A private in the guards

Preface

The fortune of war gave me eighteen months in the ranks in the Guards. I have thought I could perform no better service than describe the social life and the spirit in these historic regiments of the British Army. I should explain for those who do not know it, that the Bill Browns are the Grenadiers, the Jocks are Scots Guards, the Taffies are the Welsh Guards, the Micks are the Irish, and the Goalies are the Coldstream. Amongst the rank and file they are only referred to by their nicknames. So also in this book. An intense rivalry reigns amongst these regiments, and comparisons are nowhere more odious. The presence of the young Prince of Wales in the Grenadiers no doubt gave that regiment great prestige, but the Scots Guards yield to none. The record of each and all for the four years of conflict is most remarkable. However, it has not been the war which has been most interesting for me, but the men. We had amongst us a number of those American volunteers, the advance party of America's great manhood, who were feted in London in 1917, and I have used the point of view of these Americans and their adventures together with my own as a touch-stone for our Army institutions and customs. "Fitz" of

Virginia, and "Red" and H who yearned to

charge with the Guards, and "Gurt" who died through ministering to a fallen comrade, and

B , the Hamlet of St. Louis who was always

getting punished through his talking so much, and vi PREFACE

''Will" who would rather take the medicine of punishment than pay in coin, all were very fine fellows full of character and interest. Two of these boys died, all shone one way or another, all sufifered. The training in England was of the hardest, for Guards' discipline is the most terrible in the world. On the other hand, the pomp and circumstance of Wellington Barracks was a relief to the drudgery. I suppose, by the way, our American volunteers were amongst the very few Americans who have served as sentries at Buckingham Palace and St. James's Palace — in the King's Guard. It was a curious experience for them.

The life in France was very arduous and full of dangers. All was suffered cheerfully in the name of the great cause. After the success of the Germans in the spring of 1918 there was something which almost amounted to despair in some British units. But I well remember the miracle which the appearance of the Americans wrought "in the Spirit." One day in June some thousands of them marched past our dour, war-worn Guards, and they made an immense impression of faith and pluck. On that day, even in the extremity of Allied failure, we knew we must win through at last. I would not put down pen without a word of thanks to America. She was our great bulwark of defence at our worst hour, and again in November 1918 through American idealism we were saved innumerable extra deaths and sufferings. There is so much rivalry in the air now, but all Britain is at heart profoundly thankful to the American nation.

Stephen Graham.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Notes on Discipline i

II Little Sparta Barracks 2i

II Little Sparta Barracks

"To the Asylum and Barracks" says a finger-post pointing upward to Little Sparta, and you climb the hill to the place where you must serve as a novice in soldiering. The lunatic asylum and the barracks stand side by side, and the ineffable sergeant-instructor when he has you in his care is bound to inquire whether by chance you have climbed over the wall.

As you climb the steep hill you inevitably wonder what sort of gruelling you will be put through in the famous soldier factory. It has a fame which is somewhat thrilling, the severest training-ground in England, the place where the most rigorous discipline in Europe is maintained. Not even Prussian Guards had a more terrible time in the making. "If you go to Little Sparta it's kill or cure." "If you don't break down during the training you've got a remarkably fine constitution." "If you get through your course at Little Sparta you can get through anything."

There is a poor but large village without village life, long lines of poor cottages and poky, mysterious shops; there are sweet-stuff shops, tea-shops, cobblers' shops, diminutive drapers, and crowded little grocers, where the soldiers buy macaroni boxes to make their packs square; there is the Asylum tavern, there is a row of labourers' cottages with lodgings for men who live out, and just outside the gates the little establishment where a man and his wife make a living by selling the soldiers sausage and mashed. At night there is ever the characteristic tramp of guardsmen's feet, the steady beat of army boots as twos and threes stamp past in the style learned upon the barrack square.

Civilians have a garishly emaciated look beside the robust recruits, there is a curious humility about their ways, a gentleness, a hesitancy. But even the recruit of a week has a self-assurance and resoluteness which make one feel that khaki has the future with it, and that the men in black belong to an order which is passing away. Fallacious thought!

Little Sparta is, however, the one first-class institution of this place. In the midst of a sort of down-at-heel outer Suburbia it is thorough, and knows it. A fine sentry is pacing to and fro at the gate. A picquet, in voluminous great-coat and freshly khakied belt, is standing to attention with cane in hand waiting to be sent on a message that may break the tedium of his two-hour immobility. There stands the gloomy guard-house, with its cells for misdemeanants. Beyond that, but just inside the gates, is the abortive-looking church, which looks as if religion had with difficulty been squeezed in; after the church is the barrack square, where pandemonium reigns, and all manner of tiny groups of recruits are marching and countermarching, and yelling numbers at the top of their voices; beyond the square stand the blocks of the barrack buildings, fine and stern and gloomy, high and many-windowed.

"What a lot of queer fellows come in at this gate," says a Tafify to a Bill Brown as I enter the barracks in civilian attire on the day of enlistment. *'Yes, they come in queer, but they all pass out the same in three months," says the Welshman.

I realise that I have entered the soldier factory in which you go in at one end civilian and pass out eventually at the other soldier of the King. And this was a very special type of factory, with a very special type of product. The soldiers made here were supposed to be much more deadly to the enemy than those made at any other depot. However, if you were in any way developed or individualised as a civilian it was a stiff process, being wrought into shape and standardised to type.

I suppose the British nation coming to the barrack-gates did exhibit an extraordinary diversity, a divergency from type that in the long run must have somewhat disgusted the sergeant-instructors, and they must have been pretty well "fed up" with the British people before they had been long at their task. I was such an undisciplined person that I felt I owed the army some apology for myself. Still, the fact of enlistment is the surrender of an individual to the army; the individual has surrendered and the army has to make the best of him. He has offered his body and soul and will and mind as so much raw material — the responsibility is not his, however much he may be sworn at in days to come.

An immense gulf seems to separate the man who wrote from the man who shoulders the rifle. It is as if he had died, as if I who write had once been he and died, and then been born again as a soldier.

When for the first time after many months I took up the pen again and tried to write, I felt that even my hands had changed. For at Little Sparta you never touch the rifle with your hand in any action of the drill but you strike it. The squad stands with blood streaming from fingers and palms, and the instructor yells for "noise, more noise — ye're afraid of hitting it." So with rough, swollen hands I sit now and try to think and write as of yore, whilst my mind in a gloomy mood seems waiting rather for orders.

My last day in civilian life was calm. I believed that the suppression of my thought in a material way would cause it to shine forth more strongly by and by. What I dreaded most was the taking away of the marks of individuality. For I knew well that the army hated all distinguishing marks except its own stripes and stars and crowns and patches, and that the general appearance of the ordinary civilian was always somewhat more or less of an offence to a good soldier. I used to think that in the drab, dull way of the modern tailor every one was really in uniform even in peace-time — the bowler hat, the dark clothes, the stick, the newspaper in hand, this was the livery of the commercial service, and I rebelled. I wore my distinguishing marks. However, it soon became clear that the army was the straiter sect. When I came to Little Sparta the whole army seemed to glare at me, as uniformity stares at diversity and discipline at freedom.

I was a day in civilian attire, and then the process set in: change of clothes, of boots, hair off, buttons polished. The "trained sweat" ^ who cut my hair said it seemed like murder to him, but I'd be hanged if the sergeant-major saw how long it was. I scrubbed floors and tables, blackleaded the grates, shined the everlasting ration-tins. I went out with the scavenging cart and picked up leaves and paper; I was on cook-house fatigue, sergeants'-mess fatigue, washed out the floors of the canteens, on sewage fatigue, I with a scoop ten feet long, a companion, also a new recruit, with a large muckholder. And, ''Daddy," said he facetiously, 'Svhat did you do in the Great War?"

A new squad was in formation, and we were set all manner of fatigues. In the midst of these the reality of civilian life seemed to be slipping back and receding like shifting sands under the feet. There were twenty or thirty of us, and we none of us felt sure of ourselves as soldiers, and I had misgivings that I should never correspond to type. Worse doubts were to come when appearing on parade-ground in the new squad to drill. Mere change of dress does not change a man. Originality and individual expression shone through my uniform, and was at odds with it, so that I looked as if I had just put on a friend's uniform or exchanged clothes with him for a joke. Several others in the same squad were more or less in the same case as I. But I think that for the first week no one came to our squad to drill it or inspect it but his eyes lighted on me particularly, and he asked with some querulousness, ^'Who is that man?"

1 Trained siveai, slang name for the barrack-room old soldier who trains raw recruits in "cleanliness."

Temporary lance-corporals seemed to have power of life and death over us, and thought out ever more dreadful oaths and vulgar epithets as we came daily under their notice.

An oldish fellow, who had broken down under the severe training, and was now held, against all conscience, as an employed man, a tailor, instead of being returned to his family in Perth, warned several of us not to take what was said to us to heart. "The great process of bullying and intimidation has set in," said he. "They try and break you at the beginning and take all your pride out of you. But it'll be better later on. Never answer any of them back or get angry. It's not worth it."

Another man also gave us excellent advice. "Never catch the sergeant's eye," said he. "The sergeants hate being looked at."

The officers had very little to do with us in the initial stages of training. A very great personage to us was the brigade sergeant-major, with the royal arms embroidered on his sleeve. He was kind to the recruits but a terror to the non-commissioned officers. His sharp eye often detected a corporal or sergeant in the act of striking the men. He seemed to regard it as one of the worst offences possible, and he never failed to administer a sharp reprimand to an offender. The men had no greater grievance than that of being struck whilst on parade, and it made the blood boil to be struck oneself or to see men near forty years of age struck by corporals or sergeants of twenty-three or twenty-four without the possibility of striking back. The sergeant-major also tried to stop the more exuberantly filthy language that was used, but in that he was much less feared by the instructors. Even when he was near them, the latter had a way of standing quite close to you and delivering a whispered imprecatory address on adultery, the birth of Jesus, the sins of Sodom, and what not. The instructors, who had a very free hand whilst "knocking civvies into shape," said the sort of things which every man instinctively feels can only be answered by blows. Descriptive justice can never be done to this theme, so important in itself, this particular aspect of the training. For although there is a French book in which such obscenity as is used has been set down as heard, it is not really possible in English.

It is not even desirable, except for one reason — that reason being the assumption that bad language, the "hard swearing," is only a trait of which we may be indulgently proud, a few bloodies and damns, and that's all. It is much more than that, and it is frantically disgusting and terrible. It could not be helped in the middle of a great war, and no one naturally would find fault with the old peace-time professional army, whatever language it found most convenient, but it is different when the whole nation is brought under the military yoke. If conscription is going to survive, let us remind all private soldiers who have come through the obscenity and detested it all the while, lest as fathers of the rising generation they should regard it in a more lenient spirit, and think it harmless for their sons when at eighteen or nineteen they leave the purer atmosphere of home or school or factory or office for the training-ground. Army life has many compensations, but there are thousands of quiet youths in every generation who would be corrupted and spoiled by the sort of treatment received during the Great War. And among these quiet youths would be found most of the really gifted and promising. The army is an institution somewhat like a public school, in that each fresh generation going into it inherits the undying part of the language and manners of those who have gone before. The old controls the new, and it is impossible to escape traditions which, besides being manifest and glorious, are often secret and evil as well. It is impossible to make a fresh start and train the young nation in a completely wholesome, positive, and ideal atmosphere. It seems strange, however, that ''the red little, dead little army" should now set the way of life and expression for the whole nation in arms, and that we should all have gone through such a miserable eye of a needle. But at the moment When practically all have been brought in, it is possible to look around and see that the whole system is staffed by the survivors of the pre-1914 army. They have made the tone. The hope is that if military service comes in as a national feature of our life after the war we shall purify the system and make the army a decent continuation school, where a young man can grow nobly to manhood among his fellows. As a squad we were nominally in charge of one very young corporal, but as there were many supernumerary instructors on the parade-ground, there were many sergeants and corporals who tried their arts upon us, and we were drilled day by day not by one but by ten or twelve non-commissioned officers. For convenience I give them numbers, though they had no numbers really, and the numbers have no reference to their seniority or to any other facts of their military life.

Sergeant One ("Ginger") was somewhat of an old man on the barrack square. He was not so supple as he had been: his limbs and form had set long since — set in a curious regimental, wooden way. He was senior sergeant and instructor, but it was necessary for him, as for other instructors, to show recruits how the drill ought to be done.' He did the drill in front of us like a wooden-jointed soldier working on strings — his body had set to the type of the toy soldier — wooden, regimental, jerky, correct. He did not, I believe, turn out such good squads of recruits as some of the younger instructors. This was perhaps due to lack of youth and enthusiasm. When alone he could upon occasion be heard talking to himself, giving drill orders and making imaginary ranks of men form fours. Rather an amusing figure in his way, he ought to have risen long since to the rank of sergeant-major, but could never master vulgar fractions, and his long multiplication sums were generally wrong. He had a natural malice against educated men, and was never tired of saying that it did not take a college education to do this or do that. He was the most illiterate of the sergeants, had difficulty in explaining himself in words, and could often be heard saying in his jaunty voice: "Nah, I don't want you to do one of them theres, I want you to do one of them theres." When an officer came near he would coo at us like a dove, and be so vulgarly persuasive that we would grin, so patient and laboriously illustrative that he must have been thinking that he would be put down for promotion at last. He felt he knew how to manage officers. As soon, however, as the officer would be out of hearing he would blast and damn to make up for his patience. He was capable of frantic fits of anger, when he would use indescribable language, and threaten to strike right and left. He was always going to '^bash your silly head in." When he had us away from the barracks, on a field expedition where no one of higher rank was near to hear, he displayed the temperament of a madman. He certainly gave one the impression of having a mad streak in him, racing us far and wide over the mud, cursing and blinding like some old woman given to drink. We also formed the impression that he taught some parts of the drill incorrectly. When other non-commissioned officers pointed out mistakes that we were making he would say, "The captain '11 never fluff," and that was enough for him.

Sergeant No. 2 was a fierce, lean Edinburgh lad, who had been at the Battle of Loos and been wounded. He had the dour tone of his regiment developed par excellence. His whole idea in drilling and training was terror, and he seemed to get strange pleasure from giving all manner of people the shock of their lives, bursting suddenly upon them in military rage. He would be dressed before reveille, and be waiting at our door for the first sound of the bugle, to dash in and pull down half the collapsible beds in the room, screeching at us as if the enemy had arrived. He struck his rifle so violently in the drill that his hand was always bleeding, never looked any one fair in the face, but growled and snarled in his curious Scottish tone. He was a good instructor, but off parade he was known as the bun sergeant, owing to his proclivity for sharing men's parcels from home. One day when some one had bought a pot of jam he came into the room and said to another recruit, "Here, you, take that up to my bunk, will you?" And the jam was gone. He was reputed to have married a Salvation Army girl, and he neither drank nor swore, but he made a meal of conscientious objectors every day, prided himself on having chased some leader of an anti-conscription league round and round the drill square till he dropped in a faint. He would never take a German prisoner, and in general he was a thoroughgoing old army type.

He had a natural prejudice in favour of men hailing north of the Tweed, and if he found fault with a man in the squad he would ask:

"Where do ye come from?"

"Inverness," the recruit would perhaps reply.

"Don't tell that to me," he would blurt out in gutturals, but he would find no more fault with that recruit. If the luckless wight had answered "Liverpool" or "Tooting" or "Maidstone," the sergeant would tell him he'd got to "brighten his ideas up" and lead him a dog's life. He had a tremendous prejudice in favour of the "Jocks," and was never tired of twitting our brother regiment of England — the "Bill Browns," who, he averred,

"left us in the lurch at Loos." When he found out that I had been born in his own city he discovered no fault in me, but took a larger share in any parcels sent me. One evening he called me to his bunk and said, "Ye were a writer or something in civil life, weren't ye? Ah well, and this life doesn't suit me either, I can tell ye. I wasn't meant to be a soldier. Just take my bike and clean it, will ye?" Sergeant No. 3 was the humorous sergeant, a Whitechapel cockney, very fond of beer, and possessing an endless flow of humorous remarks. By the smartness of his salutes he often startled the officers. He did everything in an exaggerated way, and exhibited a whole series of idiosyncrasies and funniosities. Though a most excellent drill-instructor, a regular "Sergeant Whatshisname" who could drill a black man white, he was illiterate and unskilled and would not have made a decent living outside the army. They say that if a cockney gets into a Highland regiment he makes the best soldier of all. In Sergeant No. 3 the humour, the selfconceit, the natural cleverness and whimsicality of the coster ran riot. He had been turning out squads of soldiers as fast as they could be trained ever since August 1914, had not been interfered with by officers, and had developed a high degree of crankiness. His forte was "about turn and double march," and he broke men in by the most violent exercise. He could make us go faster and faster by accelerating his left-rights till our march was a dizzy madness, and he delighted in giving about turns following directly upon one another, so that the barrack walls spun past us. We streamed sweat, our hearts thumped, our wind went, we fell out and were rushed in again, and all the time the sergeant followed us with imprecations and jokes and commands. He was one of the most successful sergeants on the square and, despite his ways, he was very popular.

Sergeant No. 4 was a dark young fellow with a bushy black moustache and a most violent voice. To him we were always ruptured ducks or ruptured crows. He was a most successful drill-instructor. He was not so original as the rest, but felt it necessary to be funny. This he achieved by scaring the timid recruits. He had absorbed all the brutality of the soldiers' profession, and thought that brutality was humour.

Sergeant No. 5 was a genial ex-policeman given to drink.

Sergeant No. 6 was a quiet, careful sergeant who used no bad language, and of whom the men said with real appreciation, "He's a gentleman." He had the name of turning out very good squads.

Sergeant No. 7 was a boxer, who was also kind. He told us he had once been a religious man but the war had caused him to swear and to kill without an idea of mercy. He gave us, as it were, long P.S.A. talks punctuated by bayonet drill.

Sergeant No. 8, a bayonet-instructor of a brutal cast of intelligence, seemed by his conversation to be sexually mad. He would commonly say to massed squads when they had made a mistake:

"Wait for it, can't yer? Yer mother had to wait for you before you were born."

Most of his observations were of this kind, and his favourite way of bullying his men was by making indecent inquiries. It was very tedious, and made the drudgery of becoming a soldier rather worse.

Corporal 9 was a bayonet-instructor, a Welshman, who talked a great deal to us on the ethics of killing Germans. A very good fellow in his way, clean-mouthed, the right type, and similar to Sergeant 7.

Corporal 10, who took us a great deal, was young, stupid, foul, given to striking the men, a poor instructor, and very unpopular.

There were others, of course, but they had less to do with us, and the details of these probably give some notion of our masters.

The men who were coming in to be trained were those destined to fill the gaps in the army in the late winter and spring of 1918. They proved themselves in course of time to be as firm and brave and as effective as any that had gone before. It is even probable that the ordeal they were destined to stand in France and Belgium was the greatest of the war. In them Little Sparta was justified even more than in the others.

We were rather the last hundred thousand, the gleanings of British manhood. Not that we had come literally to the last hundred thousand recruits. The forty-to-fifty-years-of-age men had yet to be called up. But we were mostly "hard cases" of one kind or another, and there were a considerable number who would ordinarily have been considered unfit for our Spartan regiment even when reemits were scarce. Some also in a true and sensible national economy ought never to have been sent to fight.

My barrack-room neighbour on one side is a sturdy lead-puddler from Newcastle, nicknamed Wilkie Bard by Sergeant Three. He is a man with a mighty arm earning five or six pounds a week lifting huge weights of molten lead. He has his own wee house in one of those jaded Newcastle suburbs, which when walking through I have thought must be wretched to live in. But his wife and four children are there, and he is proud that he has never had a half house but always a whole house to himself. He enlisted the same day as I, and he looked so miserable that I tried to cheer him up. "Eh, man, but I do feel bad," said he. He has spent many a quarter of an hour telling me domestic details of his home in his broad tongue. The one on the other side is Songster, as some have called him, and he also is married and has four children; he nears forty, and has a daughter of seventeen. He has been taken from "the gas and brake department" of a northern railway — poor old Songster, the scapegoat of the squad. Further on in the room is Sandling Junction, a man who came from east of Kent instead of north of Forth, and suffered accordingly. He had a neck like a tram horse, and I remember one day Sergeant No. 8 got hold of it with both hands and squeezed it till his eyes dilated. He looked rather obstinate and dull, though I think he was only a characteristic south of England peasant. He was pointed out to the jocose Sergeant Three one day. The two stood facing one another, making a very comic couple. Then suddenly the sergeant seemed to brighten up with an idea. ''Oh, Sandling," said he, "fetch me my entrenching tool — and some flowers." The sergeant implied that if he drilled him long a grave and a wreath would become necessary.

We have also in the room B , a well-known

musical composer, rather an angel, and certainly of a very charming personality and a temperament unsuited to army life. The training was knocking all music out of him, his hands were like a navvy's, and when he had to go to Queen's Hall to hear one of his pieces performed, he had a nightmare with his fingers worse than that of Lady Macbeth. "The first thing people will notice when I come forward will be my dreadful hands," said he. But he worked hard at the drill. Sergeant 5, who had charge of him, was very kind. I don't think, however, any one realised the strain and torture of the mind in a man whose heart and soul is given to Art, given long since, and the mind and body suddenly given to the army. I watched it lay this man prostrate. Suddenly he was taken to the hospital, and he lay there in a wretched state for weeks. When he came out he was excused all drills and military exercises, but instead was put to do dirty domestic work. He was most conscientious, and used to sit in a corner of the barracks with the appalling ration-tins in a cloud of bath-brick dust, and he would scour, scour, scour for hours on end. Watching him one day when he was doing something else, I suddenly saw that his face no longer expressed music but reflected ration-tins; it was ration-tins all over — a most appalling physical expression. Even so, however, polishing ration-tins was better for him than the parade-ground, and he visibly relaxed and was always making jokes, sloping and presenting arms with the barrack-room broom and imitating the drill. In the army everything is done by numbers. On the command One you do this, on the command Two you do that, and