MOBILISATION
By MARTIN CASTLETHORPE
cc FFICERS will send their swords to be sharpened by the armourer-sergeant." This extract from battalion orders of August 5th, 1914, was pasted in the mess scrap- book, and many of us have smiled over it during the last twenty years. Now the hands of the clock have turned full circle. The scrap-book is gone. With the regimental colours, our pictures and plate it was sent to store last week. Today the orders read: "All officers will draw battle-dress from the quartermaster "; and I am thankful that I shall go into action in that very practical (and inconspicuous) uniform which we have seen the Militia wearing, and not, as in 1914, sword in hand.
For a week now we have been hard at it. I was in the company store that morning, trying to differentiate between pouches canvas basic, pouches canvas supporting and pouches canvas grenade for use of, when someone came in and said that the Prime Minister was speaking. The storeman sleeps there, and he has a wireless-set. I turned it on to hear: . . . and I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received. A state of war therefore exists. . . ." My colour-sergeant and I looked at each other. He is a veteran and I could not help feeling sorry for him. That a man should have to go through two wars in one lifetime seemed even more outrageously unfair. We neither of us spoke ; and when we broke the silence it was about the pouches. A few minutes later the first air-raid warning sounded. As I put down the inventory and seized my steel helmet and respirator and ran to my post I told myself that we should be doing this several times a day from now on. How, I wondered, would we ever get mobilised, how would anybody ever be ready for anything again?
But now we are nearly finished. In thc course of seven days we have almost completed the complicated change-over from a peace to a war footing. All private property and spare kit has been sent away. Ammunition, service bayonets, cooking utensils and field dressings have been issued. Ledgers and accounts have been closed down. Our respira- tors have been tested in the gas-chamber, our weapons on the range. We have completed innumerable " returns " and compiled many long lists: of "those proceeding overseas" with the company : of those under nineteen who are rele- gated to Details and who, in military terminology, will also "proceed," but only to the band block on "Zero plus seven ": of clothing and equipment, weapons and stores. We have been medically examined ; the men in line in the barrack-room, the officers in the comparative privacy of the billiard-room. Inoculation is, I suppose, a pleasure still to come. We have kept pace with the day's schedule, and in addition we have solved several new problems for which no provision was made in the "mob, scheme," such as where to dispose of property varying from the company typewriter to the regimental beagles. Those of us who have not been on active service before have learned many new things such as that buttons and badges are not cleaned in war, and that the second of the two identity discs is intended for one's grave!
There are many strange faces, mostly reservists, amongst us. Former officers have returned to us, leaving their busi- nesses, farms and estates. We now number amongst us a brewer, a stockbroker, a haulage contractor, a Parliamentary candidate and several farmers, with all one thing at any rate in common—uniform that is now many inches too tight. Two others have joined us, a young doctor fresh from a country practice and a chaplain. The chaplain is now performing more marriages in a day than he ever did before in a month, since many couples get married now on about a couple of pounds. The doctor, in his brand-new uniform, is instruct- ing the band in stretcher-drill.
There is no lack of keenness. Derek, just nineteen, was genuinely frantic when he was ordered to India, as he so wanted to become an Old Contemptible. Nobody envies the Major (still with a piece of shrapnel in his spine) who has been sent away to command an internment camp. Everyone wants to be in at the start. Buying kit assumes a certain urgency when (for all one knows to the contrary) one may be in action a week hence. So officers snatch an hour off here and there and dash into the town, returning with queer-shaped parcels. Most have a fancy: perhaps for a shooting-stick, a Balaclava helmet or a patent shaving- brush which turns into a fountain pen. (" Socks is the thing," said Curley White in 1914. He packed eighteen pairs, but was killed within forty-eight hours in the pair in which he landed in France.) War brings incomparable misery to all classes, but can there be any doubt at all that far the greatest burden falls upon the devoted shoulders of the private soldier? I shall shortly have to leave a wife and three adorable young children, but at any rate I shall have the comfort of knowing that they will be well provided-for in things material. It is often not so with the men. As a company commander I have had to listen to some pathetic stories in the last few days from reservists who have been called up at a moment's notice, leaving sick wives at home with nobody to look after them. Even where all is well at home, unlike the officers, they cannot in most cases afford to send for their wives to share these last few days, with them. In every disaster it is the poor who suffer most, for at the best of times the security margin is slight, and when things go wrong that margin simply disappears. At British Legion meetings I have heard ex-officers say that nothing is too good for the private soldier. Now I realise just how true this is. I realise also that though the future could scarcely seem more unpromising, I would wish to be nowhere else than with these men of mine today.
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