The Complete McAuslan (12 page)

The Movements Office gave me a great sheaf of documents, a few instructions on how to command a troop train, reminded me that we left at ten sharp, and waved me away. The place looked like a stock market during a boom, everyone was running and shouting and chalking on boards; I got out to the bar, where sundry wellwishers cheered me up with anecdotes about the Jerusalem run.

‘Tell me they’re blowing one train in three,’ said an American Air Corps major.

‘Doing it dam’ neatly, too,’ said a captain in the Lincolns. “Course, most of ’em are British or American-trained. On our side a year or two ago.’

A quarter-master from the South Lancs said the terrorists’ equipment and stores were of the finest: Jerry landmines, piles o’ flamin’ gun-cotton, and more electrical gear than the G.P.O.

‘Schmeiser machine-pistols,’ said the American cheerfully. ‘Telescopic sights. Draw a bead on your ear at six hundred yards with those crossed wires – then, barn! You’ve had it. Who’s having another?’

‘Trouble is, you can’t tell friend from foe,’ said the Lincoln. ‘No uniforms, dam’ nasty. Thanks, Tex, don’t mind if I do. Well, thank God they don’t get me past Gaza again; nice low demob. group, my number’ll be up in a month or two. Cheers.’

I said I had better be getting along to my train, and they looked at me reflectively, and I picked up my balmoral, dropped my papers, scrabbled them up, and went out in search of Troop Train 42, Jerusalem via Zagazig, Gaza and Tel Aviv, officer commanding Lt MacNeill, D., and the best of luck to him.

The platform was jammed all along its narrow length; my cargo looked like the United Nations. There were Arab Legion in their red-checked head-cloths, leaning on their rifles and saying nothing to anybody, A.T.S. giggling in little groups and going into peals of laughter at the attempts of one of them to make an Egyptian tea-seller understand that she didn’t take milk; service wives and families on the seats, the women wearing that glassy look of worn-out boredom and the children scattering about and bumping and shrieking; a platoon of long bronzed Australians, bush-hatted and talking through their noses; worried-looking majors and red-faced, phlegmatic corporals; at least one brigadier, red-tabbed, trying to look as though he was thinking of something important and was unaware of the children who were playing tig round him; unidentified semi-military civilians of the kind you get round bases – correspondents, civil servants, welfare and entertainment organisers; dragomans sweeping majestically ahead of their porters and barking strange Arabic words. Hurrying among them, swearing pathetically, was a fat little man with R.T.O. on his sleeve and enormous khaki shorts on his withers; he seized on me and shouted above the noise of people and escaping steam.

‘Stone me! You MacNeill? What a blasted mess! You’ve got the short straw, you have. Fourteen service families, Gawd knows how many kids, but they’re all in the manifest. A.T.S. an’ all. I said we shouldn’t have it, ought to be eighty per cent troops on any troop train, but you might as well talk to the wind that dried your first shirt.’ He shoved another sheaf of papers at me. ‘You can cope, anyway. Just don’t let any of ’em off before Jerusalem, that’s all. There’s at least two deserters under escort, but they’re in the van, handcuffed. It’s the civvies you’ve got to watch for; they don’t like taking orders. If any of ‘em get uppity, threaten to shoot ‘em, or better still threaten to drop ’em off in a nice stretch of desert – there’s plenty. Damn my skin, I’m misting up again!’ He removed his spectacles from his pug nose, wiped them on a service hankie, and replaced them; he was running sweat down his plump red cheeks. ‘Now then, there’s a padre who’s worried about the A.T.S., God knows why, but he knows his own mind best, I dare say; keep an eye on the Aussies, but you know about them. And don’t let the wog who’s driving stop except at stations – that’s important. If he tries, don’t threaten to shoot
him
, just tell him he’ll lose his pension. An’ remember, you’re the boss; to hell with ranks, they don’t count on a train. You’re the skipper, got it?’

The loudspeaker boomed overhead.

‘Attention, please, attention. Will Captain Tanner please go to platform seven, plat-form sev-en. Captain Tanner, please.’

‘All right, all right,’ said the little man, savagely. ‘I can only be one place at a time, can’t I? Where was I? Oh, yes, you’ve a second-in-command, over there.’ He pointed to a figure, standing alone near the engine. ‘One of your crowd,’ he added, looking at my tartan shoulder-flash. ‘Seems all right. Sergeant Black!’ he shouted, and the figure came oyer to us.

He was about middle height, with the big spreading chest and shoulders you often see in Highland regiments; his chin was blue and his profile was like a Red Indian’s under the tilted bonnet with its red hackle. He was neat, professional, and as hard as a gangster, and he had the M.M. in front of the Africa and Italy ribbons. A pair of stony eyes looked me over, but he didn’t say anything.

‘The run takes about seven hours,’ went on the R.T.O. He stopped and shuffled his papers. He was thinking. ‘If you hit trouble,’ he said at last, ‘you use your initiative. Sorry it’s not much help, but there you are. You’ve got some signallers, and the telegraph line’s never far away. You’ll be O.K. as far as Gaza anyway; after that there’s more chance of . . . well, anyway, it’s not likely there’ll be any bother.’

The loudspeaker crackled again for Captain Tanner.

‘Oh, shut up!’ he snapped. ‘Honest, it’s the only blasted name they know. Well, look, you’re off in about ten minutes. Better start getting ’em aboard. I’ll get a bleat for you on the tannoy. Best of luck.’ He hurried off, and then turned back. ‘Oh, one other thing; there’s a captain’s wife with a baby and she thinks it’s getting German measles. I wouldn’t know.’

He bustled off into the crowd, and as he disappeared I felt suddenly lonely and nervous. One train, two hundred people – a good third of them women and children – seemed a lot of responsibility, especially going into a country on fire with civil strife and harried by armed terrorist gangs. Two deserters, a worried padre, and possible German measles. Oh, well, first things first. How does one start clearing a crowded platform into a train?

‘Sergeant Black,’ I said, ‘have you made this trip before?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Oh. I see. Well, start getting them aboard, will you?’

God bless the British sergeant. He flicked his bonnet with his hand, swung round, and thundered, ‘All aboard for Jerusalem,’ as though he had been a stationmaster all his life. The tannoy boomed into sound overhead and there was a general move towards the train. Sergeant Black moved in among the crowd, pointing and instructing – he seemed to know, by some Godgiven instinct, what to do – and I went to look at the engine.

I’m no authority, but it looked pretty rickety, and the genial Arab driver seemed to be in the grip of some powerful intoxicating drug. He had a huge laugh and a glassy eye, spoke no English, and fiddled with his controls in a reckless, unnerving way. I thought of asking him if he knew the way to Jerusalem, but it would have sounded silly, so I climbed into the front carriage, dumped my hand baggage on a seat in the compartment marked ‘O.C. Train, Private’ (with the added legend ‘Kilroy was here – he hated it’) and set off down the corridor to tour the train.

It was like the lower gun-deck of the Fighting Temeraire at Trafalgar, a great heaving mass of bodies trying to sort themselves out. There were no Pullman cars, and the congestion in the carriage doorways was brutal. I worked my way through to the guard’s van, and found Sergeant Black eyeing the two deserters, tow-headed ruffians handcuffed to a staple on the wall.

‘Let them loose,’ he was saying to the M.P. escort.

‘I’m responsible . . .’ the M.P. began, and Black looked at him. There was one of those pregnant silences while I examined the instructions on the fire extinguisher, and then the M.P. muttered some defiance and unlocked the handcuffs. Sergeant Black lit a cigarette and tapped the butt of his Luger.

‘See, you two,’ he said. ‘Run for it, and I’ll blow yer— — — —heids aff.’ He caught sight of me and nodded. ‘Awright this end, sir.’

‘So I see,’ I said and beckoned him out in the corridor. ‘You think it’s safe to loose those two?’

‘Well, it’s like this. If there’s trouble, it’s no’ right they should be tied up.’

‘You mean if we hit the Stern Gang?’

‘Aye.’

I thought about this, but not for long. There would certainly be other, more important decisions to make on the journey, and there was no point in worrying myself at this stage about the security of two deserters who were hardly likely to take off into the desert anyway. So I allotted Sergeant Black the rear half of the train, struggled back to my place at the front, checked my notorious pistol to see that it was loaded, satisfied myself that everyone was off the platform, and settled down with
The Launching of Roger Brook,
which was the current favourite with the discerning literati, although closely challenged by two other recent productions,
Animal Farm
and
Forever Amber.
The train suddenly heaved and clanked, and we were off.

The Cairo—Jerusalem run is one of the oldest and most well-worn routes in the world. By train in those days you went due north towards the Nile delta and then swung east through Zagazig to Ismailia on the Canal. Then north along the Canal again to El Kantara, ‘the Bridge’ by which Mary and Joseph travelled and before them Abraham. Then you are running east again along the coast, with the great waste of the Sinai on your right and the Mediterranean on your left. This was the way the world walked in the beginnings of recorded time, Roman, Arab, Assyrian, Greek; if you could talk to everyone who used this road you could write the history of the human race. Everyone was here, except the Children of Israel who made it the hard way, farther south. And now they were trying to make it again, from a different direction, over the sea from Europe and elsewhere – still the hard way, they being Jews.

The tracks stick to the coast as far as the Palestine border, where the names become familiar, echoing childhood memories of Sunday school and the Old Testament – Rafa and Gaza and Askalon away to the left, where the daughters of the uncircumcised were getting ready to cheer for Goliath; and then the line curves slowly away from the coast to Lydda, and doubles almost back on itself for the last lap south and east into Jerusalem.

At various points along the route Samson had destroyed the temple, Philip had begun preaching the gospel, Herod had been born, the Lord smote the thousand thousand Ethiopians, Peter cured in the name of Jesus, Solomon dreamed of being wise, and Uzziah broke down the walls of Jabneh. And Lt MacNeill, D., was following in their footsteps with Troop Train 42, which just shows that you can always go one better.

We had just rattled through Zagazig and Roger Brook was squaring up to the finest swordsman in France when there was a knock at my door and there stood a tall, thin man with a big Adam’s apple knocking on his dog collar, wearing the purple-edged pips of the Royal Army Chaplain’s Department. He peered at me through massive horn-rims and said:

‘There are A.T.S. travelling on this train.’

I admitted it; and he sucked in his breath.

‘There are also officers of the Royal Air Force.’

His voice was husky, and you could see that, to his mind, Troop Train 42 was a potential White Slave Special. In his experience, R.A.F. types and A.T.S. were an explosive formula.

‘I shouldn’t worry, padre,’ I said, ‘I’m sure . . .’

‘But I must worry,’ he said indignantly. ‘After all, if we were not in this train, it would be time for Lights Out. These young girls would be asleep. The young men. . .’ he paused; he wasn’t so sure about the young men. ‘I think that, as O.C. train, you should ensure that a curfew of compartments is observed after eleven o‘clock,’ he finished up.

‘I doubt if there’s any regulation . . .’

‘You could enforce it. You have the authority.’

That was true enough: an O.C. train, however junior in rank, is like the captain of a ship; obviously he exercises tact where big brass is concerned, but when the chips are down he is the man. But authority cuts two ways. Now that I’d been reminded of it, I resented having a young sky-pilot (he was ribbonless and under 30), telling me my job. I got formal.

‘A curfew would be impractical,’ I said. ‘But I shall be patrolling the train from time to time, as will my sergeant.

You could see he was wondering about that, too. He looked at me doubtfully and muttered something about spiritual duty and promiscuity. Plainly he was a nut. After shifting from one foot to the other for a moment, he bade me good night unhappily, and lurched off down the corridor, colliding with a fresh-faced young flight-lieutenant who was coming the other way. The R.A.F. type was full of bonhomie, duty-free in the Service.

‘Hiya, Padre,’ said he. ‘Playing at home this weather, eh?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Well, this is your territory, isn’t it?’ said the youth. ‘Y’know, bound for the Holy Land. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Jezebel,’ he waved expansively, ‘Goliath of Gath, Sodom and Gomorrah and Gomorrah and Gomorrah creeps in this petty pace from day to day . . .

I went inside quickly and closed the door. Something told me the padre was going to have a worrying trip.

He wasn’t the only one, although it was past El Kantara that the next interruption came. I had taken a trip along the train, and seen that everyone was reasonably installed for the night, conferred with Sergeant Black, and come back to my compartment. Roger Brook had pinked the villain long ago, and was now rifling the Marquis’s closet for the secret plans, when the knock came.

It was a small A.T.S., blonde and snub-nosed, wearing two stripes. She saluted smartly and squeaked at me.

‘Please, sir, could something be done about our carriage window? It’s broken and boarded up, and Helen is in a draught. Actually, we all are, sir; it’s very cold. But Helen feels it most.’

A young officer appealed to by A.T.S. is a sorry sight. He becomes tremendously paternal and dignified, as only a 21-year-old can. Elderly staff officers look like babbling lads beside him. He frowns thoughtfully, and his voice drops at least two octaves. I was no exception.