Inferno - Max Hastings [209]
Most of those who fought clung stubbornly to their own amateur status, performing a wholly unwelcome duty before returning to their “real” lives. As a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant in action against the Germans with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, Peter White, reflected: “It must take about seven years … to make a being feel really like a soldier and not just a civilian dressed up. The situation seemed so ludicrously unreal and yet grimly real at the same time. We could at least comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the poor blighters opposite us were in the same boat even though it was a boat of their seeking.” John Hersey wrote of the marines on Guadalcanal: “The uniforms, the bravado … were just camouflage. They were just American boys. They did not want that valley or any part of its jungle. They were ex-grocery boys, ex–highway laborers, ex–bank clerks, ex-schoolboys, boys with a clean record … not killers.”
RAF corporal Peter Baxter lamented: “My whole generation … are wasting some of the finest years of their lives in the dreary business of war. Our manhood has come to full fruition, but it is stifling and decaying in these wasted years … The deadening, paralysing influence of service life has blighted my middle twenties.” Many young men had never before lived away from home, and they hated the indignities and discomforts of barracks existence. Frank Novy, a twenty-one-year-old, spent his first night in the army at a depot in Leeds. “After a few minutes on the palliasse I heard complaints from all sides. My own was terribly hard, and I had no pillow, my teeth were aching and soon I had a headache. I felt depressed and tired out. I tried to sleep, but I kept thinking of home, and all I had left went round and round in my head, ceaselessly, persistently … At times I felt so depressed that I wanted to cry, but couldn’t.”
Recruits found themselves growing new skins. Len England described how a fellow soldier delivered a stream of wisecracks to a girl behind the counter in the YMCA, then turned to England and said in surprise, “I’ve never flirted before in my life. I’ve only been in the army five days, and now look at what I’m doing.” England observed that he and his new comrades felt like different people, “more authoritative and self-assertive in uniform.” Educated men recoiled from the crude banality of barracks vocabulary: among Americans, everything seemed to be “tough shit”; an alleged coward “was shaking like a pup shitting carpet tacks”; and civilians who escaped military service were “4-F bastards.”
No sentence was complete without its obscene expletives: the fucking officers made them dig fucking foxholes before they received fucking rations or stood fucking guard. Even the most delicately reared recruits acquired this universal military habit of speech, though officers’ messes aspired to more gentility. Cultured men were pained by translation into a world in which art, music, and literature had no place. Capt. Pavel Kovalenko of the Red Army wrote one night in the line: “After dinner I sat down to read Nekrasov. My God, when will I be able to spend as much time as I want enjoying Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov. I saw a photograph of Tolstoy as a young man in officer’s uniform … Tears choked in my throat, almost overwhelming me.”
Capt. David Elliott of the Welsh Guards found himself “terribly depressed” on