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1. The Regimental Sergeant-Major

This Mr Hyde has a face of Punch,
hellfire eyes, a horn of a chin,
and the energy of a fly.

Even off parade, even to the Naafi,
arms swing shoulder-high, and
the carborundum throat’s about to grind:

‘Left-roight, left-roight.’
The swagger-stick whips and points and plies:
‘Head back, that man, thumb up, and shoulders square!’

The joke’s on us. The only enemy in sight
is this familiar, blessed with the right
to have a voice in how we go to shite.

2. First Booze-up

None of us have learned to drink.
A glass of port at Christmas, a stolen pint,
but now we sip a whisky, a sherry, and a gin.

Who was this khaki girl I was kissing?
Somehow back at camp and up at reveillé,
It’s a vomit for breakfast, not my first.

Dawn is dawning: getting canned
requires the skill and wariness
of a night out in No Man's Land.

3. Defenders of Freedom

Wire surrounds our free time too.
We’re on parole and owned by someone else.

And how to get a girl? The pay’s too low to feed her,
the girls in sight callipygous, coarse, unread.

We all believe there’s bromide in our tea.
Army life unmans you, but eyes can docket

sweet fruit behind an ATS breast pocket.

4. Vera Lynn

We’ll meet again, don’t know where,
Don’t know when, but I know...

whom will I meet again? Myself perhaps?
And will it be in heaven?

5. The War Office Selection Board

Here’s a glimpse of a lost civilisation.
The food good, beds comfortable,
officers courteous.

The table’s for ten. I choose a place
next to the captain. Rumour has it
that it helps to get you in.

I take good care to sit up straight
and neither hunch nor shovel. I fork
a morsel gracefully to my mouth.

The captain’s handsome and finds me,
apparently, entertaining.
I recognise good breeding.

Even the tasks are to my taste:
simple psychological tests
in comfortable classrooms.

A picture of a motherly-looking
lady at a rural garden gate.
‘A world that's gone,’

I write, ‘yet still
worth fighting for.’ Bullshit's
what you learn, and not for nothing.

There’s a mini-rugby match
on an obstacle course. As former
hooker for the first XV I’m footsy.

Now I must manoeuvre
three men across a road of mustard gas
with duckboard and rope.

‘Right, you men!’ I say.
‘Any suggestions?’
I get them across

but am not accepted. Sent back
for three months, to grow up.
I joined the Corporal’s Cadre yesterday.

6. The Lance-corporal's Cadre

More battle drill, and the same old stuff:
two hours bashing Napoleonic formations
about the square.

The instructors are the duffers.
Who can — do,
who can’t — teach cadres.

Lieutenant Atkinson's a lanky mouse
with a dingbat mad-dog look —
camp as a khaki tunic allows.

Rosy-cheeked, with an epicene
giggle, a silly grin and
dead-keen determination,

he plans a march, four days, a hundred miles.
Day two, his feet are bleeding in his boots.
Maverick, sado-masochistic, all smiles,

He’s no hermaphrodite.
Day three, he shoulders a bren-gun.
Like us, he’s really out of sight.

7. Lance- corporal

Now I boss recruits around,
straighten rifles and salutes, inspect
shaves, adjust the angle of another’s feet.

I roar them up and down the barrack square,
jolly them at the bayonet bags, shout;
Kick him in the balls’ as I was taught.

I teach the secrets of the Bren,
how, with the middle finger, to slide
the catch back underneath.

I don't say ‘You'd soon find it
if it had hair round!’ Could I
find something with hair round myself?

8. Corporal Cosgrove

Cosgrove’s a matchstick version
of the RSM: same height, or smaller,

but legs like straws and boots like Mickey Mouse.
His black Brylcreem has a white crack like surgery.

Mincing up and down before the ranks,
he stamps like a guardsman on the turn,

salutes, and his arm swings up, a railway signal,
vibrating at the eye. Even in our room,

he parades the floor, halts and smiles triumphantly
at the punchline of his favourite joke.

His arm's a hard-on: ‘Wallop! Red hot cock!’
He smiles to himself, repeats it once or twice,

and I'm watching in the certain knowledge
he’s never been inside a woman either.

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