Fridays’ were floor-scrubbing (anon), and clean-sheets day in Charlie Company. This ordeal began with Reveille at sunup, and a mad dash not to be first and not to be last in the chow line (more anon here, too), then back to the barracks.

With a buddy, each lucky draftee then bodily picked up a bunk and carried it outside to the Company Quad, where they were set down in rows – not standing at attention of course, like their nighttime sleepees when turned out onto this same Quad, but all regimentalized and “dressed-right-dressed” none the less, so no bunk was out of alignment. (The Army – generally – leastways back then - had an absolute horror of unaligned objects: be they animal, vegetable or mineral…).

Then – and here was the best part - we tore all the sheets off our bunks, and replaced them with clean sheets brought down in a weapons carrier from the Battalion laundry. But we were not allowed to cover the fresh bedding back over with our OD blankets… the made-up bunks were, in fact, to be left entirely open to the skies all day “…so the sun could get at them” – though the bed clothes were brand spanking fresh from the laundry.

What no one from the rank of Corporal up seemed to notice – or much mind – was the fact that at the end of the Quad stood two messhalls with attendant kitchens and their coal-fired stoves. Added to which each barracks in turn around the Quad, of course, sported a coal-fired boiler at one end to provide hot-water for the latrine showers. When all these fireboxes got fired-up good and hot, with their load of Alabama soft coal – well, the soot that poured out of their stacks was a wonder to behold. Even more wonderful was the way it then proceeded – all day long while we were off on the march somewhere – to settle out all over our clean bedding – being thus exposed for health purposes as it was... “ to the sun.” (Also sometimes an occasional late afternoon shower).

Then, we would come marching in from some distant range, usually around 4:00 pm or so, dog-tired, sweaty, covered with a thin film of red dust all – and if we were nimble enough, grab a quick shower before we had to don our clean dress O.D.’s to Stand Retreat. (Many just accepted the inevitable logjam in the showers, and climbed unshowered direct into their clean uniforms…).

Then up to the Messhall to eat once more, and then back to the barracks for the best part of it all – which began by our having to first strip naked – nothing on but dogtags around our necks. Depp (fully clothed of course) and with his skunk-striped helmet liner on even indoors (to sort of show his superior position over all this inferior rabble I suppose) would have us fill waiting scrub buckets with hot water and grab soap and brushes – and a suitable number of safety razor blades (anon).

Keep away from dirtiness -- keep away from mess,
Don't get into doin' things rather-more-or-less!
Let's ha' done with abby-nay, kul, and hazar-ho;
Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!

The 'eathen.... (R. Kipling)

The way it worked – then – was that a naked line of troops – maybe twelve or fifteen guys would now form crosswise of the empty barracks down at one end. At the word from Depp, we would all squat at once, and begin to scrub the floor with hot water and soap as we advanced in a line toward the farther end before us. A situation perhaps reminiscent of impressed seamen forced to "holystone" decks in a man-o-war a couple centuries back. Check out (click), for instance, my adventures on HMS Rose this same website. (Of which vessel and life at sea generally, no less than Patrick O'Brian, author of "Master and Commander" (the acclaimed Russell Crowe movie of a year or so back - likewise shot aboard Rose believe it or not... she was renamed HMS Surprise in the movie, and later permanently... wrote):

"...the maintopmen washed the starboard side of the quarter-deck, and the quarter-deck men all the rest, grinding away with holystones until the water ran like thin milk from the admixture of minute raspings of wood and caulking ,..." p.101

(Why it was known always as “Depp’s floor” I never knew. Depp didn’t own it any more than we. But everything around us in the Service seemed to belong to some Non-Com or another: the Mess Sergeant’s tables, the Cook’s stoves, - even our helmet liners and helmets (anon) belonged to…Uncle Sam, who when no direct link could be established to a nearby Noncom, became the Owner-of-Record for everything else).

One thing was certain though: while we did not “own” – we sure ourselves were in turn “owned”. You betcha – as was sometimes said, our souls belonged to Jesus, but the AUS (Army of the United States – different from the USA, you see, as the AUS was the draftee levies of yesteryear. Not like today…) owned our asses.

Oh, I don’t think I told you what “the word” was that Depp intoned each Friday night at this same time and place, as that long row of naked men before him squatted and bent to their toil: “Gentlemen,” he would say in that nasal, slurred North Carolinian dialect drawl of his, “Naow, all’s I want to see here before me is…assholes and elbows!” And then like the Good Shepherd he was, he drove his little group of trainees forward down the length (and breadth) of the barracks – twitching any lagging butts lightly with his ever-present prod or “pointer stick” (“…so’s you always get the point, Powell”) as he alternately prodded, poked, swatted, and generally indicated “the way” we were to go in this man’s army…. For all the world like he was driving a recalcitrant bunch of pink-bottomed piggies to market – as in olden days.

Well, anyhow, as soon as the floor was dry, we carried our bunks back in, re-hung our dress O.D.’s on our racks, showered, and crawled beneath our soot-dusted sheets till another Reveille sounded at dawn.

Sigh.

(I read today more than half a century later, of our “mixed gender” Services and all and wonder idly about the “living arrangements” and all, and cannot help but surmise that many of the “old regimental ways” as Kipling might have put it, have no doubt long since been retired. Including, I trust, “assholes and elbows night” as a means of keeping the barracks all spic and span…).

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