CITIZEN INTO SOLDIER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 90, 14 March 1941, Page 8

CITIZEN INTO SOLDIER

(5) Intensive Training

E have now been in camp almost two months, and our " intensive training " is becoming more and more intensive. Before we joined the army-I use the word for kindliness-few of us could see what we might be called upon to do during these long months. It seemed a long time in which to learn only to be a soldier. Personally, I believed then, and still do, that soldiering cannot be listed as an occupation for adults. It would not take long, I believed, before we were ready to come back and get on with the civilian job. I-was wrong. We were all wrong. It takes weeks to teach a raw recruit to turn correctly, about the same time to make him slope arms in unison, and an eternity to teach him the complicated sequence of movements in porting arms for inspection. And these are not the only things we learn nowadays. When I was at school, and I think it was primary school, we used to have a subject called geography, and geography had something to do with maps. We learned ,all about it at the time, but forgot as * speedily as our young minds grasped. As penalty, we must now go through the process again, and we discover with horror and amazement, that collectively we are duller and slower and less intelligent now than we were ten or fifteen or twenty years ago. Map reading has assumed the proportions of

a problem in Ejinsteinian mathematics. Now, after almost three weeks’ occasional training in its use, we are still not all of us certain that the needle always points north on the compass. I see recruits setting their compass for night marching, and not releasing the lock. They assume, having set it, that it invaribly points the way they should go. Soldiering is Complicated The Lewis gun is scarcely less complicated. Not in its action, I mean. We can all see that the gas works a piston which recharges the chamber. We can all see that it is loaded so, and fired so, But few of us can grasp, after some weeks of concentration on the matter, exactly how it should be loaded, fired, inspected, carried, and generally messed about with for the purposes of instruction on 1 m.g. drill. Even the .303 Lee-Enfield still gives us headaches. We are called upon at intervals to relate to our instructor the three rules for aiming, and they invariably become mixed up with the three (or is it four? or two?) aids to trigger pressing; and/or the five (or is it six?) aids to good shooting. Then you must know how many knuckles of your closed fist equal twelve degrees of a,circle in the field of fire and how many sections there are in a brigaded detachment of artillery if five howitzers are firing every three minutes and 16 eighteen-pounders come in every five minutes, and how long it will take to carry water to make tea for the gun teams if the river is five miles away and you only have a gas-contaminated kerosene tin in which to carry it. Only the other day, for the umpteenth time, one of the officers tried to tell us

how the whole show worked. The explanation occupied some four or five hours in total, and at the end of the time all we rookies were agreed upon was that the secret of the British Army’s famous success in retreat was that it then became disorganised and could function without rulings by the Esher Committee (1904). I still,do not think that soldiering is the business of any proper adult, but it remains a decidedly involved affair. Learning to be a soldier, at the age of 25 or anything else between, 19 and 40, is as completed as learning to appreciate the principles of Archimedes at the age of 12 years, and that takes some time, as all third formers will agreed. Three Months Not Enough I have my doubts, in fact, if it can be done in three months. You have to remember that men who have left school for even five short years have had all their sensibilities thoroughly dulled by office routine, the radio thriller, and the movies. They are in no fit condition to learn anything. I speak from observation of my own reactions as well as of those of other people. Before we came here we were more or less good or bad at our own jobs. We held ‘them down, from habit if not from ability. But now we must suddenly learn something new, and it is the devil’s own job to adjust our minds to this new perspective, even if the something new is only three movements with the hands and arms. I think the army, for its size, approaches something like a good method for teaching us. Theoretically, we should all be subjected to powerful psychological influences for three months even before we start learning how to listen for the "Halt!" as the right foot is passing the left. But there is no time for this, so, instead we are given the halt on the tight foot for a month or so and after

that we are in fit condition to learn how to adjust compass error by rule-out-of-book without understanding the subject at all, really This is hardly the fault of the army. Some recruits could no doubt be trusted to work things out intelligently, and understand their process of reasoning. But there are the others who cannot. For them there must be rules of thumb. For their sake, the army must drill us constantly for weeks on end, until, whether we are warriors, bookworms, socialists, or anarchists, our muscles jump with nervous tension whenever anyone says something in any tone but normal, When this desirable state is achieved we are soldiers. Theory and Practice That is the theory, as any permanent staff instructor will be glad to explain, since he is proud of its practical efficacy, observed over, any period up to 40 years, or since the Boers spoiled war as a business for gentlemen. Here, however, it does not entirely work out. Three months is not long enough, and I for one am glad, not so much as an individual as some sort of ‘patriot who wants his country to support a decent people, some day. At the end of, three months’ training, even in‘tensive training, even the private soldier in New Zealand still thinks partly as an individual. I think that is a very good atrangement. We Begin to Appreciate Freedom We want to win this war now that it’s really begun. But we don’t want to come out of it listening for a word of command, any more than an amateur politican wants to come out of politics listening to the sound of the whip in the corridor. For some years all of us have been unusually free men. Whether our free(Continued on next page)

CITIZEN INTO SOLDIER (Continued from previous page) dom was time to spare for the movies or time to spare for thinking we are now beginning to appreciate the fact that it was freedom. Now that we have no time for ourselves, no time for other people, no time to think or read, scarcely time even to attend thoroughly to personal hygiene — now we are beginning to believe that this war will be worth fighting over if we come out of it clear enough in our heads to make use of the advantages which victory will bring back to us. For some these will once again be the picture theatie and the well remembered telephone number. For others there will be something better or worse, according to the way you look at it. For all of us it will be something about which we knew little, possessing much of it, and about which we now understand a great deal, since we have none of it. It will be freedom, or I hope it will be. We Must Keep Our Heads Sometimes I am reassured that the private soldier in New Zealand’s amateur army is keeping his head-that he is still able to resist this constant impingement of regulation under the happier disorder of his natural thoughts and ideas. And then sometimes I wonder if even three months will not ultimately have the effect; if the soldier and his rifle, shooting at the word of command, will not become the civilian with his vote, giving it where he is told. There was a good deal of regimentation before this war. Most of it was

called equality of some sort. But ‘t meant more, and not such good things as equality of opportunity. It meant that the good were equal to the average, and not always that the bad came up to the average standard. After the war there will be a good deal more regimentation. It will seem to be necessary. There will need to be discipline if big jobs are to be carried through efficiently. Some of us here in camp are concerned lest that discipline will also mean dullness. Still Not Impressed At this moment there is not one of us here who does not hate to discover that his thinking is the job of someone else. We dislike most heartily the thought that we are children again at school, occupied with something that scarcely becomes intelligent adults. We still feel an occasional pang when we are lined up and marched to our meals, with our denims draped like sack on convicts. Now that we are in the army, and absolved of. so many of the responsibilities of careful civilian life, we have time to appreciate such simple sensations without preoccupying worry about such distant. things as war. And we still do not like it. For all its immensity, and omnipotency, and the vastness and accuracy of its organisation, and the wonder of its machines, and the unfailing precision of its thinking, the army still fails to impress us. I hope we stay that way. This is an instrument for our using. I believe we can use it efficiently if we are given the chance to sort out all the small stupidities that haste and emergency have

brought into it. But we must not forget that it is only an instrument, and that the surgeon’s knife must be put aside when the operation is over. It cannot go on cutting in the same place without killing the patient. Let’s keep the patient alive in the end, whatever interest we might now perceive in the excision. After all, the patient is humanity itself, and although we as doctors are using a brutal instrument, there is no logical reason for becoming brutal ourselves. If these small points are remembered I do not mind remembering as well as I can that the rifleman in the army reloads at the shoulder, and not on the ground, where the movement can be performed in comfort.