THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, January 21, 1995 TAG: 9501200001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
Hating to wake up is a pretty common thing. Hating to be waked up is almost universal.
Whether the arouser is a mother getting a youngster off to school, or an alarm clock signaling the approach of work time, or - especially - one of the devilish, pre-daylight calls from deep sleep that various uniformed forces inflict on their members, the victim's unhappiness is about the same.
I was reminded of that latter just the other day when I came across a couple of paragraphs in Robert Skimins' biographical novel about the Civil War's General Grant, Ulysses.
Reporting on the mood in a Union camp early in the war, Skimins noted that soldiers have detested their early morning rousting-out ``since well before Hannibal's time.'' The author went on to say that a bugle's ``Reveille'' in a large camp in Grant's day might well bring this response, attributed to some private's invention: ``Gabr'el blow your trump! I don't want this world to last any longer.''
A piece of graveyard humor even emerged among the troops, he wrote, as an accompaniment to regimental Reveille by fife and drum.
``Wake ye lazy soldier, rouse up and be killed . . .'' the rhyme started, followed by further cynical and/or macabre passages and ending with the soldier ``buried under ground.''
This brings to mind, of course, a more lighthearted but still verbally violent ditty from a modern military versifier - a song that talks about murdering the bugler and amputating his Reveille, then getting ``that other pup, the guy who wakes the bugler up'' and spending ``the rest of my life in bed.''
Even more galling than buglers, however, to many of us who have spent time in uniform, have been the barracks waker-uppers armed with whistles, taking unseemly delight in driving their charges to duty with ear-splitting blasts, a totally unmusical summons. At least the bugle call is a tune of sorts.
The Civil War anecdotes also jogged another memory of morning trauma in the military, something I may have written about before in another context. One morning, in semidarkness, when I was at an Air Force school in Florida, the whistles had brought our squadron of trainees all into foggy-eyed attention out on the pavement near our quarters. I suppose the stiff-legged attention posture lasted too long or it was exceptionally early or something, but suddenly there was a thud off behind me. And then two or three more in quick succession. It turned out that one formation member after another had pitched forward, unconscious, onto the concrete, one cutting his head quite severely.
Some kind of psychological hysteria, with the power of suggestion at work on susceptible brains? Who knows.
They were sleep-numbed brains, at any rate, brains which resisted being disturbed. Just like those in the 1860s. And those in every other time and clime where sleep has been destroyed, on a daily basis, by military buglers, whistlers and kindred malefactors. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.Mr. Hebert is a former
editor of The Ledger-Star. by CNB