Part One - Destination Bedford, September to October 1941

Summary

In early September 1941, Denis Argent was completing his initial military training with the Royal Engineers, and was about to be sent to a posting as yet unannounced.

Tuesday, 9 September

As our departure from this training centre [in Barton Stacey, Hampshire] approaches, one subject of conversation is heard everywhere – where are we going to be posted? Rumours and wishful thinking pass our days.

I stayed in camp this evening intending to do a lot of writing, but it always seems to be 7 p.m. before one can settle down after washing, changing, etc., and then sometime during the evening a trip to the NAAFI for a supper snack breaks up the evening a bit more. Lights out at 10.15 is enforced here, and one way and another I much feel the lack of spare time compared with the hours I had with my medical orderly job [in Pembrokeshire]. More often than not an argument starts in the hut – political or religious, say. I can write undistracted through mere noise, babel or chatter. But when there's a discussion I find myself listening with one ear, then two, then joining in – and the writing I was doing has to be packed up. That happens very often.

Wednesday, 10 September

Still the rumours fly thick and fast. Still one manages to keep up with one’s reading by whipping out a book every time one has a ‘Fall out for a smoke’ or a break on the job. Today I finished Graham Greene's Stamboul Train [1932], read mainly in these short spasms. I read a short book in the course of the evening: I borrowed that anonymous Diary of a Staff Officer in the Battle of France. That shows very clearly the hopeless muddle, the senseless delays in the name of ‘security’, the safety-first outlook which lost us that war – and presumably most of the campaigns since then. When soldiers say to each other, ‘God help the Army if this is the way they fight a war’ (when there’s been some particularly blatant piece of silly camp routine), it seems that at least in the days before Dunkirk the war was fought like that.

I was intending to go to a gramophone recital (Debussy, Richard Strauss, etc.) in the other camp a mile up the road. But a mile's a mile.