ON BEING IN KHAKI.
LAST evening, upon a wet and lonely road, I saw approaching a figure in oilskins. As the figure swung past me it said : " Good night, Tom ! " To which I made reply : Good night, Jack ! " My name is not Tom. As far as I am aware, the gentleman in oilskins was not christened Jack. But I was in khaki—n soldier. And he was a sailor. Hence our familiar interchange of greetings.
I confess I find that sort of episode very pleasant. A trifle ! But —candidly—flattering. I admit it these are the trifles which make a man vain. To be called " Chum ! " by a fellow-soldier on top of a tramcar ; to be hailed casually as " Digger ! " by an Australian who wishes to borrow a match ; to have a lift-girl in the tube shout "Hurry along, Tommy !" and favour me with a grin which I should never have won when in civilian garb ; to behold a van-driver slow down to offer me a lift ; to sleep in a Y.M.C.A. but for sixpence, after receiving a cup of tea from the jewelled hands of a Real Lady ; to be intercepted by a greybeard Volunteer desirous of directing me through an Underground station whose geography I know rather better than that of my own garden : these occurrences are curiously agreeable. Even were I able, like some of my privileged superiors, to move about in mufti, I should not do so. Newer ! My clothes are far from comfortable, at times. The tunic is stuffy. Its continually tarnishing—and therefore continually to be repolished—buttons are an outrage: the hours wasted on metal buttons most stagger the gods. The puttees are (for home-service wear) idiotic. The belt is nonsense. The swagger-cane—without which one is " improperly dressed" ; which nevertheless is not supplied by the authorities but must be bought out of one's own pocket—is a silliness. The cap is ill-designed. And yet I am sorry for any man of military age —nay, for any man of any age—compelled to tread the streets in other rig than this, or than its naval counterpart.
Enlistment was, I grant, something of an adventure. I remember the extreme nervousness with which, in a crowd of other individuals who were perhaps even more timid, I awaited the pleasure of a recruiting officer. On that occasion I was rejected. This happened so long ago that I may divulge a secret : namely, that I was rather relieved to emerge on to the pavement a civilian. Disturbances in the region of the conscience (a very real region, if hard to locate anatomically) had driven me into that crowd, and with that crowd through that door. The door was an ominous door ; and the disturbances were not limited to the conscience : there were disturbances—and not dissimilar ones— in the diaphragm. Yes, I had misgivings. Rejection allayed. those misgivings. And- id a' week they had returned, in the form of
renenveddisturbances of the conscience. Thesickening strain of those days when one was not in khaki ! Thus, presently, I was facing a second recruiting officer. This functionary (unlike the first) dial not crush me by the device of keeping me waiting for an obviously needless hour. He was promptitude and courtesy iftelf—anul promptly and courteously rejected me.
That was my second reprieve. I celebrated it by a trip North for a week's fishing. When in doubt, go fishing : this, I think, has always been my motto, consciously or unconsciously At any rates I go fishing either when in doubt or when not in doubt, which seems a safe rule. I am sure the artificers of flies and the keepers of tackle- shops will support me iu this view, and there are no more delightful sophiets on the surface of the habitable globe. I went fielding. 1 told myself that at the third offer I should be accepted, and I might as well enjoy a holiday first and be in good fettle for soldiering. As a matter of fact, no soldiering of the type I anticipated was to be mine. Forty-eight hours after I had basketed my last trout I was, it is true, a soldier. But not a soldier engrossed in soldiering. As a hospital orderly I had acquired the technique of the house- maid considerably prior to the moment when I first mastered the forming of fours. However, I do not know that the one branch of knowledge would have seemed more formidably foreign than the other to the civilian who, with sinking heart, stood in the mob of would-be recruits. All he knew was that, by the quits simple process of putting on a khaki suit, he suddenly found a calm which he had not experienced for one minute since One war's out- break. The deed was done. He had enlisted. Scarcely in the way he had meant ; but still, he had enlisted ; he was genuinely in the Army—not as the heroic "Tommy Atkins" of the battlefield, but as an unmistakable " Tommy Atkins " all the same, with a number. and a separation allowance, and a "Religion " (" C. of E." scrawled before he could excogitate an answer to the unanswerable—tho Churelia statistics, in this connexion, must be noteworthy). What a load was off his mind !
All of which is ancient, history. It deals with that epoch when vulgarians, having chanted their refrain of " Business as Usual" and made decent folks blush by the inventions of the White Feather "stunt," were publishing articles about the methods whereby we could soon cross the Rhine, and why it was imperatively necessary that we should build Zeppelins. The same scribes (those who are over forty-one, and the others who have successfully appealed for exemption) are still at it—" funk-holes " and all the otter encourage- the-Germans nastinesses ; but they, and many worthier souls in normal tailoring, are to be pitied. Khaki is the only wear, if you would learn what it is to be serene. This remains true even of him who is weary of wearing it, as—let us be frank- are most of its wearers. With what eagerness does every single soldier 1 have met look forward to the war's end ! Fed up. It is a pregnant plware- And notwithstanding its terrific significance, notwithstanding all the gossip about "working your ticket" and the facile barrack- room envy of So-and-so who was boarded out, there are not a few w-ho oncedreaded to become soldiers, and now conceal a hardly lees positive dread of becoming civilians—before the war's finish makes civilian attire possible. "I couldn't show myself in the street' This is what the soldier says. He envisages the sheer, cowardly inquietude which would be his lot were he forced to walk the world in a dress other than this safe and calmness-giving khaki. His self-respect is now secure. Without the label which •Ithaki attaches to him he perceives that he would be eternally wanting to stop the passers-by and explain. . . Besides, no one would hail him as " Chum !" and "Digger ! "—and when he went a journey he would have to sit up straight and prim in an ordinary compart- ment and be debarred from the cosy comradeship of the one with " Tnoors ONLY" pasted on its window. We long—oh, how ws
long !—to get out of khaki. But not yet. Want, Mum
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