The Naked Island | Page 3

and started pounding his pockets one after the other in the
frenzied manner of all smokers who know quite well that they have no
cigarettes but wish to give the impression that this is a fact they have
only just discovered. Finally, with an air of childlike candour, which
was most unbecoming, he turned to me and said: "Wouldn't it, eh?
clean out of smokes! Got a cigarette to spare, laddy?" I said I was sorry,
I hadn t. "Got the makings?" he persisted, and his brown face, with its

short ginger moustache, assumed an air of pleading even less pleasing
than the one of candour.
I said I didn't smoke. Making the best of it, he laughed abruptly and
inevitably remarked, "Don't smoke: don't drink and don't go out with
bad women." He then turned to the private who was the clerk in the
office, and, abandoning all pretence of pleading, said peremptorily,
"Give us a fag, Snowy," and Snowy, with considerable ill-grace, passed
him over a cigarette. The sergeant then slapped all his pockets again
one after the other so, rather wearily, Snowy also tossed over his
matches. The sergeant lit up, inhaled deeply, blew a cloud of smoke out
of the hut door towards the gentlemen's lavatory and then tiring for the
moment of swelling His Majesty's Forces- stepped out of the office into
the sunlight of Martin Place.
"Be back in half an hour, Snow, * he said, tossing him his matches.
"You, laddy," he added, "you come back at two and well have transport
for you over to Victoria Barracks." Another cloud of smoke and he was
gone.
"That bastard," observed Snow, with detached calm, "is the great est
cold bite in the A.I.F.!" And, having delivered himself of this verdict,
he, too, turned his back on me and began gloomily going through a vast
pile of Army forms. Ignored by all in this my latest attempt to fight the
Germans, I followed the sergeant's example and stepped out into the
sunlight of Martin Pkce. Probably, I thought, I would gp for a swim
All of these trivial incidents were to control my destiny. As I stepped
out of the hut, I was hailed by a boyhood friend who, looking most
surprised, said, "You joining up?" and when I nodded, asked, "What
unit?"
"God knows," I told himit didn't seem important anyway.
"Well, what branch of the Army?" he asked.
"What do you mean, what branch?" I demanded. It had frankly never
occurred to me that armies had branches. As far as I was concerned,

impelled by one's sense of duty, or by whatever other motive it was,
one just joined the Army and killed Germans.
"Well," he explained, "infantry, artillery, A.S.C., sappers what branch?"
"I don't know," I assured him, "they haven't told me. Infantry, I
suppose." This appeared to shock him greatly. The infantry, appar ently,
were not at all a good thing. The infantry were just foot- sloggers the
P.B .1. "You'd better come up and see Dad,' he told me: and so, being
an obliging youth, I went up and saw Dad. *
Dad was a solicitor, who asked all sorts of penetrating questions about
my future military plans, none of which, to his unconcealed dismay, I
could answer. Finally, he made the fateful decision.
"You'd better join your father's old unit," he said firmly. "I know the
C.O. Ill write him a note and get him to apply for you. Then when you
go out to Victoria Barracks, you'll be requisitioned."
"I'll be what?" I asked.
"Requisitioned," he said. Whatever it was, I didn't like the sound of it.
But I had been well brought up, and he was an old friend of the family,
so I merely repeated the word "requisitioned," noting mentally that it
was very uncouth, and said politely, "Thank you, sir," and left. Thus,
though fortunately at that moment I was bliss fully unaware of the fact,
was my entire future settled by the playing of brass bands, the sudden
desire of a recruiting sergeant for a smoke rather than an immediate
recruit, and the firm pulling of strings by an old friend of the family the
better to procure that heart-warming procedure known as
"requisitioning."

Arrived at Victoria Barracks, all did not go smoothly not at all
smoothly. We recruits (there were about a dozen of us that day) had
been greeted with overwhelming bonhomie by yet another ser geant, a
middle-aged man with less charm than stomach the latter being firmly
girt up by a pair of vast trousers and yards of webbing belt. He had a

ready line of patter, "Just this way, son," he had said. "You'll be right,
me boy . . . just sit here and well have you fixed up before