There was a little town a couple of miles down the road where one used
to lunch in the old days, and had the hotel to oneself. Now there are
six ever-changing officers in billet there, and the astonished houses
quiver all day to traction engines and high-piled lorries. A unit of the
Army Service Corps and some mechanical transport lived near the station,
and fed the troops for twenty miles around.
‘Are your people easy to find?’ I asked of a wandering private, with the
hands of a sweep, the head of a Christian among lions, and suicide in
his eye.
‘Well, the A.S.C. are in the Territorial Drill Hall for one thing; and
for another you’re likely to hear _us_! There’s some motors come in from
Bulford.’ He snorted and passed on, smelling of petrol.
The drill-shed was peace and comfort. The A.S.C. were getting ready
there for pay-day and for a concert that evening. Outside in the wind
and the occasional rain-spurts, life was different. The Bulford motors
and some other crocks sat on a side-road between what had been the local
garage and a newly-erected workshop of creaking scaffold-poles and
bellying slatting rick-cloths, where a forge glowed and general repairs
were being effected. Beneath the motors men lay on their backs and
called their friends to pass them spanners, or, for pity’s sake, to
shove another sack under their mud-wreathed heads.
A corporal, who had been nine years a fitter and seven in a city garage,
briefly and briskly outlined the more virulent diseases that develop in
Government rolling-stock. (I heard quite a lot about Bulford.) Hollow
voices from beneath eviscerated gear-boxes confirmed him. We withdrew to
the shelter of the rick-cloth workshop—that corporal; the sergeant who
had been a carpenter, with a business of his own, and, incidentally, had
served through the Boer War; another sergeant who was a member of the
Master Builders’ Association; and a private who had also been fitter,
chauffeur, and a few other things. The third sergeant, who kept a
poultry-farm in Surrey, had some duty elsewhere.
A man at a carpenter’s bench was finishing a spoke for a newly-painted
cart. He squinted along it.
‘That’s funny,’ said the master builder. ‘Of course in his own business
he’d chuck his job sooner than do wood-work. But it’s _all_ funny.’
‘What I grudge,’ a sergeant struck in, ‘is havin’ to put mechanics to
loading and unloading beef. That’s where modified conscription for the
beauties that won’t roll up ‘ld be useful to _us_. We want hewers of
wood, we do. And I’d hew ‘em!’
‘_I_ want that file.’ This was a private in a hurry, come from beneath
an unspeakable Bulford. Some one asked him musically if he ‘would tell
his wife in the morning who he was with to-night.’
‘You’ll find it in the tool-chest,’ said the sergeant. It was his own
sacred tool-chest which he had contributed to the common stock.
‘And what sort of men have you got in this unit?’ I asked.
‘Every sort you can think of. There isn’t a thing you couldn’t have made
here if you wanted to. But’—the corporal, who had been a fitter, spoke
with fervour—‘you can’t expect us to make big-ends, can you? That
five-ton Bulford lorry out there in the wet——’
‘And she isn’t the worst,’ said the master builder. ‘But it’s all part
of the game. _And_ so funny when you come to think of it. Me painting
carts, and certificated plumbers loading frozen beef!’
‘What about the discipline?’ I asked.
The corporal turned a fitter’s eye on me. ‘The mechanism is the
discipline,’ said he, with most profound truth, ‘Jockeyin’ a sick car on
the road is discipline, too. _What_ about the discipline?’ He turned to
the sergeant with the carpenter’s chest. There was one sergeant of
Regulars, with twenty years’ service behind him and a knowledge of human
nature. He struck in.
‘_You_ ought to know. You’ve just been made corporal,’ said that
sergeant of Regulars.
‘Well, there’s so much which everybody knows has got to be done
that—that—why, we all turn in and do it,’ quoth the corporal, ‘_I_ don’t
have any trouble with my lot.’
‘Yes; that’s how the case stands,’ said the sergeant of Regulars. ‘Come
and see our stores.’
They were beautifully arranged in a shed which felt like a monastery
after the windy, clashing world without; and the young private who acted
as checker—he came from some railway office—had the thin, keen face of
the cleric.
‘We’re in billets in the town,’ said the sergeant who had been a
carpenter. ‘But I’m a married man. I shouldn’t care to have men billeted
on us at home, an’ I don’t want to inconvenience other people. So I’ve
knocked up a bunk for myself on the premises. It’s handier to the
stores, too.’
‘THE HUMOUR OF IT’
We entered what had been the local garage. The mechanical transport were
in full possession, tinkering the gizzards of more cars. We discussed
chewed-up gears (samples to hand), and the civil population’s old-time
views of the military. The corporal told a tale of a clergyman in a
Midland town who, only a year ago, on the occasion of some manœuvres,
preached a sermon warning his flock to guard their womenfolk against the
soldiers.
‘And when you think—when you _know_,’ said the corporal, ‘what life in
those little towns really is!’ He whistled.
‘See that old landau,’ said he, opening the door of an ancient wreck
jammed against a wall. ‘That’s two of our chaps’ dressing-room. They
don’t care to be billeted, so they sleep ‘tween the landau and the wall.
It’s handier for their work, too. Work comes in at all hours. I wish I
was cavalry. There’s some use in cursing a horse.’
Truly, it’s an awful thing to belong to a service where speech brings no
alleviation.
‘_You!_’ A private with callipers turned from the bench by the window.
‘You’d die outside of a garage. But what you said about civilians and
soldiers is all out of date now.’
The sergeant of Regulars permitted himself a small, hidden smile. The
private with the callipers had been some twelve weeks a soldier.
‘I don’t say it isn’t,’ said the corporal ‘I’m saying what it used to
be.’
‘We-ell,’ the private screwed up the callipers, ‘didn’t you feel a
little bit that way yourself—when you were a civilian?’
‘I—I don’t think I did.’ The corporal was taken aback. ‘I don’t think I
ever thought about it.’
‘Ah! _There_ you are!’ said the private, very drily.
Some one laughed in the shadow of the landau dressing-room. ‘Anyhow,
we’re all in it now, Private Percy,’ said a voice.
There must be a good many thousand conversations of this kind being held
all over England nowadays. Our breed does not warble much about
patriotism or Fatherland, but it has a wonderful sense of justice, even
when its own shortcomings are concerned.
We went over to the drill-shed to see the men paid.
The first man I ran across there was a sergeant who had served in the
Mounted Infantry in the South African picnic that we used to call a war.
He had been a private chauffeur for some years—long enough to catch the
professional look, but was joyously reverting to service type again.
The men lined up, were called out, saluted emphatically at the
pay-table, and fell back with their emoluments. They smiled at each
other.
‘An’ it’s _all_ so funny,’ murmured the master builder in my ear. ‘About
a quarter—no, less than a quarter—of what one ‘ud be making on one’s
own!’
‘Fifty bob a week, cottage, and all found, I was. An’ only two cars to
look after,’ said a voice behind. ‘An’ if I’d been asked—simply
_asked_—to lie down in the mud all the afternoon——!’ The speaker looked
at his wages with awe. Some one wanted to know, _sotto voce_, if ‘that
was union rates,’ and the grin spread among the uniformed experts. The
joke, you will observe, lay in situations thrown up, businesses
abandoned, and pleasant prospects cut short at the nod of duty.
‘Thank Heaven!’ said one of them at last, ‘it’s too dark to work on
those blessed Bulfords any more to-day. We’ll get ready for the
concert.’
But it was not too dark, half an hour later, for my car to meet a big
lorry storming back in the wind and the wet from the northern camps. She
gave me London allowance—half one inch between hub and hub—swung her
corner like a Brooklands professional, changed gear for the uphill with
a sweet click, and charged away. For aught I knew, she was driven by an
ex-‘fifty-bob-a-week-a-cottage-and-all-found-‘er, who next month might
be dodging shells with her and thinking it ‘_all_ so funny.’
Horse, Foot, even the Guns may sometimes get a little rest, but so long
as men eat thrice a day there is no rest for the Army Service Corps.
They carry the campaign on their all-sustaining backs.