An Officer and a Gentlewoman (19 page)

But with the ‘
bonjours
' came ‘
au
revoirs
' and, as we moved into New College not everyone in Imjin Company was there to unpack their bags. Some had enjoyed their taste of freedom outside the Academy too much and chose not to return. The break between Juniors and Inter was the point in the Commissioning Course when most people bolted. In Eleven Platoon one girl left us, quitting the digging-crawling routine to start a life of accountancy exams and Tube strikes in London (I did try to warn her). She was free to go. The army wasn't for her and she'd given it a good shot. Outwardly, we were saddened to say farewell but inside we felt smug. Smug that, as people left, it gave credit to those of us remaining, hacking it out. Bailing when things got tough reinforced that Sandhurst wasn't easy and gave greater credence to those of us left in the game.

As the Junior Term had come to a close, I was left considering the value of what we were being taught at Sandhurst in light of Jo Dyer's death. Aside from all the cleaning, polishing, marching inanity, the tactics felt dated. I wasn't a military tactician but I could tell that the plans we were making to defend the south of England from an invading Russian Motor Rifle Brigade were not the contemporary tactics that would get us around the streets of Basra or Sangin. What did we do if the enemy weren't in tanks advancing in straight lines? What about suicide bombers? And IEDs like the one that had killed Jo Dyer? The British Army was at war, but not the Cold War, not with the Russians, relic Russian weapons yes, but not the hoards of armour in a Russian Vanguard. I thought Russian relations are warmer these days. Over Easter leave I had consoled myself that with Juniors complete the army were now content with my ironing and bed-making skills and could start teaching the really important stuff: hearts-and-minds and counter-insurgency, wars about people and clashing civilizations that would all surely start on our move to New College. And so with this in mind three weeks into the
Intermediate Term I packed my bergen once more, ready to deploy into the field again: on a First World War trench-digging exercise in Norfolk.

One standard I had discovered at Sandhurst was that anything you had yet to do was going to be
the
worst experience you'd have at the Academy. And listening to exaggerated war tales from battle-worn cadets in the intake above us, exercise First Encounter was built up into Operation Near Death; horror stories of cadets collapsing from exhaustion, being hospitalized with trench-foot, or sectioned with sleep-deprived delirium made for effective scaremongering as we stuffed clothing and sleeping bags that wouldn't be used into our bergens.

The exercise plan was simple.

With Norfolk's turkey farmers and mustard makers under threat from advancing enemy we would find a suitable spot on Thetford training area and dig a line of trench defences, just like those dug by our great-grandfathers along the Western Front. Extra spades and picks were packed along with plenty of Redbull and Pro-Plus, because in reality the exercise was actually less about our ability to dig a hole in the ground and more a painful experiment in sleep deprivation.

The excitement about exercise First Encounter (which soon became renamed Worst Encounter) was that it was taking us somewhere new; this time we weren't going back to the hideousness of Wales or the misery of Eeyore's Gloomy Place, because Worst Encounter was in Norfolk, an area of the British Isles renowned for one especially gracious quality: it is flat. As a pancake. No horrendous hills, no seemingly insurmountable mountains. The maps we were given barely even had contours drawn on them. There was not a knoll, mound nor pimple in sight, just field upon field of arable sugar beet and brewers' barley, growing in a nice diggable sandy loam. And it was now May, so having cried with cold on my previous two excursions into the
field I was looking forward to the promise of more balmy conditions; the prospect of being able to feel my toes and not cracking an icy crust from my sleeping bag as I woke for stag.

So despite the scaremongering things were looking up for Worst Encounter.

And really, how difficult can digging a hole be?

I'm not sure if the coach driver got lost, but the exercise started on the hard shoulder of a main road, while Monday morning rush-hour traffic sped past. As we got off the bus, Captain Trunchbull, who unfortunately we hadn't left behind in Old College, was busy shouting at us in her usual nettling manner while CSgt Bicknell tentatively chivvied us along, still finding his feet with his new brood. Once again we hauled all our heavy kit onto our backs, shovels and picks poking from the top of our bergens like prospecting miners, and steadied ourselves for the evil bergen carry onto the area.

Once we arrived at the pre-agreed ‘X' on the map, our trenches were marked out on the grass with white tape and we began mentally preparing ourselves for the ‘big dig'. Except digging a trench isn't as straightforward as simply putting spade to soil; first a demoralizing de-turfing process has to be completed, which involved ripping innocuous clumps of grass from the topsoil around the planned hole. There were two trenches per section and with me I had Allinson, Rhodes and Lea. The four of us worked uninterrupted, fuelled by beginning-of-exercise zeal, but this disheartening de-turfing still took us twelve hours. Twelve whole plucking hours. We started at lunchtime on day one and it was deep into the first night before we were even ready to scrape the surface and put shovel to ground.

And the exercise was covert too, so we now found ourselves digging in complete darkness, unable to switch on our head torches in case the enemy were alerted. It was a particularly calm night on the first night. The air around us felt heavy and still,
damp with the smell of the day's rain. Trees stood motionless on the horizon, not a rustle from their branches. Occasionally I could hear the hoot of an owl, but otherwise there were just the gentle sounds of spades tucking into the earth and the odd whisper. With the grass removed, we made good progress and after an hour were a foot deep. In our trench we developed an efficient routine in which I swung a pick to loosen the soil and Allinson and Rhodes cleared it away with their shovels, forming small piles of earth around the trench. As I dug, we found the sandy ground was pocked with sporadic flinty stones that we discarded as they were dug up, continuing on with our mission to get six feet down. In the early hours of what was now the second day, sparks began to fly as I brandished my pick and it struck hard against a particularly large flint rock. A couple more arches of the pick and I began to think it unusual. It was certainly larger than those we'd been finding and not loosening in the ground as I hit it. I stopped and reached down to feel with my hands, hoping to find a corner to lever it out with, but the moment my bare hand I touched it I realized straight away that it wasn't a rock. It was clearly metallic and man-made. As I explored with my hands, groping at the dirt, I could discern the obvious fluke of a tail at the top, leading into a rusty body. A rusty unexploded body. I quickly fumbled in my pocket for a torch and shone a small light at it, unmindful of the light discipline we were supposed to be digging by. There unmistakably before me was an unexploded bomb. A rusty Second World War relic, now with a couple of clean scratches along the metal shell where I had chipped away with my pick. If I hadn't previously given much consideration to the dangers of war, I had certainly given no consideration to the dangers of training. I would have preferred a pot of gold.

Despite the distraction of unearthing a bomb, we continued to work straight through that first night and into the following morning, slowly deepening the trench (which was relocated two metres west until the bomb could be destroyed), and by dawn
word reached us that the first of the boys' platoons were complete. The sooner you finished the sooner you could rest and we weren't even halfway there. As the sun rose and burned off the morning mist, tiredness started to take its toll. With helmet and body armour on, it was exhausting work. We had had no sleep. Not a wink. The big swinging arches of my pick had become small scrabbling hiccups, while the spades full of excavated earth dwindled to tiny handfuls. As time wore on, our pace slowed further, and the slower we worked the longer it was going to take us to complete and the more time wore on. But fatigue wasn't our only problem, because back at Sandhurst ‘rations-gate' was unfolding and CSgt Bicknell was about to get an important insight into the female psyche.

While at Sandhurst strict rules are applied to using only the military-issued kit and equipment. While not the best money can buy, it does the job and we had to learn how to live with it, if only to be able to sympathize with the private soldiers' whose salaries couldn't supplement them in Millets or Blacks. For example, the army-issued sleeping bags we had all been given were just as effective as expensively bought non-issued ones from camping shops, except they took up three times as much space in our bergens and added precious more weight. On our feet we had to wear only the issued leather boots despite their blister-giving properties and through the freezing cold nights we were limited to just the issued thermal clothing. On Worst Encounter we had all stuck religiously to these rules and our bergens were conformingly packed with issued sleeping bags and clothing that we were barely even going to get to use over the course of the week. But where we had bastardized the rulebook was in its application to food. On the Sunday before deployment, after Chapel, we had enterprisingly driven to Tesco and stocked up, stacking the trolley full of more appealing alternatives to
corned-beef
hash. Then that night, before departing for Thetford, we had opened up our ration packs and emptied them into the bin,
stuffing our bergens instead with Pot Noodles (‘Fuel of Britain'), peperamis, malt loaf, Haribo and lots and lots of chocolate.

Remembering that an army marches on its stomach.

Our error in this deceit was that the following morning as we boarded the coaches to Norfolk, these bins remained unemptied. The evidence of our crime left us exposed. Laid bare and waiting. Waiting for the Academy commandant, a major general, accompanied by a delegation of foreign dignitaries touring the Academy, to happen upon them, like parents finding a squirrelled stash of pornography as they came into our rooms. Landing us in a whole mountain of trouble that would see us grounded for the rest of our lives.

Rations-gate was something that simply wouldn't have occurred in a boys' platoon. Boys are not precious or fussy about food. CSgt Bicknell had contentedly eaten boil-in-the-bag horrors for his entire military career and would never have contemplated our rejection of them. So when our actions surfaced he was livid. Livid because we'd cheated. Livid because he hadn't thought to check. And livid because he'd received a monumental bollocking for it, so we were going to get an even bigger one. He called us all in, gathering us together under a tree, lined up to attention, leaving shovels and picks in our half-trenches. He paced back and forth in front of us, pulling his hair out. He raged at us: ‘You fucking idiots, what did you think you were doing? You will bloody well eat what you are given to eat. If you are issued ration packs, then you bloody well pack them and eat them. I don't care if you don't like them. In war you don't get Pot Noodles and sweets. Do you think I had Haribo in Iraq? Do you? No, I didn't. I spent six months in the desert eating fucking ration packs and I'm telling you that the shitters there were not a place to spend more time than necessary. But I ate them. I didn't go into downtown Basra to buy peperami and Mars bars. You lot need to learn to stop being so fucking pampered.' He stopped and took a deep breath, putting his hands on his hips, his face now red with fury.

‘You've made yourselves look like fucking fools, you have. Not just to me, not just to the commandant but the whole fucking Academy. I don't ever want to have to remind you of this again. You are a fucking disgrace. The lot of you. When I've finished with you here,' he said, his rant nearing a febrile crescendo, ‘I want you to go back to your fucking trenches and dig as though your lives depend on it. Because I'm going to make sure this is a lesson you never fucking forget.'

He was angry, very, very angry, but anger was not the answer. And with this ranting rage he had got it hugely wrong, because girls do not respond to maddened shouting. As he finished with piqued conclusion, he looked to us for some sort of confirmation, a reassurance that we'd heard and understood. Instead he received a blank response as we flounced off in a girly huff, heading back to our trenches to bitch about him, metaphorically stomping upstairs and slamming the bedroom door. We walked away from him and brooded, turning our backs to avoid him. Some cried. His words had upset us, but not taught us a lesson.

That was the one and only time CSgt Bicknell bollocked us. With this one incident he realized that girls required a different, more measured approach. Girls respond to a ‘you've-let-
me-down
' emotional message not the rage of men. And eventually with Eleven Platoon CSgt Bicknell embraced the new angle to army life girls brought. After twenty testosterone-filled years, he relished his role as the guiding father figure in our lives. He took us under his wing and became defender of our honour, agony aunt and opener-of-jars.

The trench-digging continued through Tuesday and into the second night, bringing with it extreme tiredness. There had been no let-up. We hadn't stopped to rest or sleep since arriving and, now suffering from chronic fatigue, everything we did became slow and measured like the movements of a drunken tramp. We stumbled about in our trenches, breaking occasionally to join the
growing queue of people outside the Portaloos, where inside people had fallen asleep. My bloodshot eyes stung as I battled hopelessly to keep them open; my head lolled heavy on my neck. As my consciousness waned my awareness clouded. That night, in the cathedral calm of darkness, I became hazy and confused, having an almost out-of-body experience I was so tired. I felt nearer death than life. And my capacity for clear coherent thought became lost in the piles of excavated dirt. I have never been more tired than I was at 5 a.m. on that Wednesday morning, when finally my will to sleep was consented. I had been awake for over 48 hours. We eventually downed tools and I unfurled my sleeping bag on the bare grass and climbed straight in, as I was, sandy boots still on, sleeping on the damp earth under the night stars, catatonic with the eventual release of sleep.