The Sheik and the Dustbin
George MacDonald Fraser
Private McAuslan, J., The Dirtiest Soldier in the World (alias the Tartan Caliban, or the Highland Division's answer to Pekin Man) first demonstrated his unfitness for the service in' The General Danced at Dawn'.He continued his disorderly advance, losing, soiling, or destroying his equipment, through the pages of' McAuslan in the Rough. The Sheikh and the Dustbin 'pursues the career of the great incompetent as he bauchles (see Glossary) across North Africa and Scotland, swinging his right arm in time with his right leg and tripping over his untied laces. His admirers already know him as court-martial defendant, ghost-catcher, star-crossed lover and golf caddie extraordinary; here he appears as the most unlikely of batmen to his long-suffering protector and persecutor, Lieutenant Dand MacNeill, as guardroom philosopher and adviser to the leader of the Riff Rebellion and even as Lance Corporal McAuslan, the Mad Tyrant of Three Section. Whether map-reading his erratic way through the Sahara by night or confronting Arab rioters, McAuslan's talent for catastrophe is as sure as ever.
GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER
THE SHEIKH
AND THE DUSTBIN
Contents
Cover (#u6e822464-6f31-5639-8b8d-a0d80fd8d2fb)
Title Page (#uc28fca02-e144-5a05-aca7-0f159dbb2dcd)
The Servant Problem
Captain Errol
The Constipation of O’Brien
The Sheikh and the Dustbin
McAuslan, Lance-Corporal
The Gordon Women
Ye mind Jie Dee, Fletcher?
Extraduction
Author’s Note
Glossary
Praise
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Servant Problem (#u95881581-f823-5a8d-a3ac-d9448f6e897a)
One of the things I never learned from my tough grandmother (the golfing Calvinist, not the Hebridean saga-woman) was how to deal with domestic help, and this although she was an authority, having been both servant and mistress in her time. As a girl, straight from the heather, she had been engaged as kitchenmaid at one of those great Highland shooting lodges to which London society used to repair a century ago, and being a Glencoe MacDonald of critical temper and iron will, she had taken one cold Presbyterian look at the establishment with its effete southern guests and large inefficient staff and decided, like Napoleon contemplating the map of Europe, that this would never do. Within six weeks she had become senior housemaid, by the end of the season she was linen-mistress, and before her twentieth birthday she was head housekeeper and absolute ruler of the place, admired and dreaded by guests and staff alike. I can only guess what she was like as a teenage châtelaine, but since in old age she reminded you of a mobile Mount Rushmore, handsome, imposing, and with a heart of stone, it is a safe bet that living in that lodge must have been like being a galley slave in a luxury liner. Knowing her zeal for order and reform, I suspect that her aim would be that of an enlightened prison governor - not to break the spirit of the inmates altogether, but to see that they went back into the world better and wiser human beings.
Whatever effect she had on those sophisticated ladies and worldly gentlemen - and I’m sure she taught them that there were higher things in life than grouse-shooting and flirtation - they can have been in no doubt that the Highland servant, whether lowly menial or autocratic housekeeper, was very different from the southern domestic. My grandmother was not alone in her generation in simply not knowing what servility meant; indeed, mere civility was no commonplace, as witness the famous John Brown, whose devotion to Queen Victoria was matched only by his rudeness. My grandmother, who gave respect only when she felt it was due, which wasn’t often, used to recall (without a glimmer of a smile) an event from her early years in service when the lodge’s head cook, another stern Caledonian, noted for her prowess at whist drives, was called in by her employers to take part in a bridge game, there being a shortage of players among the guests. As luck had it, the cook partnered a Prince of the blood, who took mild exception to her bidding, whereon the cook rose in her wrath before the Quality assembled, and hurled down her cards, exclaiming: “Away, ye crabbit auld Prooshan, and play by yersel’!” Nor was she dismissed; a Prince may be a Prince, but a Highland cook who knows the secrets of venison and cold salmon is something else.
It may be significant, too, that grandmother’s only joke was based on the English master-Highland servant relationship. It described how a chimpanzee escaped from the circus and was found dead in a ditch by two ghillies employed at the local castle, then occupied by a London shooting-party. The ghillies had never seen a chimpanzee before, and didn’t know what to make of it. At last the elder said: “It’s ower hairy for a MacPherson, no’ broad enough in the chest for a Fraser, and too long in the lip for a Cameron - away you up to the big hoose, Erchie, and see if ony o’ the gentry’s missing.”
[I told that joke in the mess once, with mixed success: the Padre worked it, with Gaelic subtlety, into a sermon, but the second-in-command looked puzzled and asked: “And was anyone from the big house missing? No? Oh … bit of a mystery then, what?”]
However, you will note that there are two butts of the joke - the foreign gentry and the ignorant ghillies - which says something about grandmother’s outlook on life. Her censure knew no class boundaries; dukes and dustmen alike (and grandsons) had to be kept in their place, and she was the woman to do it, even when she was very old. My heart bled for her own maidservants when, as a small boy, I used to visit her home, that still, immaculate domain with its softly-chiming clock, redolent of beeswax and lavender, all swept and polished to perfection. I lived on tiptoe there, giving ornaments a wide berth, wondering at her bookshelves where Cruden’s Concordance and Bunyan’s Holy War lay beside long outdated fashion magazines from Paris, pushing in my chair to the exact inch when I received the almost imperceptible nod of dismissal from the stately, white-haired figure at the end of the table, straight and stiff as her own ebony walking-cane; dreading the cold eye and sharp, quiet voice, even when they were addressed to her maids and not to me. How they endured her, I’ll never know; perhaps they knew what I sensed as an infant: like her or not, you could be sure of her, and that is a quality that can count far beyond mere kindness.
Anyway, with that background I ought to have mastered the servant problem, but I never have, not from either side. On the occasions when I have had to serve, I have been a disaster, whether shirking my fagging duties at school, or burning toast, dropping plates, and letting the cookhouse boiler go out as a mess orderly and assistant scullion at Bellahouston Camp, Glasgow. Nor am I one of nature’s aristocrats, born to be ministered to and accepting it as my due; anything but. I hate being waited on; servants rattle me. I find their attentions embarrassing, and they know it, damn them. There was a butler once, about seven feet tall, with a bald head and frock coat, who received me at a front door; he looked me up and down and said: “Good morning, sir. Would you care to wash … at all?” I can’t describe what he put into that pause before the two final words, but it implied that I was filthy beyond his powers of description. Nor am I deceived by the wine-waiter unctuously proffering his bottle for my inspection: this bum wouldn’t know it from turpentine, is what he’s thinking.
Such an advanced state of doulophobia is bad enough in civilian life; for an army officer it is serious, since he has to have a body-servant, or orderly, or batman, call it what you will, whether he likes it or not. This did not trouble me when I first encountered it as a cadet in India; we had native bearers who brought our morning tea, cleaned our kit and rooms, laid out our uniforms, dressed us on ceremonial occasions, and generally nannied us through a fourteen-hour day of such intensive activity that we couldn’t have survived without them; there was even a nappy-wallah who shaved you as you sat bleary-eyed on the edge of your cot - and never have I had a chin so smooth. It seemed perfectly natural forty years ago; it would not have seemed natural from a white servant - and before anyone from the race relations industry leaps in triumphantly with his labels, I should remark that the Indian cadets were of the same opinion (as often as not, so-called race prejudice is mere class distinction) and were, on the whole, less considerate masters than we were. My own bearer was called Timbooswami, son and grandson and great-grandson of bearers - and proud father of an Indian Army officer. So much for the wicked old British Raj.
My troubles began when I joined my Highland battalion in North Africa and had to have a batman from the ranks of my own platoon. No doubt I had been spoiled in India, but the contrast was dramatic. Where I had been accustomed to waking to the soft murmur of “Chota hazri, sahib”, and having a pialla of perfectly-brewed tea and a sliced mango on my bedside table, there was now a crash of hob-nailed boots and a raucous cry of “Erzi tea! Some o’ it’s spillt, an’ there’s nae sugar. Aye, an’ the rain’s oan again.” Not the same, somehow. And where once there had been a fresh-laundered shirt on a hanger, there was now a freckled Glaswegian holding up last night’s garment in distaste and exclaiming: “Whit in Goad’s name ye been daein’ in this? Look at the state o’ it. Were ye fu’, or whit? Aye, weel, it’ll hiv tae dae - yer ither yins arenae back frae the dhobi. Unless he’s refused them. Aye. Weel, ye gettin’ up, or are ye gaunae lie there a’ day … sur?”
That was Coulter. I got rid of him inside three days, and appealed to Telfer, my platoon sergeant, for a replacement. And I hate to record it, for I like to think well of Telfer, who was a splendid soldier, but he then did one of the most diabolic things any sergeant could do to his new, green, and trusting platoon commander. Without batting an eye, and with full knowledge of what he was doing, this veteran of Alamein and Anzio glanced at his platoon roll, frowned, and said: “What about McAuslan?”
Innocent that I was, those doom-laden words meant nothing to me. I didn’t know, then, that McAuslan was the dirtiest soldier in the world, a byword from Maryhill Barracks to the bazaars of Port Said for his foulness, stupidity, incompetence, illiteracy, and general unfitness for the service, an ill-made disaster whom Falstaff wouldn’t have looked at, much less marched with through Coventry. This was the Tartan Caliban who had to be forcibly washed by his fellows and locked in cupboards during inspections, whom Telfer was wishing on me as batman. In fairness I can see that a sergeant might go to desperate lengths to keep McAuslan off parade and out of public view, but it was still a terrible thing to do to a subaltern not yet come of age.
I had seen McAuslan, of course - at least I had been aware of a sort of uniformed yeti that lurked at the far end of the barrack-room or vanished round corners like a startled sloth at the approach of authority, which he dreaded; I had even heard his cry, a raucous snarl of complaint and justification, for beneath his unkempt exterior there was a proud and independent spirit, sensitive of abuse. He had fought in North Africa, mostly against the Germans, but with the Military Police on occasion; his crime-sheet was rich in offences of neglect and omission, but rarely of intentional mischief, for McAuslan had this virtue: he tried. In a way he was something of a platoon mascot; the other Jocks took a perverse pride in his awfulness, and wouldn’t have parted with him.
Of all this I was happily ignorant at the time, and it gave me quite a start when I got my first view of him, crouched to attention in my doorway, eyeing me like a wary gargoyle preparing to wrestle; he always stood to attention like that, I was to discover; it was a gift, like his habit of swinging left arm and left leg in unison when marching. He appeared to be short in stature, but since he was never fully erect one couldn’t be sure; his face was primitive and pimpled, partly obscured by hair hanging over an unwashed brow, his denims would have disgraced an Alexandrine beggar (and possibly had), but the crowning touch was the filthy napkin draped carelessly over one forearm -1 believe now that he was trying to convince me that he had once been a waiter, and knew his business.
” 14687347Pr’iteMcAuslansah!” he announced. “Ah’m yer new batman, Sarn’t Telfer sez. Whit’ll Ah clean first?”
The smart answer to that would have been “Yourself, and do it somewhere else”, but I was a very new second-lieutenant.
“Ah brung ma cleanin’ kit,” he went on, fishing a repulsive hold-all from inside his shirt. “Oh, aye, it’s a’ here,” and he shook out on to the table a collection of noisome rags and old iron in which I recognised a battered Brasso tin, several bits of wire gauze and dried-up bianco, a toothbrush without bristles, and a stump of candle. (That last item shook me; was it possible, I wondered, that he performed his toilet by this illumination alone? It would have explained a lot.) It all looked as though it had been dredged from the Sweetwater Canal.
He made a sudden shambling pounce and snatched two rusted objects from the mess with a glad cry. “Aw, there th’are! Goad, an’ me lookin’ a’ ower the shop! Ah thought Ah’d loast them!” He beamed, wiping them vigorously on his shirt, adding a touch of colour.
“What are they?” I asked, not really wanting to know.
“Ma fork an’ spoon! They musta got in there that time I wis givin’ ma mess-tins a wee polish - ye hiv tae scoor them, sur, ye see, or ye get gingivitis an’ a’ yer teeth fa’ oot, the M.O. sez.” He peered fondly at the rusting horrors, like an archaeologist with burial fragments. “Here, that’s great! It’s been a dam’ nuisance bein’ wi’oot them at meal-times,” he added, conjuring up a picture so frightful that I closed my eyes. When I opened them again he was still there, frowning at my service dress, which was hanging outside the wardrobe.
“That’s yer good kit,” he said, in the grim reflective tone in which Sir Henry Morgan might have said: “That’s Panama.” He took a purposeful shuffle towards it, and I sprang to bar his way.
“It’s all right, McAuslan - it’s fine, it’s all clean and ready. I shan’t need it until five-thirty, for Retreat.” I sought for some task that should keep him at a safe distance from my belongings. “Look, why don’t you sweep the floor-out in the passage? The sand keeps blowing in… and the windows haven’t been washed for weeks; you could do them - from the outside,” I added hastily. “And let’s see … what else?” But he was shaking his matted head, all insanitary reproach.
“Ah’m tae clean yer kit,” he insisted. “Sarn’t Telfer sez. Ah’ve tae polish yer buttons an’ yer buits an’ yer Sam Broon an’ yer stag’s heid badge, an’ brush yer tunic, an’ press the pleats o’ yer kilt, an’ bell yer flashes wi’ rolled-up newspaper, an’ wash an’ dry yer sporran, and see the dhobi starches an’ irons yer shirts, an’ melt the bastard if he disnae dae it right, an’ mak’ yer bed …”He had assumed the aspect of a dishevelled Priest of the Ape People chanting a prehistoric ritual, eyes shut and swaying slightly, “… an’ lay oot yer gear, an’ bianco yer webbin’, an’ bring yer gunfire in ra mornin’, and collect yer fag ration, an’ fetch ye tea an’ wee cakes frae the Naafi for yer elevenses unless ye fancy a doughnut, an’ take ma turn as mess waiter oan guest nights, an’ …”
“Stop!” I cried, and he gargled to a halt and stood lowering and expectant. It was that last bit about being a mess waiter that had hit home -1 had a nightmare vision of him, in his unspeakable denims, sidling up to the Brigadier’s wife with a tray of canapés and inquiring hoarsely, “Hey, missus, ye want a sang-widge? Ach, go on, pit anither in yer bag fur efter …”
“We can discuss it tomorrow,” I said firmly. “My kit’s all ready for Retreat, and I’m on the range until five, so you can fall out until then. Right?”
It isn’t easy to read expressions on a face that looks like an artist’s impression of Early Man, but I seemed to detect disappointment in the way he blinked and drew his forearm audibly across his nose. “Can Ah no’ help ye oan wi’ yer gear?” he suggested, and I snatched my bonnet from beneath his descending paw in the nick of time and hastily buckled on my belt and holster. “Thanks all the same, McAuslan,” I said, withdrawing before he decided my collar needed adjustment - and he looked so deprived, somehow, that like a soft-hearted fool I added: “You can comb the sporran if you like … you better wash your hands first, perhaps, and be sure to hang it straight. Right, carry on.”
They say no good deed ever goes unpunished, but I could not foresee that in combing the big white horse-hair sporran he would drop it on the floor, tramp on it, decide that it needed rewashing, and then try to dry it over the cookhouse stove while the master-gyppo’s back was turned. They got the blaze under control, and probably only the gourmets noticed that the evening meal tasted of burned horse-hair. Meanwhile McAuslan, escaping undetected through the smoke, galloped back to my billet and tried to repair the charred remnant of my sporran by scraping it with my sgian dubh, snapping the blade in the process; he next tried daubing the stubble with white bianco, and dripped it on my best black shoes, which he then rendered permanently two-tone by scrubbing the spots with his sleeve. Warming to his work, he attempted to steal a sporran from Second-Lieutenant Keith next door, was detected and pursued by Keith’s batman, and defended his plunder by breaking my ashplant over the other’s head. After which they called the provost staff, and the Jeeves of 12 Platoon was removed struggling to the cells, protesting blasphemously that they couldnae dae this tae him, he hadnae finished gettin’ Mr MacNeill ready fur tae go on Retreat.
All this I learned when I got back from the range. I didn’t attend Retreat - well, you look conspicuous in mottled grey brogues and a bald, smoking sporran - and was awarded two days’ orderly officer in consequence; it was small comfort that McAuslan got seven days’ jankers for brawling and conduct prejudicial. I summoned him straight after his sentence, intending to announce his dismissal from my personal service in blistering terms; he lurched into my office (even in his best tunic and tartan he looked like a fugitive from Culloden who had been hiding in a peat-bog) and before I could vent my rage on him he cleared his throat thunderously and asked:
“Can Ah say a word, sur?”
Expecting apology and contrition, I invited him to go ahead, and having closed his eyes, swayed, and gulped - symptoms, I was to learn, of embarrassment - he regarded me with a sort of nervous compassion.
“Ah’m sorry, sur, but Ah’m givin’ notice. Ah mean, Ah’m resignin’ frae bein’ yer batman. Ah’m packin’ it in, sur, if ye don’t mind.” He blinked, wondering how I would receive this bombshell, and my face must have been a study, for he added hastily: “Ah’m sorry, like, but ma mind’s made up.”
“Is it, by God?” I said. “Well, get this straight, McAuslan! You’re not resigning, my son, not by a dam’ sight, because—”
“Oh, but Ah am, sur. Beggin’ yer pardon. Ah want ye tae understand,” he continued earnestly, “that it’s nuthin’ personal. Ye’re a gentleman, sur. But the fact is, if Ah’m lookin’ efter you, Ah hivnae time tae look efter mysel’ - an’ Ah’ve got a lot o’ bother, I can tell ye. Look at the day, frinstance - Ah wis rushed, an’ here Ah’m oan jankers - och, it’s no’ your fault, it’s that wee nyaff o’ a batman that works fur Mr Keith. Nae cooperation—”
“McAuslan,” I said, breathing hard. “Go away. Go quickly, before I forget myself. Get your infernal carcase on jankers, and tell the Provost Sergeant he can kill you, and I’ll cover up for him—’
“Awright! Awright, sur! Ah’m gaun!” He beat a shambling retreat, looking puzzled and slightly hurt. ‘Keep the heid, sur.” He saluted with crestfallen dignity. “Ah wis just gaun tae say, ye’ll be needin’ anither batman, an’ ye could dae worse than Chick McGilvray; he’s Celtic-daft an’ a bit casual, but - awright, sur, Ah’m gaun! Ah’m gaun!’
You know, when our sister regiment, the Black Watch, was first raised centuries ago, it was unique in that every private soldier had his own batman - and in next to no time that great fighting regiment had mutinied. It was now clear to me why: several hundred batmen in the McAuslan mould had simply proved too great a strain.
On the principle that any recommendation of his must be accursed, I did not approach McGilvray. Instead I spoke sternly to Sergeant Telfer - who had the grace to admit that eagerness to get shot of McAuslan had warped his judgment - and told him I would engage replacements on a trial basis. There was no shortage of volunteers, for a batman’s life is a cushy billet, with perks and time off, but none of them was any real improvement on Coulter, although all were grace itself compared to the Dark Destroyer who had succeeded him.
There was Fletcher, Glasgow spiv, dead shot, and platoon dandy, who kept my kit immaculate - and wore it himself in his sorties after female talent. Next there was Forbes, nicknamed Heinie after Himmler; he was small, dark, and evil, a superb footballer who performed his duties with ruthless efficiency, but whose explosive temper bred friction with the other batmen. After him came Brown, alias Daft Bob, an amiable dreamer who supported Partick Thistle (that’s a tautology, really) and was always five minutes late; he was also given to taking afternoon naps on my bed with his boots on. And there was Riach, who came from Uist and belonged to that strict religious sect, the Wee Frees; he had a prejudice against working on the Sabbath, and only did it under protest. (I once asked him how, during active service in the Far East, he had brought himself to kill Japanese on Sunday, and he ground his teeth in a grim, distant way and said that was all right, it was a work of necessity and mercy.)
I parted from each trialist in turn, without rancour. Perhaps I was hard to please - no, I was impossible to please, partly because I disliked being waited on and feeling my privacy invaded, but also because it was dawning on me that Scots (as I should have learned from my grandmother) are not natural servants; they have too much inborn conceit of themselves for the job, and either tyrannise their employers, like my grandmother and Coulter (although I’m sure her technique was that of the rapier, where his was the bludgeon), or regard them as victims to be plundered in a patronising way. Of course there are exceptions; Hudson of Upstairs, Downstairs does exist, but you have to be exceptional yourself to employ him (I never thought the Bellamy family were quite up to him, and I doubt if he did either).
Anyway, there were no Hudsons in 12 Platoon, and I wondered how it was that the other young officers got by - MacKenzie, heir to a baronetcy, had an easy, owner-serf relationship with his orderly, and the rest of the subalterns seemed to take personal attendance for granted, without noticing it. That is the secret, of course: you have to be of the fine clay that isn’t even aware of servants, but regards them as robots or talking animals who just happen to be around, lubricating you unobtrusively through life. The moment you become sensitive to their mere presence, never mind their thoughts, you stamp yourself as a neurotic peasant, like me, unfit to be looked after. So I concluded - and it never occurred to me that I was someone’s grandson, and possibly seeking an unobtainable ideal.
Finally, in despair, I offered the job to McAuslan’s nominee, McGilvray, a grinning, tow-headed Glaswegian who confessed that he hadn’t volunteered because he didn’t think he was cut out for it - that was a change, anyway. Mind you, he was right, but he wasn’t alone in that, and he was a cheery, willing vandal who, beyond a tendency to knock the furniture about and gossip non-stop, had only one serious defect: I had to darn his socks. This after I had noticed him limping slightly, made him take off his plimsolls, and discovered two gaping holes repaired by whipping the edges together into fearsome ridges.
“No wonder you get blisters, you Parkhead disaster,” I rebuked him. “Did no one ever teach you to darn? Right, get me some wool and a needle and pay attention …”
Darning socks was a vital art in those days; if you couldn’t darn you couldn’t march - unless you were one of those eccentrics who dispensed with socks and filled their boots with tallow, and I wasn’t having him doing that, not within fifty yards of my perfumed bower. But my tuition was wasted; he just couldn’t darn, and before you knew it I was inspecting his socks regularly and mending them myself, while he beavered away on my brass and webbing and explained why Celtic weren’t winning these days. From time to time I would wonder resentfully why the hell I was doing this, but I knew that if I didn’t it wouldn’t get done at all, and you know how it is: line of least resistance, etc., and I couldn’t be bothered finding yet another batman - which was an utterly trivial matter anyway, alongside the important things that were happening to me at that time. Such as getting to know and work well with my platoon, discovering that mutual reliance which is a gift (and an honour) beyond price, enjoying the acceptance that comes in a Highland battalion when the Jocks stop calling you “MacNeill” among themselves and give you a nickname (“Darkie”, I discovered), getting my second pip, feeling at home in one of the world’s most famous regiments, preparing to go home on leave after three years …
The self-imposed task of darning McGilvray’s socks was a small price to pay for all of that. Mind you, I could have done without it; it was a piece of nonsense, really … perhaps when I came back off leave I’d find another batman. Yes, definitely.
It was a whole month’s leave, what they called L.I.A.P., meaning leave in advance of Python, which was the codeword for demobilisation. I qualified because, having been in the ranks in India, I’d been overseas longer than most of the subalterns; consequently I found myself barraged with requests to go and see their families. This was a phenomenon of the time which may be hard to understand in these days of instant world travel - anyone going home was expected to visit his comrades’ parents, just so that they could hear about their boy from someone who’d actually been with him. Letters weren’t the same as being able to talk to and touch someone who’d been with Jack or Billy; it was a great reassurance in those days.
So, apart from a commission to buy the Colonel half a dozen of his favourite Lovat pipes (“and don’t let them fob you off with any damned Bulldogs or patent puffers, d’you hear?”) I had four or five addresses to call at in and around Glasgow and Edinburgh. That was after I had undergone the extraordinary experience of “coming home from the war”, which must differ from person to person, I suppose, but is like nothing else in life. For this young soldier, unmarried and unattached, it was a going home to parents, a wonderful elated reunion full of laughter and babbling and maternal tears, and aunts exclaiming, and father shaking his head and grinning with satisfaction before going through to his surgery, bursting quietly with the news for his patients, and my MacNeill grandmother, ninety-three years old, bright-eyed and laughing softly in Gaelic as she preened herself in the Arab shawl I had brought her. (I wonder if she remembered my MacDonald grandmother’s remark to her as they listened together to Chamberlain’s declaration of war in 1939: “Well, Mrs MacNeill, the men will be going away again.” Only a Highland matriarch would put it quite like that. If my MacNeill grandmother did remember, she was probably reflecting that now the last of the men was home; the first ones she had seen returning, as a little girl, had been from the Crimea.)
It was very happy, but it was strange. They looked the same to me, of course, but now and then I realised that they were recognising the boy of 18 whom they remembered, in this much bigger, sunburned young man of 21. That’s an odd feeling. So is standing alone in the quiet of your room, just as you remember it but a little smaller, staring at each familiar thing of childhood and thinking: that day of the Sittang ambush … that terrible slow-motion moment at Kinde Wood when the section went down around you in the cross-fire … that night when the Japs came up the Yindaw road, the little ungainly figures in the light of the burning trucks, passing by only a few yards away … that hectic slashing mêlée at the bunkers under the little gold pagoda where L—bought his lot and J—had his hat shot off and the ground was dark and wet with blood - while all that was happening, a world and a lifetime away, this was here: the quiet room, just as it had always been, just as it is now. The porcupine-quill inkstand that the old man brought home from East Africa, the copy of Just William with its torn spine, the bail you broke with your fast ball against Transitus (it must have been cheap wood), the ink-stain low down on the wallpaper that you made (quite deliberately) when you were eight… Nothing changed, except you. Never call yourself unlucky again.
I couldn’t sleep in bed that night. I did something I hadn’t done since Burma, except on a few night exercises: I went out into the garden with a blanket and rolled up under a bush. God knows why. It wasn’t affectation -1 took good care that no one knew - nor was it sheer necessity, nor mere silliness in the exuberance of homecoming. At the time I felt it was a sort of gesture of thanksgiving, and only much later did I realise it was probably a reluctance to “come home” to a life that I knew there could be no return to, now. Anyway, I didn’t sleep a bloody wink.
After just a few days at home (which was in Northern England) I took off for Scotland. My excuse was that I had to make the visits I had promised, but the truth was I was restless and impatient. Three years of adventure - because there’s no other word for that kaleidoscope of travel and warfare and excitement and change in strange lands among weird exotic peoples - had done its work, and once the elation of just being home, so long dreamed of, had passed, there was the anticlimax, the desire to be off and doing again. It was no big psychological deal of the kind you see in movies; I wasn’t battle-happy, or “mentally scarred”, or hung up with guilt, nor did patrols of miniature Japanese brew up under my bed (as happened to one of my section whenever we came out of the line: we used to tell him to take his kukhri to them, and when he had done so to his satisfaction, swearing and carving the air, we all went back to sleep again, him included). It was just that my life was now outside that home of boyhood, and I would never settle there again. Of course no word of this was said, but I’m sure my parents knew. Parents usually do.
I was nearly two weeks in Scotland, staying at small hotels and making my afternoon calls on families who had been forewarned of my coming; it was a succession of front-rooms and drawing-rooms, with the best tea-service and sandwiches and such extravagance of scones and home-made cakes as rationing allowed (I had to remind myself to go easy on the sugar, or I would have cleaned them out), while I was cross-examined about Drew or Angus or Gordon, and photographs of the poor perishers were trotted out which would have curled their toes under, and quiet aunts listened rapt in the background, and younger brothers and sisters regarded me with giggling awe. They were such nice folk, kind, proper, hanging on every word about their sons, tired after the war, touchingly glad that I had come to see them. It was fascinating, too, to compare the parents with the young men I knew, to discover that the dashing and ribald Lieutenant Grant was the son of a family so douce that they said grace even before afternoon tea; that the parents of the urbane Captain D—, who had put him through Merchiston and Oxford, lived in a tiny top-floor flat in Colinton; and that Second Lieutenant Hunter, a pimply youth with protruding teeth, had a sister who was a dead ringer for Linda Darnell (and whose R. A.F. fiancé stuck to her like glue all through tea).
But the most interesting calls were the last two. The first was to a blackened tenement in Glasgow’s East End, where McGilvray’s widowed mother lived with his invalid great-uncle, on the third floor above a mouldering close with peeling walls, urchins screaming on the stairs, and the green tramcars clanging by. Inside, the flat was bright and neat and cosy, with gleaming brass, a kettle singing on the open black-leaded grate, an old-fashioned alcove bed, and such a tea on the table as I had not seen yet, with gingerbread and Lyle’s golden syrup. Mrs McGilvray was a quick, anxious wee Glasgow body, scurrying with the tea-pot while Uncle chuckled and made sly jokes at her; he was a small wheezy comedian with a waxed moustache and a merry eye, dressed in his best blue serge with a flower in his buttonhole and a gold watch-chain across his portly middle; he half-rose to greet me, leaning on a stick and gasping cheerfully, called me “l’tenant”, informed me that he had been in the H.L.I, in the first war, and wha’ shot the cheese, hey? (This is a famous joke against my regiment.) When he had subsided, wiping his eye and chuckling “Ma Goad, ma Goad”, Mrs McGilvray questioned me nervously across the tea-cups: was Charlie well? Was Charlie behaving himself? Was Charlie giving me any bother? Was Charlie saving his pay or squandering it on drink, cards, and loose women? (This was actually a series of questions artfully disguised, but that was their purport.) Was Charlie attending Church? Was he taking care? Were his pals nice boys?
“In Goad’s name, wumman,” cried Uncle, “let the man get his tea! Yattety-yattety-yattety! Cherlie’s fine! Thur naethin’ wrang wi’ him. Sure that’s right, L’tenant?”
“He’s fine,” I said, “he’s a great lad.”
“There y’are! Whit am Ah aye tellin’ ye? The boy’s fine!”
“Aye, well,” said Mrs McGilvray, looking down at her cup. “I aye worry aboot him.”
“Ach, women!” cried Uncle, winking at me. “Aye on aboot their weans. See yersel’ anither potato scone, L’tenant. Ma Goad, ma Goad.”
“Does he …” Mrs McGilvray hesitated, “does he … do his work well? I mean … looking after you, Mr MacNeill?”
“Oh, indeed he does. I think I’m very lucky.”
“Ah’d sooner hae a cairter lookin’ efter me!” wheezed Uncle. “Heh-heh! Aye, or a caur conductor! Ma Goad, ma Goad.’
“Wheesht, Uncle! Whit’ll Mr MacNeill think?”
“He’ll think yer an auld blether, gaun on aboot Cherlie! The boy’s no’ a bairn ony langer, sure’n he’s no’. He’s a grown man.” He glinted at me. “Sure that’s right? Here … will ye tak’ a wee dram, L’tenant? Ach, wheesht, wumman - can Ah no’ gie the man a right drink, then? His tongue’ll be hingin’ oot!” At his insistence she produced a decanter, shaking her head, apologising, while he cried to gie the man a decent dram, no’ just dirty his gless. He beamed on me.
“Here’s tae us! Ninety-Twa, no’ deid yet!”
“Whisky at tea-time - whit’ll Mr MacNeill think o’ ye?” wondered his niece, half-smiling.
“He’ll no’ think the worse o’ me for gie’n him a wee dram tae the Ninety-Twa,” said Uncle comfortably. He raised his glass again. “An’ tae the Bantam’s, hey, L’tenant? Aye, them’s the wee boys! Ma Goad, ma Goad …”
Mrs McGilvray saw me to the door when I left, Uncle crying after me no’ tae shoot ony cheeses gaun doon the stair. When I had thanked her she said:
“I wonder … Charlie doesnae write very often. D’you think …?”
“He’ll write every week,” I assured her. “He’s a great lad, Mrs McGilvray. You’re very lucky.”
“Well,” she said, clasping her hands, “he’s always been right enough. I’m sure you‘ll look after him.” We shook hands and she pecked me quickly on the cheek. “Take care, laddie.”
Uncle’s hoarse chuckle sounded from the inner room. “Come ben, wumman! Whit’ll the neebors say, you hingin’ aboot the stairheid wi’ sojers!’
She gave me a despairing look and retreated, and I went down the stairs, stepping over the children and reflecting that I was certainly not going to be able to change my batman now.
The final visit was to MacKenzie’s people, who lived in a fifteenth-century castle-cum-mansion in Perthshire, a striking piece of Gothic luxury in beautiful parkland with a drive a mile long through banks of cultivated heather; it contained its own salmon river, a fortune in standing timber, and a battalion of retainers who exercised dogs, strolled about with shotguns, and manicured the rhododendrons. Sir Gavin MacKenzie was his son thirty years on, tall, commanding, and with a handshake like a mangle; the red had apparently seeped from his hair into his cheeks, but that was the only difference. In manner he was cordial and abrupt, a genuine John Buchan Scottish aristo - which is to say that he was more English than any Englishman could ever hope to be. If you doubt that, just consider such typical “Englishmen” as Harold Macmillan, David Niven, Alec Douglas-Home, Jack Buchanan, Stewart Granger, and Charles II.
This was the only visit on which I actually stayed on the premises overnight. We dined at a long candlelit table in a large and clammy hall with age-blackened panelling covered with crossed broadswords, targes, and flintlocks, with silent servitors emerging occasionally from the gloom to refuel us. At one end sat Sir Gavin in a dinner jacket and appalling MacKenzie tartan trews cut on the diagonal; at the other, Lady MacKenzie, an intense woman with a staccato delivery who chain-smoked throughout the meal. From time to time she and her husband addressed each other in the manner of people who have met only recently; it was hard to believe that they knew each other well enough to be have begotten not only their son but a daughter, seated opposite me, a plain, lumpy sixteen-year-old with the magnificent MacKenzie hair, flaming red and hanging to her waist. The only other diner was a pale, elderly man with an eyeglass whose name I didn’t catch - in fact, looking back, I’m not sure he was there at all, since he never spoke and no one addressed him. He drank most of a bottle of Laphroaig during the meal, and took it with him when the ladies withdrew, leaving old man MacKenzie and me to riot over the port.
Coming on the evening of the day I had spent with the McGilvrays, it was an odd contrast. Lady MacKenzie had chattered non-stop about her son, but without asking any questions, and his sister had not, I think, referred to him at all, but since she had the finishing-school habit of talking very quickly to her armpit it was difficult to be sure. Sir Gavin had spoken only of the Labour Government. Now, when we were alone, he demanded to know why, in my opinion, Kenny had not joined the Scots Guards, in which he, Sir Gavin, had held an exalted position. Why had he chosen a Highland regiment? It was extraordinary, when he could have been in the Brigade; Sir Gavin couldn’t understand it.
I said, trying not to smile, that it was possible some people might prefer a Highland regiment, and Sir Gavin said, yes, he knew that, but it wasn’t the point. Why young Kenneth? It seemed very odd to him, when the family had always been in the Brigade, and he could have kept an eye on the boy - “I mean, I don’t know your Colonel - what’s his name? No, don’t know him. Good man, is he?”
“They don’t come any better,” I said. It seemed fairly obvious to me why young Kenneth, a firebrand and a maverick, had chosen not to be in father’s regiment, but that could not be said. Sir Gavin looked glum, and said he didn’t know anything about Highland regiments - fine reputation, of course, but he didn’t know how they were, d’you see what I mean? With the Guards, you knew where you were. Life for a young officer was cut and dried … Highland regiment, he wasn’t so sure. Suddenly he asked:
“Is he a good officer?”
“Kenny? Yes. His Jocks like him.”
“His what?”
“His Jocks-his men.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “What about your Colonel?”
“I’m sure he thinks Kenny’s a good officer.” Indeed, Sir Gavin didn’t know about Highland regiments, where the opinion of the men is the ultimate test, and every colonel knows it. Sir Gavin chewed his cigar and then said:
“You were a ranker, weren’t you? Very well - in Burma, would you have … accepted Kenneth as your platoon commander?”
I mentally compared Kenny with the brisk young man who’d once challenged me to a spelling bee and caught me out over “inadmissible”, and who’d died in a bunker entrance the next day. A good subaltern, but no better than MacKenzie.
“Yes,” I said. “Kenny would have done.”
“You think so?” he said, and suddenly I realised he was worried about his son. In the Guards, he could have served with him in spirit, so to speak - but he didn’t know how Highland regiments were, he’d said. Did the boy fit into that almost alien background? Was he a good officer? Like Mrs McGilvray, he aye worried about him, if for a different reason. So it seemed sensible to start talking about Kenny, describing how he got on in the regiment, how he and his platoon sergeant, McCaw, the Communist Clydesider, formed a disciplinary alliance that was a battalion byword, recalling incidents in which Kenny had figured, our own companionship, things like that, no doubt babbling a bit, while Sir Gavin listened, and kept the decanter going, now and then asking a question, finally sitting in silence for a while, and then saying:
“Well, I’m glad he’s all right. Thank you.”
It was two in the morning when we finally rose, port-bloated and drowsy - he must have been partially kettled, for he insisted on a frame of snooker with accompanying brandies before we parted for the night. “John’ll look after you,” he said, hiccoughing courteously, and I was aware of a dim sober figure at the foot of the massive staircase, waiting to conduct me to my room - which brings me back, after this digression of homecoming, to where I was in the first place.
John was a footman, the only one I have ever encountered outside the pages of Georgette Heyer and Wodehouse, and he would have fitted into them perfectly, along with the rest of the MacKenzie ménage. No doubt I was a trifle woozy with tiredness and Croft’s Old Original, but I have no impression that I had to stir so much as a finger in order to get into bed. His shadow flitted about me, my clothes vanished, towel and soap and warm water swam into my ken, followed by pyjamas and a cup of some bland liquid, and then I was between the sheets and all was dark contentment. When I woke two hours later there was a tray at the bedside with various mineral waters, biscuits, and a glass of milk, all under a dim night-light. I think the milk had been spiked, for the first two hours after waking next morning passed in a beatific haze; I seem to remember curtains being drawn and a cup of tea appearing, and then I was borne up gently into a sitting position and presently subsided, shaven, while a voice murmured that my bath had been drawn - not filled or running, you understand, but drawn. At that point he vanished, and when I emerged from the bathroom, more or less awake, there was a breakfast tray on the window table, with porridge and Arbroath smokies and ham and eggs and such morning rolls as God’s Own Prophet eats only in Glasgow bakeries; the Scotsman and the Bulletin lay beside it (not that I was fit for more than the Scottykin comic strip), my clothes were laid out, pressed, brushed, and beautiful, my shoes a-gleam, and even my cap badge and sporran chains had been polished.
This, it slowly dawned on me, was living, and it took an immense effort to decline the MacKenzies’ invitation to stay on, but I suspected that after a few days of John’s attention I would have forgotten how to tie my shoe-laces and wave bye-bye. As I travelled south again, and later on the flight to Cairo, I had daydreams in which the press-gang had been reintroduced, and John had been crimped into my personal service; it would give me a new outlook on life, and I would rise effortlessly to general rank and a knighthood, possibly even C.I.G.S., for nothing less was conceivable with that mysterious retainer sorting me out; I would have to live up to the ambience he created. At that point the dreaming stopped, as I realised that I simply wasn’t made for that kind of destiny, or for the ministrations of people like John.
This was driven home with a vengeance in Benghazi, of all unlikely places, where I had to spend three days between flights on the way back to the battalion. I had just entered the room allotted me in the transit camp when there was a clump of martial feet on the verandah, and into the doorway wheeled a gigantic German prisoner-of-war. From the crown of his blond shaving-brush skull to his massive ammunition boots and rolled socks must have been a cool six and a half feet; in between he wore only tiny khaki shorts and a shirt which appeared to have been starched with concrete. He crashed to attention, stared at the wall, and shouted:
“Saar, Ai em yewer betmen. Mai nem is Hans. Pliz permit thet Ai unpeck yewer kit.”
My immediate reaction was: how the hell did we ever beat this lot? For what I was looking at was one of Frederick William’s Prussian giants, the picture of a Panzer Grenadier, the perfect military automaton. He was, I learned later, captured Afrika Korps, waiting to be repatriated and meanwhile employed to attend transients like myself. When I had recovered and told him to carry on, he stamped again, ducked his head sharply, and went at my valise like a great clockwork doll, unpacking and stowing with a precision that was not quite human; it was a relief to see that there wasn’t a knob on the side of his neck.
It was my first encounter with the German military, and I didn’t mind if it was the last. In his heel-clicking way he was as perfect a servant as John had been, for while John had worked his miracles without actually being there, apparently, and never obtruding his personality, Hans succeeded by having no personality at all. It was like having a machine about the place, bringing tea by numbers; you could almost hear the whirr and click with every action. In fact, he was a robot-genie, with the gift of sudden shattering appearance; he would be out on the verandah, standing at ease, and if I so much as coughed he would be quivering in the doorway shouting “Saar!”, ready to fetch me a box of matches or march on Moscow. I began to understand Frederick the Great and Hitler; given a couple of million Hanses at your beck and call, the temptation to say “Occupy Europe at once!” must be overpowering.
I say he had no personality, but I’m not so sure. In three days he never betrayed emotion, or even moved a facial muscle except to speak; if he had a thought beyond the next duty to be performed, you would never have known it. But on the last night, I had gone up to the mess in khaki drill, having left my kilt hanging by its waist-loops on the cupboard door. Coming back, I glanced in at my window, and there was Hans standing looking at the kilt with an expression I hadn’t seen before. It was a thoughtful, intense stare, with a lot of memory behind it; he moved forward and felt the material, traced his thumb-nail along one of the yellow threads, and then stepped back, contemplating it with his cropped head on one side. I may be wrong, but I believe that if ever a man was thinking, “Next time, you sons-of-bitches”, he was. I made a noise approaching the doorway, and when I went in he was turning down the bed, impassive as ever.
But whatever secret thoughts he may have had in his Teutonic depths, Hans, as a servant, was too much for me - just as the disembodied John had been. As I observed earlier, you have to be a Junker, or its social equivalent (with all that that implies) to be able to bear having the Johns and Hanses dance attendance on you; if you are just a gentleman for the working day, you must stick to your own kind.
I reached the battalion the following evening, asked the jeep driver to drop off my kit at my billet, and walked over to 12 Platoon barrack-room. They were there, loafing about, lying on their cots, exchanging the patter, some cleaning their kit, others preparing to go out on the town: the dapper Fletcher was combing his hair at a mirror, fox-trotting on the spot; Forbes, in singlet and shorts, was juggling a tennis ball on his instep; Riach was writing a letter (to the Wee Frees’ Grand Inquisitor, probably); Daft Bob Brown was sitting on his bed singing “Ah’ve got spurrs that jingle-jangle-jingle, so they doo-oo!” and at the far end Private McAuslan, clad à la mode in balmoral bonnet and a towel with which he had evidently been sweeping a chimney, was balanced precariously on his bed-end, swiping furiously at moths with his rifle-sling; from his hoarse vituperations I gather he blamed their intrusion on Sergeant Telfer, the Army Council, and the Labour Government of Mr Attlee. He and Sir Gavin MacKenzie should have got together.
One of the corporals saw me in the doorway and started to call the room to attention, but I flagged him down, and the platoon registered my appearance after their fashion.
“Aw-haw-hey, Wullie! The man’s back!”
“See, Ah told ye he hadnae gone absent.”
“Hiv a good leave, sur?”
“Way-ull! Back tae the Airmy again!”
“Whit did ye bring us frae Rothesay, sur?”
“Aye, it’ll be hell in the trenches the morn!” and so on with their keelie grins and weird slogans, and very reassuring it was. I responded in kind by bidding them a courteous good evening, looked forward to meeting them on rifle parade at eight and kit inspection at ten, and acknowledged their cries of protest and lamentation. McGilvray came forward with my Sam Browne in one hand and a polishing rag in the other.
“Yer leave a’right, sur? Aw, smashin’. Ah’m jist givin’ yer belt a wee buff - Captain McAlpine asked tae borrow it while ye were away, an’ ye know whit he’s like - Ah think he’s been hingin’ oot a windae in it; a’ scuffed tae hellangone! But the rest o’ yer service dress is a’ ready; Ah bulled it up when Ah heard ye wis back the night.”
Well, I thought to myself, you’re not John or Hans, thank God, but you’ll do. They can keep the professionals - and they can certainly keep McAuslan, and the farther away the better - and we’ll get by very nicely.
He was looking at me inquiringly, and I realised I had been letting my thoughts stray.
“Oh … thanks, McGilvray. I saw your mother and great-uncle; they’re fine. Come and finish the belt in my room and I’ll tell you about them.” I was turning away when a thought struck me, and I paused, hesitating: I could sense that stern shade with her black ebony cane frowning down in disapproval from some immaculate, dusted paradise, but I couldn’t help that. “Oh, yes, and you’d better bring your socks with you.”
Sorry, Granny MacDonald, I thought, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.
Captain Errol (#u95881581-f823-5a8d-a3ac-d9448f6e897a)
Whenever I see television newsreels of police or troops facing mobs of rioting demonstrators, standing fast under a hail of rocks, bottles, and petrol bombs, my mind goes back forty years to India, when I was understudying John Gielgud and first heard the pregnant phrase “Aid to the civil power”. And from that my thoughts inevitably travel on to Captain Errol, and the Brigadier’s pet hawks, and the great rabble of chanting Arab rioters advancing down the Kantara causeway towards the thin khaki line of 12 Platoon, and my own voice sounding unnaturally loud and hoarse: “Right, Sarn’t Telfer - fix bayonets.”
Aid to the civil power, you see, is what the British Army used to give when called on to deal with disorder, tumult, and breach of the peace which the police could no longer control. The native constabulary of our former Italian colony being what they were - prone to panic if a drunken bazaar-wallah broke a window - aid to the civil power often amounted to no more than sending Wee Wullie out with a pick handle to shout “Imshi!”; on the other hand, when real political mayhem broke loose, and a raging horde of fellaheen several thousand strong appeared bent on setting the town ablaze and massacring the European population, sterner measures were called for, and unhappy subalterns found themselves faced with the kind of decision which Home Secretaries and Cabinets agonise over for hours, the difference being that the subaltern had thirty seconds, with luck, in which to consider the safety of his men, the defenceless town at his back, and the likelihood that if he gave the order to fire and some agitator caught a bullet, he, the subaltern, would go down in history as the Butcher of Puggle Bazaar, or wherever it happened to be.
That, as I say, was in the imperial twilight of forty years.ago, long before the days of walkie-talkies, C.S. gas, riot shields, water cannon, and similar modern defences of the public weal - not that they seem to make riot control any easier nowadays, especially when the cameras are present. We didn’t have to worry about television, and our options for dealing with infuriated rioters were limited: do nothing and get murdered, fire over their heads, or let fly in earnest. There are easier decisions, believe me, for a youth not old enough to vote.
The Army recognised this, and was at pains to instruct its fledgling officers in the techniques of containing civil commotion, so far as it knew how, which wasn’t far, even in India, with three centuries of experience to draw on. Those were the postwar months before independence, when demonstrators were chanting: “Jai Hind!” and “Pakistan zindabad!”, and the Indian police were laying about them with lathis (you really don’t know what police brutality is until you’ve seen a lathi charge going in), while the troops stood by and their officers hoped to God they wouldn’t have to intervene. Quetta and Amritsar were ugly memories of what happened when someone opened fire at the wrong time.
Bangalore, where I was completing my officers’ training course, was one of the quiet spots, which may have been why the authorities took the eccentric view that instruction in riot control could be imparted through the medium of the theatre. If that sounds unlikely, well, that’s the Army for you. Some genius (and it wasn’t Richard Brinsley Sheridan) had written a play about aid to the civil power, showing the right and wrong ways of coping with unrest; it was to be enacted at the garrison theatre, and I found myself dragooned into taking part.
That’s what comes of understudying Gielgud, which is what I like to think I had been doing, although he didn’t know it. In the last relaxed weeks of our officers’ training, a few of us cadets had been taking part in a production of The Harbour Called Mulberry for India Radio, with Cadet MacNeill as the Prussian general riveting the audience with his impersonation of Conrad Veidt; it was natural that when Gielgud’s touring company arrived in town with a double bill of Hamlet and Blithe Spirit, and some of his cast went down with Bangalore Belly, our amatuer group should be asked to provide replacements in case they needed a couple of extra spear-carriers. I was fool enough to volunteer, and while we were never required even to change into costume, let alone go on stage, we convinced ourselves that we were, technically, understudying the lead players - I mean to say, Bangalore Belly can go through unacclimatised systems like wildfire, and in our backstage dreams we could imagine being out there tearing the Soliloquy to shreds while Gielgud was carted off to the sick-bay. He wasn’t, as it happened, but no doubt he would have been reassured if he’d known that we were ready to step in.
That by the way; the upshot was that, having drawn attention to ourselves, my associates and I were prime targets when it came to choosing the cast for the aid-to-the-civil-power play, a knavish piece of work entitled Nowall and Chancit. I played Colonel Nowall, an elderly and incompetent garrison commander, which meant that I had to wear a white wig and whiskers and make like a doddering Aubrey Smith in front of a military audience whose behaviour would have disgraced the Circus Maximus. The script was abysmal, my moustache kept coming loose, the prop telephone didn’t ring on cue, one of the cast who took acting seriously dried up and fainted, and in the last act I had to order my troops to open fire on a rioting crowd played by a platoon of Indian sepoys in loin-cloths who giggled throughout and went right over the top when shot with blank cartridges. The entire theatre was dense with cordite smoke, there seemed to be about seven hundred people on stage, and when I stood knee-deep in hysterical corpses and spoke my deathless closing line: “Well, that’s that!” it stopped the show. I have not trod the boards since, and it can stay that way.
My excuse for that reminiscence is that it describes the only instruction we ever got in dealing with civil disorder. Considering that we were destined, as young second-lieutenants, to lead troops in various parts of the Far and Middle East when empires were breaking up and independence movements were in full spate, with accompanying bloodshed, it was barely adequate. Not that any amount of training, including my months as an infantry section leader in Burma, could have prepared me for the Palestine troubles of ‘46, when Arab and Jew were at each other’s throats with the British caught in the middle, as usual; the Irgun and Stern Gang were waging their campaign of terror (or freedom-fighting, depending on your point of view), raid, ambush, murder, and explosion were commonplace, the Argyll and Sutherlands had barbed wire strung across the inside corridors of their Jerusalem barracks, and you took your revolver into the shower. It was a nerve-racked, bloody business which you learned as you went along; commanding the Cairo-Jerusalem night train and conducting a security stake-out at the Armistice Day service on the Mount of Olives added years to my education in a matter of days, and by the time I was posted back to my Highland battalion far away along the North African coast I felt I knew something about lending aid to the civil power. Of course, I didn’t know the half of it - but then, I hadn’t met Captain Errol.
That wasn’t his real name, but it was what the Jocks called him because of his resemblance to Flynn, the well-known actor and bon viveur. And it wasn’t just that he was six feet two, lightly moustached, and strikingly handsome; he had the same casual, self-assured swagger of the man who is well content with himself and doesn’t give a dam whether anyone knows it or not; when you have two strings of ribbons, starting with the M.C. and M.M. and including the Croix de Guerre and a couple of exotic Balkan gongs at the end, you don’t need to put on side. Which was just as well, for Errol had evidently been born with a double helping of self-esteem, advertised in the amused half-smile and lifted eyebrow with which he surveyed the world in general - and me in particular on the day he joined the battalion.
I was bringing my platoon in from a ten-mile route march, which they had done in the cracking time of two and a half hours, and was calling them to march to attention for the last fifty yards to the main gate, exhorting McAuslan for the umpteenth time to get his pack off his backside and up to his shoulders, and pretending not to hear Private Fletcher’s sotto voce explanation that McAuslan couldn’t march upright because he was expecting, and might, indeed, go into labour shortly. Sergeant Telfer barked them to silence and quickened the step, and I turned aside to watch them swing past - it was a moment I took care never to miss, for the pride of it warms me still: my platoon going by, forty hard young Jocks in battle order, rifles sloped and bonnets pulled down, slightly dusty but hardly even breaking sweat as Telfer wheeled them under the archway with its faded golden standard. Eat your heart out, Bonaparte.
It was as I was turning to follow that I became aware of an elegant figure seated in a horse-ghari which had just drawn up at the gate. He was a Highlander, but his red tartan and white cockade were not of our regiment; then I noticed the three pips and threw him a salute, which he acknowledged with a nonchalant forefinger and a remarkable request spoken in the airy affected drawl which in Glasgow is called “Kelvinsaid”.
“Hullo, laddie,” said he. “Your platoon? You might get a couple of them to give me a hand with my kit, will you?”
It was said so affably that the effrontery of it didn’t dawn for a second - you don’t ask a perfect stranger to detach two of his marching men to be your porters, not without preamble or introduction. I stared at the man, taking in the splendid bearing, the medal ribbons, and the pleasant expectant smile while he put a fresh cigarette in his holder.
“Eh? I beg your pardon,” I said stiffly, “but they’re on parade at the moment.” For some reason I didn’t add “sir”.
It didn’t faze him a bit. “Oh, that’s a shame. Still, not to panic. We ought to be able to manage between us. All right, Abdul,” he addressed the Arab coachman, “let’s get the cargo on the dock.”
He swung lightly down from the ghari - not the easiest thing to do, with decorum, in a kilt - and it was typical of the man that I found myself with a valise in one hand and a set of golf-clubs in the other before I realised that he was evidently expecting me to tote his damned dunnage for him. My platoon had vanished from sight, fortunately, but Sergeant Telfer had stopped and was staring back, goggle-eyed. Before I could speak the newcomer was addressing me again:
“Got fifty lire, old man? ‘Fraid all I have is Egyptian ackers, and the Fairy Coachman won’t look at them. See him right, will you, and we’ll settle up anon. Okay?”
That, as they say, did it. “Laddie” I could just about absorb (since he must have been all of twenty-seven and therefore practically senile), and even his outrageous assumption that my private and personal platoon were his to flunkify, and that I would caddy for him and pay his blasted transport bills - but not that careless “Okay?” and the easy, patronising air which was all the worse for being so infernally amiable. Captain or no captain, I put his clubs and valise carefully back in the ghari and spoke, with masterly restraint:
“I’m afraid I haven’t fifty lire on me, sir, but if you care to climb back in, the ghari can take you to the Paymaster’s Office in HQ Company; they’ll change your ackers and see to your kit.” And just to round off the civilities I added: “My name’s MacNeill, by the way, and I’m a platoon commander, not a bloody dragoman.”
Which was insubordination, but if you’d seen that sardonic eyebrow and God-like profile you’d have said it too. Again, it didn’t faze him; he actually chuckled.
“I stand rebuked. MacNeill, eh?” He glanced at my campaign ribbon. “What were you in Burma?”
“Other rank.”
“Well, obviously, since you’re only a second-lieutenant now. What kind of other rank?”
“Well … sniper-scout, Black Cat Division. Later on I was a section leader. Why … sir?”
“Black Cats, eh? God Almighty’s Own. Were you at Imphal?”
“Not in the Boxes. Irrawaddy Crossing, Meiktila, Sittang Bend—”
“And you haven’t got a measly fifty lire for a poor broken-down old soldier? Well, the hell with you, young MacNeill,” said this astonishing fellow, and seated himself in the ghari again. “I’d heap coals of fire on you by offering you a lift, but your platoon are probably waiting for you to stop their motor. Bash on, MacNeill, before they seize up! Officers’ mess, Abdul!” And he drove off with an airy wave.
“Hadn’t you better report to H.Q.?” I called after him, but he was through the gate by then, leaving me nonplussed but not a little relieved; giving lip to captains wasn’t my usual line, but he hadn’t turned regimental, fortunately.
“Whit the hell was yon?” demanded Sergeant Telfer, who had been an entranced spectator.
“You tell me,” I said. “Ballater Bertie, by the look of him.” For he had, indeed, the air of those who command the guard at Ballater Station, conducting Royalty with drawn broadsword and white spats. And yet he’d been wearing an M.M. ribbon, which signified service in the ranks. I remarked on this to Telfer, who sniffed as only a Glaswegian can, and observed that whoever the newcomer might be, he was a heid-case - which means an eccentric.
That was the battalion’s opinion, formed before Captain Errol had been with us twenty-four hours. He had driven straight to the mess, which was empty of customers at that time of day, smooth-talked the mess sergeant into paying the ghari out of bar receipts, made free with the Tallisker unofficially reserved for the Medical Officer, parked himself unerringly in the second-in-command’s favourite chair, and whiled away the golden afternoon with the Scottish Field. Discovered and gently rebuked by the Adjutant for not reporting his arrival in the proper form, he had laughed apologetically and asked what time dinner was, and before the Adjutant, an earnest young Englishman, could wax properly indignant he had found himself, by some inexplicable process, buying Errol a gin and tonic.
“I can’t fathom it,” he told me, with the pained expression he usually reserved for descriptions of his putting. “One minute I was tearing small strips off the chap, and the next you know I was saying ‘What’s yours?’ and filling him in on the social scene. Extraordinary.”
Having found myself within an ace of bell-hopping for Captain Errol by the same mysterious magic, I sympathised. Who was he, anyway, I asked, and the Adjutant frowned.
“Dunno, exactly. Nor why we’ve got him. He’s been up in Palestine lately, and just from something the Colonel said I have the impression he’s been in some sort of turmoil - Errol, I mean. That type always is,” said the Adjutant, like a dowager discussing a fallen woman. “Wouldn’t be surprised if he was an I-man.”
“I” is Intelligence, and the general feeling in line regiments is that you can keep it; I-men are disturbing influences best confined to the higher echelons, where they can pursue their clandestine careers and leave honest soldiers in peace. Attached to a battalion, they can be unsettling.
And Captain Errol was all of that. As he had begun, with the Adjutant and me, so he went on, causing ripples on our placid regimental surface which eventually turned into larger waves. One of the former, for example, occurred on his first night in the mess when, within half an hour of their first acquaintance, he addressed the Colonel as “skipper”. It caused a brief silence which Errol himself didn’t seem to notice; officially, you see, there are no ranks in the mess, but junior officers (of whom captains are only the most senior) normally call the head man “sir”, especially when he is such a redoubtable bald eagle as our Colonel was. “Skipper” was close to the edge of impertinence - but it was said so easily and naturally that he got away with it. In fact, I think the Colonel rather liked it.
That, it soon became plain, was Errorl’s secret. Like his notorious namesake, he had great charm and immense style; partly it was his appearance, which was commanding, and his war record - the family of Highland regiments is a tight little news network, and many of the older men had heard of him as a fighting soldier - but most of it was just personality. He was casual, cocky, even insolent, but with a gift of disarmament, and even those who found his conceit and familiarity irritating (as the older men did) seemed almost flattered when he gave them his attention - I’ve seen the Senior Major, a grizzled veteran with the disposition of a liverish rhino, grinning sourly as Errol teased him. When he was snubbed, he didn’t seem to notice; the eyebrow would give an amused flicker, no more.
The youngest subalterns thought him a hell of a fellow, of course, not least because he had no side with them; rank meant nothing to Errol, up or down. The Jocks, being canny judges, were rather wary of him, while taking advantage of his informality so far as they thought it safe; their word for him was “gallus”, that curious Scots adjective which means a mixture of reckless, extrovert, and indifferent. On balance, he was not over-popular with Jocks or officers, especially among the elders, but even they held him in a certain grudging respect. None of which seemed to matter to Errol in the least.
I heard various verdicts on him in the first couple of weeks.
“I think he’s a Bad News Type,” said the Adjutant judicially, “but there’s no doubt he’s a character.”
“Insufferable young pup,” was the Senior Major’s verdict. “Why the devil must he use that blasted cigarette holder, like a damned actor?” When it was pointed out that most of us used them, to keep the sweat off our cigarettes, the Major remarked unreasonably: “Not the way he does. Damned affectation.”
“I like him,” said plump and genial Major Bakie. “He can be dashed funny when he wants. Breath of fresh air. My wife likes him, too.”
“Captain Errol,” observed the Padre, who was the most charitable of men, “is a very interesting chentleman. What d’ye say, Lachlan?”
“Like enough,” said the M.O. “I wouldnae let him near my malt, my money, or my maidservant.”
“See him, he’s sand-happy. No’ a’ there,” I heard Private McAuslan informing his comrades. “See when he wis Captain o’ the Week, an’ had tae inspect ma rifle on guard? He looks doon the barrel, and says: ‘I seem to see through a glass darkly.’ Whit kind o’ patter’s that, Fletcher? Mind you, he didnae pit me on a charge, an’ me wi’ a live round up the spout. Darkie woulda nailed me tae the wall.” (So I would, McAuslan.)
“Errol? A chanty-wrastler,” said Fletcher-which, from that crafty young soldier, was interesting. A chanty-wrastler is a poseur, and unreliable.
“Too dam’ sure of himself by half,” was the judgment of the second-in-command. “We can do without his sort.”
The Colonel rubbed tobacco between his palms in his thoughtful way, and said nothing.
Personally, I’d met plenty I liked better, but it seemed to me there was a deeper prejudice against Errol than he deserved, bouncy tigger though he was. Some of it might be explained by his service record which, it emerged, was sensational, and not all on the credit side. According to the Adjutant’s researches, he had been commissioned in the Territorials in ‘39, and had escaped mysteriously from St Valéry, where the rest of his unit had gone into the P.O.W. bag (“there were a few heads wagged about that, apparently”). Later he had fought with distinction in the Far East, acquiring a Military Cross (“a real one, not one of your up-with-the-rations jobs”) with the Chindits.
“And then,” said the Adjutant impressively, “he got himself cashiered. Yes, busted - all the way down. It seems he was in charge of a train-load of wounded, somewhere in Bengal, and there was some foul-up and they were shunted into a siding. Some of the chaps were in a bad way, and Errol raised hell with the local R.T.O., who got stroppy with him, and Errol hauled out his revolver and shot the inkpot off the R.T.O.’s desk, and threatened to put the next one between his eyes. Well, you can’t do that, can you? So it was a court-martial, and march out Private Errol.”
“But he’s a captain now,” I said. “How on earth—?”
“Chubbarao, and listen to this,” said the Adjutant. “He finished up late in the war with those special service johnnies who were turned loose in the Balkans - you know, helping the partisans, blowing up bridges and things and slaughtering Huns with cheese-wire by night. Big cloak-and-dagger stuff, and he did hell of a well at it, and Tito kissed him on both cheeks and said he’d never seen the like—”
“So that’s where he got the M.M.”
“And the Balkan gongs, and the upshot of it was that he was re-commissioned. It happens, now and then. And of late he’s been undercover in Palestine.” The Adjutant scratched his fair head. “Something odd there - rumours about terrorist suspects being knocked about pretty badly, and one hanging himself in his cell. Nasty business. Anyway, friend Errol was shipped out, p.d.q., and now we’re landed with him. Oh, and another thing-he’s to be Intelligence Officer, as if we needed one. Didn’t I say he was the type?” The Adjutant sniffed. “Well, at least it should keep him out of everyone’s hair.”
The disclosures of Errol’s irregular past were not altogether surprising, and they helped to explain his alakeefik attitude and brass neck. Plainly he was capable of anything, and having hit both the heights and the depths was not to be judged as ordinary mortals are.
His duties as I-man were vague, and kept him out of the main stream of battalion life, which may have been as well, for as a soldier he was a contradictory mixture. In some things he was expert: a splendid shot, superb athlete, and organised to the hilt in the field. On parade, saving his immaculate turn-out, he was a disaster: when he was Captain of the Week and had to mount the guard, I suffered agonies at his elbow in my capacity as orderly officer, whispering commands and telling him what to do next while he turned the ceremony into a shambles. Admittedly, since McAuslan was in the guard, we were handicapped from the start, but I believe Errol could have reduced the Household Cavalry to chaos - and been utterly indifferent about it. Doing well or doing badly, it was all one to him; he walked off that guard-mounting humming and swinging his walking-stick, debonair as be-damned, and advising the outraged Regimental Sergeant-Major that the drill needed tightening up a bit. (He actually addressed him as “Major”, which is one of the things that are never done. An R.S.M. is “Mr So-and-so”.)
Being casual in all things, he was naturally accident-prone, but even that did nothing to deflate him, since the victim was invariably someone else. He wrecked the Hudson Terraplane belonging to Lieutenant Grant, and walked away without a scratch; Grant escaped with a broken wrist, but there was no restoring the car which had been its owner’s pride.
He was equally lethal on blue water. Our garrison town boasted a magnificent Mediterranean bay, strewn with wrecks from the war, and sailing small boats was a popular pastime among the local smart set; Errol took to it in a big way, and from all accounts it was like having a demented Blackbeard loose about the waterfront. I gather there is a sailing etiquette about giving way and not getting athwart other people’s hawses, of which he was entirely oblivious; the result was a series of bumps, scrapes, collisions, and furious protests from outraged voyagers, culminating in a regatta event in which he dismasted one competitor, caused another to capsize, and added insult to injury by winning handsomely. That he was promptly disqualified did not lower the angle of his jaunty cigarette-holder by a degree when he turned up at the prize-giving, bronzed and dashing, to applaud the garrison beauty, Ellen Ramsay, when she received the Ladies’ Cup. She it was who christened him the Sea Hog - and was his dinner companion for many nights thereafter, to the chagrin of Lieutenant MacKenzie who, until Errol’s arrival, had been the fair Ellen’s favoured beau.
None of which did much for Errol’s popularity. Nor, strangely enough, did an odd episode which I thought was rather to his credit. The command boxing tournament took place, and as sports officer I had to organise our regimental gladiators - which meant calling for volunteers, telling them to knock off booze and smoking, letting them attend to their own sparring and training in the M.T. shed, and seeing that they were sober and (initially) upright on opening night. If that seems perfunctory, I was not a boxer myself, and had no illusions about being Yussel Jacobs when it came to management. Let them get into the ring and lay about them, while I crouched behind their corner, crying encouragement and restraining the seconds from joining in.
The tournament lasted three nights, and in winning his semifinal our heavyweight star, Private McGuigan, the Gorbals Goliath, broke a finger. Personally I think he did it on purpose to avoid meeting the other finalist, one Captain Stock, a terrible creature of blood and iron who had flattened all his opponents with unimagined ferocity; he was a relic of the Stone Age who had found his way into the Army Physical Training Corps, this Stock, and I wouldn’t have gone near him with a whip, a gun, and a chair. Primitive wasn’t the word; he made McAuslan and Wee Wullie look like Romantic poets.
Left to find a substitute willing to offer himself for sacrifice at the hands of this Behemoth, I got no takers at all, and then someone said he had heard that Errol used to box a bit, and must be about the right weight. There was enthusiastic support for this suggestion, especially from the older officers, so I sought the man out in his room, where he was reclining with a cool drink at his elbow, shooting moths with an air pistol - and hitting them, too.
“What makes you think I could take Stock, if you’ll pardon the expression?” he wondered, when I put it to him. “Or doesn’t that matter, as long as we’re represented?”
“Someone in the mess said you used to be pretty useful …”
“Did they now? That’s handsome of them.” He grinned at me sardonically. “Who proposed me - Cattenach?” This was the second-in-command, Errol’s principal critic. “Never mind. It’s not on, Dand, thanks all the same. I haven’t boxed for ages. Too much like work.”
“There’s no one else in the battalion,” I said subtly.
“Stop waving the regimental colours at me.” He picked off a large moth on the wing, bringing down a shower of plaster. “Anyway, I’m an interloper. Let Cattenach take him on if he’s so damned keen; God knows he’s big enough. No, you’ll just have to tell ‘em I’ve retired.”
So I reported failure, and there was disappointment, although no one was daft enough to suggest that Errol was scared. The Adjutant, who was a romantic, speculated that he had probably killed a man in the ring - his fiancée’s brother, for choice - and vowed never to box again; he would have joined the Foreign Legion, insisted the Adjutant, if it hadn’t been for the war. Others joined in these fine flights, and no one noticed the Colonel sauntering out of the mess, but later that evening he told me casually that I could pencil in Errol for the final; he had been persuaded, said the Colonel, filling his pipe in a contented way. Knowing his fanaticism where the battalion’s credit was concerned, I wondered what pressure he had applied, and concluded that he probably hadn’t needed any, just his gentle, fatherly insistence which I knew of old. He could have talked a salmon out of its pool, the same Colonel - and of course the possibility that his man might get half-killed wouldn’t even cross his mind.
It crossed mine when I saw Errol and Stock face to muzzle in the ring; so might Adonis have looked in the presence of a silverback gorilla. Stock stood half a head taller, two stone heavier, and about a foot thicker, especially round the brow. He came out at the bell like a Panzer tank - and Errol moved round him as though on rollers, weaving and feinting until he’d sized him up, and then began systematically left-handing him to death. It was Carpentier to the town drunk; Stock clubbed and rushed and never got near him until the second round, when he had the ill-judgment to land a kidney-punch. Errol came out of the clinch looking white and wicked, and thereafter took Stock apart with clinical savagery. The referee stopped it in the third, with Stock bloodied and out on his feet; Errol hadn’t a hair out of place, and I doubt if he’d been touched more than half a dozen times.
But as I said, he got no credit from that fight. It had been so one-sided that all the sympathy was for the battered Stock, and there was even a feeling that Errol had been over-brutal to a man who wasn’t in his class as a boxer. Which was unfair, since he had been reluctant to fight in the first place - my guess is that he knew exactly how good he was, and that Stock would be no contest. But if he compared the polite clapping as he left the ring with the thunder of applause for his groggy but gamely smiling opponent, it didn’t seem to worry him; he strolled back to the changing-room cool and unruffled as ever.
It was immediately after this that he finally fell from grace altogether, and the mixed feelings of the mess hardened into positive dislike. Two things happened to show him at his worst; neither was earth-shattering in itself, but in each case he displayed such a cynical indifference that even his friends could find no excuses.
In the first instance, he stole another man’s girl - and it wasn’t a case of cutting out someone like MacKenzie, the battalion Lothario, with Ellen Ramsay, whose admirers were legion (including even the unlikely Private McAuslan, whose wooing I have described elsewhere). Boy met, dated, and parted from girl with bewildering speed in post-war garrisons, and no harm done; Errol himself must have been involved with half the nurses, A.T.S., Wrens, and civilian females, and no one thought twice, except to note jealously that while the rest of us had to pursue, he seemed to draw them like a magnet.
But the case of Sister Jean was different. She was a flashing-eyed Irish redhead, decorative even by the high standard of the hospital staff, and her attachment to a U.S. pilot at the bomber base was the real thing, what the Adjutant called Poignant Passion, engagement ring, wedding date fixed, and all - until Errol moved in on the lady. I was on detachment at Fort Yarhuna during the crisis, but according to MacKenzie it had started with casual cheek-to-cheek stuff on the dance-floor at the Uaddan Club, progressing to dates, picnics, and sailing-trips on Errol’s dinghy while the American was absent on his country’s service, dropping sandbags on the desert (I quote MacKenzie). In brief, Jean had been beglamoured, her fiancé had objected, a lovers’ quarrel had ensued with high words flying in Irish and American, the ring had been returned, the pilot had got himself posted to Italy in dudgeon, and the hapless patients in Sister Jean’s ward were learning what life was like under the Empress Theodora.
“Talk about hell hath no fury,” said MacKenzie. “She’s lobbing out enemas like a mad thing. You see, not only is her romance with Tex kaput, bus, washed up; on top of that, the unspeakable Errol has given her the gate and is pushing around the new Ensa bint - who is a piece of all right, I have to admit. What women see in him,” he added irritably, “I’m shot if I know. The man’s a tick, a suede-shoe artist, a Semiramis Hotel creeper of the lowest type.”
“Didn’t anyone try to steer him away from Jean?” I asked, thinking of the Colonel, who when it came to intervening in his junior officers’ love lives could have given Lady Bracknell a head start. “Why didn’t you tackle him yourself?”
“Come off it. Remember what happened to Stock? Actually, Ellen Ramsay did get stuck into him at one stage … gosh, she’s a honey, that girl,” said MacKenzie, smiling dreamily. “I think I’ll take her grouse-shooting when we go home. You know, dazzle her with Perthshire … Eh? Oh, well, she tore strips off Errol, and he just laughed and said: ‘Why, darling, I didn’t know you cared,’ and swanned off, cool as be-damned, to take Jean swimming. And now, having wrecked her future, and Tex’s, he goes around blithe as a bird, as though nothing had happened. Yes - a total tick, slice him where you will.”
A fair assessment, on the face of it, and the temperature dropped noticeably in the mess when Errol was present, not that he seemed aware of it. Otherwise the incident was closed; for one thing, there were far more urgent matters to think about just then. Political trouble was beginning to brew in our former Italian colony, with noisy nationalist demonstrations, stoning of police posts by Arab gangs, and the prospect that we would be called out to support the civil administration. If there’s going to be active service, the last thing you need is discord in the mess.
Even so, Errol’s next gaffe came close to blowing the lid off with his bête noire, Cattenach, the second-in-command; it was the nearest thing I ever saw to a brawl between brother-officers, and all because of Errol’s bloody-minded disregard for other people’s feelings. He had set off early one morning to shoot on the salt flats outside the town, and came breezing in just as we were finishing breakfast, calling for black coffee and telling Bennet-Bruce that his shotgun (which Errol had borrowed, typically) was throwing left. Bennet-Bruce asked if he’d had any luck.
“Nothing to write to the Field about,” said Errol, buttering toast. “In fact, sweet dam’-all, except for a couple of kites near the Armoury. Weird-looking things.”
Cattenach lowered his paper. “Did you say near the Armoury? Where are these birds?”
“Where I left them, of course; somewhere around the Armoury wall. They weren’t worth keeping.”
Cattenach looked thoughtful, but went back to his paper, and it wasn’t until lunchtime that he returned to the subject. He brought his drink across from the bar and stopped in front of Errol’s chair, waiting until he had finished telling his latest story and had become aware that Cattenach was regarding him stonily. The second-in-command was a lean, craggy, normally taciturn man with a rat-trap mouth that made him look like one of the less amiable Norman barons.
“You may be interested to know,” he said curtly, “that the ‘kites’ you shot this morning were the Brigadier’s pet hawks.”
There was a startled silence, in which the Padre said: “Oh, cracky good gracious!”, and Errol cocked an incredulous, eyebrow. “What are you talking about - hawks? Since when do hawks stooge around loose, like crows!”
“They were tame hawks - something unique, I believe,” said Cattenach, enjoying himself in his own grim fashion. “A gift to the Brigadier from King Idris, after the desert campaign. Quite irreplaceable, of course, as well as being priceless. And you shot them. Congratulations.”
Well, you and I or any normal person would at this point have lowered the head in the hands, giving little whimpering cries punctuated by stricken oaths and appeals for advice. Not Errol, though; he just downed his drink and observed lightly:
“Well, why didn’t he keep them on a leash? I thought it was usual to put hoods over their heads.”
We stared at the man, and someone protested: “Oh, come off it, Errol!”, while Cattenach went crimson and began to inflate.
“Is that all you’ve got to say?” he demanded, and Errol regarded him with maddening calm.
“What d’you expect me to say? I’m sorry, of course.” If he was he certainly didn’t sound it. “I’ll send the old boy a note of apology.” He gave Cattenach a nod that was almost dismissive. “Okay?”
“Just… that?” growled Cattenach, ready to burst.
“I can’t very well do anything else,” said Errol, and picked up a magazine. “Unless you expect me to rend my garments.” To do him justice, I believe that if anyone else had brought him the glad news, he’d have shown more concern, but he wasn’t giving Cattenach that satisfaction - just his cool half-smile, and the second-in-command had to struggle to keep a grip on himself in the face of that dumb insolence. He took a breath, and then said with deliberation:
“The trouble with you, and what makes you such an unpleasant regimental liability, is that while most of us couldn’t care more, you just couldn’t care less.”
No one had ever heard Cattenach, who was normally a quiet soul, talk with such controlled contempt - and in the mess, of all places. A little flush appeared on Errol’s cheek, and he rose from his chair, but only to look Cattenach in the eye and say:
“You know, that’s extremely well put. I think I’ll enter it in the mess book.”
That was when I thought Cattenach was going to hit him - or try to, because Errol, for all his composure, was balanced like a cat. Suddenly it was very ugly, the Padre was making anxious noises, and the Adjutant was starting forward, and then Cattenach turned abruptly on his heel and stalked out. There was a toe-curling silence - and of course I had to open my big mouth, heaven knows why, unless I thought it was time to raise the conversation to a higher plane.
“Why can’t you bloody well wrap up, just for once?” I demanded, and was told by the Adjutant to shut up. “I think you’ve said enough, too,” he told Errol. “Right - who’s for lunch?”_
“I am, for one,” said Errol, unabashed. “Drama always gives me an appetite,” and he sauntered off to the dining-room, leaving us looking at each other, the Padre muttering about the pride of Lucifer, and the M.O., after a final inhalation of the Tallisker, voicing the general thought.
“Yon’s a bad man,” he said. “Mercy is not in him.”
That was a fact, I thought. Not only had he shown a callous disregard for the feelings of the Brigadier, bereaved of his precious pets, he had strained the egalitarian conventions of the mess to the limit in his behaviour to Cattenach - who, mind you, had been making a meal of his own dislike for Errol. It was all enough to make one say “Tach!”, as my grandmother used to exclaim in irritation, and lunch was taken in general ill-temper - except for Errol, who ate a tranquil salad and lingered over his coffee.
And then such trivia ceased to matter, for at 2.15 came the sudden alarm call from the Police Commissioner to say that the unrest which had been simmering in the native quarter had suddenly burst into violence: a mob of Arab malcontents and bazaar-wallahs were rioting in the Suk, pillaging shops and fire-raising; one of the leading nationalist agitators, Marbruk es-Salah, was haranguing a huge gathering near the Yassid Market, and it looked only a matter of time before they would be spilling out of the Old City and rampaging towards the European suburbs. Aid to the civil power was a matter of urgency - which meant that at 2.45 the two three-ton trucks bearing the armed might of 12 Platoon pulled up on the great dusty square east of the Kantara Bridge, and I reviewed the force with which I was expected to plug that particular outlet from the native quarter.
In theory, the plan for containing unrest was simple. The Old City, an impossible warren of tall crumbling buildings and hundreds of crooked streets and narrow alleys, spread out like a huge fan from the waterfront; beyond the semi-circular edge of the fan lay the European suburbs of the Italian colonial era, girdling the squalid Old City from sea to sea in a luxurious crescent of apartment buildings, bungalows, shops, restaurants, and broad streets - a looter’s paradise for the teeming thousands of the Old City’s inhabitants, if they ever invaded in force. To make sure they didn’t, the 24 infantry platoons of our battalion and the Fusiliers were supposed to block every outlet from the Old City to the New Town, and since these were innumerable, careful disposition of forces was vital.
Kantara was an easy one, since here there was an enormous ditch hemming the native town like a moat, and the only way across was the ancient bridge (which is what Kantara means) which we were guarding. It was a structure of massive stones which had been there before the Caesars, twenty feet broad between low parapets, and perhaps twice as long. From where I stood on the open ground at its eastern end, I could look across the bridge at a peaceful enough scene: a wide market-place in which interesting Orientals were going about their business of loafing, wailing, squatting in the dust, or snoozing in the shadows of the great rickety tenements and ruined walls of the Old City. Behind me were the broad, palm-lined boulevards of the modern resort area, with dazzling white apartments and pleasant gardens, a couple of hotels and restaurants, and beyond them the hospital and the beach club. It looked like something out of a travel brochure, with a faint drift of Glenn Miller on the afternoon air - and then you turned back to face the ancient stronghold of the Barbary Corsairs, a huge festering slum crouched like a malignant genie above the peaceful European suburb, and felt thankful for the separating moat-ditch with only that single dusty causeway across it.
“Nae bother,” said Sergeant Telfer. Like me, he was thinking that thirty Jocks with fifty rounds apiece could have held that bridge against ten times the native population - provided they were empowered to shoot, that is. Which, if it came to the point, would be up to me. But we both knew that was highly unlikely; by all accounts the trouble was at the western end of the Old City, where most of our troops were concentrated. Kantara was very much the soft option, which was presumably why one platoon had been deemed enough. They hadn’t thought it worthwhile giving us a radio, even.
Since it was all quiet, I didn’t form the platoon up, but showed them where, in the event of trouble, they would take up extended line, facing the bridge and about fifty yards from it, out of range of any possible missiles from beyond the ditch. Then they sat in the shade of the trucks, smoking and gossiping, while I prowled about, watching the market for any signs of disturbance, vaguely aware of the discussion on current affairs taking place behind me.
“Hi, Corporal Mackie, whit are the wogs gettin’ het up aboot, then?”
“Independence.” Mackie had been a civil servant, and was the platoon intellectual. “Self-government by their own political leaders. They don’t like being under Allied occupation.”
“Fair enough, me neither. Whit’s stoppin’ them?”
“You are, McAuslan. You’re the heir to the pre-war Italian government. So do your shirt up and try to look like it.”
“Me? Fat chance! The wogs can hiv it for me, sure’n they can, Fletcher? It’s no’ my parish. Hi, corporal, whit wey does the government no’ let the wogs have it?”
“Because they’d make a bluidy mess o’ it, dozy.” This was Fletcher, who was a sort of Churchillian Communist. “They’re no’ fit tae run a mennodge. Look behind ye - that’s civilisation. Then look ower there at that midden o’ a toon; that’s whit the wogs would make o’ it. See?”
So much for Ibn Khaldun and the architects of the Alhambra. Some similar thought must have stirred McAuslan’s strange mental processes, for he came out with a nugget which, frankly, I wouldn’t have thought he knew.
“Haud on a minnit, Fletcher - it was wogs built the Pyramids, wisn’t it? That’s whit the Padre says. Aye, weel, there ye are. They cannae be that dumb.”
“Those werenae wogs, ya mug! Those were Ancient Egyptians.”
“An Egyptian’s a wog! Sure’n he is. So don’t gi’ me the acid, Fletcher. Anyway, if Ah wis a wog, Ah wid dam’ soon get things sortit oot aboot indamapendence. If Ah wis a wog—”
“That’s a helluva insult tae wogs, right enough. Ah can just see ye! Hey, fellas, meet Abu ben McAuslan, the Red Shadow. Ye fancy havin’ a harem, McAuslan? Aboot twenty belly-dancers like Big Aggie frae the Blue Heaven?” And Fletcher began to hum snake-charmer music, while his comrades speculated coarsely on McAuslan, Caliph of the Faithful, and I looked through the heat haze at the Old City, and thought about cool pints in the dim quiet of the mess ante-room.
It came, as it so often does, with daunting speed. There was a distant muttering from the direction of the Old City, like a wind getting up, and the market-place beyond the bridge was suddenly empty and still in the late afternoon sun. Then the muttering changed to a rising rumble of hurrying feet and harsh voices growing louder. I shouted to Telfer to fall in, and from the mouth of a street beyond the market-place a native police jeep came racing over the bridge. It didn’t stop; I had a glimpse of a brown face, scared and staring, under a peaked cap, and then the jeep was gone in a cloud of dust, heading up into the New Town. So much for the civil power. The platoon were fanning out in open order, each man with his rifle and a canvas bandolier at his waist; they stood easy, and Telfer turned to me for orders. I was gazing across the bridge, watching Crisis arrive in a frightsome form, and realising with sudden dread that there was no one on God’s green earth to deal with it, except me.
It’s quite a moment. You’re taking it easy, on a sunny afternoon, listening to the Jocks chaffing - and then out of the alleys two hundred yards away figures are hurrying, hundreds of them, converging into a great milling mob, yelling in unison, waving their fists, starting to move towards you. A menace beats off them that you can feel, dark glaring faces, sticks brandished, robes waving and feet churning up the dust in clouds before them, the rhythmic chanting sounding like a barbaric war-song -and you fight down the panic and turn to look at the khaki line strung out either side of you, the young faces set under the slanted bonnets, the rifles at their sides, standing at ease - waiting for you. If you say the word, they’ll shoot that advancing mob flat, and go on shooting, because that’s what they’re trained to do, for thirty bob a week - and if that doesn’t stop the opposition, they’ll stand and fight it out on the spot as long as they can, because that’s part of the conscript’s bargain, too. But it’s entirely up to you - and there’s no colonel or company commander to instruct or advise. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve led a section in warfare, where there is no rule save survival; this is different, for these are not the enemy - by God, I thought, you could have fooled me; I may know it, but I’ll bet they don’t - they are civilians, and you must not shoot unless you have to, and only you can decide that, so make up your mind, Dand, and don’t dawdle: you’re getting nine quid a week, after all, so the least you can do is show some initiative.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/george-fraser-macdonald/the-sheik-and-the-dustbin/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.