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My Private War
By Alan Wykes as told to Barrie Pitt, editor of "Punell's History
of the Second World War".
Some time ago I happened to be chairman of a meeting at which the following
paper was read. It was presented by the well-known writer Alan Wykes,
himself an ex-soldier, and concerns a little-known (and perhaps even hushed-up)
episode in the Second World War.
Mr. Chairman, your position as a military historian is unassailable. All
the same, I shall offer you a fragment of military history that never
got into print. I shall tell you the unexpurgated version of the story
of my private war.
When I was dragged into the army in 1939 I was taught how to be a sentry
by a jolly sergeant. Well, perhaps he wasn't so much jolly as rosy. He
had a wall-to-wall flush like a puce-coloured carpet and eyes like burn-holes
in it. I'm no mimic, so I shall leave his voice unmimicked; but it was
like something put down by the Ham River Grit Company.
His instructions were very clear, if gritty. "The way to challenge anyone
approaching your post in darkness," he said, "is to point your bayonet
at his belly-button and say loud and clear, Halt! Who goes there?"
I said fretfully, "But Sergeant, apart from the difficulty of locating
anyone's navel in the darkness, especially when he's swaddled in clothes,
you've got the semantics wrong. If he's approaching, he's coming, not
going. Surely you say, Who comes here? not Who goes there?"
The sergeant said - breathing a bit heavily, I thought - this wasn't so.
He added that if I would make my way to the cookhouse and give his compliments
to the cook sergeant, the cook sergeant would give me a whole sack of
potatoes and tell me what to do with them. Which indeed he did. While
I did it the sergeant looked in on me. "I know your sort," he said. "Eccentrics.
Trying to draw attention to yourselves. Trying to work your ticket."
I was as indignant as a man festooned with potato peelings can be. "Not
at all," I said. "I'm hoping that between us we can make a great contribution
to the war. But not with sloppy semantics."
It's funny how you can sense people's moods. I could see the close-fitting
flush seething like a seismograph charting a mild earthquake under the
carpet.
I grew quite fond of potatoes. It's a fascinating job if you bring the
creative spirit to it. Marvellous designs you can make with the peelings
in the scummy water.
But being confined to camp didn't break down my resistance to challenging
people with this paradoxical "Halt! Who goes there?" I went on saying
"Who comes here?" until most of the punitive measures had been exhausted
and I was led away to the army psychiatrist.
"Let me put it to you this way," he said. "Have you considered that your
insistence on this foolishness can be interpreted as deliberate malingering
with intent to avoid facing the enemy - a court-martial charge?"
"What!" I said. "Shot at dawn to support an illogical interrogative?"
"It might even come to that," he said.
Actually it didn't. I got transferred. To intelligence of course. With
an upgrading to corporal. Corporals don't do sentry duty, so the army
presumably thought it was safe from my semantic interference. Little did
they know....
We now leap through time and space to an isolated garrison where our only
contact with the outside world was through our commissariat, which was
infrequently replenished through the supply line, and through the mail,
which brought, among other things, Amendments to War Office Orders. Wads
of them.
There were not only amendments, but amendments to amendments, right down
to the nth degree of complexity. And since we sometimes received the amendments
to the amendments before we received the amendments - if you see what
I mean - it was all very mystifying. But it was all part of the great
design for winning the war. One must have some printed instructions to
go to.
Well, one day, in the basement of a bombed building that had once been
a jobbing printer's, I found an old flat-bed printing press and some cases
of type that wasn't conspicuously different from that used in War Office
Orders. I suddenly thought of the immense possibilities. I toyed with
a lot of them. Raise the pay of corporal to ten pounds a day? All men
whose numbers begin 550 to go on leave immediately? All rosy sergeants
to be linked in chain gangs?
I didn't do any of those. Instead, I carefully compiled an amendment in
official gobbledygook saying that with effect from a certain date sentries
would challenge persons approaching their posts with the words "Halt!
Who comes here?" and that the challenge "Halt! Who goes there?" would
cease forthwith.
Well, I waited till the CO went off to the mess for his elevenses, nipped
into his office, took a cursory butcher's at a few papers that were no
concern of mine, and slipped a whole bundle of amendments, including the
one which was my concern, into his in-tray.
He passed it to the adjutant, I may say, without a flicker of enquiry.
Whitehall, like the word of God, went unquestioned. And to the bitter
end of my time with them the sentries in that isolated neck of the army
woods all said, "Halt! Who comes here?" Very properly, too.
Source: Punell's History of the Second World War
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