terrible suffering and broken spirit.’
‘Are you trying to frighten me?’ Steve asked.
‘No,’ his father said. ‘I’m just asking you not to make any sudden moves. If the army needs you, it will find you soon enough.’ When the youngster wouldn’t listen, William appealed to his conscience. ‘Look at all your mother and I have done for you. Even during the Depression, you and your sister never went without. I worked at odd jobs, and your mother worked at Macy’s day in, day out, as a salesgirl doing everything to keep the family together. On a shoestring! Doesn’t that mean something?’
‘Dad,’ Steve said, ‘if you don’t sign the papers, I’ll forge your name and run away.’ Reluctantly, William Weiss signed his teenage son over to the care of the United States Army.
But for the foolish and the heroic who ignore all physical limitations, nature may have to provide these peculiar forms of escape from pain or emotion too strong to endure.
Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 320
PRIVATE JOHN VERNON BAIN deserted from the British Army in Scotland long before the British Army sent him into combat. He was no coward. The nineteen-year-old volunteer’s record in the boxing ring – finalist at age fourteen in the Schoolboy Championships of Great Britain, Northwest Divisional Junior Champion, Scottish Command Middle Weight Champion in 1941, gold medals and press acclaim – proved as much. Yet, in 1941, he had run away for three weeks from his regimental base at Fort George, which to him was ‘that dark and grey promontory that lay in the Moray Firth like a fossilized Leviathan.’ At the time, he was a corporal in the 70th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highland Regiment. Deserting from relatively easy duty in Scotland as PTI, physical training instructor, made little sense, and his rationale was vague even forty-six years later: ‘I was supposed to be a corporal, and I was no good at this. I had no idea how to conduct drills and mount guard and all that kind of thing. In a kind of disgust or something, I just sort of cleared off. I wasn’t away long, about three weeks.’
Rather than court martial him for desertion, Bain’s commanding officer demoted him to private. ‘If you did revert to the ranks and had been an NCO,’ Bain said, ‘you could then claim for a transfer. And I was transferred to the London Scottish, and they were a sister regiment of the Gordons. And that was how I was sent to the Gordon Highlanders.’ His new unit was the 5/7th Gordons, a union of the old 5th and 7th Battalions of the distinguished regiment that the Duke of Gordon had established in 1794. Its commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel H. W. B. Saunders.
Bain had first volunteered in early 1940 to become a pilot in the Royal Air Force, despite his admission that he was ‘singularly ignorant of the political realities’. He knew nothing about the Nazis, the German annexation of Austria or Hitler’s ambition to conquer most of Europe. A physical examination turned up colour-blindness and one punch-damaged eye that disqualified him from flying, so he and his older brother, Kenneth, decided to become merchant mariners. Neither of the Bain brothers, having grown up in the inland Buckinghamshire town of Aylesbury, was an Able Bodied Seaman or had any shipboard experience. Their attempts to sign on before Christmas 1940 at the docks in London, Cardiff and, finally, Glasgow were met with derision. Staying in a rented room that was reducing the meagre hoard of cash they had brought from home, John and Kenneth chanced on a poster: ‘Are you over 18 and under 20? If you are you can join a young soldiers’ battalion.’
John asked his brother, ‘What about that? At least I’d get some shoes without holes.’ Kenneth corrected him, ‘Boots.’ He added the sticking point that, at two years older than John, he was over twenty.
They had a notion that twin brothers could not be separated. ‘The recruiting officer did not show the least disbelief when we gave the same date of birth,’ John wrote. ‘We were medically examined and passed as A1.’ The Army sent them to the 70th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherlands at the Bay Hotel outside Glasgow. ‘The Army was one service I had sworn I would never join,’ Bain wrote, ‘but, I told myself, a Scottish regiment would be different, more glamorous.’ The glamour of the regimental kilt, stylish headgear and bagpipes gave way to recruit training that was disappointingly unglamorous. ‘The object is to turn one into a kind of automaton,’ he said. ‘It works in a way.’
He ‘disliked the Army very much,’ recalling his time in Scotland as ‘nearly two years of boredom, discomfort and misery, relieved by occasional booze ups …’ He resented his ‘early days in the army when he had first stood guard at Duff House in Banff in the cruel winter of 1941 … protecting the old mansion against imaginary German parachutists dressed as nuns’. From the ways that Bain revisited his Army service in letters, books and poems, he appeared to have been pathologically unsuited to soldiering. He wrote, ‘By nature I was impractical, unpunctual, and clumsy, attributes that do not endear themselves to military authority.’ Thirty years after the war, his thoughts turned
… not so much to memories of battle but to the grinding tedium of service in the United Kingdom, training, manoeuvres, guards, courses, discomfort, humiliation, frustration, boredom and – rarely but unforgettably – moments of bizarre comedy, excitement and the joy of extraordinary physical well-being when food, warmth and the rest were not commonplace elements which we had the automatic right to expect in the pattern of our days but pleasure as real intensity, positive blessings.
In common with other British youngsters of the time, Bain had little experience of people from other classes. His own background was what he described as ‘working class but with aspirations of an entirely materialistic kind towards stifling gentility’. His mother read books and kept a piano, and his father worked for himself in a photography studio. Officers, some with no leadership qualifications apart from the right accent, irritated him, but the ‘other ranks’ seemed almost a foreign species. When one of them asked his name, he answered, ‘Vernon,’ his middle name that he had been called all his life. Bain recalled the squaddies’ mocking question: ‘“Vernon? What’s that?” And I’d say, “John”, quickly, which they could handle. So, I became “John” in the army.’
‘A lot of the chaps in the 70th Argylls were from the Glasgow slums, the Gorbals,’ he recalled, ‘and had pretty disgusting habits.’ In another reflection on his fellow squaddies, he wrote, ‘My comrades were mostly sub-literate, embittered children of the general strike, from the slums of Glasgow and Edinburgh.’ One of them pilfered Bain’s gold boxing medal, indicative of the petty thievery rampant in the ranks. Nevertheless, he wrote, ‘They would happily stick by you, and they were generous.’ Paid only two shillings a day, the Jocks gave their last pennies to comrades in need or to stand a friend a pint. The only person Bain trusted was his brother Kenneth, who was transferred to the Royal Engineers a year into their enlistment. That was about the time John ran away for three weeks.
To get along, Bain concealed from his squad mates his passion for books, poetry and classical music. In fact, he gave up reading altogether. ‘I deliberately suppressed that part of myself that I most valued,’ he wrote.
I became ashamed of my interest in literature, ideas and the arts. I consciously adopted a mask with forehead villainous low. I was already, at eighteen, greedily addicted to beer, so no acting ability was needed to play the part of boozer. My interest in boxing was genuine and my skill was respected, so it was not difficult for me to flex my muscles and roar with the roaring boys. But it was not good for me either. It was shameful and brutalizing.
After the transfer to B Company of 5/7th Gordon Highlanders, Bain made one good friend. Private Hughie Black was a working-class Scotsman of roughly his age and with a more profound contempt for officers. Black’s cynicism about the military had a hard class edge to
