Sergeant Nelson of the Guards by Gerald Kersh Page A

again:
    “Work with me, and I’ll be all right. Work against me, make things difficult, impede the progress of fitness and the war by any idleness, laziness, insubordination or funny business …” He grinds his teeth, leaving the rest unsaid but hideously implied.
    Then he hands us over to the striped Sergeant, Paul, who lines us up and says:
    “I’m the best fellow in the world if you treat me right. Work willingly and do your best, and I’m your pal. Play me up, and I don’t mind telling you I’ll make life a misery for you. I’ll soon get that paleness off your faces and put some zing into those limbs. Now, let’s see you run …”
    An hour later we go back to the hut.
    Sergeant Nelson grins at us.
    “Well? Grown any hair on your horrible little chests? Get back into battledress. I, I , do you hear me, I am going to tell you about the Short Lee-Enfield Rifle. Hi-de-Hi!”
    “Ho-de-Ho!”
    Bates says: “Please Sergeant Oi think Oi’ve got a torn muscle.”
    “So what d’you want me to do? Darn it? Get going.”
    *
    The little aches and pains of unaccustomed exercise affect different men in different ways. Some remember what their mothers told them about “overstraining” themselves, and fall into dismal panic. Others—heavy manual workers, and the like—consider them philosophically, without entirely ignoring them. Sedentary men, clerical fellows, black-coated workers like Dale, suffer considerably in the first weeks ofGuards training, but suffer like heroes, saying nothing at all except an occasional “Owch,” like the parrot that laid square eggs.
    Months afterwards, Sergeant Nelson, speaking to the N.C.O. known as Corporal Bearsbreath, said:
    “Bearsbreath, I definitely admit that the wartime Guardsman is not the same as the peacetime Guardsman. In peacetime you can settle down to quiet training. You can chase your man into shape for months; and then again he’s come into the Army because he wants to make it his job for a few years to come. Definitely. In wartime, you get all sorts and shapes and sizes of Guardsmen, within the height limits. But you have to hand it to one or two of them, the way they take it.
    “There was a guy called Spencer, some sort of a salesman of some kind of biscuits or some such tack, that had spent his life sitting in a little motorcar driving from boozer to boozer hawking this here stuff. He come in at fourteen-stone-seven, puffy as pastry, carrying maybe three stone of superfluous fat, and dead out of condition. Oh definitely. Built to weigh eleven stone; carrying three stone extra: thinnish in the leg, softish about the thigh, not too good in the feet. Well, Bearsbreath , you know as well as I do that the chief trouble with Guardsmen is their feet. There’s practically a disease: ‘Guardsmen’s Heels,’ from excessive stamping. I thinks to myself: ‘With all the good will in the world,’ I thinks, ‘this here Salesman wallah is going to turn out pretty poor … yes, I’m afraid he’s going to be definitely steady.’
    “And I watches him. Well, Bearsbreath, you know as well as I do that the first week or two cracks up quite a few rookies, for the time being … ammo boots on their poor little feet, and stamp, stamp, stamp on the Square; and the Staff Sergeant in the muscle factory; and the change of grub, and so on. This here Spencer drops weight like a Wop dumping his pack on the run. You can see stones and stones dripping off of him on the Square. Millions of stones that rook lost; billions. And sometimes, coming in at night to see if everything was hunky-doke, I’d see this here biscuit, or potato-crisp salesman, sitting on his bed with a pair of feet on him—I swear to God, Bearsbreath, they was like barrage balloonspainted red, only bigger. ‘Sore tootsies?’ I says, and he always says: ‘It’s all right, Sarnt.’ Conscientious? I never see such a conscientious rook. And I see him shape, and I say to myself: ‘This rook is a dead cert for the