The Naked Island | Page 9

men in the middle of an empty parade ground stood resting their bottoms on nothing as if con vinced that they were seated in a 30-hundredweight truck, to which was attached a Mark IV eighteen-pounder and its limber not a trace of derision on any one face.
Then it happened. The officer, obsessed with the excitement of this exhilarating manoeuvre, screamed at us; "Sit at attention there. When you mount your tractor you sit at attention!" and up shot my eye brow. In that non-existent truck with its six petrified passengers, the only thing that moved was my eyebrow and immediately I was on a charge. Same old thing. Dumb insolence. I resolved thencefor ward to keep the offending feature horizontal.
And having thus acquired both a knowledge of gun drill and a sense of discipline, I was transferred into Battery Headquarters to learn the more precise art of ranging the guns onto their targets.
I moved into a galvanized iron hut which, in those winter months, was so freezing at night that its occupants fairly refrigerated. Re quests for extra blankets were met with the restatement of a sum mertime regulation, which limited blanket issues to three. Our quar termaster sergeant devoted his entire life to the cause of issuing nothing if possible and as little as he decently could if it were not Consequently, we got no extra bedding from him and everyone retired to sleep at nights dressed in every single article of his clothing issue, not excluding the two pairs of obscene-looking long wool len underpants.

I soon came to like most of the men in the hut. They were an assorted bunch, certainly, but likable. Four of them had enlisted together (with yet a fifth, who, being a sergeant, dwelt elsewhere) from an accountants firm Piddington, Magee, Shackle, Robinson. Of them only Piddington was to survive. Magee and Robinson died in Thailand on the Japanese railway, Shackle died on the Sandakan March in Borneo. Then there were the two Icetons Johnny and Bluey, who was called Bluey, in the Australian fashion, because he had red hair. They had not known each other before their Army days and had met in the regiment quite by chance. They became inseparable friends. Johnny was to be killed at Parit Sulong: Bluey lost an arm in an action the day before,
Wimpey, who slept opposite me, was small and quiet and never washed. Ponchard, his mate, was seldom in camp, being more or less permanently A.W.O.L. This tendency he was unable to curb even in Thailand when in 1943 I saw him wandering in the jungle, apparently mad and miles from his own camp.
Ronnie Welsh, stocky, dark-haired, played a delightful game of football and in battle proved that he had no fear and had never known it. He was a bombardier and a man whom I respected whole heartedly His fellow bombardier, Rosenberg (a solicitor of nearly forty), was a pleasant soul with a passion for slide-rule computa tionswhich took him hours and for shaving with a cut-throat razor and no mirror which he did in a matter of seconds. He, too, died in Thailand.
Hugh Moore, who had been at the university with me, was to share in many of the unpleasant events which subsequently befell me, Clif t, though a gunnery officer of the 1914 war and the only man in the regiment who combined a fluent knowledge of the Malayan language with a high speed on the morse key, was to languish as a gunner (his talents quite wasted) for the duration.
These were the men whose company I was to share for the next few months. They were friendly and generous to an incredible de gree.
There were, of course, others whose names now escape me others, like the two friends who, whenever the price of rabbit skins became high, gave up soldiering for weeks on end while they trapped rabbits instead. Rabbit trapping had been their civilian occupation. Theirs was an economic delinquency, not one of discipline they could not resist high prices for rabbit skinsl The C.O. treated them with understanding, knowing that as soon as prices dropped they would be back, amiable and conscientious as ever.
Finally, there were the drivers always grumbling: always in trouble: and always ready to lend a hand (after a reasonable period of protesting) in any difficulty.

Thus, for months we trained. The regiment had been formed for fifteen months and had become extremely efficient. It wanted now to put its efficiency to some purpose overseas. For months more nothing happened.
But in July the regiment was given its final embarkation leave and everyone went home to say good-bye before departing overseas for the serious business of war*
My own farewells turned out to be completely unsatisfactory. Having determined to have no fuss, and my family having determined like