The Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas (1966)

Brigg is a naive, virgin, 19-year-old private coming towards the end of his two-year National Service in Malaya during the communist insurgency (1948 to 1960). He’s a clerk in the Royal Army Pay Corps based at Panglin, a little way north of Singapore Island. In the evening he and his mates take the bus down to the island, to hang around in bars, many of them full of Chinese or Malay prostitutes. He knows he’s had a cushy number compared to the poor bastards who have been posted ‘up country’ i.e. further north and into the jungle. Those guys have seen real fighting, have been injured and seen their mates killed. By contrast the only violence Brigg and his buddies see is fights among the bored squaddies themselves or the occasional farcical incident such as when a drunk corporal having a crap in a latrine saw some fireflies dancing in the middle distance and so emptied his Sten gun magazine at them, sparking a barrack-wide panic until the other soldiers came running and saw what a plonker he’d been.

So it’s essentially a farce of army life, or features many farcical incidents – which means that, when the brutal reminders of war do come, they seem all the more brutal, inexplicable and horrible.

Cast of characters

As with many army novels, there’s a fairly big cast of characters because that’s the basic fact about the army, it’s very big, very populous – all the privacy and domestic quiet you enjoyed at home is torn from you and you’re thrown into the permanent company of all kinds of men you really don’t like, all day long, and then spend all night in big dormitories surrounded by men fidgeting, farting, crying and wanking.

And just often enough to give the whole experience a horrific edge, there’s the risk of actual fighting, of ambushes or sudden attacks by a homicidal enemy.

One way to cope with all this is to bring out the ludicrous and farcical aspects of army life. And one way to do that is to convert all the horrible men you’re forced to spend all your time with into gargoyles and caricatures. At moments The Virgin Soldiers reminded me a bit of Catch-22 in the way that both are populated with characters each of whom is allotted an obsession, an idée fixe or dominant characteristic which recurs robotically for comic effect.

Private Brigg, main character.

Private Sandy Jacobs, a hairy Scottish Jew.

Corporal Brook, ‘a thin man who was mad’, oddly ineffective, liable to freeze at vital moments, a figure of fun right up till the moment when he freezes in the face of a crowd of rioters in Singapore, so that one of them skewers him with a fence railing, in one of those moments of sudden violence which pierce the farcical mode.

Private Fenwick, who is trying to give himself an ear infection so as to be invalided home but only manages to give himself rheumatism and then falls in love with a nurse at the hospital where he’s treated so that, when he’s offered the opportunity of going home, he now desperately tries to have it rescinded so he can stay with his love.

Private Tasker, in on most conversations and trips to the bars and brothels, reliably randy, always first to pick up a girl and then take her off into the jungle to get his end away.

Private Sinclair, one of the most broadly comic characters, an obsessive trainspotter (p.60), continually thinking about train timetables, keen member of the Railway Society, despises the other men and their obsession with sex. In the book’s sudden violent finale, he turns out to be something of a hero before being killed by insurgent fire.

Patsy Foster and Sidney Villiers, gay couple, walk around hand in hand, always found in each other’s bunks; officers yell at them but they never get into any real trouble i.e. everyone seems to accept them.

Gravy Browning, international table tennis champion.

Sergeant Wellbeloved, officious bully and loudmouth, constantly bragging about his experiences in World War Two when he was captured by the Japs and interned in one of the notorious prison camps, singing his own praises as the only prisoner who stood up to them etc. Late in the book we are informed that this is all bullshit, that he was a coward and sold out his comrades to the Jap authorities. ‘He had a rancid face and a yellow bald head,’ (p.24). Brigg heartily loathes him.

Sergeant Driscoll, haunted by the memory of accidentally shooting some of his own men in Caen, during the Normandy Landings, when his Sten gun jammed. Moments later the house they were in was bombed so they’d have died anyway, but it doesn’t stop his ongoing PTSD. He is also haunted by the way his beloved wife divorced him when he refused to quit the army. Both scenes are described very powerfully.

Sergeant Fred Organ, 22 stone of blubber, ran the canteen tent, hung up a sign saying Fred’s Bar, 30 years service, barman, fatman, singer (p.67). Meets a grisly end when he treads on a landmine left over from the war on an apparently innocent carefree beach.

Phillipa Raskin, the daughter of Regimental Sergeant Major Raskin. Her father mercilessly bullies her, wants her to be a real woman, eventually provoking her into drunkenly losing her virginity on the night of a regimental party, she getting completely plastered at the family home and shouting at more or less the first soldier she sees passing the family home to come and fuck her. This soldier turns out to be Sergeant Driscoll and they proceed to have a very satisfying affair.

Colonel Wilfred Bromley Pickering, officer in charge of the regiment and the barracks. Lost his eye in Normandy, which terminated a promising career. To his eternal ignominy it wasn’t due to some heroic engagement with the enemy but when, under fire, he looked into a particularly beautiful flower thus disturbing a bee which was nestling in it, which came out and stung him on the eyeball. This disability explains why he has ended up in charge of this clerical unit down in peaceful Singapore, well away from the fighting against the communist insurgents further north.

Juicy Lucy. Crude nickname given to the slim, beautiful Chinese prostitute that Brigg goes with one night, more or less as a bet, who guides him through the mysteries of sex and who he thus loses his virginity to, thereupon falling heavily in love with.

She started from the beginning and went all the way. He felt like a balloon being slowly blown up. When she showed hi the big secret, she whispered: ‘How the virgin like?’ ‘Oh it’s lovely, Lucy,’ he shivered. ‘It’s lovely, it really is.’ (p.47)

Main events

The narrative consists of a series of incidents, some comic, some farcical, some grimly violent:

Wellbeloved supervises a squad digging a ditch who unearth a mass grave of Australians murdered by the Japanese during the war.

Wellbeloved and Driscoll nearly have a fight in the beer tent.

Fred Organ gets blown up on the beach when he has the bad luck to tread on one of the many landmines sprinkled on it back in 1942.

Brigg loses his virginity to prostitute ‘Juicy Lucy’ and then agonises that she will have given him an STD.

A soldier tells the boys that if you have a circumcision you get ten days leave. After some discussion in the bar, Brigg and his mates all agree to undergo the operation. But the soldier was misinformed and none of them get any leave. There’s some crude comedy when the nurse attending the row of just circumcised squaddies play with their exposed toes at the bottom of their beds, acting coy, just enough to arouse them and give them erections which, of course, hurt excruciatingly.

The boys build a catapult to hit the countless barking dogs which keep them awake at night but which instead, with its very first shot, hits Wellbeloved on the knee with half a brick, temporarily crippling him.

Phillipa chooses Sergeant Driscoll

The regimental dance. Sergeant Major Raskin’s beastly behaviour to his daughter Phillipa who he bullies and accuses of being a lesbian. To appease him she dances with the first soldier she sees, Brigg, then escapes the dance, goes home, makes herself very drunk, then leans out of the posh house she lives in with her bullying dad and gaga mother and shouts at a soldier crossing the wooden bridge below. This soldier turns out not to be Brigg, as she drunkenly thought, but Sergeant Driscoll, who takes advantage of her drunkenness to relieve her of her virginity, and they commence a friendly affair. Despite this Brigg insists on looking her up and taking her out and she allows him to, but never with the slightest possibility of sleeping with him. She is being very satisfactorily serviced by her sergeant.

The Singapore riots

Riots break out in Singapore. Sent to quell them, a patrol of our boys comes directly face to face with rioters. Wellbeloved orders ineffectual Corporal Brook to disarm the leading rioter but Brook freezes and is skewered and killed by a man with a spiked railing (who is immediately eviscerated by our guys’ gunfire).

Whoops there go my trousers

During this rioting period, Briggs finds himself in Lucy’s part of town and runs up the stairs to her flat. There she lures him in, scantily clad in a silk dressing gown, and persuades him to have sex. Then he wants to leave but she playfully throws his trousers out the window into the alleyway below. In a panic Briggs yells at his patrol partner Lantry to go and retrieve them. But when Lantry gets to the alleyway the trousers are gone. Terrified he’s going to get court martialled, Briggs makes Lucy give him some trousers, the only ones she owns being green silk woman’s trousers which, of course, look ludicrous, but Briggs wearing them rushes off with Lantry. Almost immediately they come upon a calm dignified Sikh holding the trousers who says that, finders keepers, they are now his. Furious Briggs attaches his bayonet to his rifle and points it at the Sikh who calmly hands them over. Farce.

The Driscoll and Wellbeloved fight

Sergeants Driscoll and Wellbeloved hate each other. In the empty sports arena where the regiment are staying while in Singapore, they have an epic fight. Driscoll has discovered that all Wellbeloved’s stories about fighting the Japs during the Second World War are lies, that he was not only not a hero, but sold out some of his comrades in the Japan camp to curry favour with their captors.

Brigg saves Phillipa

The platoon are driven back up to regimental headquarters at Panglin where there is an extended farcical incident. When a squad are detailed to go and protect officers’ houses from possible attack by the rioters Briggs smuggles himself along, effectively disobeying orders. He then peels off to the house of Phillipa and her dotty mother and, in an infection of panic, warns them that rioters are coming, hustles them out of the house and through the garden, as he sees a crowd of Chinese running towards them. He gets off a few shots before hustling them up a path behind the houses then he has a brainwave: there’s a huge overland pipeline running behind the houses so he forces the dazed stumbling mother and protesting Phillipa up onto it then they set off in terror through the night full of shots and cries. Their panic increases when they realise the Chinese mob have followed them and are also running along the pipeline. Brigg turns, kneels, gets off a few potshots then turns to hassle the women along, but the old mum is exhausted, and eventually slips and falls off the pipeline into the muddy swamp below.

Brigg drags Phillipa down there with her and all three hide in the scrubby jungle as they hear the mob come up abreast of them, on the pipeline overhead, pause, confer, then, mercifully, hurry on. They say in the muddy swamp till dawn, then wearily ascend the pipeline and stagger the last few hundred yards to a road where a jeep finds them and drives them back to the barracks.

Here Brigg is brought in front of Colonel Pickering who wearily points out that he disobeyed orders at least twice; there were no rioters near the houses so he, in effect, abducted Phillipa and her mother, nearly killing the old woman in the process; and that the Chinese he shot at were loyal Chinese from the camp laundry who were also fleeing in a panic. Lastly, one of his bullets shot off the fingers of the laundry’s chief mangler, a venerable old boy in his 70s who all the others look up to and the Chinese union are now demanding compensation or they’ll go on strike. Altogether a completely farcical misunderstanding. And the vulgar icing on the cake is that the venerable old mangler’s name is Fuk Yew.

The Colonel very decently says he won’t press charges against Briggs for desertion in the face of the enemy. nor will he name him as the shooter-off of Fuk’s fingers, but he will require him to hand over his next 6 weeks’ pay as compensation to the old Chinese. Thoroughly chastened, Brigg leaves the colonel’s office thinking of the possible newspaper headline: ‘How I shot FUK YEW the Chinese mangler’.

Lucy is dead

Brigg goes to see Lucy for the last time of dancing and sex but the bar manager tells him she’s dead. She was kicked to death by squaddies who thought she’d given them STIs. In a sweat of panic fear Briggs takes a taxi to her apartment and sure enough finds it has been emptied, only an old Chinese lady on the bed looking at some of the bric-a-brac before she gets up and walks out, leaving Briggs to collapse on the bed where he lost his virginity and cry his eyes out.

Frog races

As a result of handing over his weekly pay, Brigg is now penniless until he comes up with a plan of volunteering to do guard duty at the nearby ammunition depot for cash in hand. He discovers that the ammo boys hold epic frog races using the big wild frogs which throng the jungle. After a comical build-up Briggs’s frog wins the big race and the next day he puts in for some leave.

R&R up north

He catches a train north and a ferry across to the leave centre on Panang Island. His mellow mood is ruined by being billeted with a soldier, Waller, who’s been sent here because a squad of all his mates was recently massacred by CTs (communist terrorists). Waller flatly, calmly, asks Briggs how he can wangle himself a nice cushy number like Brigg has and Brigg is ashamed.

The rickshaw race

The boys attend a bordello named the Piccadilly Lights. To their surprise Sinclair the trainspotter ends up dancing with one of the prettiest hookers, nicknamed Little Nell. The other boys – Brigg, Lantry and Tasker – have a discussion about whether Little Nell should be left to Sinclair or one of them should take her for the night which escalates into the decision to have a rickshaw race for it. They go outside to the rack of rickshaws, each get into one then brief their drivers that it’s a race, which proceeds with predictably farcical results.

Phillipa relents

On the last day of his leave Brigg is mucking about in a canoe when is surprised to see Phillipa standing on the shore. She’s up her beginning the long training to become a nurse and his room-mate Waller mentioned he (Brigg) was here so she came looking. They spend a lovely day together till they get back to her room where Brigg makes a move, she says no, and he explodes with frustration, slapping her face and turning to go, crying tears of anger and frustration. But she calls to him, he turns and finds she has stepped out her dress, quite naked. They make love and it is wonderful. Fall asleep, shower, go out for an evening meal, come home, make love again. Early the next morning she’s left for her early shift and he has to hurtle back to the leave centre just in time to pack his stuff and jump onto the lorry to the ferry and the start of the journey back to Panglin. Just one niggle. In the middle of the night, he had reached out to hold her and she had sleepily said, ‘sergeant’. Sergeant? Which sergeant?

CT attack on the train

The book climaxes with a serious attack by armed insurgents on the troop train. An intense ten pages describe how the train is blown up and derailed, then wave after wave of rebels storm it. The soldiers fight back, not just our boys but a platoon of plucky Gurkhas. Waller, the infantryman traumatised by the deaths of his pals takes charge and is rock steady. Brigg finds a place under a carriage and fires at each new wave of attackers. Sinclair is taken down to the Gurkha end of the train and out in charge of an arc lamp to highlight the attackers, until it is shot out and he is shot twice in the chest, falling from the top of the carriage. Waller is shot dead and Brigg panics, he runs off shouting hysterically that he is going to fetch help. He stumbles through the jungle, falls into a ditch, becomes completely disorientated and blunders back out onto the track some distance away.

Brigg walks along the track till he sees the lights appear of an approaching train which he flags down. This one is packed with soldiers and he briefs the officer in charge about the ambush, so that the train starts up again and arrives as a relieving force. Brigg is thrilled to find his old muckers Lantry and Tasker still alive if seriously shell shocked, dirty and shaking. For the whole of the rest of his life Brigg spends long nights piecing together the chain of events, trying to make sense of it, trying to make sense of his behaviour, but never quite managing.

The end

Two short final codas.

1) Driscoll has been stationed in Butterworth, in the north of the country, and Phillipa moves to Penang to be with him. She hears about the raid on the train but isn’t worried. She knows her sergeant is indestructible.

2) Then in the last few pages, the National Service boys pack up their kit for the last time, climb aboard the truck which will take them to the port and their ship back to Britain. The last image is of Brigg spotting the old Chinese mangler at his work outside the laundry and he shouts a cheerful ‘Fuk Yew’ at the Chinaman who makes a cheerful V-sign in return.

Prose style

Given the book’s reputation for bawdiness it’s a surprise to see how hard Thomas worked at giving it style. Every page contains sentences which make an effort to impress.

It was not really dark because there was a moon looking daggers through the doors. (p.69)

Having a cold shower:

He let the stream of cold water hit him sharply like a dropping sword, jumping at its first strike, but then tackling it and mixing into it. (p.95)

After Sinclair has had his first sex, with a prostitute, he walks down to the beach:

He walked from her flat, down some concrete steps to the beach and then along the sand towards the place where big waves were coming white over the rocks like sporting ghosts. (p.175)

And:

On this beach the waves came up noisily, banging their fists on the shore and trying to grip the shingle with their fingers as the parent sea pulled them away again. (p.177)

The hot tropical sun, its movements and shadow, inspire repeatedly florid descriptions from Thomas:

They got a bus from the foot of the hill into Georgetown, arriving when the shadows were probing everywhere, and the sun was drifting away on its evening journey. (p.181)

As I read these many instances of imaginative and teasing descriptions, I couldn’t decide whether this is good style or terrible style, vivid and imaginative or arch and contrived. Either way I found them interesting and different and, when I learned to relax and enjoy them, all these little metaphors and turns of phrase add hugely to the book’s entertainment value.

Thoughts

When I was a boy this kind of book had the thrill of being ‘naughty’, about boobs and sex and stuff, an impression encouraged by saucy cover of the hardback edition showing images of war projected onto a busty Asian body.

But although there is a fair amount of sex in it – numerous soldiers fantasising about sex, talking about sex, and then actually having sex in a sweaty fumbling sort of way – there’s much more to the novel than that. It is an impressive depiction of life as a British soldier doing National Service in a hot, sweaty country on the other side of the world. It has the depth of lived experience and, although some of the passages are extended comic set-pieces, others are as disturbing and upsetting as life is.

Most of all, and despite Thomas’s often strange, sometimes contrived way with words, it is amazingly easy to read. During his lifetime it sold not just a million but millions of copies. Touched a nerve or a cluster of nerves. Impressive.

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Credit

The Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas was first published by Constable and Co in 1966. References are to the 1974 Pan paperback edition.

Leslie Thomas reviews

• The Virgin Soldiers (1966)
• His Lordship (1970)
• Onward Virgin Soldiers (1971)
• Tropic of Ruislip (1974)
• Stand Up Virgin Soldiers (1975)
• Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective (1976)

Malaya reviews

History

• The War of Running Dogs by Noel Barber (1971)

Fiction

• Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River by Joseph Conrad (1895)
• An Outcast of The Islands by Joseph Conrad (1896)
• Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad (1898)
• Collected short stories of Somerset Maugham volume two
• Collected short stories of Somerset Maugham volume four
• Passage of Arms by Eric Ambler (1959)

Posted by Simon on June 3, 2024

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