Second post trickles faintly through the steaming windows: then 'lights out', short and sharp. With the switches' click comes darkness, surprising the late-sitters yet dressed on their beds. A snigger and two muttered curses from up the hut. Corporal Abner's voice rings loud, 'Silence there. I won't warn you again' and silence it is except for an intermittent whisper that might as well be the wind in a cracked window. I see the Corporal's cigarette doused: one more stone on the road to our earned unconsciousness of sleep. But hullo his bed's creaking! I raise my head and just get his whereabouts between me and a whited patch on the wall. Yes, he's sitting up. Now he has slid his legs quietly over the edge of the plaintive bed. His trousers are still on. I rather feel than see him pad down the gangway past me. After whole minutes of dead silence in the hut the swish of slow feet creeps back over the linoleum, and a shadow re-crosses the light patch of wall. A blank run tonight. I extend my left arm and give 'all clear' to the next bed; he passes the signal on. The whispering of the cracked pane resumes.
The moon is a day past its full: and before midnight stands just at the level of the clerestory windows. Through their openness it shines squarely, very yellow and quiet, on my face: though little scurrying night-clouds flock ever about it, as if they begrudged us a full sight of their queen. Its rays fill the hut roof with shifting half-light, in which the piled kits on the long central shelf, with their flat caps atop, nod like drilled mandarins over the shadowed beds.
Everything new in this camp, animate or inanimate, must conform to the straight line that nature avoids and man fails to maintain. So the beams and ties of the roof-trusses are tonight futurist and mysterious, being pendent with all our equipment, slung up there to dry stiff, after scrubbing. The beds, of course, should now be drowning in silence, under the low breathing which is the brother of silence: but R.A.F. beds are so hard that every sleeper turns crampily about, once or twice in the hour, and groans as he turns: and so hot are our bellies that you will not wait three minutes in this hut of fifty-four men without hearing a loud spirtle of wind from someone. 'The cry of an imprisoned turd,' they call it: our surest humour, which may break the tension even of an Armistice two minutes. The very sergeants shake with laughter when one leaps out roundly: for farts are not punishable like any other retort. Sailor can fart every five minutes, inimitably, with all the force and stink of nature. We expect the comment from him, whenever a senior is pompous.
11. Fatigues
Fatigues, fatigues, fatigues. They break our spirits upon this drudgery. One of us ninety recruits (to so many are we grown) already wishes aloud he had not joined the R.A.F. In under a week we have clicked three or four fire-pickets, ('Swinging it on the fucking rookies, they are, the old sweats' grumbled Tug. 'Old soldier, old cunt' quoted Madden with a laugh. 'Ah,' flung back Tug malevolently, 'young soldier, fly fucker. That's me') dust-cart we get, and refuse-collection, scrubbing the shit-houses, the butcher's shop, the Q.M. Stores, Barrack Stores, sweeping and dusting the Cinema. Then there's message running at H.Q., the main point of which is to bring back for the clerk's elevenses their Chelsea buns while warm. China got into disgrace there. 'I wasn't going to fuck about for those toffy-nosed buggers, so I got back after fucking twelve, and they shoved me on the fizzer!'
He received two extra fatigues, as punishment: - which was getting off scot-free, for we are all, innocent and guilty, on extra fatigues, what with stoking the boiler-house or in the cook-house, or at the officers' mess, or hut cleaning or polishing the fire-station, or washing down the pigsties, or feeding the incinerator. At dawn we leap from bed, rush to wet our hands and faces, fall in for P.T.: fall out and fall in for breakfast, put on puttees and overalls, sweep the hut (under the eye of our corporal, who has us all by name, and misses nothing of what we fail to do), tidy our beds again, and fall in for fatigues. After that the hut does not see us, except for a hurried moment each side of dinner, till tea-time: and after tea is fire-picket, save for those who work an evening shift till nine at officers' mess, or dining hall, or civilian hut.
These two last are scullion jobs: - and not in neat sculleries with sinks and racks and hot taps. We dip into a tub of cold water, through its crusted grease, four or five hundred tea-stained mugs and a thousand plates: which afterwards we smooth over with a ball of grease-stiff rag. A stomach-turning smell and feel of muck it is, for hour upon hour: and a chill of water which shrivels our fingers. Then a clattered piling of wet dishes on the table, to drip dry. Nor may you ever call yourself your own, or a job yours. The camp pullulates with recruits, and every employed man's our master, who will get from us what privy convenience he can. Many exercise a spite upon the recruits so that out of fear we may be more accommodating. The Sergeant Major set an example of misuse, when he led the last fatigue man in the rank to his wife's house, and had him black the grate and mind the children, while she shopped. 'Gave me a slab of jam-tart, she did,' boasted Garner, lightly forgiving the crying infant because of the belly-full he'd won. We are always hungry.
The six-weeks men we meet on fatigues shock our moral sense by their easy-going. 'You're silly cunts, you rookies, to sweat yourselves' they say. Is it our new keenness, or a relic of civility in us? For by the R.A.F. we shall be paid all the twenty-four hours a day, at three halfpence an hour; paid to work, paid to eat, paid to sleep: always those halfpence are adding up. Impossible, therefore, to dignify a job by doing it well. It must take as much time as it can for afterwards there is not a fireside waiting, but another job. The gods allow us in our hut just long enough to clean it, and our brass and leather and cloth - and they make the hut bare and regimental, so that we do not wish to linger in it. Our days pass half-choked in dusty offices, or menially in squalid kitchens, to and from which we hurry at a quick-step in fours through the verdant beauty of the park and its river valley: the stamp of our armoured feet fighting down the thrushes' twitter and the grave calling of rooks in the high elms.
12. Reveille
Our morning turn-out is sleepy. Few hear the long reveille floating through the camp in the black restlessness of nature before dawn. But Corporal Abner, old soldier and older man, has been stirring some while in the darkness, pulling on his clothes. With the first trumpet note he is stamping into his boots. 'Out now, lads' he yells harshly, the long menace of him lunging at the switches down our aisle this side of the bar, and up the other. We roll over heavy with sleep and paw blindly for yesterday's socks by the bedside. If our noses were not as sleep-filled as our eyes we should easily find these socks, clotted as they are with the wear of several yesterdays.
However, we have them on at last and reluctantly we lower our legs over the bedside and grope them into the clammy trousers. Out of bed now: we tightly stuff in the ample shirt-tails, tie our braces round our waists, slip on shoes. We roll our mattresses and crown them with an ornamental sandwich of the layered blankets and sheets: - unless it's a Saturday, as today, when one clean sheet is issued each man in exchange for the more soiled of his pair. The first twenty minutes of morning pass in a constrained rush. Only those few loosen their voices who have run over to the wash-house for a sluice. One of these, today, against the hut's chilly discouragement tried to sing a verse of the sad little insect which had been his honey bee. But Dickson, with puckered painful forehead, begged him to put a sock in it. P.T., after a wet-bar night, is not a joke.
However, this morning we were lucky. Normally the early exercise is more torment than training; the pimple-faced Gym Instructors, beef-fed to bursting point with strutting muscles all alive oh, jangle us like frightened sheep round and round the square under the baleful eye of the crippled Commandant, till all are breathless and the faint-hearted