Reveille was at 5.30.
Grunts, groans, curses, a kick,—and you were sleepily struggling with your riding breeches and puttees.
The morning bath? Left behind with all the other things.
There were horses to be groomed and watered and fed, stables to be “mucked out,” much hard and muscular work to be done before that pint of tea and slab of grease called bacon would keep body and soul together for the morning parade. One fed first and shaved and splashed one’s face, neck, and arms with water afterwards. Have you ever cleaned out a stable with your bare hands and then been compelled to eat a meal without washing?
By nine o’clock one paraded with cleaned boots, polished buttons and burnished spurs and was inspected by the sergeant-major. If you were sick you went before the doctor instead. But it didn’t pay to be sick. The sergeant-major cured you first. Then as there weren’t very many horses in barracks as yet, we were divided half into the riding school, half for lance and sword drill.
Riding school was invented by the Spanish Inquisition. Generally it lasted an hour, by which time one was broken on the rack and emerged shaken, bruised and hot, blistered by the sergeant-major’s tongue. There were men who’d never been on a horse more than twice in their lives, but most of us had swung a leg over a saddle. Many in that ride were grooms from training stables, riders of steeple-chasers. But their methods were not at all those desired in His Majesty’s Cavalry and they suffered like the rest of us. But the sergeant-major’s tongue never stopped and we either learned the essentials in double-quick time or got out to a more elementary ride.
It was a case of the survival of the fittest. Round and round that huge school, trotting with and without stirrups until one almost fell off from sheer agony, with and without saddle over five-foot jumps pursued by the hissing lash of the sergeant-major’s tongue and whip, jumping without reins, saddle or stirrups. The agony of sitting down for days afterwards!
Followed a fifteen-minute break, after the horses were led back to the stables and off-saddled, and then parade on the square with lance and sword. A lovely weapon the lance—slender, irresistible—but after an hour’s concentrated drill one’s right wrist became red-hot and swollen and the extended lance points drooped in our tired grasp like reeds in the wind. At night in the barrack room we used to have competitions to see who could drive the point deepest into the door panels.
Then at eleven o’clock “stables” again: caps and tunics off, braces down, sleeves rolled up. We had a magnificent stamp of horse, but they came in ungroomed for days and under my inexpert methods of grooming took several days before they looked as if they’d been groomed at all.
Dinner was at one o’clock and by the time that hour struck one was ready to eat anything. Each squadron had its own dining-rooms, concrete places with wooden tables and benches, but the eternal stew went down like caviar.