大象传媒

The All-Important Parade Ground.

Freedom to roam the barracks seemed to be as natural as apple pie. He was as innocent as a newborn baby as he decides to cut across the all-important Parade Ground. Within striking distance a partly human noise filled his head. It had turned on the right switches for the army and had reduced him to an unmoving thing attached to the ground. Solid and stolid he was frozen and had lost any control of his body. the body would only move when that voice gave the order to move.

The order to move was given; feelings of a rabbit about to have its life shaken out of it by a stoat reduced this Private soldier into a jelly.

"You come here"! It was long drawn out, with the strength of twenty kilowatts didn鈥檛 seem to provide the amount of motion he expected from the lad.

鈥淒ouble, double, faster鈥� with ever-increasing volume, some how he was expected to travel even faster on those unusable solid legs. Move he did, and was now in close contact with this bellowing monster.

It was his first meeting with the RSM. His badges of rank stood out from his red tunic, the hat set as only a RSM could wear it. Now looking down with the airs and graces of a supreme overlord looked down on a miserable creature. Badges of rank seemed to hover above the uniform, there was a no doubt it, and it was the Big Him. All his RSM鈥檚 leather equipment shone with a mirror shine. His short stick long since removed from under his arm was waving about like a magic wand. Mesmerised by it was a further step in turning the young one into a toad.

Distance between them was so close by now that he had to drop his arms to his side to place his face within inches of the shaking soldier. In case the soldier was hard at hearing, the mouth that seemed to extend from the chin to the top of his head was placed over the ear. It trumpeted through the ear, with a voice that sounded like thunder. The Sergeant-major鈥檚 performance had reached it peek, a captured audience surrounded this spectacle. Some were relieved that it wasn鈥檛 one of them standing there, others standing there bemused by the whole thing. Possible as a warning to those that might transgress upon his sacred ground he shouted out details of the terrible things that had been done to his parade ground. In great detail he raved on with what would be the result or even worse if his parade ground was denigrated.

It seems that his parade ground had suffered the weight of this toad鈥檚 size six in boots. The body that filled them was even a worse offender. No human he said especially a Private was blessed with the power to walk across his parade ground. A toad had soiled his parade ground; it was an act of God that he was at hand to cleanse this area of this crime he had committed.

From then on for him, the square was only there to play at being a barrack-room soldier. Come to think more about it now, 1941 memories of it is worth three coats of laughter.

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