Sergeant Nelson of the Guards by Gerald Kersh Page A

everywhere. But I’m going to let you go on your own, just to show you I trust you. You won’t get lost? Or make mugs of yourselves in any way?”
    “No, Sergeant.”
    Come to the cookhouse door, boys, cries the bugle.
    “Knives, forks, and spoons, and scram, then!”
    We rush to the door.
    “Halt!”
    We stop, paralysed by that shattering voice.
    “Hi-de-Hi, Squad!”
    “Ho-de-Ho, Sergeant!”
    We go to Dinner.
    That afternoon we get our first Fatigue. There isn’t much for us todo until we are squadded. Hanging around, putting twice-ordered bits of kit again in order, looking around, exchanging speculative horrors, we wait, killing time by inches. One or two of us—Hodge, Dale, and Thurstan foremost, as it happens—start on our boots. The surface of these Ammunition Boots is what the shopkeepers call “Scotch Grain”: that is to say, it is all bumpy. This has to be smoothed out by the chemical action of spit and the mechanical action of polish. We have been warned that, at first, the more we polish the less there will be to show for our efforts. “Think of the Foorer,” says Trained Soldier Brand, “think of Gobbles, think of Gooring … and spit.” But the Ammos, or boots, would absorb the digestive juices of a shark. John Johnson watches us. Soon, he says: “You got no oidea, that’s what it is, no oidea.” And he picks up a boot and a tin of polish, and, baring his sunburnt arms, begins to polish away with a mad enthusiasm. All the misdirected energy of a little, misspent life, is being concentrated on a toe cap. He polishes as if some strange fate has condemned him to it … which, indeed, it has. “Oi’ll get that cap badge,” he says, “oi betcher a million pounds.” A Bedfordshire lad who used to work in a Nottinghamshire boot factory talks of buffing leather. He takes out of a battered fibre case a toothbrush; compares it with the Army issue, and finally strokes his boots with it. Everybody else follows suit. As any gentleman’s gentleman will tell you, it helps if you beat the surface of a leather boot flat with a bone … but you’ve got to put your weight behind it. Alison, the glum old soldier, says that if you smear the surface of the boots thickly with polish and then set light to it, you get the grease out quicker. Trained Soldier Brand, hearing this, says: “That is a serious offence,” and adds:
    “Say you burn your boots. What happens? Boots are made of what? Well … what, Bates?”
    “Oi don’t know, Trained Soldier.”
    “Leather and stitches. Burn the leather, and you burn the stitches. Burn the stitches, and what happens? Well, Bates?”
    “It’s a serious offence, Trained Soldier.”
    “They bust. And if the stitches of your boots bust, what happens, Bates?”
    “Oi don’t know, Trained Soldier.”
    “One day your boots come apart. And remember—a soldier marches on his feet. On his … what, Bates?”
    “On his feet, Trained Soldier.”
    “Good. You’ll be a lieutenant colonel inside of a fortnight.”
    “Will Oi——”
    “So. Don’t burn your boots. If you’re without boots, you’re what, Bates?”
    “Uh?”
    “Say you’ve got no boots, what happens?”
    “Oi don’t know, Trained Soldier.”
    “You’re barefoot.”
    “Oi know that, but——”
    “Then why didn’t you say so? You can’t march, and the war is as good as lost. So no burning. Leather,” says Brand, “comes from abroad. It takes sailors. Sailors die so that you wear boots. Get it? Them boots are covered in the blood of sailors.”
    Bates says: “Trained Soldier, Oi thought that was grease.”
    “God give me strength,” says Brand.
    We polish away. Later, a sergeant with a book under his arm comes into the hut and shouts: “Stand to your beds and listen! Is there anybody here who’s good at painting and decorating?”
    Two men stand up.
    “Anybody play football … I don’t mean just kicking a ball around: I mean, anybody who can play it well.”
    One man rises and