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Richards missed the Boer War by being too promising a signaller. When he was drafted for service in South Africa, with his course in signalling still unfinished, his instructor had the order cancelled. Richards completed his course, was then sent with a draft to India. On the whole, he liked India. In some respects, the life he tells about is the same that Kipling sentimentalized in Soldiers Three, but Private Richards includes many a first-hand report that would have cost Victorian Kipling his journalist's license. To Richards the brothels were as important as the beer and the barracks, and he would never admit that Gunga Din was a better man than what he was. To him and all his right-thinking pals. Viceroy Curzon was a dangerous softy whose silly innovations made it necessary to punch natives in the belly instead of beating them on the head, where the marks would show.
Richards' greatest pal was a soldier known as the Prayer-wallah, who was fond of reading the Bible, though not from piety. The Decameron "was considered very hot stuff; but the Prayer-wallah used to say that in this respect it did not come within shouting distance of certain pas sages in the Old Testament, once you got the hang of the Biblical language." Hewas an earnest student of the crab-bat (Hindu anathema ) and became a fluent expert in it. Richards tells of a bazaar swearing match between two natives that made the Prayer-wallah "tremble with admiration." The two contestants stood with folded arms, volleying antiphonal abuse, until the appreciative crowd hailed one as the victor. The acclaim finally went to the one who "had gone back 2,000 years in his rival's genealogical line and given convincing proof that a direct female ancestress had secretly cohabited for years during her widowhood with a diseased bullfrog, thus going one better than her mother, who had legitimately married and cohabited with a healthy pig."
The heat (sometimes 121° in the shade) and the climate, no respecters of privates, played Richards some nasty tricks, laid him low with malaria more than once. But he never allowed these accidents to interfere with his old-soldierly habits, stuck manfully to his belief that death in India came oftener to teetotallers than to his sort. "A curious effect of the heat was that one could drink beer for hours without it having any effect on the bladder."
When his enlistment expired, and he went home to Wales, ex-Private Richards soon found he was missing the army. For six years he worked at various odd jobs August 1914 took him back to barracks' and he was glad to go.
*Last week merged with Random House.