A Military Miscellany E-Book

Jeremy Archer

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 232

Beschreibung

From Napoleon Bonaparte to Winston Churchill, military experience has provided both men and women down the ages with a wealth of sage advice and wise council, not only on wartime strategy, but on lessons for living a good life; from the moral and political dimensions of conflict, to leadership, work, marriage, family and friendship. Historian Jeremy Archer has delved into his personal archives to compile an absorbing and illuminating collection of advice from military figures through the ages, from great generals and military strategists, to wartime leaders, soldiers, writers and poets. Ranging in tone from the heartfelt - such as letters of advice written from fathers to sons - to more light-hearted instruction, Jeremy Archer's collection of military wisdom provides a wealth of wise words, humorous anecdotes and witty bon mots, as well as life lessons learned by military figures that still resonate strongly today.

Leseprobe

A MILITARY MISCELLANY

A MILITARY MISCELLANY

The combined wit and wisdom of the armed forces

JEREMY ARCHER

Illustrated by Matilda Hunt

To the memory of my father, General Sir John Archer

Contents

Foreword by General Sir Peter Wall

Introduction

Language and Lore

Acronyms

Terms of Endearment

Nicknames

Sergeant-Majors’ Cries

Confidential Reports

Royal Navy Signals

Bugle Calls

Expressions

Borrowed Words

Articles of Clothing

Surprising Ships

Advice

From Father to Son

To Young Officers

To the Private Soldier

To a Soldier from the Reverend John Wesley

Hints, Subalterns, for Use of

To Officer Cadets at the German School of Artillery

To British Servicemen in France

To American Servicemen in Britain

To Land Girls

On the Wearing of Bowler Hats in the 1980s

In Their Own Words

Military Quotations

Twentieth-Century Words on War

Music and Songs

‘A Modern Major General’

‘Over the Hills and Far Away’

‘The British Grenadiers’

‘Hot Stuff’

‘The World Turned Upside Down’

‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’

‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’

‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’

‘Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-bag’

‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’

‘Goodbye-ee!’

‘The White Cliffs of Dover’

‘Lili Marleen’

‘Love Farewell’

Prayers

The Prayers of Sir Francis Drake

Queen Elizabeth I’s ‘A Prayer, to be delivered from our Enemies’

Sir Jacob Astley’s Prayer

The Prayer of Vice Admiral of the White Horatio Nelson

Queen Victoria’s New Year’s Prayer

William Noel Hodgson’s ‘Before Action’

R. E. Vernède’s ‘A Prayer to England’

King George VI’s Christmas Broadcast 1939

J. G. Magee’s ‘High Flight’

General Douglas MacArthur’s ‘Prayer for Arthur’

Field Marshal Earl Wavell’s ‘Form of Daily Service’

The Far East Prisoners of War (FEPOW) Prayer

‘Absent Veterans’: the Korean War 1950–3

Things to Remember

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Foreword

Only somebody with profound expertise in British regimental history, an eye for entertaining detail and a quirky sense of humour would think of producing such a unique compendium of military expressions, habits, songs, dits and traditions. Jeremy Archer has done so painstakingly and to good effect in this compact, well-researched, informative and humorous Military Miscellany.

In charting military and naval humour some of the language here is inevitably rather earthy. Indeed, I suspect much of the patter from the drill square and the stories in this book were never really intended to be committed to print. But this compilation pulls those tricks admirably, providing a window on a world that only those who have undergone military training can have experienced for real.

The links to Empire caught my attention in particular; how many of us use Army or Navy patois without understanding its origins? There is something to intrigue and amuse everybody in this pithy work, which is also an excellent reference piece.

General Sir Peter Wall GCB CBE ADC Gen Chief of the General Staff

Introduction

This little book is exactly what it says it is on the cover: a miscellany. Apart from the Armed Services, there is no theme. If there was a litmus test for inclusion, it is that the reader might perhaps exclaim: ‘Oh! that’s interesting, I must try to remember that.’

At the back of my mind was a broad intention to try to inform, educate and entertain. With those thoughts in mind, there is a mixture of historical background – interleaved with pathos and poignancy – hopefully leavened with doses of good humour.

Much of the material is derived either from my relatively short experience of service with three British Army infantry regiments – The Devonshire and Dorset Regiment, The Royal Hampshire Regiment and The Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment – or from knowledge gained from my research as a published military historian.

By way of discipline, I have deliberately edited down two chapters and two sections – Prayers; Music and Songs; Terms of Endearment and Expressions – otherwise the fun and focus might easily be lost.

Language and Lore

Those who have served would doubtless agree that military service is much more than a job; it is a way of life. As generation has succeeded generation, the language, culture, customs, standards and sense of belonging have developed in subtle – and unsubtle – ways, particularly when the survival of the Nation was in doubt. The funeral of Baroness Thatcher, which took place in St Paul’s Cathedral on Wednesday, 17 April 2013, provides a fine example of connection, continuity and a sense of belonging: Garrison Sergeant-Major Bill Mott, Welsh Guards, was the conducting Warrant Officer while his younger brother, Major Nick Mott, Welsh Guards, was the Officer in Charge of the burial party. In the sections that follow I have explored some of these threads.

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ACRONYMS

In Soldiers (London: HarperPress, 2012), his splendid tour d’horizon, published soon after his untimely death, Richard Holmes, for whose support and encouragement over the years I am extremely grateful, wrote that ‘adding acronyms stirs that alphabet soup which itself contributes to a military sense of identity by helping form a language all but impenetrable to outsiders’. Having spent ten years in the Army myself, some eminently practical military advice has become hard-wired into my brain, often in the form of acronyms beloved of non-commissioned officer instructors:

KISS ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’

CLAP ‘Clearly, Loudly, As an order, with Pauses’

EDI (with particular reference to teaching) ‘Explanation, Demonstration, Imitation’

OCD ‘Order, Counter-order, Disorder’, which, although it has similarities, should not be confused with its contemporary civilian counterpart, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

CAKE refers to the British Army’s principles of battle procedure:

C Concurrent activity

A Anticipation at all levels

K Knowledge of the grouping system

E Efficient drills for the receipt and issue of orders

Before his brave Zulu warriors crossed the White Umfolozi River on 17 January 1879, King Cetshwayo’s instructions were: ‘March slowly, attack at dawn and eat up the red soldiers.’ This philosophy can be distilled into a rather more simplified and direct form of CAKE: ‘Chase, Attack, Kill, Eat’.

This may go some way towards explaining why the Zulu impis triumphed at the Battle of Isandlwana on 22 January 1879, as the British Army’s cake rapidly turned to crumbs.

Next come the Seven Ps, which must not be confused with T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom: ‘Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance’.

Since examples are always useful – and help imprint such things on the consciousness – I have chosen the Battle of Spion Kop, fought on 23/24 January 1900 between the Ladysmith relief force, commanded by General Sir Redvers Buller, and the Boers besieging Ladysmith, under the command of General Louis Botha. Buller delegated responsibility for the seizure of Spion Kop, a commanding feature in the centre of the Boer line, to Lieutenant General Sir Charles Warren, who had rejoined the Army ten years earlier, after failing to apprehend ‘Jack the Ripper’ when he was Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

A commendably bold and original plan of attack on Spion Kop – later described by John Atkins, Manchester Guardian correspondent, as ‘that acre of massacre, that complete shambles’ – failed disastrously, after a series of seven almost unbelievable omissions and errors on the planning and preparation front:

Although it is a well-worn military maxim that ‘time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted’, there had been no reconnaissance, either of the approach routes or of the summit itself, beyond that carried out by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Thorneycroft, through his telescope. No scouts or patrols had penetrated the defences or established the best approach routes for a night march and assault, that most difficult of military operations.

While artillery was viewed as a key weapon by both sides, 4th Mountain Battery, stationed some way behind the British front line, never received the order to accompany the assault group, as had been intended.

As the column of some 2,000 men embarked in the dark on their precipitous climb to the summit of Spion Kop, no one remembered to order the soldiers to pick up a sandbag each, although sufficient sandbags had been made available.

Just twenty picks and twenty shovels, carried up in stretchers by the Royal Engineers, were available to dig trenches for the assault group. Thirty years earlier, Sir Garnet Wolseley had written that ‘The Regimental Entrenching Tools to accompany a battalion of infantry in the field are as follows: one hundred shovels, 10 spades, 60 pickaxes, 16 felling axes, 2 four-feet and 2 five-feet crowbars. These will be packed in one light waggon, and officers commanding battalions will be held responsible for their safety.’

Although the battle was fought under the harsh glare of the African sun, the soldiers carried just one water-bottle and one day’s field rations each. The officers later searched desperately for the section of water carriers in the darkness – but they were nowhere to be found.

The trenches were sited in the middle of Spion Kop, rather than on the forward slope, or on the rear of the feature, as the tactics manual recommended. The result was that the British were unable to cover the dead ground, up which the Boers advanced, while being vulnerable to enfilade fire, from either flank.

There was a catastrophic breakdown of communications, to the extent that, after the column commander, Major General Sir Edward Woodgate, had been mortally wounded by shell-fire, no one was quite certain who was in command on the summit of Spion Kop itself. In the darkness and confusion, no oil could be found for the signalling lamp – and so the British withdrew, as the Boers had already done – leaving the latter to reoccupy the peak the following morning.

Two hundred and forty-three British officers and men died within that ‘acre of massacre’ and their bodies still lie in the pathetically inadequate and ill-sited main British trench. The majority of the British troops who fought – and died – on Spion Kop were from the Lancashire Brigade. Although Woolwich Arsenal’s Manor Ground was first referred to as ‘the Kop’ in 1904, the new open-air embankment at Anfield, home of Liverpool Football Club, was given that name two years later – and still proudly bears it today.

The Defence of Duffer’s Drift (London: William Clowes, 1904) by Captain Ernest Dunlop Swinton, Royal Engineers, was first published in the United Service Magazine in 1903, less than four years after the Battle of Spion Kop. A notably innovative thinker, Major General Sir Ernest Swinton, as he became, deserves much of the credit for the development and adoption of the tank during the First World War. Among other things, he wrote the first tactical doctrine for armoured warfare. The Defence of Duffer’s Drift is a highly informative and educational stage-by-stage analysis of how a subaltern’s defensive measures gradually evolve, through his experiences in six unsettling dreams. It echoes the wise words of Sir Garnet Wolseley, who wrote in The Soldier’s Pocket-Book for Field Service (1869): ‘Tactical instructions should begin with the company officers learning to handle their fifty or one hundred men as an independent body without supports, when called upon to perform some of the very minor operations of war.’

In 1949, Field Marshal Earl Wavell, himself a veteran of the Second Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902, wrote a foreword to a new edition: ‘If the up-to-date young officer asks scornfully what he can possibly learn from the tactics of the Boer War nearly fifty years ago, I can only advise him to read and then inwardly digest some admirable precepts of common sense ... If after studying this little work, an officer decides that he has learned nothing, I can only recommend him to apply for employment in an Administrative branch of the War Office; for he will certainly be a danger to troops in the field.’ I gave a copy to my brother, as he embarked for the First Gulf War, as a Staff Captain with 7th Armoured Brigade, the ‘Desert Rats’.

Then there are the Seven Ss, all of which relate to camouflage and the things that a sniper, for example, should think about, in order to avoid giving away his position:

Shape; Shine; Shadow; Silhouette; Spacing; Skyline; Sudden movement

I was amused recently, while attending a seminar on ‘chalk stream trout tactics’, that the speaker, who had served with the Royal Engineers and the Royal Marines, used the same acronym to remind his audience how best to approach their prey.

There are also, thankfully, acronyms of the more humorous variety: in On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), Norman Dixon rather primly describes his ‘directly instinctual’ human activities – FFR – as ‘Feeding, Fighting and Reproduction’. When I was serving, FFR meant either transport which was ‘fitted for radio’, or which was deemed ‘fit for role’. In Norman Dixon’s example, it was the ‘R’ that caused all the problems.

While the VC is one of the rarest and is certainly the most highly regarded gallantry award of all, VD (venereal disease) was much more common – and caused real problems in both world wars. Penicillin was first widely used during Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, which commenced on the night of 9/10 July 1943. On 29 August 1943, the War Production Board granted nine pharmaceutical companies a licence to manufacture penicillin and, with the ratio of sick to wounded running at an unacceptable ratio of almost three to one during the Italian Campaign, its use was soon sanctioned for the treatment of VD. According to the history of the Royal Army Medical Corps, ‘the wastage in men was greatly reduced’. Three years earlier, prior to Dunkirk, Major General (later Field Marshal Viscount) Bernard Montgomery had issued an order concerning how to prevent VD amongst British soldiers, which prompted a marvellous piece of doggerel, written by ‘Cupid’, who was serving with the Royal Corps of Signals:

Mars Amatoria

The General was worried and was very ill at ease,

He was haunted by the subject of venereal disease;

For four and forty soldiers was the tale he had to tell

Had lain among the beets and loved not wisely but too well.

It was plain that copulation was a tonic for the bored,

But the gallant British Soldier was an Innocent Abroad;

So ’ere he takes his pleasure with an amateur or whore,

He must learn the way from officers who’ve trod that path before.

No kind of doubt existed in the Major General’s head

That the men who really knew the game of Love from A to Z

Were his Colonels and his Adjutants and those above the ruck,

For the higher up an officer the better he can f—k.

The Colonels and the Majors were not a bit dismayed,

They gave orders for the building of a Unit Love Parade,

And the Adjutants by numbers showed exactly how it’s done,

How not to be a casualty and still have lots of fun.

The Adjutants explained that ‘capote’ did not mean a cup,

That refreshment horizontal must be taken standing up,

They told the troops to work at Love according to the rules

And after digging in to take precautions with their tools.

Now the General is happy and perfectly at ease,

No longer is he troubled with venereal disease,

His problem solved, his soldiers clean (their badge is now a dove),

He has earned the cross of Venus, our General of Love.

It is unsurprising that the authorities held strong views on ‘directly instinctual’ human activities in Nazi Germany. For women, it was the Three Ks: Kinder, Küche und Kirche (children, kitchen and church). To that end, membership of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, or the League of German Maidens, became compulsory on 1 December 1936. The National Socialist Women’s League, or NS-Frauenschaft, which espoused these views, was the women’s wing of the Nazi Party.

In military parlance, SITREP stands for Situation Report. ‘Send SITREP, over,’ was regularly heard on British Army radio networks. During the Second World War, US servicemen and -women introduced a completely different – and rather refreshing – take on SITREPs. In order of increasing seriousness, here is a selection of US SITREPs:

SNAFU Situation Normal; All Fucked Up

SUSFU Situation Unchanged; Still Fucked Up

FUMTU Fucked Up More Than Usual

TARFU Things Are Really Fucked Up

FUBAR Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition

In the British Army, the code name ‘mushroom’ means a watch-keeper in one of the many headquarters, whose job it is to monitor, transcribe and facilitate traffic on the radio networks. In the trade, mushrooms are invariably known – not entirely inaccurately – as KIDFOS or ‘Kept In the Dark and Fed On Shit’.

This reminds me of a rather good story, which underlines just how tedious life could be for a KIDFOS. In the autumn of 1983, I was the Regimental Signals Officer of the 1st Battalion, The Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment, but had been loaned to Brigade Headquarters as a watch-keeper for Exercise Eternal Triangle, the final divisional exercise of the year. We were on radio silence, which meant that there was absolutely nothing to listen to anyway. Whenever a transmission was made, the Clansman radio ‘pressel switch’ was depressed and there was a squelchy sound. We heard that noise, just before a soft voice said: ‘Are there any other friendly teddy bears out there?’ Fifteen minutes later, it happened again: ‘Are there really no friendly bears out there?’ Provoked beyond endurance, the Divisional Commander snapped back: ‘Hello all stations, this is zero, we are on radio silence – repeat, radio silence – out.’ After a respectable interval, the first, now rather plaintive, voice said: ‘You’re not a very friendly teddy bear, are you?’ The whole company of KIDFOSes fell about laughing – and the culprit was never identified.

My introduction to cavalry radio procedure came during a battle group exercise on Soltau Training Area in northern Germany, written and controlled by The 5th Royal (Inniskilling) Dragoon Guards, otherwise known as ‘the Skins’. It was an advance to contact by armour and mechanised infantry. On the operations map, there was a series of report lines, the code names of which were given over the battle group radio net when each line had been successfully consolidated. In order to make things more fun – and perhaps provide greater incentive to the participants – the report lines had been arranged in a suitably seductive manner: ‘stilettos’, ‘stockings’, ‘garters’, ‘skirt’, ‘blouse’, ‘brassiere’, ‘panties’ – before we finally reached the objective. Even the Cold War had its hotter moments!

Maps, such as those in the previous tale, were frequently protected with something called ‘talc’, on which one could then write, using Chinagraph pencils. It has only recently been pointed out to me that, in typical Army fashion, TALC stands for ‘Training Aid, Linoleum, Clear’. I always wondered – but never had the courage to ask.

Although unrelated to acronyms, it seems a pity not to include two enduring memories of an Op Banner tour in Northern Ireland in early 1979. One of my section commanders was Corporal ‘Yogi’ Johnson, the origin of whose nickname is lost in the mists of time, although he certainly was a bit of a joker, like Yogi Bear. We were stationed in the old Grand Central Hotel, Belfast, a much-bombed building which the British Army had first taken over in 1972. ‘Yogi’ Johnson had two notices pinned to the walls of his shared room. One read ‘Be Alert: the Army needs Lerts’; the other read ‘When on patrol, don’t walk, boogie’. With that attitude and sense of humour, a four-month operational tour flies past surprisingly quickly. In the mid-1980s the Grand Central Hotel was demolished to make way for Westfield CastleCourt shopping centre.

One of the most testing phases of warfare is that which takes place in villages, towns and cities, where obstacles and cover work to the defenders’ advantage. This was known as FIBUA, or ‘Fighting In a Built-Up Area’. Soldiers often refer to it, irreverently, as FISH & CHIPS or ‘Fighting In Someone’s House and Creating Havoc in Public Spaces’.

NAAFI stands for the ‘Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes’, which was founded in 1921 to run recreational establishments for the British Armed Forces and to sell goods to servicemen and -women and their families. Inevitably, over the years, it has acquired some irreverent nicknames, including ‘Never ’Ave Any Fags In’, ‘Not Anywhere Around the Falkland Islands’ and ‘No Ambition And Fuck-all Interest’. On 23 January 1959, The Spectator published a rather splendid clerihew:

The NAAFI

Is a sort of caafi

Where soldiers are rude

About the food.

Thinking of food, the verb scoff – meaning to eat greedily – has an interesting derivation. Having always thought that it had its origins in the nineteenth-century French chef, Auguste Escoffier, who worked at the Savoy Hotel, I was interested to read that it comes from the Dutch, schoft, which evolved into the Cape Dutch, schoff, meaning a quarter of a day, or time for a meal, and was first used during the Second Anglo-Boer War. Wherever the truth lies, I much prefer to believe that we use it in honour of SCOFF – or ‘Senior Catering Officer Field Force’ – responsible for making such arrangements. Strong supporting evidence for this theory is that scoff was first included as an intransitive verb in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1899, the year war was declared. Nor were the animals ignored during that campaign: the roads of South Africa are lined with wide banks of cosmos, an alien species brought into the country in the British Army’s horse-feed, which was sourced from Mexico. Not all horses were so lucky, though. With rations running low in besieged Ladysmith, Major Cecil Park, The Devonshire Regiment, wrote: ‘The new horse soup, known as “Chevril,” is most excellent stuff, and tastes like best beef-tea.’ The name Chevril was a variation on the popular beef extract, Bovril. Park continued: ‘Some of the men won’t touch it, simply because they know it is horse, silly idiots; but the majority like it and clamour for more.’

Pilots frequently have a rather high opinion of themselves, which may have something to do with the rarefied atmosphere in which they work. Army pilots are often referred to as GIGJAMs or ‘God I’m Good: Just Ask Me’. I wish I had known this a little earlier, since I could have had an enjoyable discussion with my late father-in-law, Major General David Goodman, who served as Director, Army Air Corps from 1983 to 1987. Something that he certainly would not have disagreed with, though, was QNPBT or ‘Quick Nervous Peek Before Take-off’, which seems only sensible as a pre-flight drill.

Common in civilian – particularly office – life as well, BOGSAT might be describing a bodily function. In fact, it refers to a ‘Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around Talking’. In the context of Afghanistan and the Pashtun people, this probably describes a loya jirga – or local ‘grand council’ – pretty accurately. Somehow, if one attempts to be politically correct and gender-inclusive, BOPSAT does not have quite the same ring about it.

During the Second World War, in order to ensure that fuel was quickly and efficiently made available after the invasion of Normandy, two pipe-lines were laid under the English Channel. One went from Shanklin on the Isle of Wight to Cherbourg and the other from Dungeness to Boulogne. These were named PLUTO – which stands, ever-so-slightly inaccurately, for ‘Pipe Line Under The Ocean’ – after Mickey Mouse’s pet dog, which appeared in no fewer than eighty-nine short Walt Disney films between 1930 and 1953.

The name, Fido, which means ‘I am faithful’, was first popularised for dogs by Abraham Lincoln. The British Army’s usage is altogether more brutal: in case of an incident that might well lead to an unacceptable delay, FIDO over the radio net means, very simply and succinctly, ‘Fuck It! Drive On!’ There was at least one Royal Navy precedent. As the Allied invasion fleet sailed across the Channel in deteriorating weather conditions on the night of 5 June 1944, Rear Admiral A. G. Talbot, who was in charge of amphibious operations off Sword Beach, flew the signal: ‘Good luck, drive on.’

Military headquarters, of whatever level, regularly take officers and senior ranks aside for training sessions in the field. Since there was no involvement from the soldiery, these were referred to as a TEWT or a ‘Tactical Exercise Without Troops’. To unwilling attendees, they were known as a ‘Pointless Exercise Not Involving Soldiers’. Work it out! The cynics soon devised similar schemes, such as a PEWC: a ‘Parking Exercise Without Cars’; or perhaps a JEWT: a ‘Jungle Exercise Without Trees’; or even a NEWD: a ‘Night Exercise Without Darkness’. The Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, widely known as either the ‘Sky Pilots’ or as the ‘God Botherers’, was far from immune: in their case, a PEWC was known as a ‘Padre’s Exercise Without Congregation’, while a BEWB was a ‘Burial Exercise Without Body’. The end of every exercise was always announced by a single word, ‘ENDEX’ over the radio net. In practice, we preferred to use the much more expressive term, PUFO, or ‘Pack Up! Fuck Off!’

For a variety of reasons, there has always been some tension between the Regular Army and the Territorial – or so-called weekend – Army. At its worst, this manifested itself in a couple of slightly unpleasant and unnecessary acronyms: a STAB was a ‘Stupid Territorial Army Bastard’, while an ARAB was an ‘Arrogant Regular Army Bastard’.

Bearing in mind that it is always important to know to whom you are talking – and where they fit into the organisation – one can occasionally be tempted to make use of the disparaging acronym, PONI, or ‘Person Of No Importance’. In the same way, both officers and soldiers resented those promoted, along the lines of the Peter Principle, to their level of incompetence. Members of one stratum were widely known as GOPWOs, or ‘Grossly Over-Promoted Warrant Officers’.

While the British Army affectionately refers to young recruits as CROWs – from Combat Recruit Of War – the US Army has its GIs. G.I. was originally the abbreviation for galvanized iron, routinely recorded in that way in inventories. During the First World War, though, G.I. began to mean Government Issue. Just two decades later, a G.I. was an enlisted man, with the term ‘G.I. Joe’ being popularised by David Breger’s cartoon strip of the same name, which appeared in the first issue of Yank, The Army Weekly on 17 June 1942.

In a fitness-obsessed world, officers sometimes get things badly wrong. In military terms, ORBAT stands for Order of Battle. There is, though, an alternative meaning, which is a touch cruel to all ranks. An officer who spends too much time in the gym, toning his or her lats, pecs and triceps, might perhaps end up with an ORBAT: an Other Rank’s Body And Torso.

Finally, there is a thought-provoking acronym. Bearing in mind the hugely depressing statistic that more than 20 per cent of the homeless in London have Service connections, there is a significant safety net, comprising a broad range of Service charities, all performing subtly different roles, having taken into account a range of factors, grouped under the mnemonic, HERBS:

H Health, emotional and physical

E Environment, situation and condition

R Resources, financial, home care and travel

B Background service, mobility, previous assistance

S Social relations, family support, separation/bereavement

Those interested in further reading may wish to check out the ARmy Rumour SErvice (ARRSE): www.arrse.co.uk.

TERMS OF ENDEARMENT

During my military service, I have happy memories of seeing envelopes – both incoming and outward-bound – covered with apparently meaningless letter groupings. Many years later, I found one such letter, which had somehow become folded into my map-case – and for which the poor lad is presumably still waiting patiently. It took a while for me to realise that this was a continuation of a Second World War tradition, which happily sanctioned affectionate love tokens such as:

SWALK Sealed With A Loving Kiss

ITALY I Trust And Love You

WALES With All Love Eternal Sweetheart

BELFAST Be Ever Loving Faithful And Stay True

HOLLAND Hope Our Love Lasts And Never Dies

FRANCE Friendship Remains And Never Can End

Over time, these became far more suggestive and racy so, after six of one, here are half-a-dozen of the other, offering a range of adventurous destinations:

NORWICH (K)Nickers Off Ready When I Come Home CHINA Come Home I Need Action

MALAYA My Ardent Lips Await Your Arrival

USSR Under Sofa Stripped (and) Ready

BURMA Be Undressed (and) Ready My Angel

EGYPT Eager (to) Grab Your Pretty Tits

To make such a public display of affection must have demanded a measure of GUTS, which is altogether more forceful: ‘Get Up Them Stairs’.