One reads a lot nowadays about the "slavery" of various habits (drug,
drink, bigamy, etc.) and loud is the outcry. But there is yet another
bondage, just as binding and far more widespread, which nobody ever
seems to mention, namely, the drill habit. Drill the young soldier up
in the way he should go and for ever after his body will spring to the
word of command, whether his soul approves or no.
Once upon a time two men turned up in a railway construction camp deep
in the Rhodesian bush. They were a silent, furtive, friendless pair,
dwelling apart, and nobody could discover whence they came, whither
they were bound, or, in fact, anything about them. It was generally
conceded that they had some horrid secret to bury (camp optimists
voted for "murder") and left it at that. Time went by and so did the
rail-head, leaving the two mysteries behind as permanent-way gangers.
Solitude seemed to suit them. Years passed along and still the two
remained in that abomination of desolation guarding their stretch of
track and their horrid secret. Then one day ROBERTS rolled by on his
way to Victoria Falls, and, his train halting to tank-up, the old
Field-Marshal stepped ashore and called to the two gangers, who
happened to be close at hand tinkering at their trolley. The guard,
who was taking a bottle of Bass with the steward on the platform of
the diner, suddenly jabbed his friend in the brisket.
"Look, for the love of Mike!" he giggled.
The two gangers were standing talking to "BOBS," shoulder to shoulder,
heels together, feet spread at an angle of forty-five degrees, knees
braced, thumbs behind the seams of their trousers, backs hollowed,
heads erect--in short in the correct position of attention as decreed
in the Book of Infantry Training. The old man finished speaking and
the two saluted smartly and broke away. The steward looked at his
friend and nodded, "Old soldiers."
"Old deserters, you mean," retorted the guard. "_Now_ we know."
The drill habit had been too strong for those two fugitives even after
ten years.
The other night our Babe, as Orderly Officer, sat up alone in the
Mess, consuming other people's cigarettes and whisky until midnight,
then, being knocked up by the Orderly Sergeant, gave the worthy fellow
a tot to restore circulation, pulled on his gum-boots and sallied
forth on the rounds. By 12.45 he had assured himself that the line
guards were functioning in the prescribed "brisk and soldierly
manner," and that the horses were all properly tucked up in bed, and
so turned for home.
He paused at the cross-roads to hear the end of the Sergeant's
reminiscences of happy days when he, the Sergeant, (then full-private,
full in more senses than one) had held the responsible position of
beer-taster to a regiment at Jaipurbad ("an ideal drinkin' climate,
Sir"), then, dismissing the old connoisseur, continued on his way
bedward.
It must have been one o'clock by then, a black wind-noisy night. As
the Babe turned into the home straight, he saw a light flash for an
instant in a big cart-shed opposite the Mess--just a flicker as of a
match scratched and instantly extinguished.
This struck him as curious; it was no weather or hour for decent folk
to be abroad. The Babe then remembered that the mess-cart was in the
shed, and it occurred to him that somebody might be monkeying with the
harness. He thereupon marched straight for the shed (treading quite
noiselessly in his gum-boots) and, pulling out his electric torch,
flashed it, not on some cringing Picard peasant, as he had expected,
but on three unshorn, unwashed, villainous, whopping big Bosch
infantrymen! It would be difficult to say who was the most staggered
for the moment, the Huns blinking in the sudden glare of the torch
or the Babe well aware that he was up against a trio of escaped and
probably quite desperate prisoners of war. "Victory," says M. HILAIRE
BELLOC (or was it NAPOLEON? I am always getting them mixed) "is to him
who can bring the greatest force to bear on a given position." That
is as may be, but, after personal participation in one or two of
the major disputes in the late lamented war, I put it this way. Two
opposing factions bump, utter chaos reigns supreme and the side which
recovers first wins. In this case the Babe was the first to recover. A
year before the War he found himself in a seminary in the suburbs of
Berlin, learning to cough his vowels, roll his r's and utter German
phonetically. Potsdam was near at hand, and many a pleasant hour did
the Babe spend on a bench outside the old Stadt Palast, watching young
recruits of the Prussian Guard having their souls painfully extracted
from them by _Feldwebels_ of great muzzle velocity and booting force.
The sight of those three Hun uniforms standing before him must have
pricked a memory, which in turn set some sub-conscious mechanism to
work, for suddenly the Babe heard a voice bawling orders in German. It
was fully five seconds, he swears, before he recognised it as his own.
"Attention!" snarled the voice in proper Potsdammer style. "Quick
march! Right wheel!" The three great hooligans trembled all over,
clicked their heels and stepped off the mark as punctiliously as
though on the Tempelhofer Feld at the Spring Parade.
In two minutes the Babe, snarling like a Zoo tiger at dinner-time,
had manoeuvred them across a hundred yards of bog and filed them,
goose-stepping, into a Nissen Hut full of sleeping Atkinses. The
Atkinses rolled, gaping, off their beds at the Babe's first shout, and
the game was up.
Ten minutes later the Bosch gentlemen were _en route_ for the main
guard under strong, if _déshabillé_, escort.
It turned out that one of them spoke English quite badly and on
reaching the Guard Room he opened out.
They had escaped from a prison camp at Abbeville, he said, and were
heading for Holland, travelling by night.
Passing the farm at about midnight they espied our hooded mess-cart
and, feeling tired and footsore, had conceived the bright idea of
stealing a horse to fit the cart and driving to Holland in style and
comfort. Just as they were getting things shipshape along came the
Babe and clapped the lid on--"_verfluchte kleine Teufel_!"
When the Main Guard lads inquired how it was that after all their
trouble they had allowed one lone unarmed infant to corral the three
of them, instead of quietly biffing him on the head, as they quite
easily might have done, the Huns were very confused. At one moment
they were in the shed, they said, fascinated like moths in the glare
of the torch, and the next thing they knew they were in the midst of a
horde of underclothed Tommies--trapped. As to what had happened in the
interval, or how they had been spirited from one place to the other,
they were not in the least clear--couldn't explain it at all.
The Drill Habit again.