission-specific gloss is taught after commissioning, by the units and corps cadets commission into. Second-lieutenants leaving Sandhurst are not propelled into the wider army with just a pip on their chests and shiny shoes; instead they are taken deep into the bosom of their new cap badges, held away from real soldiers to be trained further on young officers’ courses; the boys who sign up to the infantry pack their bergens once more and head back to Brecon for more crawling. The engineers build bridges and then blow them up in Kent. The signallers fiddle with wiggly amps on the Jurassic coast and the pilots climb into the seat of a cockpit and try not to become too RAF.

  As it was, on the few occasions we did receive some contemporary training at Sandhurst, it proved to be neither pertinent nor enjoyable. I could think of plenty of war skills that should feature higher up the Afghanistan checklist than dealing with NBC, but at Sandhurst it was the first modern-day training we were given.

  NBC is Nuclear, Biological and Chemical warfare, and was undoubtedly selected to take prominence on the Sandhurst curriculum because of its eye-watering, lung-burning, head-boiling potential. I won’t deny that for Saddam’s Iraq this may have had some slim importance but Saddam was now dead, his weapons of mass destruction never existed and the only tasks left for the cadets from CC071 going to Iraq would be closing the doors and turning off the lights. Nevertheless, as we ran around the polo pitch panting and wheezing in our charcoal-lined chemical oversuits, I hoped to God that this wasn’t relevant training for war.

  We were playing NBC rugby, although there was no chance of me actually seeing the ball through the lenses of the thick rubber gas mask I had strapped to my face. The sweat from the mid-August sun had turned to steam inside my mask, misting the lenses and obscuring my sight, while the tight seal restricted my breathing, rendering me completely inc
apacitated for any form of sport. Despite these disadvantages the match was still equal, as the players on both sides were clumsily stumbling around in their NBC suits playing this mal-coordinated sado-sport, fumbling for the ball as if in the dark. And we were happy to stay here, out in the midday sun, running around in four layers of clothing, with rubber gloves and boots on, because we knew that when the final whistle blew something much, much worse was coming next.

  It was the gas chamber.

  We weren’t allowed to call it that, but no matter how they dressed it up, as a ‘respirator testing facility’, or ‘NBC confidence room’, it was still a chamber in which we were about to get gassed. And the experience was as hideous as it sounds.

  We’d long known that the little innocuous grey brick hut that was tucked away among the trees next to Range A would have to be visited at some point. And now, gasping and sweating, we queued outside it like condemned women, nervously waiting to see what would happen inside, each one of us hoping that we’d turn out to be in the statistical 1 per cent of people who are unaffected by the gas. The sweat we had worked up playing NBC rugby was part of the cruel conditioning before we went inside; the dampness on our skin and shortness of our breath would accentuate the symptoms caused by the gas, ensuring we could appreciate the full range of its effects.

  And the full range of effects was utterly horrendous.

  It was like being water-boarded with urine.

  As the door shut behind us we held our breath and removed our gas masks, six of us standing inside a concrete bunker in the woods staring down at the small tablets of CS gas burning on a breeze block in the centre of the room. In front of me, CSgt Rattray was covering the exit, blocking the way to clean, fresh, leafy Surrey air. He turned to look at me with his gas mask on, and I could see a smile forming across his eyes behind the glass lenses.

  ‘Number? Rank? Name?’ the Rat asked in a muffled voice, prompting me to think and speak in the gaseous fug. Straight away I could feel the surface of my skin starting to tingle with a wasabi sting, as the delicate skin around my lips and eyes started to burn.

  ‘Whisky, one, zero, six, one, four, five, one. Officer Cadet Goodley,’ I blurted out, trying to hang on to the reserves of my saved breath, so that I wouldn’t have to draw any of the noxious air around me into my lungs.

  ‘And what is your favourite colour?’ he asked, attempting once more to make me gulp in a lungful of the potent gaseous cocktail.

  ‘Blue, colour sergeant,’ I said, my head starting to feel light, as the gas lingering in my nostrils slowly built from a gentle korma into the agonizing fire of a phall.

  ‘And what is the square root of 206?’ he finally quizzed. A small triumphant twinkle in his eye.

  What? The square root of 206? How the heck was I supposed to know that? My brain had stopped working. My lungs were screaming out for air. I could feel the effects of the gas drowning every part of me. And then I lost it. My eyes and nose started streaming great swathes of snotty dribble. My ears burned. My skin inflamed. I needed to breathe. I desperately needed clean fresh air. Through streaked tears, I looked across the bare brick hut at the Platoon Donkey. I could see her chatting away nonchalantly, remaining remarkably composed. At the Rat’s request she was listing her top five Take That hits, and taking her considered time over it. I couldn’t believe it; she was completely unaffected. She was immune. Of all people. Of all the personal attributes. The Platoon Donkey had finally found something she was good at, and it was just such a shame that this would be the one and only time in her entire military career she’d be called upon to do it.

  Then just as I thought my lungs were about to collapse, the Rat stepped aside and bundled me through the open door, coughing and choking uncontrollably into the summer’s air. I gasped at it, gulping in lungfuls between short snotty splutters. I wanted to curl up on the grass into a hugging ball and will the pain away, but outside CSgt Bicknell was shouting instructions for us to keep moving. Keep our arms outstretched to let the fresh air get in. So instead I stumbled blindly about, my eyes and nose streaming, waiting for the burning to subside, while those still left in the queue to go into the chamber watched in abject horror. And as the chilli sting finally mellowed, I prayed that God forbid we may never have to do this on exercise.

  But of course we were going to have to do it on exercise; this was Sandhurst after all. Exercise was uncomfortable enough without the faff and sting of NBC, but now, at the hottest time of the year, we were deploying into the field once more and this time we would be digging holes, fighting Gurkhas and advancing to contact, all in two layers of additional clothing. The extra warmth I had cried out for during those shivering nights in Brecon and the Hundred Acre Wood now just became more junk that I had to wear and carry around with me, as NBC meant more stuff to squeeze into my bulging bergen.

  And we soon discovered that, whereas in FIBUA everyone dies of gunshot wounds, in NBC everyone chokes to death instead. We sat in NBC lectures in Churchill Hall, absorbing the horrors of what Saddam Hussein did to his own people, and realizing that there was nothing at all sporting about NBC. We were taught about each of the possible agents in an evil villain’s arsenal: nerve, blood, blister and choking agents, all of which were lethal. Gruesome pictures illustrated for us what would happen if we were exposed to them: first our pupils would contract then we’d experience profuse salivation and dizziness. This would be followed by convulsions, muscle twitching, involuntary urination, defecation. Then by asphyxiation and eventually death. None of which sounded like an agreeable event to have to deal with on the battlefield.

  If we came under attack from any of these nasty agents we had just nine seconds to get our gas masks on. Nine frenzied seconds of hurriedly scrabbling at rubber, eyes screwed shut, breath held. In case of an attack our gas masks were carried around with us in a small bag strapped to our waists, like the bumbags that were popular in the eighties or with American tourists in London. Then when the chemical attack alarm sounded for us to put them on, we had to quickly remove our helmet and place it between our knees, rip open the Velcro fastenings on the gas-mask bumbag, pull out the gas mask, work out which way was up, grapple with the rubber straps, stretch them over our head and fix the mask into position. Then, when it was on and sealed to our cheeks we had to breathe out and shout a muffled, ‘GAS, GAS, GAS,’ to warn others. And all of this had to be achieved wearing large, thick rubber gloves on our hands, which meant it was like trying to thread a needle whilst wearing boxing gloves.

  Making this nine-second deadline took lots of practice and all of Eleven Platoon would stand outside in a fumbling frenzy as CSgt Bicknell counted us down: ‘GAS, GAS, GAS. Nine, eight, seven. Come on, ladies, you need to be quicker than this. Six, five, four. Come on, this needs to be faster, ladies. Three, two, one.’

  At zero, half of us would still be grappling with the straps. The combat helmet that was supposed to be held between our knees would have dropped to the floor and rolled away, someone would invariably have their mask on upside down and those who had managed to get their mask on were slowly asphyxiating as it restricted their breathing.

  In an NBC environment our chances would be slim.

  Daily NBC life proved to be a complete faff too, as once the gas mask and gloves were on, everything became far more complicated. The mask narrowed your field of vision like a blinkered pony and with rubber boxing gloves over your hands the most basic of tasks became a muddled effort. I struggled with fiddly buttons and zips, while the logistics of eating, drinking and going to the toilet became an undignified and messy act. All required us to learn a complicated set drill; the defecation drill being of particular shameful indignity, and as I simulated trying to protect the toilet paper from contamination I hoped to God the constipating ration-pack biscuits never necessitated this become a reality.

  My favourite NBC drill was the ‘nuclear immediate action drill’, which was quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I did during my entire time at Sandhurst, more
bizarre even than looking for litter in the dark or singing the national anthem at dawn. The nuclear immediate action drill was to be carried out in the unfortunate event of being in the wrong place when a nuclear bomb is dropped. In this far from ideal situation, what we were to do was face the direction of the blast and lie down on the ground on our stomachs, head face-down, with our arms tucked underneath our bodies (the boys’ hands invariably clutching their crown jewels). We were to lie there like this as the blast wave rushed over us, no doubt scorching and stripping the clothing from our backs, then we were supposed to continue lying there and wait for the returning second blast wave to come rushing back over us. Finally when both waves had passed, the drill was to stand up and brush the ‘nuclear fallout’ off our bodies with leaves and twigs plucked from nearby trees, like some sort of Pagan self-flagellation ritual. That was if the explosion of a nuclear bomb hadn’t turned you into crispy bacon and the surrounding trees still had any foliage left.

  You don’t need to be in the military to realize that all this is a completely fanciful notion, probably dreamed up to convince soldiers that in a nuclear attack they stood a chance, when in reality Hiroshima and Nagasaki conclusively attest otherwise. In reality, if a nuclear bomb does go off, any sensible soldier would be putting his head between his legs and kissing his arse goodbye.

  I don’t recall much of the NBC exercise; probably because my brain has elected to wipe most of the whole sorry experience from memory and possibly because with a gas mask on I didn’t really see very much of it either. The exercise was called Marathon’s Chase, named, I’m sure, because it was a long, miserable slog which would see us in considerable amounts of pain and, in my case, unable to walk by the end of it.

  After the soggy suffering of Brecon, the third and final exercise of the Intermediate Term would be taking us back to the flat, featureless farmland of Thetford once more. To where our Worst Encounter trench demons lay and sadly I knew that this time there would be no swimming angels coming to rescue me. As the convoy of coaches pulled up on New College parade square for the pre-dawn start, the whole of CC071 piled onto them, bergens bulging with all the now well-worn exercise paraphernalia. This time for our East Anglia excursion the picks and shovels had been swapped for NBC oversuits, gas masks and a ‘chemical warfare agent detector’, which was a large cumbersome metal box that weighed a handy compact twenty-five kilograms and would have to be carried everywhere with us.