CHAPTER VII
IN CAMP
In going to camp, transferring from the solid shelter of barracks to the more doubtful comfort of crowding under a canvas roof, the soldier feels that he is getting somewhere near the conditions under which he will be placed on active service. The pitching of camp, especially by an infantry battalion, is a parade movement, and as such is an interesting business. It begins with the laying out of the tents in their bags, and the tent poles beside them, near the positions which the erected tents will occupy. The bags are emptied of their contents; men are told off to poles, guy ropes, mallets and pegs; the tents are fully unfolded, and, at a given word of command, every tent goes up to be pegged into place in the shortest possible space of time. At the beginning of a given ten minutes there will be lying on otherwise unoccupied ground rows of bags and poles; at the end of that same ten minutes a canvas town is in being, and the men who are to occupy that town are thinking of fetching in their kits.
Under ordinary circumstances, from four to eight men are told off to occupy each tent, but on manœuvres and on active service these numbers are exceeded more often than not. During the South African war the present writer once had the doubtful pleasure of being the twenty-fourth man in an ordinary military bell-tent. The next night and thereafter, wet or fine, half the men allotted to that tent made a point of sleeping in the open air. It was preferable.
Life in camp is an enjoyable business so long as the weather continues fine and not too boisterous; discipline is relaxed to a certain extent while under canvas, open-air life renders the appetite keener, and one’s enjoyment of life is more thorough than is the case in barracks. Wet weather, however, changes all this. The luxury of floor-boards is a rare one even in a standing camp, and, no matter what one may do in the way of digging trenches round the tent and draining off surplus water by all possible means, a moist unpleasantness renders life a burden and causes equipment and arms to need about twice as much cleaning as under normal circumstances.
Camp life breeds yarns unending, and in wet weather, or in the hours after dark, men sit and tell hirsute chestnuts to each other for lack of better occupation. If the weather is fine there are plenty of varieties of sport, including the ubiquitous football to occupy spare minutes, but yarns and tobacco form the principal solace of hours which cannot be filled in more active ways. There is one yarn which, like all yarns, has the merit of being perfectly true, but, unlike most, is not nearly so well known as it ought to be. It concerns a cavalry regiment which settled down for a brief space at Potchefstroom after the signing of peace in South Africa.
Some months previous to the signing of peace, a certain lieutenant of this regiment, known to his men and his fellow officers as “Bulgy,” became possessed of a young baboon, which grew and throve exceedingly at the end of a stout chain that secured the captive to one of the transport wagons of the regiment. Bulgy’s servant was entrusted with the care of the monkey, which, after the manner of baboons, was a competent thief from infancy, and inclined to be savage if thwarted. On one occasion, in particular, Bulgy’s monkey got loose, and got at the officers’ mess wagon; it had a good feed of biscuits and other delicacies, and retired at length, followed by the mess caterer, who expostulated violently both with Bulgy’s servant and with Bulgy’s monkey, until a tin of ox-tongues skilfully aimed by the monkey caught him below the belt and winded him. After that, as Bret Harte says, the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.
Well, the regiment arrived at Potchefstroom and settled down under canvas, with an average of eight men to a tent and the horse lines of each troop placed at right-angles to the lines of tents. Bulgy’s monkey was given a place away on the outside of the lines, with the other end of his chain attached to a tree-stump, and there, for a time, he rested, fed sparingly and abused plentifully by Bulgy’s servant. In the regiment itself money was plentiful at the time, and it was the custom in the tents which housed drinking men for the eight tent-mates to get in a can of beer before the canteen closed. Over the beer they would sit and yarn and play cards until “lights out” sounded.
One night, eight men sat round their can of beer in a tent of “A” Squadron, to which, by the way, Bulgy belonged. These eight had nearly reached the bottom of the can. They had blown out all the candles in the tent save one, which would remain for illumination until “lights out” sounded. The last man to unroll his blankets and get to bed had just finished, and was sitting up in order to blow out the last remaining candle, when the flap of the tent was raised from the back, and a hairy, grinning, evil face, which might have been that of the devil himself, looked in on the sleepy warriors. They, for their part, were too startled to investigate the occurrence, and the sight of that face prevented them from stopping to unfasten the tent flap in order to get out. They simply went out, under the flies, anyhow; one man tried to climb the tent pole, possibly with a vague idea of getting out through the ventilating holes at the top, but he finally went out under the fly of the tent like the rest, taking with him the sting of a vicious whack which the hairy devil aimed at him with a chain that it carried. While these eight men were fleeing through the night, the devil with the chain came out from the tent, and, seeing a line of startled horses before it, leaped upon the back of the nearest horse, gave the animal a thundering blow with its chain, and hopped lightly on to the back of the next horse in the row, repeating the performance there. In almost as little time as it takes to tell, a squadron of stampeding horses followed the eight men of the tent on their journey toward the skyline, and in the black and windy dark the remaining men of “A” Squadron turned out to fetch their terrified horses back to camp, and, when they knew the cause of the disturbance, to curse Bulgy’s monkey even more fervently than Bulgy’s servant had cursed it. The end of it all was that eight men of “A” Squadron signed the pledge, and Bulgy left off keeping the monkey; it was too expensive a form of amusement.
This is a typical camp yarn, and a military camp is full of yarns, some better than this, and some worse.
In camp, more than anywhere else, the soldier learns to be handy. The South African war taught men to kill and cut up their own meat, to make a cooking fire out of nothing, to cook for themselves, to wash up—though most of them had learned this in barracks—to wash their own underclothing, darn their own socks, and do all necessary mending to their clothes. It taught cavalrymen the value of a horse, in addition to giving them an insight to the foregoing list of accomplishments. It was, for the first year or so, a strenuous business of fighting, but the last twelve months of the war consisted for many men far more of marching and camp experience than actual war service. It was an ideal training school and gave an insight into camp life under the best possible circumstances; its lessons were invaluable, and much of the practice of the Army of to-day is derived from experience obtained during that campaign.