The Northern Garrisons

by Eric Linklater

  Winter Programme

  In a certain Yorkshire battalion the winter programme was remarkably comprehensive and set forth in detail. It is worth summarising.

  Training was divided under the three headings of Technical Military Training; General Education; Physical Training and Discipline. The technical training had a broad front, from ski-ing to a Tactical School; physical training and discipline, on orthodox lines, had produced a battalion of very smart appearance and good demeanour; and the syllabus of general education is quoted hereunder.

  GENERAL EDUCATION

  The object of this is to increase mental alertness. Every man will spend one term on education, of a specialist or general character according to his previous attainments. Every man will be encouraged to take up a hobby. A Battalion Exhibition of Arts and Crafts is being arranged.

  a. SPECIALIST CLASSES are for men in possession of an Army Second Class Education Certificate or its equivalent; those who have matriculated; and a few men who, on account of their age and employment, are more suited to learn a handicraft than likely to benefit from general education.

  Classes have been arranged in: Book-keeping, Shorthand, Mechanical Drawing, French, German, Carpentry, Metal Work, Wireless, Painting, First Aid, Pastry Cooking and Motor Mechanics.

  Vacancies for the first two terms have been allotted.

  Os. C. Detachments are encouraged to arrange additional classes for their men as facilities exist, and so long as other training and duties are not interrupted.

  b. GENERAL EDUCATION: each Company and Detachment will organise this. Each man not selected for a specialist class will attend for one term during which he will NOT be removed for other duties except in an emergency.

  Each course will consist of 72 one-hour periods, made up as follows:—

  The last period for each subject will be devoted to a Test Paper which will be set from Battalion H.Q. All who obtain 60 per cent. or more marks will be awarded an Education Certificate signed by the C.O. stating that they have reached the standard of a Second Class Army Certificate of Education.

  c. DEBATING: Debates will be held at all Detachments, on military and other subjects as laid down in Training Instructions No. I and Appendix A thereto. A firm Chairman is required, and all men should be encouraged to speak at some debate, however shortly.

  News from Home

  This battalion has also devised a means of allaying the intense anxiety which afflicts the men whenever they hear that such-and-such a town has been bombed, and there have been casualties. This anxiety, with a tortured sense of responsibility, is the most grievous burden for all troops serving in distant garrisons. They themselves may at the time be remote from attack, and their comparative or temporary immunity serves to sharpen their fear for the safety of their families. They do not relish danger for its own sake, but when the Luftwaffe is hailing upon England they would greet Göring’s bombers with delight, that they might share the perils of their wives and children, their sweethearts and their mothers at home. But all they can do is to wait with grim hearts for good news or bad.

  This particular battalion, by creating in its home-town a committee whose members, immediately after an air-raid, visit the homes of all men serving in it, and cable any ill-tidings, has done all it can to minify the recurrent periods of tense and anxious waiting.

  Communication, not merely from one part of Iceland to another, but between Britain and Iceland, is unfortunately slow, and the mail service is subject to an occasional paralysis that leaves many a soldier without a letter to read for several weeks at a time. And when the soldier is receiving no letters, he is writing none. Or very few. Because our civilisation is so largely a domestic civilisation, and the soldier is primarily interested in the affairs of his own home.

  There are exceptions, of course, but the average soldier, though living between a snow-shouldered volcano and the black deeps of the Atlantic, will write mostly of the tender, the comfortable, and familiar happenings in his native street. Of his friends who have been on leave, and the little adventures that his girl recites. Of his father’s rheumatism—heritage, most like, of a dug-out at Passchendaele—or the new cushion-covers that his wife has been making. Of his children, who are growing beyond his memory and will strain his recognition when he sees them next. Of the dining-room table, that has escaped a blitz, and the corner pub where they draw their mild and bitter behind boarded windows now.

  These are his thoughts, and the things of which he loves to write. But he must have news from home—news of the pub and the cushion-covers—before he can sit down to compose his next letter. A more frequent and more regular mail-service would be a great comfort to the men in Iceland.

  Of the larger sort of news they are given a smallish ration on the air. Wireless reception is difficult in Iceland, and the portable battery-set is quite insensitive to Home programmes. But there is a local Broadcasting Corporation in Reykjavik, and the Iceland Force has very wisely bought an hour a day of its time, which it fills with local talent and a great deal of ingenuity, concluding with a re-transmission of one of the English news bulletins. But the bulletin is brief, a thin and meagre summary, and only whets the raging modern appetite for current information. To compensate their lack of news, the Iceland soldiers are fertile in the invention of rumours, which they believe by the willing suspension of unbelief.

  Of entertainment, other than the produce of their own wit and voices, they have very little, though occasionally they are visited by an adventurous concert-party. Such a party, an E.N.S.A. group, arrived during the winter in a small steamer that met, just south of Reykjavik, the worst hurricane for half a century. A hurricane that has already become a legend, that blew motor-cars off the road and drove ships ashore, and reached a prodigious velocity ; though what was the number of miles per hour at which it blew cannot now be established, for no two people will agree about it, and there was some confusion, it seems, between miles and kilometres. But the wind was great, the E.N.S.A. party’s ship had been a week at sea, and when she arrived in Reykjavik she was coated in ice and dressed in white like pictures of an explorer’s vessel in the Polar Sea. And no sooner had they arrived than the concert party had to go aboard another ship, for their opening date was in the very north of Iceland, and at that performance, and at many others, they assuredly earned their pay; for not only were they clever and accomplished, and the girls pretty, but they were unsubdued by cold and the weariness of travel, and played with as gay a spirit as if they had merely walked to the end of a pier at Blackpool.

  Roll Out the Barrel

  Though the troops have learnt to provide nearly all their own amusement, they have as yet found no means of repairing their lack of beer. The men are well fed, and Army rations, in nearly every unit, are handsomely supplemented by fish. But they would be much happier if their diet included a little malt and hops. Icelandic beer is the depressing sort known as near-beer, and though arrangements have been made with a local brewery to produce a stronger and rather more palatable lager, there is not nearly enough to satisfy the thirst of an English garrison, and owing to the difficulties of transport it is not always possible to give the most northerly troops their meagre share. Were the brewery supplied with sufficient malt and casks, it could presumably meet the demand ; or the Army, perhaps, which has so ingeniously created Mobile Laundries and Mobile Baths, might consider the provision of Mobile Breweries.

  It may be argued, of course, that life can be supported without beer, and melancholy experience proves that such an existence is, indeed, not impossible. But though beer is not an absolute necessity, it is to Englishmen the first, the most requisite, the most wholesome of luxuries. And the Iceland Force deserves its pint. It is an admirable force. It has served us well and kept its spirit high. Let a shipload or two of decent ale be sent to cheer it against another winter.

  V. Icelandic Pictures

  Should anyone have difficulty in picturing the whole Icelandic scene, it may help him if he begins by imag
ining Ireland, grown appreciably in size and translated to the edge of the Arctic Circle, where summer is without night, and winter monstrously dark. He must deprive Ireland of nearly all its roads ; elevate the larger part of it to several thousand feet, and cover it with an ice-cap ; complicate it with extinct or quiescent volcanoes and hot springs ; girdle it with swamps and lava fields and furious winds ; and give it a population of largely-built and sturdy men, of handsome young women.

  The young women, with their fine figures, carry themselves like athletes. They have, in general, beautiful hair, which they dress attentively, and on top of which—in Reykjavik, at least—they clap the quaint forms of modern hats. Hats like a lid, like a slanting shelf, like a cross between a shako and a horse’s hoof. Some to the male eye merely comical, some elegant, but all up-to-date. Many of the elder women, however, still wear their national costume, which is dignified and attractive: a velvet skull-cap, tasselled, on long-braided hair, a formal apron over the dress, an ample shawl.

  There is throughout the country a great regard for literature and music, and the piano is a popular instrument. During a voyage round the east coast of Iceland I met a pianist who showed the most remarkable devotion to her art.

  The sea was rough, a turbulent meeting-place of wind and tide, and the ship was plunging steeply, then rolling horribly off its plunge. But a young woman, with pale yet resolute face, was playing a piano in the saloon, and a couple of young men, clearly unhappy, sat listening to her. She finished her piece in a hurry, and went out in order to be sick. Then, stern and composed, she returned and began to play another tune. The young men wore a far-away expression.

  I thought I recognised the new tune as a Swedish song I once had heard. I crossed the saloon and asked her the name of it; but she had no English. The two young men, with much courtesy, emerged from their depression and came to our assistance. There was some debate, a mustering of their English, and then one of them explained: “The song is called by two names, one Danish and one Icelandic. In consequence of the Danish name it is called A day is not a day without love. But in consequence of the Icelandic name it is called On the waves of the wild sea.”

  It does not require a psychologist to see here a difference of temper in the two countries ; and the sterner preference of the northern island was obviously conditioned by its geography. … On this side the coastline was treacherous and flat, but sprouted stony pinnacles. From the viewless land a ledge of rock appeared, with reefs before it on which the sea broke in grey fountains. Shoreward of the ledge lay the wreck of a fishing-boat and farther in, a much older wreck was a heap of rusty iron plates. Here was the entrance to a harbour, a seemingly impossible entrance between sandy bars and through steep waves that crumbled on either side to foam.

  Spartan Views

  Farther north we came into a fjord, bleak and barren as I thought, and saw a narrow little village sitting nakedly on a hillside. The houses were white, and the hill was white with snow. It all looked very cold and comfortless, but an officer who had been in Iceland for nearly a year said appreciatively: “That’s rather a nice little place, isn’t it? It must be quite a sun-trap in summer.”

  The troops in our sub-Arctic garrison have learnt a Spartan view of life. They have become acclimatised to bleakness, and in the farthest north they speak contemptuously of the relaxing air of Reykjavik. “It’s always muggy down there,” they say. “You might as well be in England.”

  This was April, but in the north-easterly fjords the snow still lay to the water’s edge. Soldiers in white clothes, ski-shod, were climbing a broken slope above the usual Nissen hamlet and a stream, new-melted, that came rushing down a steep ravine. They turned, ran swiftly down hill, came into line, and quickly found firing positions. They were tall, good-looking men, very fond of ski-ing, and already trained to do thirty miles a day. They had had a good sports meeting a few days before. One of the most popular events was a V.C. race to bring in stuffed sacks from the far side of a broad, half-frozen stream.

  There was something like a road on one side of this fjord. It was holed like a colander and partly flooded. It crossed the bed of a stream and a tremulous wooden bridge. The hillside rose above, terraced with volcanic ramparts, roofed as steeply as a cathedral nave. The road, for some relief, ran down to the beach. Bumping and banging, our truck over-ran the weedy shingle, charged a boulder or two, and turned again into uphill ruts.

  We left the truck and climbed to a higher camp. The snow, beside a beaten track, was still shoulder-high. A frozen waterfall hung glimmering in the mist. A week or two before some officers, on skis, had crossed the snow-filled camp from roof to roof. Rations had to be brought from the water’s edge, man-hauled in sledges, a six-hour job. Between the fjord and the rest of Iceland there was no communication except by sea, and a ship came only at longish intervals. Were anyone so clumsy, during the winter months, as to break a couple of lamp chimneys, then his hut, for most of the time, had to live in darkness. The soldiers lived in the risk of such tribulations as beset an Arctic explorer.

  Spring Meetings

  In these narrow fjords they see nothing of the sun, except its occasional light on the mountain-tops, for three or four months in the year. And when the sun at last looks down on them, there is a great feeling of triumph and release. When the returning sun first touches their roofs the Icelanders make holiday and feast their neighbours. Servants and friends sit down together, served by the mistress of the house, and eat a ritual pancake—which, if stuffed with cream, needs no such excuse.

  Spring had already come to the farthest north. From the shores of a shallow bay the snow had all receded, and the brown land shone cleanly in the sun. On a rocky islet there was the smallest flush of green.

  In a broad valley a village of widely dispersed Nissen huts lay between a river and the mountains. The shoulders of the mountains were still white and the upper glens full of snow, but the lowlands were bare. Here and there, in some small field, there was the first green of new grass, and a mile away, a cold bright blue, lay a steep-sided fjord.

  One of the Nissens was being spring-cleaned. A dozen pairs of skis and ski-ing sticks stood against the wall, and the men’s faces, shining with grease, were a polished brown. They had just come down from four days’ exercise in the snow. This was the last of their winter tours. They had carried with them, on sleighs drawn by Greenland huskies, their food and tents and sleeping-bags. They had built an igloo, they had manœuvred in the high recesses of the hills, and fired their rifles at dazzling targets. Their own country was the Fenland, and few of them, in their civil life, had ever seen a mountain.

  In a neighbouring valley there was a sudden clamour as the engines started of a troop of Bren carriers. They stood, undiscoverable, in well concealed stables that had been built, of turf and stones, with ingenuity and much labour, into the side of a hill. The builders and the drivers were Yorkshire Territorials.

  The carriers were driven out, formed line ahead, and with a shattering din went swiftly up a small steep slope and down a gully strewn with lava pebbles, the size of cricket balls and cannon balls. Tossing and lurching, one heard the lava cricket balls exploding like gun-fire against the steel belly of one’s carrier.

  They changed direction, formed line abreast, and careered across a stony moor. A broad stream lay ahead. The carriers put their noses down the bank and seemed to hover for a moment. Then, with a great splashing and fountaining, plunged into the water. The water of the stream—it was, in other days, a famous salmon river—rose high against their sides, but without difficulty they crossed it. One of the carriers, earlier in the year, had encountered a small glacier, and been carried over a forty-foot cliff on to the rocky beach of a fjord. It was rescued, little the worse for its drop. Like the Yorkshire-men who drive them, the carriers are toughly made.

  National Character Revealed

  We are a conservative people. … There was a cookery school nearby, where the Sergeant-Instructor spoke of the serious trouble
he had had with some Cornishmen for whom he was cooking. Cornish pasty was on the menu, but the War Office’s notion of a Cornish pasty differed from that of Cornwall, and the men, with much indignation, had utterly refused the meagre dish he offered them. Cornish pasty they had been promised, and they meant to have it. And a Cornish pasty measured eighteen inches long by eight inches broad, or was no such thing, they declared.

  We returned to the sea. On the north-west coast were tall cliffs that rose to snow-clad mountains which went climbing into snowy cloud, multiplying their peaks and shoulders. To the south the land was blue with white patterns, but to the north the untroubled snow was bright gold in the evening sun.

  The southward sky was dark and the weather turned rough. The Captain and his Chief Officer, both Scotsmen, were in a mood of mournful philosophy. They spoke about the manifold ills of to-day. Thought of such things, said one—a big, superbly healthy-looking man—kept him awake at night till he went nearly mad. Our education was to blame, said the other. Our educational system was getting worse and worse. … We are a conservative people.

  Reykjavik and the surrounding country, when we left them, had been drab and earthy, but now the grass had come and fields were green. New energy was also at work among the soldiers, and Gunners, Infantry, and Sappers went about their duties with the utmost vigour. There was training, of course: Field Gunners mobile in the hills, Coast Gunners shooting with laudable accuracy at targets in the sea. There was labour on the roads, unending labour, and new camp construction and the building of fortifications. There were soldiers who did navvy work for eight hours a day, stood-to at the prescribed hours, performed their minor duties, and in their spare time played football on a field which—before it became such a thing—was a volcanic refuse-dump, bestrewn with enormous boulders. Our soldiers found nothing ready-made in Iceland. Everything had to be built, and all their domestic amenities are the fruit of labour.