As to these same larrikins, if you please, I would like to set down some more. Scrubby they came to us, most of them, pallid, undersized, some of them wretchedly nervous from drinks, drugs, under-feeding, bad teeth, all manner of irregularities of life due to poverty, due to vice.
But, “by the living God that made” them, once you’d repaired them—fixed their teeth, fed them, exercised them, made bathing instead of a drunk a daily habit with them, once, in short, that you’d properly set them up and, excuse the emphasis, but they made the damnedest best soldiers of the lot.
Not that the professional men, business men, open-air men who went into the ranks were not as heroic. A hundred incidents of the splendor of bravery that men of all classes displayed crowd my memory to take swift, sharp issue with the idea. But you see the larrikin—the designation used to be one of contempt with me but is something pretty close to affection now and I should say with several other thousands of officers as well—comes to you with the devil’s own experience of hard-knocks. He knows hunger, thirst, the misery of cold, of pains and aches he has no doctor to allay. And I would point out that one of these boys who has survived such conditions with a physique left good enough to get him into the army, must have started life with the flesh and blood make-up akin to the steel armor-plates and entrails of a dreadnaught. So when you take him and give him only half a brushing-up, the readiness of his response would (may I borrow the expression of an Ally?) certainly jar you. His face gets pink, his chest sticks out, the sneer he wore becomes a smile, the contemptible trickery he used to work turns to good-natured, practical jokes. He is childishly amazed to find that his comrades—the man who was a lawyer at home, or the other who was a tradesman or the very wonderful person who was a well-known feature in vaudeville and even—Gawd blime me! his captain likes him. And once he believes that—knows it and feels it then (another draft on an Ally) you’ve “got something!” The very gang training he has had when he banded with his pals to fight and cheat the law, that gang spirit with all its blind devotion is at the nod of his officer. He’ll go to hell for you even when he knows there is not much or any chance of coming back, and if all of his kind, whether out of Whitechapel, the purlieus of Canadian cities or the slums of Australia who have done that very thing of going into hell and not come back, might be called on parade it would be a big procession. Yet not of grief-stricken or agonized men but they who walk with fine, clear, steady eyes, and countenances wonderfully cleansed.
To move a little ahead of that day in a then fast-approaching October when the first twenty-thousand of us sailed away to get into the big muss, I’d like to tell a little story of the only larrikin I know of who fell flatly down on his job.
They had made him, to his fierce disgust, the Lord high keeper of a carrier pigeon. He was a person who wanted to get into the fight—Anzac for Boche, yes, two Boches or three. But here he had been made custodian of the carrier pigeon. He had never had a chance at a Boche. He must trail his officer at the rear of charging men. He must have the pigeon in its little box ready, so that should the officer command, the pigeon could have a neat little message as to reinforcements or success tied to his little leg, be released from the box when he would shoot up straight as an arrow above the roar and smoke of battle and home his way to the rear, dropping into a box at the commandant’s trench or dug-out station and when he dropped into the box causing a very sharp toned little bell to ring—a tone so sharp as to cut through the thunder of guns.
Well, one night on such a charge the officer missed his larrikin and not long afterward the pigeon for whom the larrikin had so long been valet, plopped into his little box at the commandant’s dug-out, making the sharp gong clang incisively. The battle was roaring fearfully, but the commandant got the ring, retrieved the pigeon, slipped the little message roll off its slender leg, spread the message, swore first and then laughed.
“What is it?” his aide asked eagerly.
“I should,” said the commandant, “have him arrested and shot, but I don’t think I will.”
“Who?”
“Capt. ——’s larrikin.”