Using Our Libraries
Collections
Edited version of draft of unfinished memoir of army life written by Anderson in 1945 (LA 4/1/5/1)
FOREWORD
I want to write this story because I feel that it is worth telling, and it has not yet been told by any soldier of this war. Most of our own war literature has been militaristic, sometimes unashamedly, sometimes ruefully. The general note has been one of unprotesting determination. I on the other hand have admittedly never ceased to protest since I, ironically, volunteered at Oxford some two years ago. I am aware of the falseness of my position; I volunteered to fight. I am convinced that the war has to be won by the allies even if it will mean a victory only of the bad over the worse. Yet I complain, ceaselessly and indefatigably. I am writing with a desire to clarify this dilemma as much for myself as for anyone else.
For
my life in the army has not been a hard one. I have, theoretically,
never even served in the ranks. I have not been in action. Nevertheless
I have hated the army continuously, hated and feared or despised it.
And because, despite all the arguments which I myself put forward to
the contrary I believe that this hatred is fundamentally a good though
an uncomfortable emotion, I have decided to set down my experiences
so that those who do not already realise it may know that we do not
all die with our boots clean, and that other qualities go to make the
bad soldier besides effeminacy and a bogus aestheticism.
My story is a personal one. I do not set up my conduct as worthy of emulation. If everyone in the country were like me we would have lost the war: if everyone in the world felt as I do we would never have had to fight it.
CHAPTER 1: A MILITARY BACKGROUND
I joined the army on January 20 th 1943. Technically I suppose this is not strictly true, for I had carried out a 'special enlistment' (which enabled me to stay up at Oxford for a year) in March 1942. And to go back still further I had joined my public school Officer's Training Corps in May 1937; so I had behind me almost six years of military experience, of marching and countermarching, of slapping those butts and of stamping those feet. Yet I could hardly be termed a 'military type'.
My enlistment into the OTC had been automatic. I disliked it, was untidy, uninterested and incapable but accepted it all docilely enough. After one failure (in the practical half of the exam) I passed cert 'A' and spent a term on the Intelligence course - an enjoyable one in which we did not carry rifles. I do not remember our function; unfortunately it only lasted one term. Then I joined the Air Course which worked, to my pleasure, sitting down. The only drawback was a [regular] visit to the aerodrome which included in it a flight in a noisy, lurching trainer. This was very unpleasant and always made me feel sick. My sojourn in the Air Course terminated when we were all expected to sign papers committing ourselves to joining the RAF. So, without reluctance, I joined the Signals Course, in which I remained, giggling my way through unenjoyable periods of morse and flag waving, until I left. The morse I remember to this day, which is more than I can say for anything else I learnt from the OTC.
The Senior Training Corps, to which undergraduates were compelled to sacrifice a day and a half a week and three weeks in the summer, was duller than the OTC and, because more like the real thing, more unpleasant still. We were instructed by Guards sergeants, charming but brutal. As first I was very frightened by them, for I was neither sophisticated nor self-possessed when I left my public school. Later one could afford to be slack and I was frequently too ill to attend parade.
I had not, as a matter of fact, been more than a week or so at Oxford when I found myself called up, into the Royal Corps of Signals.
My acquisition of a cert 'A' afforded me a certain status in the STC and I did not have to start from scratch. I [also] passed cert 'B' which qualified one to go straight to [officer] training as a cadet instead of passing through the ranks as a private soldier. On weapon training I had to reach Bayonet III (use of the training stick). I have never been able to put over the required display of grim determination required in bayonet lessons - I can see now Sergeant Brown of the Scots Guards hunching his soldiers, clenching his fists, bearing his teeth and growling with the most terrifying ferocity as I dabbed self-consciously at the straw dummy. ' Get into it, sirr ; you're playing with it; get at its guts man.' I only just passed my weapon training test.
And so the prospect of the army drew nearer and nearer, and more and more terrifying. This is no humorous exaggeration. I really was terrified at the prospect of being swallowed up in this organisation which seemed to represent and to embody everything that I hated most in life: regimentation, destruction, mechanisation and philistinism. To many these words must seem hysterical, for many choose voluntarily, in times of peace, to live their lives thus, and they cannot understand others who find such a life not unpleasant but intolerable. And to me, who had no actual experience of the army, its terrors were, in anticipation, greatly magnified; the prospect of having to spend the next few years engaged in work in which I felt not the slightest interest - which was indeed essentially repugnant to me - was in itself nightmare enough. But there was the thought also that these years would have to be spent among uninteresting, uninterested companions, that if I got a commission I would be assuming a responsibility I was not capable of fulfilling and that if I did not I should be condemned to a squalid, useless and miserable existence. Some of these fears were exaggerated, others were never to be put to the test, but I was not to know this at that time.
Small wonder then that I wanted to evade the infantry. The Intelligence Corp had appealed for undergraduates who were reading languages or classics to volunteer for a course in Japanese: I put my name down and prayed for results. The only result was a chatty interview in Whitehall with a wing commander, a major and a civilian. I was provisionally accepted.
I would not have it thought however that I was completely selfish over all this; my friends found me at times I am afraid tiresomely moral, endlessly worrying about my duty, my responsibilities, my function in society, my capabilities and so on. All shown quite needless in the light of later event, but indicative anyway of the desire to act dutifully; unfortunately it is sometimes difficult to see just where ones duties lie. I remember feeling at the time the civilian's desire to be in uniform and to be 'doing one's bit'. Natural enough really - if only the pettiness of one's bit when one actually comes to doing it were not so impossible to reconcile with the big what were fighting for. Such identification I find, as I say, impossible: in a guerrilla army, in the International Brigade, amongst Tito's partisans, I can imagine it existing, though I do not feel that I would find existence in those armies much more pleasurable than in this. The plain fact is - a fact to which I have been forced time and time again - that we are not all soldiers and some of us, with the best intentions in the world, never will be. And among these latter I am compelled reluctantly to number myself.
CHAPTER 2: TIME'S NECESSITY
And so,
as I say, I joined the army on January 20 th 1943. I travelled from Victoria
to Wrotham, Kent.
As we approached Wrotham I grew more and more afraid. Or perhaps fear is not quite the right word. It was the feeling, much intensified, of the child about to start his first term at a Boarding School. Not 'butterflies', but nothing in the stomach; dryness in the mouth and sickness in the throat. All admittedly irrational and unnecessary, but how agonising to experience, how impossible to argue away. I looked enviously at the civilians in the carriage: how could they realise how fortunate they were? Whatever their personal troubles, they were at least free, free to do what they liked (off duty at any rate), to wear what they liked, to say what they liked and, if they wished, to stare rudely at the General they encountered in the street and to refuse to make room for him on the pavement.
[At Wrotham] we were dropped at our training camp: it was to be our home for the next twelve weeks. Here a sergeant took charge of us, a most charming sergeant all smiles and friendliness and little jokes. His duty was, I suppose, to make us feel at home and this as far as was possible, he did. He showed us to our Nissen huts and watched us indulgently as we scrambled for beds. I, without either experience or enthusiasm, had to be content with the lower half of a 'double decker'; a bad position because, the top half being only about 3' from the floor, it was difficult to make ones bed underneath and, having accomplished that, almost impossible to get into it. All the electric light bulbs save one had been stolen from the hut which therefore looked even more cold, chilly and yellow than it was; the floor was of stone and there was not a great deal of room. I began to make up my bed with the four blankets provided; when I had done that I took my pyjamas out of my bag and put them under the pillow (straw-filled and rather hard), took out a World's Classics volume of Milton and started to read. (This was in no way an affectation: I could simply not think of anything else to do). At last our nice sergeant returned and called out 'Anyone want any grub?'
We were of course all ravenous by this time and trooped almost gaily to the cookhouse. Nor, which proves that our appetites were good, were we greatly put off by the surroundings in which our food was served: for Army cookhouses are not comfortable and rarely clean. This one was certainly neither. Orderlies in shirt sleeves and grubby grease stained aprons were casually sweeping crusts and cheese rinds off the empty tables and singing 'You are my sunshine' or shouting incomprehensible taunts at each other. We - the greenhorns that is - had not been issued with knives, forks or spoons and had to eat merrily with our fingers.
After supper we washed our dishes in the cold, greasy water (now of the consistency of a rather thin vegetable soup) provided for that purpose and made our way back to the hut.
There was no unpacking to be done, for apart from a shelf running round the hut about five feet from the ground there was nowhere to put anything. On this I stacked by books. I had brought a volume of Milton, the Oxford Book of English Verse and, I think, Vanity Fair which I had not read and did not start till some eight months later. These are all I can remember but I know that there were others: indeed I have never been able to break myself of the habit of carrying a miniature library about with me into the most unsuitable places, more for the 'feel' of it than for the reading (I have had 'The Republic' with me for the last four months without opening it: but I like to be able to feel I can open it if I wish to).
© University of Stirling 2005
