Arrived at Aldershot, I got on a ’bus which seemed to be pointing in the right direction and, as we set off, asked the conductor where might be No. 1 R.A.S.C. Training Centre. ‘’Ow the ’ell d’you expect me to know?’ he replied. This was my first experience of the ‘Ask a silly question’ syndrome. I was no longer Dr Adams’s son or a scholar of Worcester. I was a stranger mug who seriously expected civilians to know about military topography. But then, whom could I ask? A policeman, a soldier? What did other people do? I got out my papers to have another look at them. At this moment some kindly passenger said ‘What’s the barracks, son?’ They were called, I now saw, ‘Buller’ (one of the more unsuccessful generals of the Boer War). I was told where to get off the ’bus and which way to go. I arrived, was directed to some building or other to check in and found others doing the same.
For those who have not had the pleasure of going to Aldershot, I had better try to describe it. Of course, this was fifty years ago, but it’s all still there - or most of it. Before the nineteenth century, soldiers used to be accommodated by being billeted, in larger or smaller groups as practicable, in the homes of local civilians or anywhere else that was thought suitable. This was, of course, an untidy and unsatisfactory system in several respects - difficulty of transmitting orders, quarrelling with civilians, lack of discipline, robbery and so on. It was the Duke of Wellington who promoted the idea of barracks, so that soldiers could be concentrated and disciplined in places where military interests and values did not clash with civilian ones. In addition to barracks in most county towns, special concentrations grew up in what were judged to be suitable places, e.g., Aldershot, Bulford and Catterick. Bulford, of course, is on Salisbury Plain, where soldiers can train and manoeuvre without getting in too many people’s way. It is easy to see why Aldershot was favoured. It is an easy journey to and from London and it is largely surrounded by land of no use for farming - heather, silver birch and pines, that sort of country. Some of the outlying barrack blocks are actually among the heather.
The barracks - I only got to know Buller, but no doubt they are all much the same – possess a uniquely bleak and dispiriting quality, something like workhouses or the precincts of old, Victorian hospitals. I would guess that they were built between about 1840 and 1880. You would not be terribly surprised to see Privates Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd come round the corner, with pillbox hats, swagger canes and big moustaches. The barracks are neither town nor country. Civilians have no haunts nor business there, and there are no trees, no flowers or grass, no shops and no pubs. Birds are restricted to sparrows. Between the red-brick barrack blocks, married quarters, guard-rooms, offices and training sheds lie bare, level areas of asphalt and featureless, straight roads. The centre of each barracks is the barrack square, about 40,000 square feet of open hard-standing, where people drill and drill and drill. The square is a sacred place. You cannot walk on it (assuming you wanted to) except in the way of duty. You may not smoke within about a mile of it. (I quote Corporal Edwards.) A barracks is like a naval ship; there is nothing there but what is necessary, utilitarian and practical. This, in my day, meant that there were no baths and no showers. The barrack blocks were all exactly the same, consisting of a large, rectangular room with a floor of polished (and that means polished slippery) boards, about thirty iron beds and lockers and a lavatory and some wash-basins at one end. To live in such an environment day in and day out, seldom going anywhere else, you have to adapt yourself, like an evolving animal, and become conformed to your surroundings.
In the 1914-18 war, as far as I can make out, people were frequently commissioned as officers straight out of civilian life. If you could pass as a gentleman you could pass as an officer. But as the casualties mounted, officers were often promoted from the ranks. R. C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End portrays what was no doubt a typical set-up in many companies. The company commander, Stanhope, is a gentleman and a veteran (though pathetically young). His second-in-command, Osborne, is an ex-schoolmaster, also a gentleman. Lieutenant Hibbert is a somewhat pseudo-gentleman, Lieutenant Trotter is a promoted Other Rank, not a gentleman, and 2nd Lieutenant Raleigh is a boy straight from his public school.
In Hitler’s war the set-up was rather different. At the outset the Daily Mirror and other newspapers declared that all promotions to officer should be by merit from the ranks. Everyone should initially have to join up in the ranks. The Dean of Worcester, Colonel Wilkinson (who had been a Guards officer and an aide to General Plumer in the 1914-18 war), head of the Oxford University Officers Training Corps, maintained openly and stoutly that this was rubbish and a waste of time and money. If someone was obviously officer-material, he should be sent straight to an Officer Cadet Training Unit (O.C.T.U.). Colonel Wilkinson did not really get away with this and it did him little good, for it was much remarked upon that although he held his appointment as head of the Oxford O.T.C. all through the war, he never received any honour in recognition of his services.
However, Oxford, Cambridge and some other universities were enabled, as it were, to meet Colonel Wilkinson half-way. Undergraduates who joined the University O.T.C. had (as we have seen) a say in what they should be mobilized into and also had their calling-up date deferred so that they could take special examinations devised more or less ad hoc. What was more, although they were not called up as cadets, they joined the ranks as ‘potential cadets’ and were put into special training squads with others like themselves. It was in such a squad - Brander Squad - that I found myself that mid-July. Who Brander may have been I am not at all sure, but it is of interest, though probably only a coincidence, that a ‘Brander’ is mentioned by Kipling as a commanding officer in one of the Mulvaney-Ortheris stones.
In Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, Guy Crouchback joins the Royal Corps of Halberdiers as a ‘probationary officer’, along with twenty others. Apart from the fact that we were not ‘probationary officers’ but ‘potential cadets’, Brander Squad’s daily life and regime were very similar to Guy Crouchback’s. I suppose there were about thirty of us. We lived in a barrack-room (though a few of us spilled over into unoccupied married quarters) and messed in the communal Other Ranks’ mess-room. Apart from messing, however, we really had little or nothing to do with the other Other Ranks, except for our squad commander, Corporal Edwards, and the various N.C.O. instructors who took us for weapon training, P.T., anti-gas and so on. We lived among ourselves and this made all the difference.
Corporal Edwards was a regular, about twenty-five, I suppose. I think it is greatly to his credit that he was able to act naturally and be his rough self, yet impose his authority on us and command our liking and respect. He pushed us hard in those long summer days, when the asphalt turned sticky and the bonnet of a lorry became too hot to touch. After all, his own standing and promotion depended on whether we were a credit to him. But he was no bully and he never had recourse to any authority but his own. He had a sharp sense of humour, he talked with us off duty and got to know us and he shared with us the life of the barrack-room. He instructed us in how to get a high shine on a pair of army boots, how to iron battle-dress trousers until they had a knife-edge crease up to the top of the thigh, and all the rest of the bullshit. He had an impressive stock of regulars’ catchwords and sayings, one or other of which could be applied to almost any situation. ‘By Jesus, you blokes want to get some service in.’ ‘Get a grip of it!’ ‘Don’t touch ’im, ’e’ll break.’ ‘Well, fall down with it, then!’ ‘Lot of bloomin’ joskins!’ (‘Joskin’ is a regular soldiers’ term for a recruit.) ‘That belt’s bloody milo.’ (No good at all.) ‘Jesus wants you for a sunbeam!’ Initially, we were all a bit shocked by Edwards’s casual taking of the name of Jesus, but the good fellow meant not the least harm by it, and after a few weeks we used to do it to each other, in inverted commas, as it were. ‘By Jesus, Dicky, you’ll never get by with that rifle.’ I started as ‘Dicky’, but one day Edwards said we were all Goons, except me, and I was ‘The Jeep’.2 After this everyone called me ‘Jeep’. I had never had a nickname before and liked it.
And what did we do for those two months, from July to September? We bashed the square. Crikey, did we bash that square? We did foot-drill and arms-drill and platoon drill, up and down and round and round the square and the adjacent drill-shed, while the sweat ran off us in streams. I can’t remember that we ever did this in shirt-sleeve order. What I do remember is that we had to keep our battle-dress jackets buttoned to the neck and the two hooks-and-eyes, at the top, fastened all the time. You had thick khaki close round your throat from morning till night, and a thick khaki shirt underneath that. Off-duty, too, whether in barracks or going down-town, in shop or pub., all the time, you had to be clipped up to the throat. If one of the barracks N.C.O.s, who knew you, happened to see a clip undone, you might get away with no more than a roar of ‘Sun-bathing, eh? Do it up!’ But out of barracks, a stranger red-cap (military police) would be quite likely to put you on a charge - or threaten to, anyway. This would not improve the prospects of a potential cadet.
In some ways it wasn’t a bad life. You had no cares or responsibilities apart from your boots, clothes, rifle and bedspace; the food was quite good and as our drill and bullshit steadily improved, Edwards became positively avuncular. He was, at bottom, as contemptuous as we of the continual orders to ‘bump’ the barrack-room floor till it shone, highly polish both our pairs of boots and so on. I remember him, one evening, giving way to an outburst. ‘’Ighly polished! ’Ighly polished! That’s all they thinks about, ’ighly polished! ’Ere, I’ll tell you what! If a bloody Messerschmitt come over, they’d want it ’ighly polished!’ This took our fancy, and the highly polished Messerschmitt became part of Brander Squad’s folklore.
We all got very fit on sunshine, plenty of food, no worries and vigorous work: but by jingo, it was a hard day we did and no mistake! Reveille sounded at five o’clock a.m. By ten past five - it didn’t matter how you were dressed: shirt and trousers were enough — you had to be out on the asphalt to give your name to the N.C.O. taking roll-call. Then there would be various things to be done: shining the taps in the washroom and so on, bumping the barrack-room floor and folding the blankets (no sheets, of course) until they were entirely uniform. After breakfast, the first hour’s drill of the day began at eight. Then would follow weapon training (Lewis gun, Bren gun, anti-tank rifle, bayonet, etc.) under Sergeant Tierney, a caustic but humorous Irishman with a biting tongue. There would be P.T. in the gym. - really arduous - followed by anti-gas instruction from Corporal Pryor, a Yorkshireman whose nickname was ‘Moosty ha-a-ay’. (‘Now phosgene ’as a pronounced odour of moosty ’a-a-ay.’) More drill, followed by instructions on, perhaps, badges of rank, by Edwards. (‘You, Jeep, badger ranker brigadier.’ ‘Three stars, corporal, in triangular formation, surmounted by a crown.’ ‘Yeah, three piss-pots, eh, surmounted by - you, Anderson, badger ranker major-general.’)
About every third night we would have to provide four men for guard duty, under an N.C.O. who might or might not be Edwards. Three men, each in turn, were sentries outside the guard-room, with two spells each of two hours on duty. When the guard were inspected at guard-mounting at quarter to six in the evening, the smartest man of the four was appointed ‘stick man’; the softest job. He had to go to the cook-house for the cocoa, wash up the supper, carry messages (if any) and so on. The trouble with guard duty, apart from the boredom of four hours as sentry, was that you never got any sleep. You might manage to doze, but somebody or something was always bumping about, or clattering or talking in the guard-room. You went sleepless back to the following day’s square-bashing.
Whenever we sat down during the day - for a gas lecture, or a talk from the Padre or the M.O. (on V.D.) - most of us simply could not help falling asleep, and the N.C.O.s were relatively easy on this. I learned how to sleep while looking as though you weren’t, but very often the N.C.O.s were in almost as bad a case as we were. Sleep in the barrack-room tended to be fitful, too, on account of interruptions. If you could get six hours in, you were darned lucky.
The interesting feature of this regime was that it included scarcely anything that a regular recruit’s training would not have included in, say, 1935. We knew nothing of the course of the war and hardly ever saw a newspaper, much less an officer. We learned nothing about the Germans or about motorized transport (although we were R.A.S.C.). We did have, I think, two days on the rifle ranges, where, we were told, we had acquitted ourselves well. Otherwise we lived an almost barrack-enclosed life, among instructors whose way of doing things had remained virtually unaffected by the war. It was, as I say, an easy life after the intellectual demands of Oxford, and at least all hardships were shared in common. We were lucky, too, in that we had no one objectionable in the squad. No one was malicious and no one was hated.
One day I found myself on some sort of coal fatigue with an old sweat, a regular. (I say ‘old’: I suppose he may have been forty.) Whatever we had been told to do - I can’t remember what it was, now - was plainly silly and ill considered, involving about twice as much work as was necessary. After a while the old soldier said to me I’ll tell yer what, lad. This is a right balls-up.’ I said I heartily agreed and we toiled on. About five minutes later he remarked ‘This is the biggest balls-up since Calonso.’ ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘what was Calonso?’ ‘Well, I don’t rightly know,’ said he, ‘but that was the biggest balls-up there ever was.’
This intrigued me, and later on - much later on - when opportunity offered, I put in a bit of research. The result was interesting. Colenso (sic), according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is a village in Natal, about sixteen miles from Ladysmith. It was the scene of an action fought between the Boers and the British under Sir Redvers Buller on 15 December 1899. The British lost. I suppose my old sweat might have joined up in 1920 or thereabouts. He must have acquired the name orally, as a proverbial term in the regular army for a military fiasco.
For part of the time - quite a few weeks, as I recall - that we were at Aldershot, there was a prisoner in the guard-room. We would come across him when we were on guard duty at night, and sometimes by day on the square. What he had done I never heard - probably overstayed his leave, I expect - but my Lord, was he atoning for it? He appeared a very ordinary sort of man, medium height with sandy hair, and he was always, or nearly always, in a state of desperate exhaustion, gasping, glassy-eyed and half-oblivious. He was taken out on the square in full equipment (no rifle) and drilled - often at the double - from morning till night by the regimental police. It was terrible to see, for he was being tortured, in effect. Even now I can hear the N.C.O.’s voice sounding through the guard-room window: ‘Left-right-left-right-left-right-left-right-left-turn, double march, left-right-left-right, mark time. Come on, pick ‘em up!’ Eventually the man would be marched back into the guard-room and would collapse, panting and pouring with sweat, on one of the cots. He never spoke. I have never seen anyone in a similarly dreadful state of suffering and exhaustion: and while he was still trembling and huddled, the time would come for the next spell outside. His life can only have been a nightmare that never stopped.
In the end, he broke a bone in his foot, marking time, and they took him away, to be seen no more - by Brander Squad, anyway.
We had one day out from the barracks about once a week, when we were put in a ‘bus and taken out to the Tank Obstacle. Hitler was still expected at any time and part of the plan of defence was to dig a ditch across the whole of southern England deep enough and wide enough to constitute an effective anti-tank obstacle. All available personnel worked one day a week on this job. Here we were allowed to strip: we stripped to the waist and worked in pairs, shovelling aside the already dug earth. It was a notable sight, the long line of the great ditch and the stripped, toiling men stretching away into the sun-haze, glistening with sweat.
By this time enemy aircraft (including highly polished Messerschmitts) had begun to appear over England, and every platoon or squad on the Tank Trap had to detail two men for anti-aircraft duty, sitting and waiting beside a Lewis light machine gun mounted on a tall tripod, pointing upwards and capable of being turned in a full circle. Except that the sun was hot, and you had no shade, this really was a soft option, and I was delighted to find myself detailed for it one August morning. I took with me on the ’bus my Complete Works of Shakespeare in one volume - the same that I had been given under Hiscocks at Bradfield. (I still have it, though coverless.) I spent the long, hot day reading As You Like It, which I had never read before. That play still recalls the tank trap, the dirt flying and the clink and glitter of the shovels in the sun. No enemy aircraft ever came.
I said there were no baths or showers in barracks. There weren’t; and by this time, reader, you may have inferred that this deficiency was rather boring. It was; but there was one mighty solace and refuge, may God bless her eternally, Miss Daniels’ Home. Who Miss Daniels was I don’t know, but to her everlasting credit she established her Home in Aldershot for the comfort of the brutal soldiery. Here you could have a hot bath, even if you did have to queue for it; and, I think, it was free. And you could follow it with eggs and bacon for about one shilling and sixpence - for in those early days of the war, rationing had not yet begun to bite, and there were still plenty of eggs, bacon, bananas and chocolate. Many a comforting hour of an evening did I spend at Miss Daniels’ Home, clean, replete and ready to appreciate the interesting variety of Victorian religious pictures on the walls. Is it still functioning, I wonder? I hope so.
I think I know how starlings must feel. One retained, of course, some sense of individuality, but at bottom you genuinely felt yourself to be primarily a particle of a group. Brander Squad’s luck or good or bad treatment were yours, and even letters from home didn’t really dilute this feeling much.
Like Guy Crouchback and his fellows, we used to chant aloud, en masse, the rhythms of obedience to drill orders. ‘Ow-pen Or-der: March!’ Edwards would shout, and the squad, responding, would yell: ‘One, one-two, stop: up, two, three, shuffle!’
Once, half the squad disappeared, quite literally, for about five days. It happened in this way. Our normal daily training routine was always liable to interruption on account of ‘the exigencies of the service’, which during that summer meant flap in one form or another; in other words, an emergency due to the real or supposed activities of the enemy. It was usually some form of nocturnal stand-to, but this particular jamboree went several times better than that.
One fine morning, Company Sergeant-Major Byrne told the good Corporal Edwards that Brander Squad were required to provide a guard for a train full of ammunition parked on a siding somewhere in the locality. We weren’t told where: nobody was ever told where anything was in those days, and all place names on roads, stations and signposts had been obliterated or removed. Something between twelve and sixteen of us altogether were detailed off. Edwards stayed behind with the remainder (which included me) while the guard embussed — rifles, bayonets, gasmasks, tin hats and full equipment - and departed for their unknown destination. They would be gone, we were told, for at least twenty-four hours.
They were: and for longer; and yet longer. After two days we began to speculate and wonder. The rumour was that the train had vanished, taking the guard with it; and apparently — or so it was whispered - no one in Buller Barracks, not even that distant and lofty presence, the rarely glimpsed Captain Cousmaker, knew where.
Three days passed. Brander Squad now had a distinct sense of amputation. Our hard-won, supple, homogeneous flexibility had been dislocated. We continued, as best as we could, drilling and stripping down the Lewis gun, but the truth was that the N.C.O.s didn’t really know what to do with us. For all sorts of purposes, half a squad is like half a novel; viable in a way (e.g., Weir of Hermiston; Edwin Drood), but essentially deficient and dissatisfying. There came to be longer and longer spells of ‘Fall out for a smoke’ or of bumping the barrack-room floor.
One blazing afternoon, as we were bumping away on boards already as bright as a mirror and slippery as a skating rink, there sounded a trampling of boots in the entrance up by the washroom, and in came the guard, trudging in ones, twos and threes, greeting no one and looking at nobody, like people who have had more than enough and can’t really believe it’s over. I remember Frank Espley and Bob Young walking boot by boot past my bedspace without a glance or a word; and Frank leaning his rifle against the wall, sitting down on his bed and beginning to unlace his boots with an air of distance and detachment from everyone. Their unforced aloofness, the guard, conferred on them a kind of authority (‘Much too good to tell to you brutes,’ said Stalky), and it was only after a while, and that by means of patient questioning, that we learned the full story.
You must understand, for a start, that any guard — even a single night’s guard - is a great bore and no joke. As I’ve said, you never really got any sleep beyond a light doze. You can’t take off your equipment or sit down to a meal. The two-hour spells of sentry-go – two hours out of every six - are tedious and wearisome. Frank Espley & Co. had had four or five days of this, all day and all night. Why had they vanished, none knew where, not even their company commander? The answer lies in the bitter disposition of the time. In that war, the entire public was conditioned to become security-mad, and in all earnest did so. Lovers did not tell their girls where they were stationed. Every vicar, waiter and tea-lady was under suspicion as a possible fifth columnist.* Invasion was an imminent reality which everyone expected as surely as rain. ‘Not may - they will come!’
Now in these circumstances an ammunition train is no fun at all; and as the time passed, the R.E. officer commanding that particular train became more and more conscious of the fact. He felt sure the Germans must know its whereabouts. That kindly old girl who had brought a tray-full of cups of tea for the lads down her garden: how much did she know? Come to think of it, her wireless aerial looked odd. Probably by this time the entire neighbourhood knew it was an ammunition train. What if a Dornier, escorted by two ’ighly polished Messerschmitts, were to come blazing and bombing down the railway track so plainly visible from the air? Enemy aircraft were over England every day now. A train stationary for several days in a siding, with sentries all round it, was asking for trouble; a natural sitter. And if it went up?
Eventually the officer determined that action was no more than his plain duty. He went to see the local Rail Transport Officer (or R.T.O. - also an R.E.), and succeeded in getting a movement order for the train. As few people as possible should know where it went. The R.A.S.C. guard need not know; they could just as easily go on guarding without knowing. Of course, Buller Barracks should have been told, but somehow that got overlooked. The train departed westward by night, taking the guard with it. They never knew where it stopped, although Frank Espley told me later that he thought it was some lonely spot in east Dorset. All they really knew was that long before they were relieved, they had had more than enough. What struck them as the last straw was that in addition to sentry duty, two people were required continuously on the ack-ack Lewis gun. No enemy aircraft came, however.
We ended those thrill-packed two months with a passing-out parade like you never saw. A new colonel, Colonel Bolton, had just taken over the barracks and this dignitary actually had the gall to send Brander Squad — Brander Squad! — off parade to make themselves smarter, saying he would see us again at three o’clock that afternoon. Edwards was incensed; his Brander Squad, whose glitter shone from beyond the horizon like the aurora borealis! Angry and resentful, we got down to work again in the barrack-room, Brasso, boot-polish, flat-iron and bianco. ‘’Ere, Jeep,’ said Edwards, ‘give me them trousers. I’ll put a crease in ‘em such as ’e’ll never check.’ And so he did. I think it was Idwal Pugh who asked Edwards, very dead-pan, if he thought we should commandeer a couple of stretchers and four members of another squad to carry us severally onto the square.
Well, we did pass out, and learned that about three-fifths of us had been selected to go on to the O.C.T.U. at Boscombe. I was one of the lucky ones, but somehow (I felt without being told) only just. In those days I looked so slight and thin, with blue eyes and very fair hair — anything but a soldier. Still, this was not the Army, but the nation in arms. I felt sorry for Brander friends left behind. They remained potential cadets, but had to go back to square one and do another two months. In the event, however, they nearly all got to O.C.T.U. and ended up as officers; a decidedly mixed blessing, as I was to learn.