UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Soldiers at Salisbury
By D. R. HURD (Trinity College, Cambridge) MANY centuries hence a plough will turn up fragments of brick or vestiges of the camp rubbish-dump, and the ploughman will scratch his head. There will once more be a flurry of archaeologists among the downs, and an authoritative article will appear: "A chain of camps and fortresses has been discovered stretching across the county of Wiltshire from Beacon Hill in the east to Warminster in the west. The arrangement and design bear considerable resemblance to the Roman Wall in Northumberland, but there are indications that the new discoveries are of a later- date. It may be surmised that the line was built to protect the Saxon kingdom of Wessex from its northern neighbours." The surmise will be only about a thousand years out of date, a drop in the ocean of archaeological error. Such a line would have been useful for Wessex, and who in the future will believe that Englishmen of the twentieth century were so foolish as to snatch for the purposes of war thousands of acres of beauty and fertility from the heart of a county which has seen little war since Alfred beat the Danes? And so Bulford, Larkhill, Tilshead and the rest will go down into the history-books as outposts of Saxon civilisation, whereas we know them to be most impressive monuments of modern foolishness. The guide-books of Wiltshire think it ill-bred to mention them, and still speak of Stonehenge as reigning in solitary majesty over a deserted plain. They ignore the little kiosk which sells the entrance tickets, and the strip of tarmac beside the road where the sightseers are requested to park their cars. They ignore above all the northern skyline crowned with barracks of brick and huts of wood, spilling down the slopes in ugly irregularity. Officers having tea on the terrace of the big mess can look down patronisingly on Stonehenge—as a noble- man fresh from the Grand Tour might have looked down on the tame Greek temple built to complete the vista from his windows. Patronisingly, for Larkhill is the proud capital of the Plain, the centre of a life which is in abrupt contrast with the life of the surrounding country. In the rich vale of Pewsey to the north, on the heights of Sarum to. the south, one can hear the sound of the guns when the wind blows from the Plain, a sinister echo of that different life.
There are, it is true, ordinary unmilitary villages on the Plain, sheltering timidly at the foot of hills down which the tanks roar. Their picturesque cottages open straight on to their crooked streets, so that the inhabitants court death many times a day. This month the gardens are full of roses, and the sun shines kindly on the mellow brick ; but to us this village is a mere map-reference, a rendezvous which it will be easy to find at the end of the battle. The church may be mentioned in the guide- books ; its tower may be a fine specimen of late Norman ; but to us it is an obvious reference point, a useful sharp edge on which we can lay the sights of our guns. Outside the village a lark sings over the long grass, and there is a hare playing beside the beechwood ; but to us this is a gun-position, and the wood the only piece of natural cover within miles. We churn up the grass with our tracks and leave empty cigarette-packets in the wood as a memento of our stay. For we are the military men, gathered together from every town and city in the land. Many of us are Z men, and for fifteen days we have left our homes and our jobs to live in the tents which have spriing up round Tilshead. We grumble perpetually, but we fall back easily enough into the old ways and the old jokes, as though there had been no interval of months and years since we heard them last.
Training stops at the traditional hour of 4.30, and after tea buses run to Salisbury, and in Salisbury there are pubs and cinemas and a milk-bar on the corner by the bus-station where neon lights glare unattractively on anaemic sandwiches and saucerless cups of yellow tea. The atmosphere is thick and homely, the well-known atmosphere of civilian life, and it is easy to forget the keen cold wind which blows about the tents on the Plain. Outside there is a reminder of the double life we are leading, when the military police drive slowly past. They sit upright in a jeep ; their white belts and gaiters are spotless, and their brasses gleam menacingly, so that they look as if they were part of a procession.
The .sight reminds us that tomorrow there will be P.T. before breakfast in the long wet grass beside the battery lines, and that it is time to leave the friendly milk-bar and catch the last bus back. The bus climbs breathlessly up the slopes to Sarum ; then gathers speed and carries-us swiftly from one world to the other. It is double-decked, and moves like a towering fortress of light through the dark fieldsv We sing something rollicking to keep the cheerfulness of the milk-bar alive in us for a few minutes longer. At last the bus leaves us at the foot of the hill, and we walk up to the camp under the stars. After all, it is only fifteen days, and there will be a £4 bounty at the end of it.
Then we shall go back to the great towns and The old life, and hope that no more buff 0.H.M.S. forms will come our way. The tents will be struck, and the rain will turn the empty cigarette- packets into pulp. There are not so many soldiers on the Plain in the winter as there used to be during the war. Grass is sprouting through the concrete in some places ; the outlying huts in each encampment have lost their glass and the rain comes through the roof. The life which/ the military invaders have imposed on the Plain has no roots. At Larkhill there is a garrison church of staring red brick, from which on Sunday mornings sounds a beautiful peal of bells—or so it appears until the bells stop with a mechanical abruptness and the stranger realises with a start that they are produced by an ingenious record and launched over the downs through an amplifier.
Such artificiality is typical of the place. They try to plant roses and trees in the garden of the Mess, and by much watering to create a green lawn ; but the roses are stunted, the trees twisted to the north by the prevailing wind, and the lawn has bare patches, for the chalk lies only a few inches beneath. The wilderness refuses to blossom, and perhaps one day the attempt will be abandoned. Perhaps the needs and fashions of war will change, or perhaps (a larger hope) we shall no longer be expected to make so much sacrifice to the science of killing. Perhaps the grass will be allowed and encouraged to return, the whole mass of ugliness left to the mercy of wind and rain, and the sheep brought back to graze on the land which is theirs by right.
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