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Captain David Elliott of the Welsh Guards found himself ‘terribly depressed’ on returning to his barracks in Britain after a weekend leave: ‘There is nothing so utterly boring, so utterly narrow and so utterly petty as regimental soldiering which lacks the accompaniment of a state of battle…Certainly in this battalion there is no charity, no loving kindness, no loyalty…Among the officers, if not among the men, there are many problem children.’ While embryo airmen revelled in the thrills of flight training, few recruits found comparable compensations in discovering how to become infantrymen. Pfc ‘Red’ Thompson from Staten Island, New York, felt that he acquired limited skills: ‘I learned to take care of myself; to be wary, to look and listen; and to dig holes.’ Every soldier became reflexively familiar with the order ‘Get your gear on and stand by to move out,’ usually with scant notion of where he was going. Ignorance of anything beyond a man’s field of vision was the norm. As a 1942 recruit training in North Carolina, nineteen-year-old Missourian Tony Moody decided that he and his comrades cherished no lust for glory: ‘We somehow hoped we wouldn’t be in harm’s way.’
Pressures on manpower caused the conscription of more than a few recruits who should never have been obliged to serve. ‘My comrades were mostly from Yorkshire and Lancashire,’ wrote the eighteen-year-old Pte. Ron Davidson.
The 1930s had been a bad time for many and physically some found things very difficult and others were barely literate. I remember one who did not make the grade, aneuretic and also sub-normal – needless to say he had been passed A1 by the army doctors! He could just about dress himself, but the intricacies of army gear were beyond him and we used to get him into it. We used to lay out his kit in the prescribed manner, but this was done at night so [he] slept on the wooden floor which he regularly wet. The army in its wisdom decided [he] was ‘idle’ and a malingerer and set about ‘waking him up a bit’. This took the form of huge P[hysical] T[raining] I[nstructor]s chasing him all over the barrack square, yelling in his ear the most frightful obscenities.
This misfit was eventually discharged, but most rifle platoons included one or two subnormal men, whose conduct in battle was unsurprisingly erratic. British soldier William Chappell avowed his own submission to military service, but never ceased to ache for the civilian world from which he had been torn: ‘I accept this life. I accept the loss of my home, the collapse of my career, the bomb that injured my mother, the wide scattering and disintegration of the web of friendship I had woven so painstakingly for myself…I still want the same things. More chocolate; longer hours in bed; easily acquired hot baths, delicious, varied and delicate food; all my own possessions around me…I am bothered by my feet, sick of khaki, bored and annoyed by my companions, all the monotonous, slow, fiddle-de-dee of army life. I long for it all to be finished with, and sometimes vaguely envy those who have gone.’
An American officer wrote from the Pacific: ‘When the tents are down, I think every man feels a loneliness because he sees that this wasn’t home after all. As long as there were four canvas walls about him, he could kid himself a little…Standing on barren ground surrounded by scrap lumber piles and barracks bags with nothing familiar on his horizon he feels uprooted and insecure, a wanderer on the face of the earth. That which is always in the back of his mind now stands starkly in the front: “Will it ever end, and will I be here to see it?”’ S/Sgt. Harold Fennema wrote to his wife Jeannette in Wisconsin: ‘So much of this war and army life amounts to the insignificant job of passing time, and that really is a pity. Life is so short and time so precious to those who live and love life that I can hardly believe myself, seeking entertainment to pass time away…I wonder sometimes where this is going to lead.’ Yet if camp life was monotonous, at least it was closer to home than the theatres of war. Pfc Eugene Gagliardi, a nineteen-year-old newspaper pressman from Brooklyn, regarded his entire later experience of service in Europe as ‘a nightmare. All my good memories of the army were before we went to France.’
Active service, when it came, changed everything. American correspondent E.J. Kahn wrote from New Guinea: ‘As an urban selectee’s military career progresses, he changes gradually from a preponderantly indoor being into a wholly outdoor one.’ Marine Eugene Sledge recoiled from the brutish state to which the battlefield reduced him: ‘The personal bodily filth imposed upon the combat infantryman by living conditions on the battlefield was difficult for me to tolerate. It bothered almost everyone I knew…I stunk! My mouth felt…like I had gremlins walking around in it with muddy boots on…Short as it was, my hair was matted with dust and rifle oil. My scalp itched, and my stubble beard was becoming an increasing source of irritation in the heat. Drinking water was far too precious…to use in brushing one’s teeth or in shaving, even if the opportunity had arisen.’
Combat opened a chasm between those who experienced its horrors, and those at home who did not. In December 1943, Canadian Farley Mowat wrote to his family from the Sangro front in Italy: ‘The damnable truth is we are in really different worlds, on totally different planes, and I don’t really know you any more, I only know the you that was. I wish I could explain the desperate sense of isolation, of not belonging to my own past, of being adrift in some kind of alien space. It is one of the toughest things we have to bear – that and the primal, gut-rotting worm of fear.’
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