W HEN I was a small boy I was very clever,
but I was also rather small. At Eton in those days enlist- ment in The Corps, as the OTC was called, was in theory on a voluntary basis, but in practice everyone was expected to join as soon as he entered the Upper School. I inevitably did this at a tender age and, being still under five foot four inches, which was the height at which you graduated from Eton jackets into tails, found myself posted to 'G' Company.
The rest of The Corps (its Edwardian sobriquet, 'the Dog- Potters,' had long fallen into oblivion) was organised as a battalion of four companies. `G' Company, that cohort of lion-hearted pigmies, was a supernumerary sub-unit, a kind of runt trotting anxiously yet proudly along behind every- body else. We were not armed, like the main body, with Lee Enfields, but with carbines said to have been used by the cavalry in the Boer War; they were lighter and shorter than the ordinary Service rifles, which was just as well.
There was no National Service in those days; during your tour of duty in The Corps you went to camp every summer and not, as reasonably enough happens now, just once. I had to go four times. The great difference between infantry training in those days and in these was that there was no motor transport. Man or boy. you marched to the training area, fought a battle against Northland or Southland, and then marched back again, after which there was the now almost forgotten ritual of a foot inspection. I cannot remember whether 'G' Company were excused camp, for I had grown out of their Lilliputian ranks by the time the summer came round; but I do remember that one's earlier camps were rather tiring and that one greatly envied the gallopers.
These were boys—at no time, I think, numbering more than half a dozen—who were known to be good horsemen and who were mounted on chargers provided by Aldershot Command. Except for that key-figure, the mounted bugler who would eventually sound the 'Cease Fire,' they represented the only effective means of communication between the umpires. The umpires were also on horses and this led, indirectly, to a vogue for dates as a supplement to the haver- sack ration; for legend insisted that one of us had, with a blank cartridge as propellant and a date-stone as projectile, caught some poor charger in a tender spot and unseated the arbiter of strategy; but I never remember anyone firing a date-stone, even at a galloper, though the project was often discussed.
The Eton College Officers' Training Corps (a designation since replaced by 'Junior Training Corps') wore in those days a distinctive uniform, different from the khaki worn by all other schools. The colour was a sort of pinkish dun, like the winter coat of a strawberry roan pony. but during my time it altered, as old uniforms wore out and were replaced by material bulk-purchased (according to rumour) from a surplus first-war stocks intended for the kilts of the London Scottish, to a cross between rhubarb fool and bloater paste. Unlike other OTCs we wore shirts and ties (both vaguely in keeping with the rose-red-city-half-as-old-as-time miff) instead of high, constricting collars forming part of the uniform jacket. This sensible practice has been—rather tardily, if I may say so— adopted throughout the Army, the Royal Air Force and the police.
The other schools, whom we lay alongside or encountered in camp, maintained that we owed our sub-Ruritanian habili- ments to the fact that, having Once killed one of the 'enemy' on a field day, we had been forbidden for ever to wear the King's uniform. None of our critics, however, claimed the macabre distinction of having provided us with our original victim, and we felt ourselves under no compulsion to rebut the charge. Had we known or even supposed it to be true we should, needless to say, have taken pride in it.
'Dans le metier tnilitaire, ii n'y a que turner,' a French soldier had confided to one of my uncles in the First War; and in The Corps this philosophy found many adherents. The abundant opportunities for smoking were tacitly acknowledged as the only compensation of an arduous and uncomfortable existence—except, of course, for the rioting on the last night of camp, when it was customary to demolish the latrines. pour blank cartridges into the incinerator and let down the tents of other schools.
All these—the other schools—we regarded with a contempt which they cordially reciprocated. With us it was a point of honour to treat everything to do with camp as an obscure and distasteful joke, and it seemed to us that some of these other places tried too hard. I remember at one camp there was a school which none of us had ever heard of, called (let us say) Cooper College. It was a small school and its total armed strength amounted to only one weak but in 'our view excessively martial platoon. When we heard its commanding officer give the order, 'At the halt—on the left—form- COOPER COLLLGIA we thought it exquisitely funny. No wonder we were loathed. Only our great numerical superiority over every other contingent saved us from reprisals.
My own military career progressed, as the years went by, steadily enough. In due course I reached the rank of Company Quartermaster Sergeant; in this capacity I carried a black stick with a silver knob on the end instead of a rifle and was responsible for the hogsheads of warm ginger beer with which the sweating troops were refreshed during truces. But although being in the LOB (or Left Out of Battle) category produced many privileges and perquisites. my ambitions were not satisfied. I aspired to be a cadet officer.
While this involved the ever-present hazard of tripping over your sword, it meant that in camp you ate in the officers' mess and shared a tent and a soldier-servant with one of your friends instead of pigging it on the floorboards with eight or nine other boys. But when my promotion to this rank became —as I judged—due, nothing happened; and it was some time before I realised why.
I was by now editor of the Eton College Chronicle and had taken it upon myself to write the accounts of field days which appeared in that organ from time to time. In the past these had, I think, been contributed by one of the more military-minded masters and were full of references to well- executed flanking movements, orderly withdrawals and other (in my experience) quite inconceivable events. I determined on a more realistic approach. Sentences like 'Throughout the action the enemy showed that readiness to retire which is so often a feature of the tactics employed by the side fighting with its backs to lunch' began to recur; and it gradually dawned on me that they were ?nal vu by those on whom my prospects of advancement depended.
So I left the next field day to be covered by my co-editor, a gifted colleger who could be relied on to keep a reasonably straight face and put in one or two of those Greek quotations which always lend tone to the profession of arms; and a few days later I tripped, for the first but not for the last time.
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