THE MUD LARKS.
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.
PATLANDER.