‘ON this parade ground YOU will learn to MARCH like SOLDIERS. You are no longer WOMEN. There are no WOMEN in the ARMY. You are in the ARMY so you must be SOLDIERS, and SOLDIERS MARCH!’ he bellowed. A rabble of four hundred women, Emily included, stared at him blankly.
‘On my COMMAND, into COLUMNS. Columns NOW!’
There was a murmur of giggles. Master Sergeant Bowler surveyed his recruits with dismay. There was no attempt to line up in columns, and no real understanding of what a column was. He opened his mouth to shout and swear at them, as he was used to; to belittle and berate until his charges were broken and obedient.
It was to be the breaking of Master Sergeant Bowler, because he found himself unable to do it. After all, despite there being no women in the army, these were unmistakably women and, in the decent middle-class family that had produced Master Sergeant Bowler, one did not swear at women. He regarded them, goggle-eyed, moustache twitching. ‘Into columns,’ he suggested. ‘March?’
Eventually, and out of mutual boredom, he had them tramping about the parade ground for an hour, but it was a sight of dismal horror to a military man. The problem, Bowler must have realized, was that they didn’t understand the necessity of it. As a career soldier, he knew that to march – to achieve discipline and precision by the repetitious and orderly stamping about on a parade ground – was the very kernel of being in the army. All his previous recruits had understood that too, and if they had not, he had bawled it into them until they had. All his previous recruits, of course, had been men.
By the end of the fourth day he was beginning to feel like a shepherd without a dog. He gave up, at that point, and passed his grievances on to his superior.
The commanding officer of the Gravenfield camp made himself known to them on the fifth day, after Bowler had them approximately lined up before the stark grey walls of the main barracks.
He appeared not at the balcony Emily was looking up at but at the main door: a heavily built man in a uniform with the insignia of a major. He stood very straight, with one hand on the hilt of his sabre, and there was something wrong with his face, something not immediately obvious.
‘Good morning, soldiers,’ he said. His voice was quiet and crisp and authoritative.
‘Good morning, sir,’ came the ragged reply.
‘Master Sergeant Bowler has told me you will not march,’ he continued. ‘Very well. I don’t think we have time to drill you, or need. The rest you will learn, though. You will learn it because, when your papers come through, when we are done with you here, you will be going to the war. If you have not learned what we have to teach you, then you will die, and you will cause the deaths of your comrades. Is that clear?’
He had their utter attention now.
‘I can promise you nothing,’ he said. ‘You will learn only what you are willing to learn. I have no faith in sending women to war. If you listen, though; if you watch what is shown to you; if you give us your undivided attention, then you may leave here with half the skills necessary to ensure your own survival.’ The left side of his face had not moved during all these words.
They were split into classes of forty or so and put to work learning their geography and history, their ranks and uniforms, taking care of kit, basic medicine and the elegant business of taking a life with a gun.
Emily and her squad filed into the gunnery sergeant’s room with some trepidation. The rest had been window-dressing, they all felt. This was to be the true apprenticeship, the mark of a soldier.
‘Ladies, gather round.’ The gunnery sergeant was an unexpectedly small man, sitting low behind his desk at one end of his cramped office. To one side, the long windows had been thrown open to show the brown lawns of Gravenfield, with wooden targets standing mute and blasted.
‘How many of you have ever fired a gun?’ His face was creased with old pain, and it creased further when only Emily raised her hand. He took a moment to gather his strength. He was really too young for this, and they all wondered why he was not at the war front himself.