The Light's on at Signpost (22 page)

Today, an instructor may touch a recruit “if he’s feeling the creases in your trousers to see how sharp they are”. If he can’t tell by looking at them, he must be a borderline case—and anyway, by today’s bizarre standards, doesn’t all this touching amount to sexual harassment?

Again, female recruits were ordered to say “Zero” instead of “Oh!”, presumably because “Oh!” might sound sexy. I fancy that Marlene Dietrich or Mae West could have loaded the word “Zero” with enough wanton sensuality to start a riot, but let that go.

Plainly the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Not content with trying to get women killed in action, the politically correct brigade have agitated for the disabled to be admitted to the forces, a campaign supported by an MP who accused the military of still living in the days of rifles and bayonets, as though these were things of the past. Tosh was talked about such distinguished disabled fighting men as Nelson and Bader, overlooking the fact that they entered the service as whole men who became expert in their trade before losing limbs, and remained expert afterwards.

No doubt someone confined to a wheelchair could do a payclerk’s job (although how he would cope if his office were attacked by the enemy is another matter), but it would be a dangerous precedent; we have seen enough of the p.c. brigade to know that it would be only a matter of time before the disabled clerk would be suing the army for denying him promotion.

It has been proposed in all seriousness that soldiers should be able to sue their officers for giving “bad” orders, a novel idea which would have bankrupted most officers of my acquaintance, myself included, to say nothing of such military blunderers as Napoleon, whose performance in Russia would have kept half the lawyers in Europe in gainful employment.

The list of insanities is endless: we read of plans to make assault courses easier, of banning the use of barbed wire in training, and of a European directive to reduce the decibel level of military bands and even words of command—it may be hard to apply it during an artillery barrage, but doubtless the experts will want the troops to operate in ear-muffs, so that they can die through not hearing orders. Europe, which is behind most of these lunacies, has ordained that male soldiers must be trained to react correctly to their female
comrades, and I have read with disbelief that NCOs must guard against using harsh language to recruits, who must be given time to recover if they are upset. Thus are heroes made.

All these follies are presumably part of the policy of creating what some idiot has called “a humanitarian, responsible new army”. You can picture him lost in a dreamworld where the military’s only role will be “peace-keeping”, and that never again will they be called on to do nasty things like shooting enemies or sticking bayonets in them. It is significant that the American military academy, West Point, has banned the word “kill” from its cadets’ vocabulary; no doubt some crank will call for a similar prohibition at Sandhurst.

This is bad enough, but there are other signs which must worry anyone concerned for the country’s martial efficiency. I haven’t been close to the Army for some years, but you don’t have to be close to realise that all is not as it should be.

There is, it seems, bullying, and there have been courts martial as a result. I served four years in war and post-wartime as a private soldier, junior NCO, and commissioned officer, and never knew a case of bullying. As a recruit in the Durham Light Infantry, I saw it
tried
, and I also saw the would-be bullies dealt with drastically by their comrades. Later I commanded a platoon of aggressive and volatile Glaswegians and hard-handed Aberdonians: the notion of anyone bullying in that company would have been laughable, and if anyone had tried it his feet wouldn’t have touched.

So when I hear of bullying in the Army today, I know that there are junior officers and senior NCOs who aren’t fit for their jobs. And that is disturbing.

I hear also of racial harassment. I’ve served with coloured soldiers, and had one in the platoon I commanded. No one harassed him, or discriminated against him; it simply wasn’t done. Those Glasgow hard men (and they were hard beyond the comprehension of nowadays) would have thought it shameful; it would have offended their ingrained sense of good manners and proper behaviour.

Maybe I was lucky, serving in such splendid regiments as the DLI, the Border, and the Gordons. One of the misfortunes that has befallen the Army is that they no longer exist, for the simplest of reasons. The Empire’s gone, and the money with it. We no longer police the ends of the earth or have to fight for survival against superpowers like Germany and Japan. The Army, like the other services, must be smaller, so the powers-that-be make a complete balls-up of reducing it in size, continuing to waste vast sums on defence establishments, unnecessary auxiliaries, and manic adventures like Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, while destroying the regiments which, when it comes to the bit, have to defend the realm against its enemies.

They need not have been amalgamated out of their old existence. An eminently practical alternative offered itself—not entirely politically correct, perhaps, but sound and simple. Take my old regiment, the Gordons, described by Churchill as the finest in the world; rather than amalgamate they could have hired out as mercenaries in the old Scottish tradition of the Gardes Ecossaises, the first great free lances more than a thousand years ago. God knows there’s no lack of employment around the world; they would have made money and kept themselves in excellent training against the day when Britain needed them again. It would have been worth suggesting if only to hear the scream that would have gone up from the wimps at Westminster—and it wouldn’t have been any sillier an idea than sending wee lassies into action against the West Side Boys, and a sight less wicked.

But the amalgamation scandal is a bee in my busily-buzzing bonnet, so I leave it for other anxieties which plague the old soldier as he wonders if the Army is as good as it was. He consoles himself with the thought that this has been a worry since Xenophon got his ticket, and that the new boys proved themselves splendidly in the Falklands, and later in Sierra Leone—an operation which I honestly believe no other army could have carried out so well. But
he frets at the suspicion that Private Atkins is not getting the care and material and intelligent organisation he deserves.

Tiny things jar on him because, in his book, they smack of poor thinking, even amateurism, on high. In his day, infantry were streamlined to the belt for fast movement; now he sees them cumbered with enough gear to outfit a brigade, a certain handicap in sudden crisis—how do they swim a river or scramble through a hedge in that lot? He marvels at TV pictures of an infantry leader with an enormous shovel strapped to his back—what for? Why isn’t it back with the stores instead of hampering him in an ambush? Was it really necessary to patrol in Belfast with full kit, automatic weapons, and camouflage paint? And are the Army authorities content with all these things?

Perhaps my criticism is out of date and unjustified…but not when I hear of faulty weaponry, failing communications gear, soldiers improvising to cover incompetence on high, and, most scandalous of all, being exposed to radiation and chemical harm because the M.o.D. thought there was “little risk”—and never a word of the criminal blunderers being called to account. Or when I hear of such nonsense as “counselling” after active service. Certainly warfare can have dreadful traumatic effects, needing careful treatment, but such cases are the exception. They won’t be if the “counselling” fanatics succeed in their aim of undermining morale—tell a man he needs “counselling”, and he’ll be first in the queue on sick parade, bawling for the psychiatrist, because that’s human nature.

A distinguished general who once commanded the SAS told me that after the Gulf War forms were issued to all soldiers advising them that they might need “counselling”, even although, as my informant said, “many of them had done no more than walk from the hotel to the swimming pool and back”. I put this to General de la Billiere, and his response was “No one gave
me
a form.” Come to think of it, it would have been a foolhardy psychiatrist who did.

“Counselling”, bullying, racism, p.c. follies without number—no, all is not well in the Army. I see on television a group of recruits (including women) being made to eat grubs as part of “survival training”, a nasty stupidity (you don’t need to eat insects when there’s vegetation) plainly designed simply to impress the recruits with the toughness of Army training. It’s part of the macho culture which leads to men dying of exhaustion on exercises, a culture that arises whenever people want to prove themselves and have to invent dangers and hardships because there isn’t a real war to give them the opportunity. And the M.o.D. claptrap is pumped out about the Army being better trained than ever before, and the reductions and neglect are glossed over with lying clichés such as “leaner and better” and “paring away surplus fat to create a more efficient fighting machine”.

To use a military vulgarism…balls. It’s not true, chiefly because successive governments have treated the forces negligently and bowed down abjectly before p.c. campaigners who have already done incalculable harm. Their hatred of all things military expresses itself in such a concentrated drive against morale and discipline that one is forced to conclude that it is not simply misguided, but a deliberate attempt to destroy our military capacity. Of one thing I’m certain: if I were a hostile power bent on destroying Britain’s ability to defend herself or fight a real campaign, I couldn’t have done a better job than our rulers, Tory and Labour, have done over the past twenty years.

These, of course, are just the paranoid ravings of a blood-lusting blimp, as any liberal can tell. They are also the heartfelt concerns of one of a generation of confirmed pacifists. Ours is not the pacifism of a military-hating Leftist establishment which pays lip-service to national defence while plunging recklessly into foreign adventures which are no concern of ours; we care deeply for the safety of our country, and of our successors in uniform. We despair of a government which not only pitches us unnecessarily into an Afghan
war, but at the same time seems bent on aligning us with European “allies” who show no sign of having our interests at heart and have proved broken reeds (and deadly enemies) in the past. Afghanistan may prove to be a less perilous folly in the long run than the move to make us part of a European army, a so-called Rapid Reaction Force—dear God, their idea of rapid reaction is sixty days! Saddam Hussein could conquer half the Middle East in that time. Participation with a European force, almost certainly German-led and German-dominated, is the last thing we need, and all the Europhile claptrap cannot make a case for it.

Consider: quite apart from the unreliability of the other European powers, Germany is not, on her record, as I have pointed out elsewhere, to be trusted. Aggressive expansionism has always been her trade, and one may ask, if the day comes, as well it may, when she decides to try conclusions with Russia again, will a Britain committed to European union and alliance be able to keep out? I don’t know; unlike the experts who
know
there is never going to be another great war, I cannot read the future.

One thing I do know, though. I have four grandsons, four “valiant young Britons” in Churchill’s words, and over my dead body will they ever be drafted into a war, or any military action whatsoever, at the behest of Europe. Blair and other Europhiles may crawl to their Continental friends, and clothe in high-sounding lies their readiness to sacrifice British lives in Europe’s quarrels. Very well, let them fill a pit. That’ll be the day.