2
We had left Fleet and the golf club and moved into hutments at Deepcut about the time I returned from the gunnery course. Now the talk centred round the firing practice when every man and officer would be put to the test and one fine morning the order came to proceed to Trawsfynydd, Wales.
We “proceeded” by train, taking only guns, firing battery wagons and teams and after long, long hours found ourselves tucked away in a camp in the mountains with great blankets of mist rolling down and blotting everything out, the ground a squelching bog of tussocks with outcrops of rock sprouting up everywhere. A strange, hard, cold country, with unhappy houses, grey tiled and lonely, and peasants whose faces seemed marked by the desolation of it all.
The range was a rolling stretch of country falling away from a plateau high above us, reached by a corkscrew path that tore the horses to pieces, and cut up by stone walls and nullahs which after an hour’s rain foamed with brown water. Through glasses we made out the targets—four black dots representing a battery, a row of tiny figures for infantry, and a series of lines indicating trenches. For three days the weather prevented us from shooting but at last came a morning when the fog blanket rolled back and the guns were run up, and little puffs of cotton wool appeared over the targets, the hills ringing with countless echoes as though they would never tire of the firing.
Each subaltern was called up in turn and given a target by the Colonel who, lying silently on his stomach, watched results through his glasses and doubtless in his mind summed each of us up from the methods of our orders to the battery, the nimbleness and otherwise with which we gauged and corrected them. A trying ordeal which was, however, all too short. Sixteen rounds apiece were all that we were allowed. We would have liked six hundred, so fascinating and bewildering was the new game. It seemed as if the guns took a malignant pleasure in disobeying our orders, each gun having its own particular devil to compete with.
In the light of to-day the explanation is simple. There was no such thing as calibration then, that exorciser of the evil spirit in all guns.
And so, having seen at last a practical demonstration of what I had long considered a fact—that the Gunners’ Bible F.A.T. (the handbook of Field Artillery Training) was a complete waste of time, we all went back to Deepcut even more than ever convinced that we were the finest brigade in England. And all on the strength of sixteen rounds apiece!
Almost at once I was removed from the scientific activities necessitated by being a battery subaltern. An apparently new establishment was made, a being called an Orderly Officer, whose job was to keep the Colonel in order and remind the Adjutant of all the things he forgot. In addition to those two matters of supreme moment there were one or two minor duties like training the brigade signallers to lay out cables and buzz messages, listen to the domestic troubles of the regimental sergeant-major, whose importance is second only to that of the Colonel, look after some thirty men and horses and a cable wagon and endeavour to keep in the good books of the Battery Commanders.
I got the job—and kept it for over a year.
Colonel, didn’t I keep you in order?
Adj, did I ever do any work for you?
Battery Commanders, didn’t I come and cadge drinks daily—and incidentally wasn’t that cable which I laid from Valandovo to Kajali the last in use before the Bulgar pushed us off the earth?