His Second War Read online

  Before the war was eight days old he had received instructions to report at his depot on the 22nd.

  16

  21 SEPTEMBER 1939

  There was a meeting of the Wine Committee that evening at the Savile. There were five other members on the committee. But only three turned up. He had not meant to go, but at the last moment, in a last-moment mood he had decided to. This was his last day in mufti. To-morrow he would be a very junior officer: to-night he was a person of some age, position and experience. He had been a member of the Club for eighteen years. Through the medium of the last war he had grown up quickly. He had had the luck as a writer to have an early, establishing success. At the age of twenty-three he had found that most of his friends and colleagues were men of over thirty. To-night he would be discussing with a couple of fairly senior treasury officials the Club’s policy in view of the changed conditions of the war. To-morrow he would be calling men of thirty “Sir.” Usually he kept rather quiet at these meetings. He knew enough about wine to know that he knew nothing. His position on the committee was due to his consequent capacity to act as a middleman between the taste of the expert and the wishes of the general member. Usually he waited till his opinion was invited and then gave it with some diffidence. But to-night, the knowledge that this was a last occasion made him initiate and maintain a point of view; to speak indeed with such conviction that he carried the several points he raised. It amused him that the last time he was to have a right to speak authoritatively at a conference, he should be using his right on so “unaustere” a subject.

  17

  22 SEPTEMBER 1939

  It is the modern fashion to assert that everyone is the opposite of what he seems; that the blustering bully suffers from an inferiority complex, that the rake is the victim of a New England conscience, that the heart of a Samson beats behind the mild manners of a city clerk. To some extent he believed that this was true of his own case. He had been told by his friends after they had come to know him, that he gave an invariable first impression of extreme shyness. In actual fact he did not know what shyness was. He was completely unselfconscious. When he walked into a room for the first time, he was so interested in what he was going to see, whom he was going to meet, that it never occurred to him to wonder whether he himself was making a fortunate or unfortunate impression.

  “And perhaps for that reason,” he thought as he sat in the train, in uniform for the first time for nearly twenty years, “perhaps for that reason, I shall make a good impression now.”

  For he was nervous, desperately nervous. He was on his way to play a strange game, on a strange wicket, among strangers. He was not returning to a familiar atmosphere. In the last war he had never joined the Wessex. Because of his fierceness on the football field, he had been nicknamed “the tank” at Sandhurst, and when an application for volunteers for the Tank Corps had been sent round, his friends had insisted on entering his name for him in the list, so that instead of joining his regiment when he had “passed out,” he had gone on a machine-gun course at Grantham—a course that had so interested him that he had become a machine-gunner instead of a Tank officer.

  There would not probably be a single person at the depot that he knew. He would not be, as the other reservists, returning among friends. On the contrary, there would be the prejudice against him that there always was against the officer who had not served with his own regiment. There would be a prejudice against him too because he was a writer. People were suspicious of the writer: they felt that writers were “different” which of course they were. They thought that writers were seeing them as copy, which of course they were. People were interested to meet writers, but they did not want to be involved with them. At this very moment possibly, the colonel was saying to the adjutant: “What on earth are we to do with the fellow? Isn’t there any course that we can send him on?”

  The colonel would expect him, because he was a writer, to be inefficient. And he would be inefficient probably, to begin with. Not because he was a writer, but because it was eighteen years since he had been in khaki, because his active service had been as a machine-gunner, because everything he had learnt at Sandhurst would be out-of-date.

  Would he find it all very difficult, he asked himself. He would be living hard where for many years he had been living soft. That did not worry him. Camp beds and leaking tents and night ops in the rain were things to be taken in one’s stride. It was in other respects that he was doubtful. How was he, who had been so very free—a free-lance for fifteen years—going to take the loss of freedom. He had been the master of his own time now for so long. Would he find it easy to fit into a time-table? Would he, who had been his own master, find it difficult to work with and under people. Up to now he had chosen the people that he worked with. Now they would be chosen for him. Sooner or later he was bound to find himself under the direct command of someone to whom he was utterly allergic, but to whom he would have to pay the respect and deference that military discipline demanded. Was he going to find that very difficult? One by one the various doubts confronted him as the train hurried through a countryside so peaceful in the autumn sunlight that it was impossible to believe it was at war. It was not till the train had run into the small West Country station that he really pulled himself together.

  “Come on, now,” he adjured himself, “you’re going to show them that a writer can make a rather better soldier than a country squire.”

  The honour of his profession was in his hands.

  18

  MARABOUT BARRACKS

  It was the second time he had been to Dorchester. He had come down five years before for a cricket tour. He had been playing the Wessex Rangers. The ground was a mile or so down the road, towards the coast. He had come by motor. He would never have seen the town at all if it had not rained, if during the interval of a playless morning he had not taken the opportunity of driving over to a friend’s house that was in the neighbourhood. Through a rainspattered windscreen he had a momentary glimpse of the high, grey, turreted entrance to the Barracks. Sentries were changing guard. He craned his neck to watch them. An officer in a mackintosh had walked quickly by, saluting as the sentry presented arms. An officer of field rank. That might have been me, he had thought, if I hadn’t had this itch to write.

  To-day it was through sunlight that he saw those grey, high turrets. Five years ago in the rain they had seemed forbidding. They did not now, in the warm autumn sunlight. They seemed, on the contrary, both welcoming and impressive, as they stood at the head of the long straight broad street that ran east and west through the city that eighteen hundred years ago had been called Durnovaria. It was a modern Victorian gateway, but it had an air of dignity, of tradition.

  It was half-past twelve. In one corner of the square a couple of platoons in shorts and vests were chasing each other in one of those circular games that relieve the strain and monotony of P.T. A company was being marched to dinner; a company of very raw recruits, very unmartial in their sloppy battledress, their respirators swinging clumsily against their sides, the enamel cups in their hands completing the impression they gave of being disguised civilians. In the centre of the square a couple of squads were drilling with the self-conscious smartness that reveals the month-old soldier. Never had he seen so much activity, heard so much noise in a barrack square. Not only were the instructors bawling out their commands, but the men as they drilled were shouting out the time: “one stop, two stop, three.” In a way everything was different. The uniforms, the drill, the way of drilling; yet in its essentials all was as it was. In its essentials army life remains unchanged. Tolstoy’s description of the Napoleonic battles, based on his experiences of Sevastopol, had rung true of the Somme and Ypres.

  As he stood by his taxi, looking across the square, at the sight so little different of what once had been so familiar, he felt his shoulders stiffen. He drew a long, slow breath into his lungs. It was good, very good to be back again. How often during the intervening years had he not regrett
ed that the itch to write had taken him from a life so essentially congenial. His doubts in the railway carriage were forgotten. As he turned to the Orderly Room to report he had a sense of the years falling from his shoulders. He was resuming an unfinished chapter, at the page where he had put it by.

  19

  THE FIRST NIGHT

  They were in tents and would be until the beginning of October. It had been hot, stiflingly, under the canvas when he had come in there before tea. But now after dinner with the damp rising from the ground, the temperature, even if one sat right over the one small oil stove, was chilly. He rose to his feet: it was close on ten and he was tired. “Good night,” he said, “I’m going where it’s warm.”

  The tents had been painted over for the black-out. But there was a moon. He could distinguish his own quite easily. It was a Friday, pay night. The troops were singing as they came back from town. Mexico Way, Roll Out the Barrel, Siegfried Line.

  He unlaced the flap of his tent. His camp bed was set out, his valise unrolled. His mackintosh sheet was on the ground with his shaving, washing and cleaning kit set out on it. His greatcoat and spare tunic hung on hangers from nails driven into the tent pole. It was hard to believe that the night before he had been sleeping in his parents’ flat in Highgate. It was hard to believe that he had ever slept anywhere but here. Now that he was back it was hard to believe that he had ever been away.

  It was cold and he undressed quickly. His sleeping-bag was warm and soft, as it had always been. The camp bed moulded itself to his body. He snuggled himself up cosily. In civilian life he was an early riser. He was usually at his desk by six o’clock. But to-morrow when reveille went, he would answer, he knew, its summons with the old reluctance.

  20

  “OLD SWEATS”

  Eleven other reservists had rejoined that day. They were all of them men of around forty. All but two wore last-war medals. Two-thirds of them had retired in 1919, the remainder in 1924 when the Geddes axe had offered a bonus of £1,000 to anyone who retired to the Reserve. Only three of them had ever had any idea of making the army their career. Those who had stayed on for a few years had only done so because after the last war nothing immediate had lain to hand, and a trip to India had seemed an experience that it would be foolish to forgo. They had gone to Sandhurst because in war-time it had seemed the easiest, the pleasantest and in the long run the most effective way of getting a commission. During the seventeen to twenty years since they had folded away their uniforms they had not one of them attended a single lecture or parade.

  None of them had been interviewed before their recall. In the previous January, after Munich, the War Office had sent out a circular asking what technical or other qualifications they had acquired in the interval. But no effort had been made to discover what manner of men would be returning to the regiments and rank that they had abandoned twenty years before. To the mobilizing authorities they were presumably what they had been in 1919, captains or lieutenants who had been through Sandhurst. No attempt had been made to discover what changes those twenty years had worked on them. For it was not just a question of their having forgotten such military knowledge as they had possessed, it was not only that they had grown stiff-limbed and short of breath, that they could no longer play Rugby football; the change went deeper than that, much deeper. Twenty years had turned them into different people.

  Though two or three of them had been roughly contemporaries of his at Sandhurst, he was not conscious of having seen any of them before. To their brother officers they were recognizable. He was witness to a number of those recognitions. There would be a checked step, a pause, a self-searching, self-questioning look then suddenly a smile of recognition. “Why, heavens, but it is you after all. You’ve changed so little that I hardly knew you.” Their brother officers were looking for the points of resemblance, but he to whom they were strangers could look for the points of difference, not only between them and the other subalterns in the mess, but between them and the senior officers, the majors and lieutenant-colonels who had once been their contemporaries, but whom twenty years of soldiering had set into the military mould.

  In a few weeks they too would have fallen back with the army routine into the military pattern. But at the moment they still carried about with them the aura of their civilian lives. He could picture them as they had been a few hours earlier, in civilian clothes. By the time a man is forty his face has become a diary; his character and way of life are written there. The puffiness of self-indulgence, the strained lines of overwork, the air of authority that success carries with it, the sleekness of the worldling, the mingled aggression and apprehension of the man who feels that the road has started to run downhill—all were there among the eleven reservists who were now his brother officers. Twenty years of civilian life had fitted them for some things, unfitted them for others, had fitted them certainly for very different roles in what was beginning to be described as a total war, although only a minute portion of the population was as yet engaged in it. “I suppose,” he thought, “it’s going to work out all right.”

  How it was to work out, though, no one knew. Least of all the Colonel, who had commanded the first battalion in France in 1918 and who had himself only been recalled from the reserve, which he had joined in ’36, a few days earlier.

  “Frankly, gentlemen,” he said in his first address to them, “I do not know what plans the War Office may have for you. I had been informed that you were to report here yesterday, but I have received no instructions as to what to do with you. I am delighted to have you here. Many of you are old friends of mine. The depot is your home. At the same time, you will, I think, appreciate my difficulties. Strictly speaking this is not the depot any longer. It is an I.T.C., an Infantry Training Centre. Our job here is to train on a fixed training programme the recruits who are drafted to us month by month. I have a fixed establishment made up of a training cadre of officers and N.C.O.s posted to us from the second battalion before it sailed for France, and from the fourth, the territorial battalion, before it went into camp. Where you are all going to fit into this organization I do not yet quite see.

  “I have only a few vacancies on my actual establishment, and it is very clear that men of your age cannot be posted to the territorial battalion or to the second battalion as platoon commanders. No doubt the War Office has its own plans. There must be a number of appointments that can only be filled appropriately by men of responsibility, with military training and experience. Orders for these postings will no doubt in the course of time come through. In the meantime, I shall post you to separate companies where you will be able to pick up a general idea of what we’re doing. And I shall arrange a short refresher course to give you some idea of some of the more recent changes that have taken place in drill and tactics.

  “As I said, I shall do my best, and I am, I repeat, delighted to see you all. But we have a very great deal of work on hand here with the training of these recruits, and I hope that none of you will feel neglected if I’m not able to pay you quite as much attention as I should like. I’m sure,” he concluded hopefully, “that everything will sort itself out in a day or two.”

  Which was what a great many people were saying during those days while the Germans who had “sorted things out” many years before, were crashing their way through Poland.

  21

  THE NEW DRAFT, OCTOBER 1939

  He stood at the gateway of the barracks watching the batch of new recruits stream up the main street from the station. Every month a new draft arrived. They were issued in London with their tickets. They were instructed to take the minimum of luggage. They would be met at the station, they were told. They need make no plans. The army was planning for them now. There were two hundred of them, belonging to the same age group—twenty-two, twenty-three. Which was about the sum, he thought, of what they had in common.

  Seldom had he seen a more heterogenous collection. They were of all ages, all classes, all conditions. Some were fit and stron
g; some bloatedly flabby, others undernourished; some looked as though they had never breathed fresh air. Some were shabby because they had no good clothes to wear, others because they did not want to spoil good clothes in camp. Some had come in their “Sunday suits,” in the hope of making a good impression, of suggesting themselves as candidates for a commission. Others were smartly dressed in a “last-time” spirit, wondering when they would wear such clothes again. Some were in tweeds. Some had a provincial dapperness. Others in corduroys and heavy boots were straight from manual labour in the fields. Some were bareheaded. Some wore Homburgs. The majority had caps. A few in disregard of the practicalities of packing had come in bowlers. They had as little in common with one another as the crowd that pours through the turnstiles at Lord’s during the last half-hour of some second afternoon when members from the pavilion, barrackers from the ring and ticket-holders from the mound jostle against each other in the Finchley Road. And within twenty-four hours they would have been re-processed into the uniformity of khaki.

  For a day or two they would retain the personal idiosyncrasies of civilian life. Some would slouch, some would stoop, some would shuffle. But within a week the military machine would have stamped them with its pattern.

  Beside him, watching the draft file past, was a territorial major with the 1915 ribbon.