TROOPERS OF THE QUEEN.
GLIMPSES OF CERTAIN “POOR DEVILS” AND THE HELL THEY INHABITED.
The Queen’s Own (2nd) Regiment of Heavy Cavalry (The Queen’s Greys)
were under orders for India and the influence of great joy. That some
of its members were also under the influence of potent waters is
perhaps a platitudinous corollary.
… “And phwat the Divvle’s begone of me ould pal Patsy Flannigan, at
all, at all?” inquired Trooper Phelim O’Shaughnessy, entering the
barrack-room of E Troop of the Queen’s Greys, lying at Shorncliffe
Camp. “Divvle a shmell of the baste can I see, and me back from
furlough-leaf for minnuts. Has the schamer done the two-shtep widout
anny flure, as Oi’ve always foretould? Is ut atin’ his vegetables by
the roots he now is in the bone-orchard, and me owing the poor bhoy
foive shillin’? Where is he?”
“In ’orsepittle,” laconically replied Trooper Henry Hawker, late of
Whitechapel, without looking up from the jack-boot he was polishing.
“Phwat wid?” anxiously inquired the bereaved Phelim.
“Wot wiv’? Wiv’ callin’ ‘Threes abaht’ after one o’ the Young
Jocks,”[16] was the literal reply.
[16] A famous Hussar regiment.
“Begob that same must be a good hand wid his fisties—or was it a
shillaleigh?” mused the Irishman.
“’Eld the Helliot belt in Hinjer last year, they say,” continued the
Cockney. “_Good?_ Not’arf. I wouldn’t go an’ hinsult the bloke for the
price of a pot. No. ’Erbert ’Awker would not. (Chuck us yore
button-stick, young ’Enery Bone.) _Good?_ ’E’s a ’Oly Terror—and I
don’t know as there’s a man in the Queen’s Greys as could put ’im to
sleep—not unless it’s Matthewson,” and here Trooper Herbert Hawker
jerked his head in the direction of Trooper Damocles de Warrenne
(_alias_ D. Matthewson) who, seated on his truckle-bed, was engaged in
breathing hard, and rubbing harder, upon a brass helmet from which he
had unscrewed a black horse-hair plume.
Dam, arrayed in hob-nailed boots, turned-up overalls “authorized for
grooming,” and a “grey-back” shirt, looked indefinably a gentleman.
Trooper Herbert Hawker, in unlaced gymnasium shoes, “leathers,” and a
brown sweater (warranted not to show the dirt), looked quite definably
what he was, a Commercial Road ruffian; and his foreheadless face,
greasy cow-lick “quiff” (or fringe), and truculent expression, inspired
more disgust than confidence in the beholder.
His reference to Dam as the only likely champion of the Heavy Cavalry
against the Hussar was a tribute to the tremendous thrashing he had
received from “Trooper D. Matthewson” when the same had become
necessary after a long course of unresented petty annoyance. Hawker was
that very rare creature, a boaster, who made good, a bully of great
courage and determination, and a loud talker, who was a very active
doer; and the battle had been a terrible one.
The weary old joke of having a heavy valise pulled down on to one’s
upturned face from the shelf above, by means of a string, as one
sleeps, Dam had taken in good part. Being sent to the Rough-Riding
Sergeant-Major for the “Key of the Half Passage” by this senior
recruit, he did not mind in the least (though he could have kicked
himself for his gullibility when he learned that the “Half Passage” is
not a place, but a Riding-School manoeuvre, and escaped from the bitter
tongue of the incensed autocrat—called untimely from his tea! How the
man had _bristled_. Hair, eyebrows, moustache, buttons even—the
Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major had been rough indeed, and had done his
riding rough-shod over the wretched lad).
Being instructed to “go and get measured for his hoof-picker” Dam had
not resented, though he had considered it something of an insult to his
intelligence that Hawker should expect to “have” him so easily as that.
He had taken in good part the arrangement of his bed in such a way that
it collapsed and brought a pannikin of water down with it, and on to
it, in the middle of a cold night. He had received with good humour,
and then with silent contempt, the names of “Gussie the Bank Clurk,”
references to “broken-dahn torfs” and “tailor’s bleedn’ dummies,”
queries as to the amount of “time” he had got for the offence that made
him a “Queen’s Hard Bargain,” and various the other pleasantries
whereby Herbert showed his distaste for people whose accent differed
from his own, and whose tastes were unaccountable.
Dam had borne these things because he was certain he could thrash the
silly animal when the time came, and because he had a wholesome dread
of the all-too-inevitable military “crimes” (one of which fighting
is—as subversive of good order and military discipline).
It had come, however, and for Dam this exotic of the Ratcliffe Highway
had thereafter developed a vast admiration and an embarrassing
affection. It was a most difficult matter to avoid his companionship
when “walking-out” and also to avoid hurting his feelings.
It was a humiliating and chastening experience to the man, who had
supported himself by boxing in booths at fairs and show-grounds, to
find this “bloomin’ dook of a ‘Percy,’” this “lah-de-dar ‘Reggie’” who
looked askance at good bread-and-dripping, this finnicky “Clarence”
without a “bloody” to his conversation, this “blasted, up-the-pole[17]
‘Cecil’”—a man with a quicker guard, a harder punch, a smarter
ring-craft, a better wind, and a tougher appetite for “gruel” than
himself.
[17] Teetotal.
The occasion was furnished by a sad little experience.
Poor drunken Trooper Bear (once the Honourable MacMahon FitzUrse),
kindliest, weakest, gentlest of gentlemen, had lurched one bitter
soaking night (or early morning) into the barrack-room, singing in a
beautiful tenor:—
“Menez-moi” dit la belle,
“A la rive fidèle
Où l’on aime toujours.”
…—“Cette rive ma chère
On ne la connait guère
Au pays des amours.”….
Trooper Herbert Hawker had no appreciation for Theophile Gautier—or
perhaps none for being awakened from his warm slumbers.
“’Ere! stow that blarsted catawaulin’,” he roared, with a choice
selection from the Whitechapel tongue, in which he requested the
adjectived noun to be adverbially “quick about it, too”.
With a beatific smile upon his weak handsome face, Trooper Bear
staggered toward the speaker, blew him a kiss, and, in a vain endeavour
to seat himself upon the cot, collapsed upon the ground.
“You’re a….” (adverbially adjectived noun) shouted Hawker. “You ain’t a
man, you’re a….” “ σκιᾶς ὄναρ ἄνθρωπος” … “Man is the dream of a
shadow,” suggested Bear dreamily with a hiccup….
“D’yer know where you _are_, you …” roared Hawker.
“Dear Heart, I am in hell,” replied the recumbent one, “but by the
Mercy of God I’m splendidly drunk. Yes, hell. ‘_Lasciate ogni
speranza,_’ sweet Amaryllis. I am Morag of the Misty Way. _Mos’_ misty.
Milky Way. Yesh. Milk Punchy Way.” …
“I’ll give you all the _punch_ you’ll want, in abaht two ticks if you
don’t chuck it—you blarsted edjucated flea,” warned Hawker, half
rising.
Dam got up and pulled on his cloak preparatory to helping the
o’er-taken one to bed, as a well-aimed ammunition boot took the latter
nearly on the ear.
Struggling to his feet with the announcement that he was “the King’s
fair daughter, weighed in the balance and found—devilish heavy and very
drunk,” the unhappy youth lurched and fell upon the outraged Hawker—who
struck him a cruel blow in the face.
At the sound of the blow and heavy fall, Dam turned, saw the blood—and
went Stukeley-mad. Springing like a tiger upon Hawker he dragged him
from his cot and knocked him across it. In less than a minute he had
twice sent him to the boards, and it took half-a-dozen men on either
side to separate the combatants and get them to postpone the finish
till the morning. That night Dam dreamed his dream and, on the morrow,
behind the Riding-School, and in fifteen rounds, became, by common
consent, champion bruiser of the Queen’s Greys—by no ambition of his
own.
And so—as has been said—Trooper Henry Hawker ungrudgingly referred
Trooper Phelim O’Shaughnessy to him in the matter of reducing the pride
of the Young Jock who had dared to “desthroy” a dragoon.
Trooper Phelim O’Shaughnessy—in perfect-fitting glove-tight scarlet
stable-jacket (that never went near a stable, being in fact the smart
shell-jacket, shaped like an Eton coat, sacred to “walking-out”
purposes), dark blue overalls with broad white stripe, strapped over
half-wellington boots adorned with glittering swan-neck spurs, a
pill-box cap with white band and button, perched jauntily on three
hairs—also looked what he was, the ideal heavy-cavalry man, the
swaggering, swashbuckling trooper, _beau sabreur_, good all round and
all through….
The room in which these worthies and various others (varying also in
dress, from shirt and shorts to full review-order for Guard) had their
being, expressed the top note and last cry—or the lowest note and
deepest groan—of bleak, stark utilitarianism. Nowhere was there hint or
sign of grace and ornament. Bare deal-plank floor, bare white-washed
walls, plank and iron truckle beds, rough plank and iron trestle
tables, rough plank and iron benches, rough plank and iron boxes
clamped to bedsteads, all bore the same uniform impression of useful
ugliness, ugly utility. The apologist in search of a solitary encomium
might have called it clean—save around the hideous closed stove where
muddy boots, coal-dust, pipe-dottels, and the bitter-end of
five-a-penny “gaspers”[18] rebuked his rashness.
[18] Cigarettes.
A less inviting, less inspiring, less home-like room for human
habitation could scarce be found outside a jail. Perhaps this was the
less inappropriate in that a jail it was, to a small party of its
occupants—born and bred to better things.
The eye was grateful even for the note of cheer supplied by the red
cylindrical valise on the shelf above each cot, and by the occasional
scarlet tunic and stable-jacket. But for these it had been, to the
educated eye, an even more grim, grey, depressing,
beauty-and-joy-forsaken place than it was….
Dam (_alias_ Trooper D. Matthewson) placed the gleaming helmet upon his
callous straw-stuffed pillow, carefully rubbed the place where his hand
had last touched it, and then took from a peg his scarlet tunic with
its white collar, shoulder-straps and facings. Having satisfied himself
that to burnish further its glittering buttons would be to gild refined
gold, he commenced a vigorous brushing—for it was now his high ambition
to “get the stick”—in other words to be dismissed from guard-duty as
reward for being the best-turned-out man on parade…. As he reached up
to his shelf for his gauntlets and pipe-clay box, Trooper Phelim
O’Shaughnessy swaggered over with much jingle of spur and playfully
smote him, netherly, with his cutting whip.
“What-ho, me bhoy,” he roared, “and how’s me natty Matty—the natest
foightin’ man in E Troop, which is sayin’ in all the Dhraghoons, which
is sayin’ in all the Arrmy! How’s Matty?”
“Extant,” replied Dam. “How’s Shocky, the biggest liar in the same?”
As he extended his hand it was noticeable that it was much smaller than
the hand of the smaller man to whom it was offered. “Ye’ll have to plug
and desthroy the schamin’ divvle that strook poor Patsy Flannigan,
Matty,” said the Irishman. “Ye must bate the sowl out of the baste
before we go to furrin’ parts. Loife is uncertain an’ ye moight never
come back to do ut, which the Holy Saints forbid—an’ the Hussars
troiumphin’ upon our prosprit coorpses. For the hanner an’ glory av all
Dhraghoons, of the Ould Seconds, and of me pore bed-ridden frind, Patsy
Flannigan, ye must go an’ plug the wicked scutt, Matty darlint.”
“It was Flannigan’s fault,” replied Dam, daubing pipe-clay on the huge
cuff of a gauntlet which he had drawn on to a weird-looking wooden
hand, sacred to the purposes of glove-drying. “He got beastly drunk and
insulted a better man than himself by insulting his Corps—or trying to.
He called a silly lie after a total stranger and got what he deserved.
He shouldn’t seek sorrow if he doesn’t want to find it, and he
shouldn’t drink liquor he can’t carry.”
“And the Young Jock beat Patsy when drunk, did he?” murmured
O’Shaughnessy, in tones of awed wonder. “I riverince the man, for
there’s few can beat him sober. Knocked Patsy into hospital an’ him
foightin’ dhrunk! Faith, he must be another Oirish gintleman himself,
indade.”
“He’s a Scotchman and was middle-weight champion of India last year,”
rejoined Dam, and moistened his block of pipe-clay again in the most
obvious, if least genteel, way.
“Annyhow he’s a mere Hussar and must be rimonsthrated wid for darin’ to
assault and batther a Dhraghoon—an’ him dhrunk, poor bhoy. Say the
wurrud, Matty. We’ll lay for the spalpeen, the whole of E Troop, at the
_Ring o’ Bells_, an’ whin he shwaggers in like he was a Dhraghoon an’ a
sodger, ye’ll up an’ say _‘Threes about’_ an’ act accordin’ subsequint,
an’ learn the baste not to desthroy an’ insult his betthers of the Ould
Second. Thread on the tail of his coat, Matty….”
“If I had anything to do with it at all I’d tread on Flannigan’s coat,
and you can tell him so, for disgracing the Corps…. Take off your
jacket and help with my boots, Shocky. I’m for Guard.”
“Oi’d clane the boots of no man that ud demane himself to ax it,” was
the haughty reply of the disappointed warrior. “Not for less than a
quart at laste,” he amended.
“A quart it is,” answered Dam, and O’Shaughnessy speedily divested
himself of his stable-jacket, incidentally revealing the fact that he
had pawned his shirt.
“You have got your teeth ready, then?” observed Dam, noting the
underlying bareness—and thereby alluded to O’Shaughnessy’s habit of
pawning his false teeth after medical inspection and redeeming them in
time for the next, at the cost of his underclothing—itself redeemed in
turn by means of the teeth. Having been compelled to provide himself
with a “plate” he invariably removed the detested contrivance and
placed it beside him when sitting down to meals (on those rare
occasions when he and not his “uncle” was the arbiter of its
destinies)….
A young and important Lance-Corporal, a shocking tyrant and bully,
strode into the room, his sword clanking. O’Shaughnessy arose and
respectfully drew him aside, offering him a “gasper”. They were joined
by a lean hawk-faced individual answering to the name of Fish, who said
he had been in the American navy until buried alive at sea for smiling
within sight of the quarter-deck.
“Yep,” he was heard to say to some statement of O’Shaughnessy’s. “We’ll
hatch a five-bunch frame-up to put the eternal kibosh on the tuberous
spotty—souled skunklet. Some. We’ll make him wise to whether a tippy,
chew-the-mop, bandy-legged, moke-monkey can come square-pushing, and
with his legs out, down _this_ side-walk, before we ante out. Some.”
“Ah, Yus,” agreed the Lance-Corporal. “Damned if I wouldn’t chawnce me
arm[19] and go fer ’im meself before we leave—on’y I’m expectin’ furver
permotion afore long. But fer that I’d take it up meself”—and he
glanced at Dam.
[19] When a non-commissioned officer does anything to risk losing his
stripes he says he “chances his arm”.
“Ketch the little swine at it,” remarked Trooper Herbert Hawker, as
loudly as he dared, to his “towny,” Trooper Henry Bone. “’Chawnst ’is
arm!’ It’s ’is bloomin’ life ’e’d chawnce if that Young Jock got
settin’ abaht ’im. Not ’arf!” and the exotic of the Ratcliffe Highway
added most luridly expressed improprieties anent the origins of the
Lance-Corporal, his erstwhile enemy and, now, superior officer, in
addition.
“That’s enough,” said Dam shortly.
“Yep. Quit those low-browed sounds, guttermut, or I’ll get mad all
over,” agreed Fish, whose marvellous vocabulary included no foul words.
There was no need for them.
“Hi halso was abaht ter request you not to talk beastial, Mr. ’Erbert
’Awker,” chimed in Trooper “Henery” Bone, anxious to be on the side of
the saints. “Oo’d taike you to be the Missin’ Hair of a noble ’ouse
when you do such—‘Missin’ Hair!’ _Missin’ Link_ more like,” he added
with spurious indignation.
The allusion was to the oft-expressed belief of Trooper Herbert Hawker,
a belief that became a certainty and subject for bloodshed and battle
after the third quart or so, that there was a mystery about his birth.
There was, according to his reputed papa….
The plotters plotted, and Dam completed the burnishing of his arms,
spurs, buckles, and other glittering metal impedimenta (the quantity of
which earned the Corps its barrack-room soubriquet of “the Polish
Its”), finished the flicking of spots of pipe-clay from his uniform,
and dressed for Guard.
Being ready some time before he had to parade, he sat musing on his
truckle-bed.
What a life! What associates (outside the tiny band of
gentlemen-rankers). What cruel awful _publicity_ of existence—that was
the worst of all. Oh, for a private room and a private coat, and a meal
in solitude! Some place of one’s own, where one could express one’s own
individuality in the choice and arrangement of property, and impress it
upon one’s environment.
One could not even think in private here.
And he was called a _private_ soldier! A grim joke indeed, when the
crying need of one’s soul was a little privacy.
A _private_ soldier!
Well—and what of the theory of Compensations, that all men get the same
sum-total of good and bad, that position is really immaterial to
happiness? What of the theory that more honour means also more
responsibility and worry, that more pay also means more expenses and a
more difficult position, that more seniority also means less youth and
joy—that Fate only robs Peter to pay Paul, and, when bestowing a
blessing with one hand, invariably bestows a curse with the other?
Too thin.
Excellent philosophy for the butterfly upon the road, preaching
contentment to the toad, who, beneath the harrow, knows exactly where
each tooth-point goes. Let the butterfly come and try it.
_What_ a life!
Not so bad at first, perhaps, for a stout-hearted, hefty sportsman,
during recruit days when everything is novel, there is something to
learn, time is fully occupied, and one is too busy to think, too busy
evading strange pit-falls, and the just or (more often) unjust wrath of
the Room Corporal, the Squadron Orderly Sergeant, the Rough-Riding
Corporal, the Squadron Sergeant-Major, the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major,
the Regimental Sergeant-Major, the Riding-Master.
But when, to the passed “dismissed soldier,” everything is familiar and
easy, weary, flat, stale and unprofitable?
The (to one gently nurtured) ghastly food, companions, environment,
monotony—the ghastly ambitions!
Fancy an educated gentleman’s ambitions and horizon narrowed to a
good-conduct “ring,” a stripe in the far future (and to be a
Lance-Corporal with far more duty and no more pay, in the hope of
becoming a Corporal—that comfortable rank with the same duty and much
more pay, and little of the costly gold-lace to mount, and heavy
expenses to assume that, while putting the gilt on, takes it off, the
position of Sergeant); and, for the present, to “keep off the peg,” not
to be “for it,” to “get the stick,” for smartest turn-out, to avoid the
Red-Caps,[20] to achieve an early place in the scrimmage at the
corn-bin and to get the correct amount of two-hundred pounds in the
corn-sack when drawing forage and corn; to placate Troop Sergeants, the
Troop Sergeant-Major and Squadron Sergeant-Major; to have a suit of
mufti at some safe place outside and to escape from the branding
searing scarlet occasionally; possibly even the terrible ambition to
become an Officer’s servant so as to have a suit of mufti as a right,
and a chance of becoming Mess-Sergeant and then Quarter-Master, and
perhaps of getting an Honorary Commission without doing a single parade
or guard after leaving the troop!…
[20] Permanent Military Police.
What a life for a man of breeding and refinement!… Fancy having to
remember the sacred and immeasurable superiority of a foul-mouthed
Lance-Corporal who might well have been your own stable-boy, a being
who can show you a deeper depth of hell in Hell, wreak his dislike of
you in unfair “fatigues,” and keep you at the detested job of
coal-drawing on Wednesdays; who can achieve a “canter past the
beak”[21] for you on a trumped-up charge and land you in the
“digger,”[22] who can bring it home to you in a thousand ways that you
are indeed the toad beneath the harrow. Fancy having to remember, night
and day, that a Sergeant, who can perhaps just spell and cypher, is a
monarch to be approached in respectful spirit; that the Regimental
Sergeant-Major, perhaps coarse, rough, and ignorant, is an emperor to
be approached with fear and trembling; that a Subaltern, perhaps at
school with you, is a god not to be approached at all. Fancy looking
forward to being “branded with a blasted worsted spur,” and, as a
Rough-Riding Corporal, receiving a forfeit tip from each young officer
who knocks off his cap with his lance in Riding-School….
[21] Summons before the Commanding Officer in Orderly Room.
[22] Guard-room.
Well! One takes the rough with the smooth—but perceives with great
clearness that the (very) rough predominates, and that one does not
recommend a gentleman to enlist, save when a Distinguished Relative
with Influence has an early Commission ready in his pocket for him.
Lacking the Relative, the gently-nurtured man, whether he win to a
Commission eventually or not, can only do one thing more rash than
enlist in the British Army, and that is enlist in the French Foreign
Legion.
Discipline for soul and body? The finest thing in all the world—in
reason. But the discipline of the tram-horse, of the blinded bullock at
the wheel, of the well-camel, of the galley-slave—meticulous, puerile,
unending, unchanging, impossible …? Necessary perhaps, once upon a
time—but hard on the man of brains, sensibility, heart, and
individuality.
Soul and body? Deadly for the soul—and fairly dangerous for the body in
the Cavalry Regiment whose riding-master prefers the abominable
stripped-saddle training to the bare-backed….
Dam yawned and looked at the tin clock on the shelf above the cot of
the Room Corporal. Half an hour yet…. Did time drag more heavily
anywhere in the world?…
His mind roamed back over his brief, age-long life in the Queen’s Greys
and passed it in review.
The interview with the Doctor, the Regimental Sergeant-Major, the
Adjutant, the Colonel—the Oath on the Bible before that dread
Superman…. How well he remembered his brief exordium—“Obey your
Superiors blindly; serve your Queen, Country, and Regiment to the best
of your ability; keep clean, don’t drink, fear God, and—most important
of all—take care of your horse. _Take care of your horse_, d’ye hear?”
Also the drawled remark of the Adjutant afterwards,
“Ah—what—ah—University?”—his own prompt reply of “Whitechapel, sir,”
and the Adjutant’s approving “Exactly…. You’ll get on here by good
conduct, good riding, and good drill—not by—ah—good accent or anything
else.”
How well he remembered the strange depolarized feeling consequent upon
realizing that his whole worldly possessions consisted in three
“grey-back” shirts, two pairs of cotton pants, two pairs of woollen
socks, a towel; a hold-all containing razor, shaving-brush, spoon,
knife and fork, and a button-stick; a cylindrical valise with
hair-brush, clothes-brush, brass-brush, and boot-brushes; a whip,
burnisher, and dandy-brush (all three, for some reason, to be paid for
as part of a “free” kit); jack-boots and jack-spurs, wellington-boots
and swan-neck box-spurs, ammunition boots; a tin of blacking and
another of plate powder; blue, white-striped riding-breeches, blue,
white-striped overalls, drill-suit of blue serge, scarlet tunic,
scarlet stable-jacket, scarlet drill “frock,” a pair of trousers of
lamentable cut “authorized for grooming,” brass helmet with black
horse-hair plume, blue pill-box cap with white stripe and button,
gauntlets and gloves, sword-belt and pouch-belt, a carbine and a sword.
Also of a daily income of one loaf, butter, tea, and a pound of meat
(often uneatable), and the sum of one shilling and twopence subject to
a deduction of threepence a day “mess-fund,” fourpence a month for
delft, and divers others for library, washing, hair-cutting,
barrack-damages, etc.
Yes, it had given one a strange feeling of nakedness, and yet of a
freedom from the tyranny of things, to find oneself so meagrely and yet
so sufficiently endowed.
Then, the strange, lost, homeless feeling that Home is nothing but a
cot and a box in a big bare barrack-room, that the whole of God’s wide
Universe contains no private and enclosed spot that is one’s own
peculiar place wherein to be alone—at first a truly terrible feeling.
How one envied the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major his Staff
Quarters—without going so far as to envy the great Riding-Master his
real separate and detached house!
No privacy—and a scarlet coat that encarnadined the world and made its
wearer feel, as he so often thought, like a live coal glowing bright in
Hell.
Surely the greatest of all an officer’s privileges was his right of
mufti, his daily escape from the burning cloth.
“Why does not the British officer wear his uniform always?” writes the
perennial gratuitous ass to the Press, periodically in the Silly
Season…. Dam could tell him.
Memories …!
Being jerked violently from uneasy slumber and broken, vivid dreams at
5 a.m., by the thunderous banging of the Troop Sergeant’s whip on the
table, and his raucous roar of “Tumble out, you lazy swine, before you
get sunstroke! Rise and shine! Rise and shine, you tripe-hounds!” …
Broken dreams on a smelly, straw-stuffed pillow and lumpy straw-stuffed
pallet, dreams of “_Circle and cha-a-a-a-a-a-a-nge” “On the Fore-hand,
Right About” “Right Pass, Shoulder Out” “Serpentine” “Order Lance”
“Trail Lance” “Right Front Thrust”_ (for the front rank of the Queen’s
Greys carry lances); dreams of riding wild mad horses to unfathomable
precipices and at unsurmountable barriers….
Memories …!
His first experience of “mucking out” stables at five-thirty on a
chilly morning—doing horrible work, horribly clad, feeling horribly
sick. Wheeling away intentionally and maliciously over-piled barrows to
the muck-pits, upsetting them, and being cursed.
Being set to water a notoriously wild and vicious horse, and being
pulled about like a little dog at the end of the chain, burning into
frozen fingers.
Not much of the glamour and glow and glory left!
Better were the interesting and amusing experiences of the
Riding-School where his trained and perfected hands and seat gave him a
tremendous advantage, an early dismissal, and some amelioration of the
roughness of one of the very roughest experiences in a very rough life.
Even he, though, knew what it was to have serge breeches sticking to
abraided bleeding knees, to grip a stripped saddle with twin
suppurating sores, and to burrow face-first in filthy tan _via_ the
back of a stripped-saddled buck-jumper. How he had pitied some of the
other recruits, making their first acquaintance with the Trooper’s
“long-faced chum” under the auspices of a pitiless, bitter-tongued
Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major! _Rough!_ What a character the fellow was!
Never an oath, never a foul word, but what a vocabulary and gift of
invective, sarcasm and cruel stinging reproof! A well-educated man if
not a gentleman. “Don’t dismount again, Muggins—or is it
Juggins?—without permission” when some poor fellow comes on his head as
his horse (bare of saddle and bridle) refuses at a jump. “Get up (and
SIT BACK) you—you—hen, you pierrot, you _Aard Vark,_ you after-thought,
you refined entertainer, you pimple, you performing water-rat, you
mistake, you _byle_, you drip, you worm-powder…. What? You think your
leg’s broken? Well—_you’ve got another_, haven’t you? Get up and break
that. Keep your neck till you get a stripped saddle and no reins….
Don’t embrace the horse like that, you pawn-shop, I can hear it
blushing…. Send for the key and get inside it…. Keep those fine feet
forward. Keep them _forward_ (and SIT BACK), Juggins or Muggins, or
else take them into the Infantry—what they were meant for by the look
of them. Now then—over you go without falling if I have to keep you
here all night…. Look at _that_” (as the poor fellow is thrown across
the jump by the cunning brute that knows its rider has neither whip,
spurs, saddle nor reins). “What? The _horse_ refuse? One of _my_ horses
_refuse? If the man’ll jump, the horse’ll jump._ (All of you repeat
that after me and don’t forget it.) No. It’s the _man_ refuses, not the
poor horse. Don’t you know the ancient proverb ‘Faint heart ne’er took
fair jump’….? What’s the good of coming here if your heart’s the size
of your eye-ball instead of being the size of your fist? _Refuse?_ Put
him over it, man. _Put_ him over—SIT BACK and lift him, and _put_ him
over. I’ll give you a thousand pounds if he refuses _me_….”
Then the day when poor bullied, baited, nervous Muggins had reached his
limit and come to the end of his tether—or thought he had. Bumped,
banged, bucketed, thrown, sore from head to foot, raw-kneed, laughed
at, lashed by the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major’s cruel tongue, blind and
sick with dust and pain and rage, he had at last turned his horse
inward from his place in the ride to the centre of the School, and
dismounted.
How quaintly the tyrant’s jaw had dropped in sheer astonishment, and
how his face had purpled with rage when he realized that his eyes had
not deceived him and that the worm had literally turned—without orders.
Indian, African, and Egyptian service, disappointment, and a bad wife
had left Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major Blount with a dangerous temper.
Poor silly Muggins. He had been Juggins indeed on that occasion, and,
as the “ride” halted of its own accord in awed amazement, Dam had
longed to tell him so and beg him to return to his place ere worse
befell….
“I’ve ’ad enough, you bull-’eaded brute,” shouted poor Muggins, leaving
his horse and advancing menacingly upon his (incalculably) superior
officer, “an’ fer two damns I’d break yer b—— jaw, I would. You …”
Even as the Rough-Riding Corporal and two other men were dragging the
struggling, raving recruit to the door, _en route_ for the Guard-room,
entered the great remote, dread Riding-Master himself.
“What’s this?” inquired Hon. Captain Style, Riding-Master of the
Queen’s Greys, strict, kind-hearted martinet.
Salute, and explanations from the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major.
Torrent of accusation and incoherent complaint and threat from the
baited Muggins.
“Mount that horse,” says the Riding-Master.
“I’ll go to Clink first,” gasps Muggins. “I’ll go to ’Ell first.”
“No. _Afterwards,_” replies the Riding-Master and sends the
Rough-Riding Corporal for the backboard—dread instrument of equestrian
persuasion.
Muggins is forcibly mounted, put in the lunging ring and sent round and
round till he throws himself off at full gallop and lies crying and
sobbing like a child—utterly broken.
Riding-Master smiles, allows Muggins to grow calmer, accepts his
apologies and promises, shows him he has had his Hell _after_, as
promised, and that it is a better punishment than one that leaves him
with a serious “crime” entry on his Defaulter’s Sheet for life…. That
vile and damning sheet that records the youthful peccadilloes and keeps
it a life-long punishment after its own severe punishment…. To the
Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major he quietly remarks: “No good non-com
_makes_ crimes … and don’t forget that the day of riding-school
brutality is passing. You can carry a man further than you can kick
him.”
And the interrupted lesson continues.
“Sit _back_ and you can’t come off. Nobody falls off backwards.” …
Poor “Old Sit-Back”! (as he was called from his constant cry)—after
giving that order and guarantee daily for countless days—was killed in
the riding-school by coming off backwards from the stripped saddle of a
rearing horse—(which promptly fell upon him and crushed his chest)—that
had never reared before and would not have reared then, it was said,
but for the mysterious introduction, under its saddle, of a remarkably
“foreign” body.
Memories …!
How certain old “Sit-Back” had been that Dam was a worthless
“back-to-the-Army-again” when he found him a finished horseman, an
extraordinarily expert swordsman, and a master of the lance.
“You aren’t old enough for a ‘time-expired,’” he mused, “nor for a
cashiered officer. One of the professional
‘enlist-desert-and-sell-me-kit,’ I suppose. Anyhow you’ll do time for
one of the three if _I_ don’t approve of ye…. You’ve been in the
Cavalry before. Lancer regiment, too. Don’t tell _me_ lies … but see to
it that I’m satisfied with your conduct. Gentlemen-rankers are better
in their proper place—_Jail_.” …
None the less it had given Dam a thrill of pride when, on being
dismissed recruit-drills and drafted from the reserve troop to a
squadron, the Adjutant had posted him to E Troop, wherein were
congregated the seven other undoubted gentlemen-rankers of the Queen’s
Greys (one of whom would one day become a peer of the realm and,
meantime, followed what he called “the only profession in the world” in
discomfort for a space, the while his Commission ripened).
To this small band of “rankers” the accession of the finest boxer,
swordsman, and horseman in the corps, was invaluable, and helped them
notably in their endeavour to show that there are exceptions to all
rules, and that a gentleman _can_ make a first-class trooper. At least
so “Peerson” had said, and Dam had been made almost happy for a day.
Memories …!
His first walk abroad from barracks, clad in the “walking-out” finery
of shell-jacket and overalls, with the jingle of spurs and effort at
the true Cavalry swagger, or rather the first attempt at a walk abroad,
for the expedition had ended disastrously ere well begun. Unable to
shake off his admirer, Trooper Herbert Hawker, Dam had just passed the
Main Guard and main gates in the company of Herbert, and the two
recruits had encountered the Adjutant and saluted with the utmost
smartness and respect….
“What the Purple Hell’s that thing?” had drawled the Adjutant
thereupon—pointing his whip at Trooper Henry Hawker, whose trap-like
mouth incontinent fell open with astonishment. “It’s got up in an
imitation of the uniform of the Queen’s Greys, I do believe!… It’s not
a rag doll either…. It’s a God-forsaken undertaker’s mute in a red and
black shroud with a cake-tin at the back of its turnip head and a pair
of chemises on its ugly hands…. Sergeant of the Guard!… Here!”
“Sir?” and a salute of incredible precision from the Sergeant of the
Guard.
“What the name of the Devil’s old Aunt is _this_ thing? What are you on
Guard for? To write hymns and scare crows—or to allow decayed charwomen
to stroll out of barracks in a dem parody of your uniform? Look at her!
Could turn round in the jacket without taking it off. Room for both
legs in one of the overalls. Cap on his beastly neck. Gloves like a
pair of … _Get inside you_!… Take the thing in with a pair of tongs and
bury it where it won’t contaminate the dung-pits. Burn it! Shoot it!
Drown it! D’ye hear?… And then I’ll put you under arrest for letting it
pass….”
It had been a wondrously deflated and chapfallen Herbert that had slunk
back to the room of the reserve troop, and perhaps his reputation as a
mighty bruiser had never stood him in so good stead as when it
transpired that an Order had been promulgated that no recruit should
leave barracks during the first three months of his service, and that
the names of all such embryos should be posted in the Main Guard for
the information of the Sergeant….
Memories …!
His first march behind the Band to Church….
The first Review and March Past….
His first introduction to bread-and-lard….
His wicked carelessness in forgetting—or attempting to disregard—the
law of the drinking-troughs. “So long as one horse has his head down no
horse is to go.” There had been over a score drinking and he had moved
off while one dipsomaniac was having a last suck.
His criminal carelessness in not removing his sword and leaving it in
the Guard-room, when going on sentry after guard-mounting—“getting the
good Sergeant into trouble, too, and making it appear that _he_ had
been equally criminally careless “.
The desperate quarrel between Hawker and Bone as to whether the 10th
Hussars were called the “Shiny Tenth” because of their general material
and spiritual brilliance, or the “Chainy Tenth” because their Officers
wore pouch-belts of gold chain-mail…. The similar one between Buttle
and Smith as to the reason of a brother regiment being known as “The
Virgin Mary’s Body-guard,” and their reluctant acceptance of Dam’s
dictum that they were both wrong, it having been earned by them in the
service of a certain Maria Theresa, a lady unknown to Messrs. Buttle
and Smith…. Dam had found himself developing into a positive bully in
his determination to prevent senseless quarrelling, senseless
misconduct, senseless humourless foulness, senseless humourless
blasphemy, and all that unnecessary, avoidable ugliness that so richly
augmented the unavoidable….
Memories …!
Sitting throughout compulsory church, cursing and mutinous of heart,
because after spending several hours of the Day of Rest in burnishing
and pipe-claying, blacking and shining (“Sunday spit an’ polish”), he
was under orders for sharp punishment—because at the last moment his
tunic had been fouled by a passing pigeon! When would the Authorities
realize that soldiers are still men, still Englishmen (even if they
have, by becoming soldiers, lost their birthright of appeal to the Law
of the Land, though not their amenability to its authority), and cease
to make the Blessed Sabbath a curse, the worst day of the week, and to
herd angry, resentful soldiers into church to blaspheme with politely
pious faces? Oh, British, British, Pharisees and Humbugs—make Sunday a
curse, and drive the soldier into church to do his cursing—make it the
chief day of dress “crimes” and punishments, as well as the busiest
day, and force the soldier into church to Return Thanks….
The only man in the world flung into church as though into jail for
punishment! Shout it in the Soldier’s ear, “_You are not a Man, you are
a Slave_,” on Sundays also, on Sundays louder than usual…. And when he
has spent his Sunday morning in extra hard labour, in suffering the
indignity of being compulsorily marched to church, and very frequently
of having been punished because it is a good day on which a Sergeant
may decide that he is not sufficiently cleanly shaved or his boots of
minor effulgence—then let him sit and watch his hot Sunday dinner grow
stone cold before the Colonel stalks through the room, asks a
perfunctory question, and he is free to fall to.
“O Day of Rest and Gladness,
O Day of Joy most Bright….”
_Yah!_
A pity some of the energy that went to making the annual 20,000
military “criminals” out of honest, law-abiding, well-intending men
could not go to harassing the Canteen instead of the soldier (whom the
Canteen swindles right and left, and whence _he_ gets salt-watery beer,
and an “ounce” of tobacco that will go straight into his pipe in one
“fill”—no need to wrap it up, thank you) and discovering how handsome
fortunes, as well as substantial “illegal gratifications,” are made out
of his much-stoppaged one-and-tuppence-a-week.
Did the Authorities really yearn to _dis_courage enlistment and to
_en_courage desertion and “crime”? When would they realize that making
“crimes,” and manufacturing “criminals” from honest men, is _not_
discipline, is _not_ making soldiers, is _not_ improving the Army—is
_not_ common ordinary sanity and sense? When would they break their
dull, unimaginative, hide-bound—no, tape-bound—souls from the ideas
that prevailed before (and murdered) the Crimean Army…. The Army is not
now the sweepings of the jails, and more in need of the wild-beast
tamer than of the kind firm teacher, as once it was. How long will they
continue to suppose that you make a fine fighting-man, and a
self-reliant, intelligent soldier, by treating him as a depraved child,
as a rightless slave, as a mindless automaton, and by encouraging the
public (whom he protects) to regard him as a low criminal ruffian to be
classed with the broad-arrowed convict, and to be excluded from places
where any loafing rotten lout may go…. When would a lawyer-ridden Army
Council realize that there is a trifle of significance in the fact that
there are four times as many soldier suicides as there are civilian,
and that the finest advertisement for the dwindling Army _is the
soldier_. To think that sober men should, with one hand spend vast sums
in lying advertisements for the Army, and with the other maintain a
system that makes the soldier on furlough reply to the question “Shall
I enlist, mate?” with the words “Not while you got a razor to cut yer
throat”…. Ah, well, common sense would reach even the Army some day,
and the soldier be treated and disciplined as a man and a citizen—and
perhaps, when it did, and the soldier gave a better description of his
life, the other citizen, the smug knave who despises him while he
shelters behind him, will become less averse from having his own round
shoulders straightened, his back flattened and his muscles developed as
he takes his part in the first fundamental elementary duty of a
citizen—preparation for the defence of hearth and home…. Lucille! Well
… Thank God she could not see him and know his life. If _she_ had any
kindness left for him she would suffer to watch him eating well-nigh
uneatable food, grooming a horse, sweeping a stable, polishing
trestle-legs with blacklead, scrubbing floors, sleeping on damp straw,
carrying coals, doing scullion-work for uneducated roughs, being
brow-beaten, bullied, and cursed by them in tight-lipped silence—not
that these things troubled him personally—the less idle leisure for
thought the better, and no real man minds physical hardship—there is no
indignity in labour _per se_ any more than there is dignity….
“’Ere, Maffewson, you bone-idle, moonin’ waster,” bawled the raucous
voice of Lance-Corporal Prag, and Dam’s soaring spirit fell to earth.
The first officer to whom Trooper Matthewson gave his smart respectful
salute as he stood on sentry-duty was the Major, the Second-in-Command
of the Queen’s Greys, newly rejoined from furlough,—a belted Earl,
famous for his sporting habit of riding always and everywhere without a
saddle—who, as a merry subaltern, had been Lieutenant Lord Ochterlonie
and Adjutant of the Queen’s Greys at Bimariabad in India. There, he
had, almost daily, taken upon his knee, shoulder, saddle, or dog-cart,
the chubby son of his polo and pig-sticking exemplar, Colonel Matthew
Devon de Warrenne.
The sentry had a dim idea that he had seen the Major somewhere before.