The British Army from Within

by Evelyn Charles Vivian

“Cells” is a different matter. Not that it lowers a man to any extent in the estimation of his comrades, but it is a painful experience, practically corresponding to the imprisonment with hard labour to which a civilian misdemeanant is subjected. It involves also total loss of pay from the time of arrest to the end of the period of punishment, while confinement to barracks involves only the actual punishment, and, unless the crime is “absence,” there is no loss of pay. Drunkenness is punished by an officially graded system of fines, as well as by “jankers” or “cells.”

The average man, however, performs work of average quality, avoids drunkenness, and keeps to time, the result being that he does not undergo punishment. Barrack-room life, for the recruit, is a fairly simple matter. He makes his own bed, and sweeps the floor round it. He folds his blankets and sheets to the prescribed pattern; the way in which he folds his kit and clothing, also, is regulated for him by the company or squadron authorities, and, for the rest, he is kept too busy throughout the day at drill, and too busy throughout the evening in preparing for the next day’s drill, to get into mischief to any appreciable extent. The recruit who involves himself in “crime” is, more often than not, looking for trouble.

It has already been stated that a full day’s work for the recruit is a strenuous business. If we take the average day of a recruit in, say, a cavalry regiment, and follow him from réveillé to “lights out,” it will be seen that he is kept quite sufficiently busy.

Réveillé sounds anywhere between 4.30 and 6.30 a.m., according to the season of the year, and, before the sound of the trumpet has ceased the corporal in charge of the room will be heard inviting his men to “Show a leg, there!” The invitation is promptly complied with, for in a space of fifteen minutes all the men in the room have to dress, wash if they feel inclined to, and get out on early morning stable parade to answer their names. They are then marched down to stables, where they turn out the stable bedding and groom their horses for about an hour. The horses are then taken out to water, returned to stables, and fed, and the men file back to their rooms to get breakfast and prepare for the morning’s drill. This latter involves a complete change of clothing from the rough canvas stable outfit to clean service dress and putties for riding-school use. The riding-school lesson is usually over by half-past ten, and after this the recruit takes his horse back to the stables, off-saddles, and returns to the barrack-room to change into canvas clothing once more, and enjoy the ten minutes, more or less, of relaxation that falls to him before the trumpeter sounds “stables.” Going to stables again, the men groom their horses, and when these have been passed as clean by the troop sergeant or troop officer the troopers set to work and clean steel work and leather. The way in which this is done in the Army may be judged from the fact that, after a morning’s parade, it takes a full hour to clean saddle and head dress and render them fit for inspection. It is one o’clock before midday stables is finished with, and then of course it is time for dinner.

For this principal meal of the day one hour is allowed; but that hour includes the getting ready for the afternoon parade for foot drill, in which the cavalry recruit is taught the use of the sword and all movements that he will have to perform dismounted. This lasts an hour or thereabouts, and is followed by a return to the barrack-room and another change of clothing, this time into gymnasium outfit. The recruit is then marched to the gymnasium, where, for the space of another hour, the gymnastic instructor has his turn at licking the raw material into shape. Marched back to the barrack-room once more, the recruit is free to devote what remains to him of the minutes before five o’clock to cleaning the spurs, sword, etc., which have become soiled by the morning’s riding-school work. At five “stables” sounds again; the orders for the day are read out on parade, and the men march to stables to groom, bed down, water, and feed their horses, a business to which an hour is devoted. Tea follows, and then, unless the recruit has been warned for night guard, he is free to complete the preparation of his equipment for the next day’s work, and use what little spare time is left in such relaxation as may please him.

In the infantry the number of parades done during the day is about the same; there is, of course, no “stables,” but the time which the cavalryman devotes to this is taken up by musketry instruction, foot drill, and fatigues. In the artillery there is more to learn than in the cavalry, for a driver has to learn to drive the horse he rides, and lead another one as well, while the gunner has plenty to keep him busy in the mechanism of his gun, its cleaning, and the various duties connected with it.

To the recruit the perpetual cleaning, polishing, burnishing, and scouring are naturally somewhat irksome; and it is not until a man has undergone the whole of his recruits’ training that he begins dimly to understand the extreme delicacy and fineness of the instruments of his trade—or profession. He comes gradually to realise that a rifle is a very delicate piece of mechanism; a spot of rust on a sword may impair the efficiency of the blade, if allowed to remain and eat in; while a big gun is a complicated piece of machinery needing as much care as a repeater watch, if it is to work efficiently, and a horse is as helpless and needs as much care as a baby. At first sight there seems no need for the eternal cleaning of buttons, polishing of spurs, and other trivial items of work which enter into the daily life of a soldier, but all these things are directed to the one end of making the man careful of trifles and thoroughly efficient in every detail of his work.

Old soldiers, having finished with foot drill (known in the barrack-room as “square”) and with riding school (which is allowed to keep its name), have a way of looking down on recruits; the chief aim of the recruit, if he be a normal man, is to get “dismissed” from riding school, square, and gymnasium, and the attitude of the old soldier encourages this ambition. Usually a recruit is placed under an old soldier for tuition in his work, and it depends very much on the quality of the old hands in a barrack-room as to what quality of trained man is turned out therefrom. Service counts more than personal worth, and in fact more than anything else in barrack-room life. The man with two years’ service will get into trouble sooner or later if he ventures to dictate to the man of three years’ or more service, whatever the relative mental qualifications of the two men concerned may be. “Before you came up,” or “before you enlisted,” are the most crushing phrases that can be applied to a fellow soldier, and no amount of efficiency atones for lack of years to count toward transfer to the Reserve or discharge from the service to pension.

So far as the infantry recruit is concerned, foot drill and musketry, together with a certain amount of fatigues, comprise the day’s routine. With foot drill may be bracketed bayonet drill, in which the recruit is taught the various thrusts and parries which can be made with that weapon for which the British infantryman has been famed since before Wellington’s time. Both in the cavalry and infantry, every man has to fire a musketry course once a year; the recruit’s course of musketry, however, is a more detailed and, in a way, a more instructive business than the course which the trained man has to undergo. The recruit has to be taught that squeezing motion for the trigger which does not disturb the aim of the rifle; he has to be taught, also, the extreme care with which a rifle must be handled, cleaned, and kept. It may be said that the recruits’ course is designed to lay the foundation on which the trained man’s course of musketry is built, and at the end of the recruits’ course the men who have undergone it are graded off into first, second, and third class shots, while “marksmen” are super-firsts.

On the whole the first year of a man’s service is the hardest of any, so far as peace soldiering is concerned. There is more reason in this than appears on the surface. A recruit joins the army somewhere about the age of twenty—the official limit is from eighteen to twenty-five; it is evident that in his first year of service a man is at such a stage of muscular and mental growth as to render him capable of being moulded much more readily than in the later military years. It is best that he should be shaped, as far as possible, while he is yet not quite formed and set, and, though the process of shaping may involve what looks like an undue amount of physical exertion, it is, in reality, not beyond the capabilities of such men as doctors pass into the service. It is true that the percentage of cases of heart disease occurring in the British Army is rather a high one, but this is due not to the strenuous training, but in many cases to excessive cigarette-smoking and in others to the strained posture of “attention,” combined with predisposition to the disease. The recruit has a hard time, certainly, but many men work harder, and the years of service which follow on the strenuous period of recruits’ training are more enjoyable by contrast.