We are housed in prefabricated, semi-hemispherical barracks, and have a mess and sports fields. We have the latitude to indulge ourselves every day in the lake for the practice of sailing, swimming, all recreations that the instructors strongly encourage.
Discipline during working hours is strict. Outside, the relationship between the trainees and the instructors, many of whom are as young as their students, is cordial, trusting, imbued with that manly and simple camaraderie customary in the British army.
The schedule is tough, one afternoon off per week that can be spent either in Poona, where the "permissionees" are dropped off by the van with the mongoose badge, the camp's emblem, or to explore the dry jungle of the neighborhood, or to sail on the lake.
As soon as you get up, long run, physical education session, basketball game, breakfast, then, until 1 p.m., instruction. After lunch – quick – back to work until 5 p.m. The time between tea and dinner is generally free, except every other evening when we have night training. Once a week, twenty-four or forty-eight hour outing.
Weapons instruction is essentially practical. We learn to take them apart, put them back together. We learn how they work. The weapons are also few:Bren machine gun, Lee Enfield rifle, Sten submachine gun, Colt pistol, Smith and Wesson revolver and Piat mortar. The latter fires very effective shells against boats, vehicles, locomotives and armored doors.
It is therefore a weapon perfectly suited to the mission of the commandos. As for the Sten and the Smith and Wesson, we can soak them in water, in mud, they always work and are ideally suited to our work.
The knowledge of these weapons is quickly explained by an old sergeant scarred from bottom to top:he had the misfortune to parachute, during a raid in Tripolitania, just above a machine gun against planes!...
Not fifteen minutes ago we started to handle the weapons that the instructors were already taking us to the firing range for sessions that become, the next day, daily. When it comes to revolver and pistol shooting, we quickly become experts, right-handed or left-handed. The colonel himself, a noble Scotsman in a kilt, is there every day:“Aggressive, be aggressive! he yells, repeating the gestures of instinctive shooting. We quickly mastered this method, which became automatic for us.
We perfect ourselves through repeated exercises in a rigged house on the hillside. There is almost total darkness on the ground floor as on the first floor. A few bluish lamps, sparingly arranged, make it possible to guess the walls.
Suddenly, a Japanese silhouette appears at the end of the corridor. You have to shoot quickly, two shots. You haven't yet finished when, behind you, a door creaking makes you jump:a threatening Nippon is aiming at you.
On the ground floor, it's worse... The first time, we are not too reassured... and the shots are wild, the bullets go a little in all directions... Sometimes in the arm of the instructor. At the end of the course, we fire our two magazines with control and no longer reach the silhouette of the prisoner surrounded by his Japanese guards.
We also practice shooting with Japanese weapons. In the jungle or in the maquis, we will sometimes be very happy to know how to use the armament that we capture.
Our endurance, our training, our qualities are tested on scholarly and laborious "obstacle course" which bring into play physical strength, tenacity, guts, resistance to vertigo, speed of execution, accuracy of shooting and grenade throwing, calm , cold blood.
We pass barbed wire hedges, we jump almost five meters deep with all our equipment, we climb rooftops, cross obstacles, cuts, progress through tunnels under the accompaniment of gunfire thirty centimeters above our heads, amid the crash of explosions that shake the earth a meter from us.
We crawl as the instructors fire rifles fifty centimeters from our head, we unpin our grenades, aim at the Japanese silhouettes which appear on the right, or on the left, or in front.
The Singarh route includes a descent on a floating rope ladder 80 meters above the void. We now perform it night and day, unconcerned with remote explosives and bursts overhead. By dint of practicing these excursions and traversing the rocky hills of the Deccan, we become harder. among the rocks, attacked a train in the full sweltering heat of the day, traveled dozens of kilometers to escape the (real) pursuits of the police or the army that our instructors had converged on us, we think of the pleasant return by truck.
And so, often, at the meeting place, instead of those vehicles marked with the mongoose that we are waiting for, there is only an instructor:"The trucks are not there, you have to walk back . »