My army days: learning to march and trying to communicate

New recruits to the army have to be taught to march. It may seem strange, after all, we almost all walk. Marching however is a bit different. Learning to march was more difficult than I had imagined, but we managed it. Eventually. This included the totally useless “slow march” that only seems to be used by a handful of soldiers when carrying a coffin at a military funeral. We all had to learn to do this. I never saw anyone actually doing it for real.

Well, all but one guy learned to march. He was from a small village outside Aberdeen and was also only five feet and a fraction of an inch tall. This just qualified him to join the army. Five feet was the minimum height. Being this small, his problem was that as he was basically a dwarf with tiny legs and he could not march in step with the others, so that he fell behind after two or three paces! To solve the problem they did not, as one might imagine let him out of the army, but instead, during Basic Training, they made him Room Orderly.

If anything was left unattended in a hut it would be stolen – and I mean anything: knives, forks, socks, small packs it did not matter much – everything can be sold in the army, and if necessary, items could be sold back to the person that had originally owned them. As a result, every hut in the training camp had to have a Room Orderly to guard it. This was a person who did not march or train for one day but had to stay in and guard the hut! Actually it was good to have two such people, so one could go to pee or whatever, and was available for any sudden mission the army decided it wanted done. So the dwarf was made a permanent Room Orderly and the rest of us took turns to join him, one by one. As he could not speak any English that we could understand, it was very boring being with him, but at least in the hut it was dry, not as cold as outside, and one could be very lazy for a day. Occasionally an officer or sergeant might look in, so one could not lie on the bed or sleep, but it was still good.

I was very lucky when it came round to my turn to be Room Orderly; this happened to fall on the day that we all had to do the assault course, where one climbs rope ladders, clambers over walls, jumps over ditches, balances on a swinging bridge over water, which the corporal keeps swinging, to try to make as many as possible fall in the icy water, and similar other nasty activities. So I missed a most unpleasant experience through sheer good fortune. Warm and dry, I watched happily as the rest of the hut came staggering in about three in the afternoon, exhausted, covered in mud, and too tired to do anything but shower and collapse onto their beds.

The tiny chap from the village outside Aberdeen spoke such a virulent form of Scottish-English than no one south of the border could understand a word he said. It sounded really like Norwegian to me. In its wisdom, once basic training was over, the army made him the Camp Messenger. Well, he had received no training on weapons and the like and could not march. As the army would not discharge him, there was nothing else he could do. This meant that he was called in to an office or whatever and told to “Go and tell the Adjutant that I will see him at three o’clock” or some such. The problem was that when he got to the other end, the Adjutant could not understand a word he said! So each time the Camp Messenger delivered a message, which he did many times a day, it first had to be written down on a piece of paper, which he was then told to take to the Adjutant or whoever! Being totally unintelligible to us English people, he was clearly the worst possible person to select as Camp Messenger, but that is what the army in its wisdom did. He was still carrying bits of paper round when I left Carlisle about nine weeks later.

I still wonder why the officers did not simply use the telephone and terminate the role of Camp Messenger.