The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [9]
Far away dark clouds were gathering. Even in remote Aberdeen there were ominous portents, with local men volunteering to fight against Franco in Spain and violent clashes in the streets when Sir Oswald Mosley’s blackshirted fascists came to town.
When I got into the Army and basic training at Bridge of Don I was super-fit and without doubt the fittest man in my regiment. On the obstacle course I was always way ahead of the pack. If there was a quicker way of doing things, I always found it.
After the officers had put us through PT, a chillingly cold shower was followed by breakfast. Then the commanding officer would give his usual speech. He paced up and down, reciting the King’s regulations and welcoming us into the British Army. When he was done we were ordered back to the parade ground for the regimental sergeant major to have a go at us. He was one of the usual ferocious and special RSM breed to be found within the British Army and had a wonderful command of a spectacular range of foul-mouthed and highly inventive insults to bestow on his hapless new charges.
But he certainly did have grounds for ripping into us. What a right bunch of idiots we must have looked! Some men literally did not know left from right. Some boys on bayonet drill could not even stab the huge straw-filled sack suspended in front of them. Half of them couldn’t run, never mind anything else. Nothing but plodders, I thought. The apoplectic RSM would storm around looking about ready to burst a blood vessel, shouting in their faces. ‘What a shower,’ he would mutter as he shook his head and stomped off. He knew he had his work cut out for him. He was used to dealing with the regular Army. But those soldiers had volunteered for a career in the military – we were all conscripts, not even reluctant volunteers. A big difference.
During bayonet drill the officers were determined we should picture the sack as a real person. ‘It’s him or you! Give him the cold steel!’ they would shout as you charged these men of straw with your rifle jousting out in front of you. Some men would hesitate before the sack and pathetically poke or prod it, much to the fury of the officers. They urged you to ‘put your war face on’ and scream a bloodcurdling war cry as you ran up and thrust your bayonet right through the sack. I really hoped that it would never come to the real thing, face to face, but I trained as if it were ‘do or die’.
In the afternoon we had light-machine-gun drill. We learned to dismantle and put Bren guns together again, and generally get the feel for them and how they worked. The Bren gun was the ‘workhorse’ of the British infantry. Introduced in the mid-thirties, it fired up to five hundred rounds a minute of the same .303 ammunition used in the Lee Enfield rifles that we would carry. It was designed by the Czechs in Brno and manufactured in Enfield, hence it became known as the ‘Bren’ gun.
By four in the afternoon we were usually done for the day and were dismissed to our barracks. I spent the time polishing my boots and blanco-ing (whitening) my webbing and polishing the brass buttons on my tunic. Others played cards, read books and generally dodged. I took to Army life better than most. There had been discipline in the Boy Scouts and I had reached the level of patrol leader before becoming a Rover Scout, so I was used to it. Plus I had had to be disciplined for my job. But others really struggled with it. If anyone stepped out of line, the Army had some inventive punishments lined up for them. They might be given seven days of ‘jankers’, punishment duties such as performing in full kit with their rifle presented in front of them or peeling endless mountains of spuds. The most soul-destroying punishment of all was the mindbending task of painting coal white.
Eventually we received rifles for .22 shooting practice. Once adept with the small-bore