Sergeant Nelson of the Guards Read Free

a-rup of disciplined iron heels, and a great, strained voice shouts: “Get a hold of the step! Get a hold of it! Eff— ite! Eff— ite!Eff…. Eff…. Eff…. EFF…. EFF!” It is a squad of Grenadiers being marched to their baths. In this place no man walks. A recruit represents two feet on a brown caterpillar: his paces are measured; his movements are predestined; his day is divided into equal squares. “Eff…. Eff!” The voice and the footsteps fade … walking en masse; a community-singing of boots….
    From an unknown distance, a flat, sore-sounding bugle blows a melancholy call of unknown significance. From different distances other bugles pick it up. The notes blend. They combine in a strange, sad discord … a rich weeping of vibrant brass. Then, right under the window, a little grim boy puts a bugle to his lips, puffs his cheeks, and blows. The red, yellow, and blue tassels on his coppery bugle hardly stir. A gathered flush empties out of his neck and face, into the mouthpiece , round the coil, and out in a great trembling note. He sounds the call again. Two scared swallows flutter from the roof. Simultaneously,a flat loud-mouthed bell in the clock tower clangs an hour; and sliding down a slanting wind comes a rattling volley of raindrops.
    Somebody sighs. The man with Punch throws down the volume and yawns.
    The bugle is our masters’ voice … and the swallows will go where the sun goes, and we shall be here under the treacherous English rain, kicking the soil into mud for our feet to slip in.
    But all England is here.
    *
    We men in this Reception Station are unreserved, inessential.
    Individually, we are necessary only to the tiny nooks and crannies of England into which life, like a wind carrying seed, has dropped us. We have our roots, of course, like all men. Pluck us up, and an empty space is left. But not for long. Without us things do not change. Only the appearance of things changes. Life moves differently, but still goes steadily on.
    We lived our peacetime lives; worked, enjoyed things a little, suffered a little; built what we could, struggling, more often than not, for just enough bread and rest to give us strength to struggle with; made homes and supported them, turning sweat into milk for the babies. We were part of the mass of the British.
    We are here. The things we lived for are behind us. All the personal importance of our own lives has been washed down in the gulf of the national emergency. Other hands were there to take up the tools we laid down. The machines still drone. The fires still roar. The potatoes still grow, and will be plucked when their time is ripe. Our work is behind us, still being done.
    And we wait here, to be made into soldiers.
    There is scarcely a man among us who did not volunteer.
    How does this happen?
    We come out of the period between 1904 and 1922—that wild waste of years, strewn with the rubble of smashed régimes. The oldest of us is thirty-six, Shorrocks of Rockbottom. The youngest is Bray, eighteen,of London. Those of us who are not old enough to remember the war-weariness of the century in its ’teens, are children of the reaction of the nineteen-twenties—when “No More War” was the war cry; and the League of Nations seemed more solid than the pipe-of-peace-dream that it was; and the younger generation—our own generation—was sworn to eternal non-belligerence in the face of the futility of war. We haven’t forgotten that. If only our own propagandists took a little of the blood and thunder that the peace propagandists so effectively used to move us!
    From page after laid-out page, the horrors of war gibbered at us … stripped men, dead in attitudes of horrible abandon … people (were they men or women?) spoiled like fruit, indescribably torn up … shattered walls that had enclosed homes, homes like ours, homes of men, men like us … cathedrals shattered; the loving work of generations of craftsmen demolished like condemned slum tenements …