Camp Life in the British Army

Belton Park Camp, Lincolnshire

By E. Charles Vivian

In going to camp, transferring from the solid shelter of barracks to the more doubtful comfort of crowding under a canvas roof, the soldier feels that he is getting somewhere near the conditions under which he will be placed on active service. The pitching of camp, especially by an infantry battalion, is a parade movement, and as such is an interesting business. It begins with the laying out of the tents in their bags, and the tent poles beside them, near the positions which the erected tents will occupy. The bags are emptied of their contents; men are told off to poles, guy ropes, mallets and pegs; the tents are fully unfolded, and, at a given word of command, every tent goes up to be pegged into place in the shortest possible space of time. At the beginning of a given ten minutes there will be lying on otherwise unoccupied ground rows of bags and poles; at the end of that same ten minutes a canvas town is in being, and the men who are to occupy that town are thinking of fetching in their kits.

Under ordinary circumstances, from four to eight men are told off to occupy each tent, but on manœuvres and on active service these numbers are exceeded more often than not. During the South African war the present writer once had the doubtful pleasure of being the twenty-fourth man in an ordinary military bell-tent. The next night and thereafter, wet or fine, half the men allotted to that tent made a point of sleeping in the open air. It was preferable.

Life in camp is an enjoyable business so long as the weather continues fine and not too boisterous; discipline is relaxed to a certain extent while under canvas, open-air life renders the appetite keener, and one’s enjoyment of life is more thorough than is the case in barracks. Wet weather, however, changes all this. The luxury of floor-boards is a rare one even in a standing camp, and, no matter what one may do in the way of digging trenches round the tent and draining off surplus water by all possible means, a moist unpleasantness renders life a burden and causes equipment and arms to need about twice as much cleaning as under normal circumstances.

Camp life breeds yarns unending, and in wet  weather, or in the hours after dark, men sit and tell hirsute chestnuts to each other for lack of better occupation. If the weather is fine there are plenty of varieties of sport, including the ubiquitous football to occupy spare minutes, but yarns and tobacco form the principal solace of hours which cannot be filled in more active ways. There is one yarn which, like all yarns, has the merit of being perfectly true, but, unlike most, is not nearly so well known as it ought to be. It concerns a cavalry regiment which settled down for a brief space at Potchefstroom after the signing of peace in South Africa.

Some months previous to the signing of peace, a certain lieutenant of this regiment, known to his men and his fellow officers as “Bulgy,” became possessed of a young baboon, which grew and throve exceedingly at the end of a stout chain that secured the captive to one of the transport wagons of the regiment. Bulgy’s servant was entrusted with the care of the monkey, which, after the manner of baboons, was a competent thief from infancy, and inclined to be savage if thwarted. On one occasion, in particular, Bulgy’s monkey got loose, and got at the officers’ mess wagon; it had a good feed of biscuits and other delicacies, and retired at length, followed by the  mess caterer, who expostulated violently both with Bulgy’s servant and with Bulgy’s monkey, until a tin of ox-tongues skilfully aimed by the monkey caught him below the belt and winded him. After that, as Bret Harte says, the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.

Training Camp for Officer Candidates

Well, the regiment arrived at Potchefstroom and settled down under canvas, with an average of eight men to a tent and the horse lines of each troop placed at right-angles to the lines of tents. Bulgy’s monkey was given a place away on the outside of the lines, with the other end of his chain attached to a tree-stump, and there, for a time, he rested, fed sparingly and abused plentifully by Bulgy’s servant. In the regiment itself money was plentiful at the time, and it was the custom in the tents which housed drinking men for the eight tent-mates to get in a can of beer before the canteen closed. Over the beer they would sit and yarn and play cards until “lights out” sounded.

One night, eight men sat round their can of beer in a tent of “A” Squadron, to which, by the way, Bulgy belonged. These eight had nearly reached the bottom of the can. They had blown out all the candles in the tent save one, which would remain for illumination until “lights out” sounded. The last man to unroll his blankets and get to bed  had just finished, and was sitting up in order to blow out the last remaining candle, when the flap of the tent was raised from the back, and a hairy, grinning, evil face, which might have been that of the devil himself, looked in on the sleepy warriors. They, for their part, were too startled to investigate the occurrence, and the sight of that face prevented them from stopping to unfasten the tent flap in order to get out. They simply went out, under the flies, anyhow; one man tried to climb the tent pole, possibly with a vague idea of getting out through the ventilating holes at the top, but he finally went out under the fly of the tent like the rest, taking with him the sting of a vicious whack which the hairy devil aimed at him with a chain that it carried. While these eight men were fleeing through the night, the devil with the chain came out from the tent, and, seeing a line of startled horses before it, leaped upon the back of the nearest horse, gave the animal a thundering blow with its chain, and hopped lightly on to the back of the next horse in the row, repeating the performance there. In almost as little time as it takes to tell, a squadron of stampeding horses followed the eight men of the tent on their journey toward the skyline, and in the black and windy dark the remaining men of “A” Squadron turned  out to fetch their terrified horses back to camp, and, when they knew the cause of the disturbance, to curse Bulgy’s monkey even more fervently than Bulgy’s servant had cursed it. The end of it all was that eight men of “A” Squadron signed the pledge, and Bulgy left off keeping the monkey; it was too expensive a form of amusement.

This is a typical camp yarn, and a military camp is full of yarns, some better than this, and some worse.

In camp, more than anywhere else, the soldier learns to be handy. The South African war taught men to kill and cut up their own meat, to make a cooking fire out of nothing, to cook for themselves, to wash up—though most of them had learned this in barracks—to wash their own underclothing, darn their own socks, and do all necessary mending to their clothes. It taught cavalrymen the value of a horse, in addition to giving them an insight to the foregoing list of accomplishments. It was, for the first year or so, a strenuous business of fighting, but the last twelve months of the war consisted for many men far more of marching and camp experience than actual war service. It was an ideal training school and gave an insight into camp life under the best possible circumstances; its lessons were invaluable, and much of the  practice of the Army of to-day is derived from experience obtained during that campaign.

One failing to which men—and especially young soldiers—are liable in camp life consists in that when they return to camp, thoroughly tired after a long day’s manœuvring or marching, they will not take the trouble to cook and get ready for themselves the food without which they ought not to be allowed to retire to rest. In the French Army, officers make a point of urging their men to prepare food for themselves immediately on their return to camp, but in the English Army this matter is left to the discretion of the men themselves, with the result that some of them frequently go to bed for the night without being properly fed. This course, if persisted in, almost invariably leads to illness, and it is important that men under canvas should be properly fed at the end of the day as well as at the beginning and during the course of their work.

When under canvas in time of peace, the authorities of most units reduce their demands on their men in comparison with barrack life. It is generally understood that a man cannot turn out in review order, or in “burnish and fake,” with the restrictions of a canvas town about him. In some units, however, this point is not sufficiently  considered, and as much is asked of men as when they have the conveniences of barracks all about them. The result of this is sullenness and bad working on the part of the men; the short-sightedness of officers leads them to press their demands while men are in the bad temper caused by too much being put upon them, and the final result is what is known technically in the Army as an excess of “crime.” A string of men far in excess of the usual number is wheeled up in front of the company or commanding officer to be “weighed off,” and the number of men on defaulters’ parade, or undergoing punishment fatigues, steadily increases. Although in theory the soldier has the right of complaint, if he feels himself aggrieved, to successive officers, even up to the general officer commanding the brigade or division in which he is serving, in practice he finds these complaints of so little real use to him that he expresses his discontent by means of incurring “crime,” or, in other words, by getting into trouble in some way. There is no accounting for this habit; it is the way of the soldier, and no further explanation can be given. Squadrons of cavalry have been known to cut all their saddlery to pieces, and companies of infantry to render their belts and equipment useless, by way of expressing their discontent or disgust at undue harshness. The relaxation of discipline and the absence of barrack-room soldiering when under canvas is a privilege which the soldier values highly, and it ought not to be curtailed in any way.

A pleasant form of camping which many units on home service enjoy is the annual musketry camp. It happens often that there is no musketry range within convenient marching distance of the place in which a unit is stationed, and, in that case, the unit sends its men, one or two companies or squadrons at a time, to camp in the vicinity of the musketry range allotted to their use. The firing of the actual musketry course is in itself an interesting business, and it brings out a pleasant spirit of emulation among the men concerned. Keenness is always displayed in the attempt to attain the coveted score which entitles a man to wear crossed guns on his sleeve for the ensuing twelve months, and proclaims him a “marksman.” In addition to this there is the pleasant sense of freedom engendered by life under canvas, and the access of health induced thereby. The soldier, in common with most healthy men, enjoys roughing it up to a point, and life in a musketry camp seldom takes him beyond the point at which enjoyment ceases.

Infantry units serving in foreign and colonial stations are frequently split up into detachments consisting of one or more companies, and serving each at a different place. This detachment duty, as it is called, as often as not involves life under canvas, and it may be understood that life under the tropical or sub-tropical conditions of foreign and colonial stations can be a very pleasant thing. Here, as in home stations, sufficient work is provided to keep the soldier from overmuch meditation. Time is allowed, however, for sport and recreation, and, even when thrown entirely on their own resources for amusement, troops are capable of making the time pass quickly and easily.

The Hated Étaples Camp in Northern France

While on the subject of camping there is one more yarn of South Africa and the war which merits telling, although it only concerns a bad case of “nerves.” It happened during the last year of the war that a column crossed the Modder River from south to north, going in the direction of Brandfort, and camp was pitched for the night just to the north of the Glen Drift. At this point in its course the Modder runs between steep, cliff-like banks, from which a belt of mimosa scrub stretches out for nearly a quarter of a mile on each side of the river. After camp had been pitched for the night, the sentries round about the camp were finally posted with a special view to guarding the drift, the northward front of the column, and its flanks. Only two or three sentries, however, were considered necessary to protect the rear, which rested on the impenetrable belt of mimosa scrub along the river bank.

One of these sentries along the scrub came on duty at midnight, just after the moon had gone down. He “took over” from the sentry who preceded him on the post, and started to keep watch according to orders, though in his particular position there was little enough to watch. Quite suddenly he grew terribly afraid, not with a natural kind of fear, but with the nightmarish kind of terror that children are known to experience in the dark. His reason told him that in the position that he occupied there was nothing which could possibly harm him, for behind him was the bush, through which a man could not even crawl, while before him and to either side was the chain of sentries, of which he formed a part, surrounding his sleeping comrades. His imagination, however, or possibly his instinct, insisted that something uncanny and evil was watching him from the darkness of the tangled mimosa bushes, and was waiting a chance to  strike at him in some horrible fashion. He tried to shake off this childish fear, to assure himself that it could not possibly be other than a trick of “nerves” brought on by darkness and the need for keeping watch, when—crash!—something struck him with tremendous force in the back and sent him forward on his face.

Half stunned, he picked himself up from the ground, and the pain in his back was sufficient to assure him that he had not merely fallen asleep and imagined the whole business. With his loaded rifle at the ready he searched the edge of the mimosa bush as closely as he was able, but could discover nothing; he had an idea of communicating with the sentry next in the line to himself, but, since there was no further disturbance, and nothing to show, he decided to say nothing, but simply to stick to his post until the next relief came round.

Suddenly the uncanny sense of terror returned to him, intensified. He felt certain this time that the evil thing which had struck him before would strike again, and he felt certain that he was being watched by unseen eyes. He was new to the country; as an irregular he was new to military ways, and he promised himself that if ever he got safely home he would not volunteer for active  service again. The sense of something unseen and watching him grew, and with it grew also the nightmarish terror, until he was actually afraid to move. Then, by means of the same mysterious agency, he was struck again to the ground, and this time he lay only partially conscious and quite helpless until the reliefs came round. The sergeant in charge of the reliefs had an idea at first of making the man a close prisoner for lying down and sleeping at his post, but after a little investigation he changed his mind and sent one of his men for the doctor instead.

The doctor announced, after examination, that if the blow which felled the man had struck him a few inches higher up in the back he would not have been alive to remember it, and the man himself was taken into hospital for a few days to recover from the injuries so mysteriously inflicted. In the morning the column moved off on its way, and no satisfactory reason could be adduced for the midnight occurrence.

But residents in that district will tell you, unto this day, that one who has the patience to keep quiet and watch in the moonlight can see baboons come up from the mimosa scrub and amuse themselves by throwing clods of earth and rocks at each other.

It is a good camp story, and I tell it as it was told to me, without vouching for its truth. Any man who cares to go into a military camp—by permission of the officer commanding, of course—and has the tact and patience to win the confidence of the soldiers in the camp, can hear stories equally good, and plenty of them. For, as previously remarked, camp life breeds yarns.

From The British Army from Within, 1914