The Naked Island | Page 3

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 you can say Jack Robinson." . * . "Now you boys, get to know one another." . . . And finally presumably to hasten the process of getting to know one another "Just come this way and strip off "
So we all went that way and stripped off and for the next three quarters of an hour remained stripped off, whilst the Army lost all interest in us. We just stood round surreptitiously comparing sun tans and birth marks, until finally, six feet of complete disinterest, in