The Naked Island | Page 8

either but no one at all con cerned with us. We were, by that time, however, developing con siderable initiative in these matters. We knew that we had to get to the camp of the 2,'15th Field Regiment at Holdsworthy. We therefore walked the town till we found one of the regiment's trucks and then clambered aboard. We sat in it for an hour till its crew returned, then we drove out with them to Holdsworthy, having re fused to be evicted by them.
In a surprisingly short time, although no one in the regiment had expected us or been warned of our arrival, we were given a meal (in which good Australian beef had miraculously been transformed into the most noisome stew), a cup of hot cocoa, a palliasse on which to lie, and a tent in which to sleep. For the first time I felt that I was really in the Army and wondered what the subsequent days of training would bring.

Very quickly I found out. They brought weeks of rookie training from an N.C.O. whose knowledge of textbook soldiering was as inti mate as his language was bawdy. There were endless lectures on the art of stripping down both rifles and machine guns. The same N.C.O. could strip and remount a Lewis machine gun blindfold and with heavy gloves on. He could also play the piano blindfold and with heavy gloves on. He would do either at the drop of a hat and of the two operations he was proudest of the latter, though the former was Infinitely the more artistic.
The weeks drew on. At the behest each dawn of a redheaded sergeant major whom I detested, I peeled about one million pounds of potatoes and disposed of about one million gallons of urine which was collected in latrine pans outside each hut each night and was especially prolific on beer nights*
I got lumps under my arms from my vaccination and lumps in the groin from my inoculations, I learnt that a Short Arm Parade had nothing to do with small arms, side arms or shouldering arms and that, at its best, it could only be described as Presenting Arms. I learnt how to hoolc up all the pieces of webbing with which we had been issued till they formed the one uncomfortable harness, and I learnt how to crawl out the back fence of the camp so that I could go absent without leave till my pay expired under the strain.
I heard sufficient foul language in five days to deter me from ever using anything but the King's English for the next five years (though not enough to blind me to the fact that on occasions the Australian uses his "bloodies" and "bastards" with a rhythmic grace of which I in my more orthodox style could never be capable). I absorbed the principles and practice of field gunnery almost with pleasure, although I never ceased to be irritated by the instructor's maxim (which he repeated with infantile pleasure) that "A gunner doesn't walk: he doesn't run he FLIES," And I never learnt to salute officers whom I regarded as dopes with the smallest degree of conviction. Moreover one day I was paid. The possibility of being paid in the Army had frankly never occurred to me. Five shillings a day it was. 1 I was most surprised.
Finally I learnt to keep quite level an eyebrow which had a de plorable tendency to rise most noticeably whenever I observed any of the innumerable follies of Army administration and which had already, after only two months service, earned me three charges for "dumb insolence,"
The last of these occasions had been when a gun crew, of which I was a member, practised gun drill round a non-existent gun. We
"This amount earned us the title of Five-bob-a-day butchers" from a pacifist Labour member who had never seen military service of any kind (and conse quently was made a high-ranking member of the wartime Labour Cabinet). wound imaginary elevating gear: levelled imaginary clinometres: hunched imaginary shells into imaginary breeches taking care (by clenching one's fist) that one's fingers were not amputated by the slamming of imaginary breech blocks. All this we had done with the most admirable composure, although I had never been good at this playing at soldiers.
Then we were ordered by the "gun s" officer to drag our imaginary gun with imaginary dragropes. Still our composure was beyond re proof. Next we were ordered to coil our imaginary dragropes, hang them on the front of the imaginary gun shield, hook up our non existent gun and ammunition limber to our non-existent tractor and leap aboard with drilled precision onto the non-existent tractor's non-existent seats.
All this we did with the external composure and ardour of lunatics playing their demented games. Six