Читать книгу Disenchantment - C. E. Montague - Страница 12

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What about officers, too? The men wonder again. That new company commander who started in as a captain, but never could give the simplest command on parade without his sergeant-major to give him the words like a parson doing a marriage? What about little Y., who suddenly got a commission when he was doing a fortnight's C.B. for coming on parade with a dirty neck? And the major's lecture on musketry? And the colonel's on field operations?

Part of the scheme of training is that all the senior officers should lecture to the men on something or other—marching, map-reading, field hygiene, and what not. An excellent plan, but terribly hard on an old Regular Army not exactly officered by the brightest wits of public schools. The major's musketry lecture has made the men think. He has told them first that, just to let them know that he was not talking through his hat, he might say he had been, in his time, the champion shot of the Army in India. The men had known that already—had doted, in fact, on anything known to the glory of any of their commanders. Fair enough, too, they had felt, that a man should buck a bit about what he had done. Anyone would. And so they had not even smiled. But then the major had amplified. He had recited his moderate, but not bad, earlier scores in competitions: he had given statistics of his rapid rise; he had painted the astonishment of all who saw him shoot in those days—above all, the delight of the men of his old regiment; for, the major had said, "I may have faults, but this at least I can say, that wherever I went the men simply worshipped the ground that I trod on."

All this had filled the first half of the lecturer's hour. The men had begun to look at each other cautiously, marvelling. When would the major begin? Could this be a Regular Army custom? But then the major had warmed to his subject. With rising zest he had described the dramatic tension pervading the butts as the crisis of each of his greater triumphs approached. And then the climax had come—"the one time that I failed." In sombre tones the major had told how five shots had to be fired at one out of several targets arranged in a row. "I fired my first four shots. A bull each time. I fired again, and the marker signalled a miss! Everyone present was thunderstruck. I knew what had happened. I said to the butt officer, 'Do you mind, sir, enquiring if there is any shot on the target to the right of mine?' He did so. 'Yes,' was signalled back. 'What is it?' I asked, though I knew. 'A bull.' 'That was my last shot,' said I. I had made the mistake of my life. I had fired at the wrong target. Fall out."

On this tragic climax the lecture had ended, the men had streamed out, some silent, bewildered, some dropping words of amazement. "Lecture! W'y, it's the man's pers'nal 'istory!"

And then the C.O. has lectured on training in field operations—the old, cold colonel, upright, dutiful, unintelligent, waxen, drawn away by a genuine patriotism from his roses and croquet to help joylessly in the queer labour of trying to teach this uncouth New Army a few of the higher qualities of the old. Too honest a man to pretend that he was not taking all that he said in his lecture out of the Army's official manual, Infantry Training, 1914, he has held the little red book in his hand, read out frankly a sentence at a time from that terse and luminous masterpiece of instruction, and then has tried to "explain" it while the men gaped at the strange contrast between the thing clearly said in the book and the same thing plunged into obscurity by the poor colonel's woolly and faltering verbiage. Half the men had bought the little book themselves and devoured it as hungrily as boys consume a manual of rude boat-building or of camping-out. And here was the colonel bringing his laboured jets of darkness to show the way through sunlight; elucidating plainness itself with the tangled clues of his own mind's confusion, like Bardolph: "'Accommodated'; that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or when a man is, being, whereby a' may be thought to be accommodated."