The orderly officer is not concerned alone with the food of the men; he is supposed to visit the barrack-rooms and see that everything is correct there; he has to visit the guard of his unit once by day and once by night, and see that the guard is correct and the articles in charge of the guard are complete according to the inventory on the guard-board; he is supposed to visit all the regimental artificers’ establishments once during the day to see that work is being carried on properly, and he is even concerned with the quality and issue of beer in the canteen, while at the end of his day’s duty he has to fill in and sign a report to the effect that he has performed all his duties effectively—whether he has or no. His work, correctly carried through, is no sinecure business.
Mention of the canteen takes us on to another point of military economy, that of supplies of varying kinds apart from the actual ration bread and meat. In each unit serving at home, a canteen is established for the supply to the troops of articles of the best possible quality at the lowest possible price “without limiting the right of the men to purchase” in other markets, according to King’s Regulations on the subject. In effect, however, the tenancy of a regimental canteen by a contractor is a virtual monopoly, and, unfortunately for the troops concerned, the monopoly is often made a rigid one. There is a “dry bar,” or grocery establishment, at which men can purchase cleaning materials for their kits and all articles of food that they require; there is a “coffee bar,” where suppers are sold to the men and cooked food generally is sold; and there is the “wet canteen,” whose sales are limited to beer alone, and where the boozers of the unit congregate nightly to drink and yarn. In old time the wet canteen used to be a fruitful source of crime—as crime goes in the Army—and general trouble, but moderation is the rule of to-day, and excessive drinking is rare in comparison with the ways of twenty years or so ago. The wet canteen of to-day is a cheerful place where men get their pints and sit over them, forming “schools,” as the various groups of chums are called, and drinking not so much as they talk, for they seek company rather than alcohol.
For the teetotallers of each unit, the society known as the Royal Army Temperance Association has established a “room” in practically every unit of the service; at a cost of fourpence a month a man is given the freedom of this room, and at the same time invited to sign the pledge, which he generally does. In any case, if an A.T.A. man is caught drinking to excess, he forfeits his membership of the Association and the right to use its room. In the room itself a bar is set up at which all kinds of temperance drinks are sold, together with buns and light eatables. In the Army, a man refraining from the use of intoxicants is said to be “on the tack,” and is known as a “tack-wallah.” Members of the R.A.T.A. are designated “wad-wallahs,” or “bun-scramblers,” by the frequenters of the canteen, who are known as “canteen-wallahs.” The word “wallah” is a Hindustani one which has passed into currency in the Army, its original meaning being the follower of any branch of trade or employment. In the same way, numbers of Hindustani terms are in general use; “roti” is almost invariably used in place of “bread,” “char” for “tea,” and “pani” for “water,” all being correct Hindustani equivalents. “Kampti,” meaning small, and “bus,” equivalent to “enough” or “stop,” come from the same language, while “scoff” in place of “eat” is derived from South Africa, where it is common currency even among civilian white folks.
Married “on the strength” in the Army carries with it a number of advantages for the married man. It is a little galling, in the first place, to have to satisfy one’s commanding officer as to the respectability of the intended wife before marriage, but it is not so many years ago that there was good reason for this. Once married, the soldier is granted free quarters for himself and wife, and the wife is allowed fuel and light up to a certain amount, together with rations, and an additional allowance is made in the event of children being born. Curiously enough, however, the size of the quarters allotted to the married men and their families is not determined by the number of children in the family, but by the rank of the married man; not many private soldiers venture to marry, for their rate of pay is so low as to make the experiment an extremely risky one, although the wife of the soldier gets—if she wishes it—a certain amount of the single men’s washing to do, by way of supplementing her husband’s pay.
Married “off the strength”—that is, without the permission of the officer commanding the unit—is doubly risky, for the wife of the man who marries thus gets no official recognition; her husband has to occupy a place in the barrack-room, for no separate quarters can be allotted to him; he has at the same time to find lodgings somewhere among the civilian inhabitants of the station for his wife—and children, if there are any—and, if he is a good character, he may be granted a sleeping-out pass, which confers on him the privilege of sleeping out of barracks—and this is a privilege that he must beg, not a right that he can claim. As the married establishment of a regiment or battalion is necessarily small, men frequently get married “off the strength,” though how they manage to exist and at the same time provide for their wives on military pay is a mystery. The most common explanation is that the wife, whatever work she has been engaged in before her marriage, continues it after; the hardest part of the business is that neither wife nor husband, in these circumstances, can count on the possession of a home as those married “on the strength” understand it.
The private soldier married “on the strength” usually has entered on his second period of service—that is, he has finished the twelve years for which he first contracted to serve, and has re-enlisted to complete twenty-one years with a view to a pension. Generally he manages to get a staff job of some sort, from employment on the regimental police to barrack sweeper, or anything else that will get him out of attending early morning parades as a rule—though all staff men have to attend early parades when the orders of the day say “strong as possible.” The rule in most units is that the staff jobs are distributed among the older soldiers, for these are supposed, and with justice, to be better able to dispense with perpetual training than the younger men. As a rule, the appointment of any young soldier to a staff appointment—except such posts as that of orderly-room clerk, for which special aptitude counts before length of service—is the cause of considerable bitterness among the older soldiers who are still at duty, and is usually attributed to rank favouritism, whether it is due to that or no.
In cavalry regiments especially, the ordinary duty-men look for amusement when the staff men are “dug out” to undergo the ordinary routine of duty, either by way of annual training or on the occasion of a “strong as possible” parade. The duty-man has his horse every day, and horse and man get to know each other, but the staff-man, attending stables only on the occasion of his being warned to attend a duty parade, has as a rule to take any horse that is “going spare,” as they call it, and usually the horse that nobody else has taken up for riding is not a pleasant beast. And the staff-man may be a bit rusty as regards drill and riding, so that the two things combined produce the effect of involuntary dismounting in the field or at riding school occasionally—or, as the soldier would say, “dismounting by order from hind-quarters.” Taken on the whole, the staff-man’s day at duty is not a pleasant one, while, if he ventures to complain to his comrades or grumble in any way, he gets more ridicule than sympathy. Usually the duty-man affects to consider the staff-man an encumbrance, and in the cavalry even signallers, during the time that they are excused riding and attending stables, are told that it is “easy enough to wag a little bit of stick about—why don’t you come down to stables and do a bit?” The reply generally makes up in forcibility for a deficiency in elegance, for the trooper is capable of maintaining his reputation as regards the use of language—of sorts.
A form of staff employment which calls for a particular class of man is the post of officer’s servant; it amounts to the regular work of a valet for “first servant,” and that of a groom for “second servant,” and is not always an enviable post, especially if the officer in question is short-tempered or “bad to get on with.” Officers’ servants occupy quarters away from the duty-men, and in the vicinity of the officers’ mess in the case of single officers; married officers’ servants are provided with quarters in their masters’ houses. In addition to the officers’ servants, there is in each unit a regular staff of mess waiters both for officers’ and sergeants’ messes, while all non-commissioned officers from the rank of sergeant upward are permitted to employ a “bâtman” from among the men serving under them. The sergeant’s bâtman, though, is not excused from duty as is the officer’s servant, but has to get through all his own work, and then clean the sergeant’s equipment, keep his bunk in order, groom his horse, and clean his saddle (in cavalry and artillery units), as well as attend all parades from which the sergeant has no power to excuse him. Every staff job carries with it a certain amount of extra-duty pay, and this, in addition to the fact of being excused from at least some of the ordinary parades of the duty soldier, causes a post on the staff to be sought after by most men. There are some, though, who prefer to be at ordinary duty, and the man who is going in for promotion usually avoids staff employ, for the two do not go together.
Among non-commissioned officers as well as among the rank and file there is a certain amount of staff employment, but it is a smaller amount, and a good deal of it is unenviable business. The post of provost-sergeant, for instance, although it carries extra-duty pay, is naturally not a popular business, for having control of the regimental police and being responsible for the punishments of delinquents on defaulters’ drill and punishment fatigues does not tend to increase the popularity of a non-commissioned officer. The business of postman in a regiment is usually entrusted to a corporal; as a rule, the oldest corporal is chosen to fill this berth, and one just concluding his term of military service is practically certain to get it as soon as it falls vacant. But staff jobs for non-coms. are far fewer, relatively, than for the rank and file, and, outside the artificers’ shops, the regimental orderly room and quartermaster’s store, practically every non-com. is at duty.