MECHANISM AND MECHANICS
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.’