The Complete McAuslan (14 page)

He said he would see what he could do, pulled down his bonnet, and set off up the train. Within a quarter of an hour there was boiling water, feeding-bottles were being sterilised, and Mrs Garnett was being rapturously thankful. The sergeant had realised that although the restaurant car was without actual cooking appliances, there was at least a place where a fire could be lit.

After that there was peace until we reached the border. Black and I stood together at an open window near the front of the train, looking out over the desert and wondering about it. Up ahead was Gaza, where we were due for a stop; after that there was the Holy Land, where the Stern Gang and the Irgun operated. I said that probably we wouldn’t see any trouble; Black scratched his blue chin and said, ‘Aye’. It was getting cold. I went back to my compartment and tried to get some sleep.

We drew into Gaza not long after, and everyone got off for tea or coffee at the platform canteen, except Black and the prisoners. We crowded the platform and I was halfway through my second cup and discussing child psychology with Captain Garnett when I suddenly realised that the crowd wasn’t as thick as it had been five minutes before. But I didn’t think they had got back on the train; where, then, were they going? Troops moving by train were confined to the platform at all halts; anywhere else was out of bounds. Oh, God, I thought, they’re deserting.

They weren’t, in fact. They were playing the Gaza Game, which was a feature of Middle Eastern travel in those days. It worked like this. At Gaza, you changed your Egyptian pounds for the Military Administration Lire (mals) used in Palestine. The exchange rate was, say, 100 mals per £E1 at the currency control post on Gaza station. But if you knew the Game, you were aware that in a back street a few hundred yards from the station there dwelt Ahmed el Bakbook of the Thousand Fingers, otherwise Ahmed the Chatterer, who would give 120 mals per £E1. So you went to him, changed your £E to mals, hastened to the control office, changed your mals back to £E, raced off to Ahmed again, did another change, and so on until you had to board the train, showing a handsome profit. How the economies of Egypt and Palestine stood it I wouldn’t know, nor yet how Ahmed made a living at it. But that was how it worked, as I discovered when I was investigating the sudden exodus from the platform, and was accosted by the pouchy lieutenant-colonel who claimed to have detected several soldiers sneaking out of the station. Oh, he knew what they were up to, all right, he said, and what was I doing, as O.C. train, to stop it? I was keen enough on finding A.T.S. girls billets to which they were not entitled, but I appeared to be unable to control the troops under my command. Well, well, and so on.

Personally, I couldn’t have cared less if the troops had changed the entire monetary reserves of Egypt into roubles, at any rate of exchange, but technically he was right, which was why I found myself a few moments later pounding down a dirty back alley in Gaza, damning the day I joined the Army. In a dirty shop, easily identified by the khaki figures furtively sneaking in and out, I confronted a revolting Arab. He was sitting at a big plain table, piled with notes and silver, with an oil lamp swinging overhead and a thug in a burnous at his elbow.

He gave me a huge smile, all yellow fangs and beard, and said, ‘How much, lieutenant?’

‘You,’ I said, ‘are conducting an illegal traffic in currency.’

‘Granted,’ he replied. ‘What do you require?’

‘Dammit,’ I said. ‘Stop it.’

He looked hurt. ‘Is not possible,’ he said. ‘I fill a need. That is all.’

‘You’ll be filling a cell in Acre jail when the military police get wise to you,’ I said.

‘Everyone gets out of Acre jail, you know?’ he said cheerfully. ‘And you do not suggest I work in defiance of the military police? They do not trouble me.’

He was just full of confidence, a little amused, a little surprised. I wondered if I was hearing right.

‘Come on, old boy, get a move on,’ said a voice behind. One of the R.A.F. types was standing there with his wallet out. ‘Time presses, and all that. And you did jump the queue, you know.’

I gave up. Ahmed dealt courteously with the R.A.F. type, and then asked me almost apologetically how much I wanted to change. I answered him coldly, and he shrugged and dealt with the next customer. Then he asked me again, remarked that it must be getting near train time, and pointed out that since I had already infringed the regulations myself by leaving the station, I might as well take advantage of his unrivalled service.

He was right, of course, this good old man. I shovelled across my £E, accepted his mals, declined his invitation to join him in a draught of Macropoulos’s Fine Old Highland Dew Scotch Whisky – ‘a wee-doch-and-dorus’, as he called it – and fled back to the station. I had no time to make another transaction, but I looked in at the currency office to see how trade was going, and asked the Royal Army Pay Corps sergeant if he was not worried about six months on the Hill at Heliopolis for knowingly assisting the traffic in black market exchange.

‘Don’t make me laugh,’ he said. ‘I’m buyin’ a pub on the Great West Road when I get my ticket.’

My lieutenant-colonel was still on the platform. He had watched several score military personnel leave the station, he said, and I had done nothing that he could see to stop them. Would I explain? His manner was offensive.

I asked him what he, as an officer, had done about it himself, he went pale and told me not to be impertinent, and after a few more exchanges I said rudely that I was not responsible to him for how I conducted the affairs of Troop Train 42, and he assured me that he would see that disciplinary action was taken against me. I got on the train again shaking slightly with anger and, I admit it, apprehension, and ran slap into the padre, who was all upset about the A.T.S. still.

I needed him. Perhaps I was overwrought, but I told him rather brusquely to stop bringing me unnecessary complaints, to mind his own business, to go back to his compartment, and generally to get off my neck. He was indignant, and shocked, he said. I advised him again to go back to his compartment, and he said stiffly that he supposed he must take my orders, but he would certainly make a report . . .

‘All right, padre,’ I said. ‘Do that. But for the present just remember that to obey is better than sacrifice, and hearkening than the fat of rams. O.K.?’

He said something about the Devil and Scripture, and I went back to my compartment pretty depressed. It seemed suddenly that I had loused things up fairly substantially: two rockets were on the way, I had failed to control the troops efficiently at Gaza, I hadn’t covered myself with glory in accommodating the A.T.S., I couldn’t even change a nappy. What was I good for? I lay down and fell asleep.

Your real hero can sleep through an elephant stampede, but wakes at the sound of a cat’s footfall. I can sleep through both. But the shriek of ancient brakes as a train grinds violently to a halt wakes me. I came upright off the seat like a bleary panther, groping for my gun, knowing that something was wrong and trying to think straight in a second. We shouldn’t be stopping before Jerusalem; one glance through the window showed only a low, scrubby embankment in moon-shadow. As the wheels screamed to a halt I dived into the corridor, ears cocked for the first shot. We were still on the rails, but my mind was painting vivid pictures of a blocked line and an embankment stiff with sharpshooters.

I went through the door to the platform behind the tender; in the cabin I could see the driver, peering ahead over the side of his cab.

‘What the hell is it?’ I shouted.

He shouted back in Arabic, and pointed ahead.

Someone was running from the back of the train. As I dropped from the platform to the ground he passed through the shaft of light between two coaches and I recognised Black’s balmoral. He had his Luger out.

He slowed down beside me, and we went cautiously up past the engine, with the little wisps of steam curling up round us. The driver had his spotlight on, and the long shaft lit up the line, a tunnel of light between the embankment walls. But there was nothing to see; the embankment itself was dead still. I was turning to ask the driver what was up when he gave an excited little yelp behind us. Far down the track, on the edge of the spotlight beam, a red light winked and died. Then it winked again, and died.

A hoarse voice said: ‘Get two men with rifles to the top of the bank, either side. Keep everyone else on the train. Then come back here.’

It had almost finished speaking before I realised it was my own voice. Black faded away, and a moment or two later was back.

‘They’re posted,’ he said.

I wiped my sweaty hand on my shirt and took a fresh grip of the revolver which I ought to have remembered back in Cairo, so that some other mug could have been here, playing cops and robbers with Bert Stern or whoever it was. ‘Let’s go,’ I said, just like Alan Ladd if he was a soprano. My hoarse voice had deserted me.

We walked up the line, our feet thumping on the sleepers, the spotlight behind us throwing our shadows far ahead, huge grotesques on the sand. The line ‘The dust of the desert is sodden red’ came into my head, but I hadn’t had time even to think the uncomfortable thought about it when he just materialised in front of us on the track, so suddenly that I was within an ace of letting fly at him. I know I gasped aloud in surprise; Black dropped on one knee, his Luger up.

‘Hold it!’ It was my hoarse voice again, sounding loud and nasty. And with the fatal gift of cliché that one invariably displays in such moments, I added, ‘Don’t move or I’ll drill you!’

He was a young man, in blue dungarees, hatchet-faced, Jewish rather than Arab. His hands were up; they were empty.

‘Pliz,’ he said. ‘Friend. Pliz, friend.’

‘Cover him,’ I said to Black, which was dam’ silly, since he wasn’t liable to be doing anything else. Keeping out of line, I went closer to him.

‘Who are you?’

‘Pliz,’ he said again. He was one of these good-looking, black-curled Jews; his mouth hung open a bit. ‘Pliz, line brok’.’ And he pointed ahead up the track.

I left Black with him, collected the driver and his mate, and went off up the track. Sure enough, after a little search we found a fish-plate unscrewed and an iron stake driven between the rail ends – enough to put us off the track for sure. I didn’t quite realise what that signified until the driver broke into a spate of Arabic, gesturing round him. I looked, and saw we were out of the cutting; now the ground fell away from the track on both sides, a rock-strewn slide that we would have crashed down.

While the driver and his mate banged out the stake and got to work on the fishplate, I went back to where Black had the young Jew in the lee of the engine. There was a small crowd round them, contrary to my orders, but one of them – an Arab Legion officer — was talking to him in Hebrew, and getting results.

‘What’s he say?’ I asked.

‘Oh, God, he’s a dope,’ said the officer. ‘He found the rail broken, I think, and heard the train coming. So he stopped us.’

‘He found the rail broken? In the middle of the bloody night? What was he doing here?’

‘He doesn’t seem to know.’ He directed a stream of Hebrew at the youth and got one back, rather slower. The voice was thick, soft.

‘Don’t believe a word of it,’ a voice was beginning, but I said, ‘Shut up,’ and asked the officer to translate.

‘He was looking for a goat. He lives in a village somewhere round here.’ It sounded vaguely biblical; what was the story again . . . the parable of the shepherd . . .

‘What about the red light?’ It was Sergeant Black.

Questioned, the youth pulled from his pocket a lighter and a piece of red cellophane.

‘For God’s sake,’ I said.

‘He’s probably a bloody terrorist,’ said someone.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ I said. ‘Would he warn us if he was?’

‘How dare you call me a fool?’ I realised it was my old friend the pouchy half-colonel. ‘Who the—’

‘Button your lip,’ I said, and I thought he would burst. ‘Who authorised you to leave the train? Sergeant Black, I thought I gave orders?’

‘You did, sir.’ Just that.

‘Then get these people back on the train – now.’

‘Now, look here, you.’ The half-colonel was mottling. ‘I’ll attend to you in due course, I promise you. Sergeant, I’m the senior officer: take this man’ – he indicated the Jew – ‘and confine him in the guard’s van. It’s my opinion he’s a terrorist . . .’

‘Oh, for heavens’ sake,’ I said.

‘. . . and we’ll find out when we get to Jerusalem. And you,’ he said to me, ‘will answer for your infernal impudence. ’

It would have been a great exit line, if Sergeant Black had done anything except just stand there. He just waited a moment, staring at the ground, and then looked at me.

‘O.C. train, sir?’ he said.

I didn’t catch on for a moment. Then I said, ‘Carry on, sergeant. Take him aboard. Get the others aboard, too – except those who want to stand around all night shooting off their mouths in a soldier-like manner.’ What had I got to lose?

I went up the track, to where the driver was gabbling away and yanking fiercely on a huge spanner. He gave me a great grin and a torrent of Arabic, from which I gathered he was coming on fine.

I went back to the train: Sergeant Black was whistling in the sentries from the banks; everyone was aboard. Presently the driver and his mate appeared, chattering triumphantly, and as I climbed aboard the engine crunched into life and we lumbered up track. The whole incident had occupied about ten minutes.

In the guard’s van Black and the Arab Legion captain and my half-colonel were round the prisoner – that’s what he was, no question. The captain interrogated him some more, and the half-colonel announced there was no doubt about it, the damned Yid was a terrorist. To the captain’s observation that he was an odd terrorist, warning trains instead of wrecking them, he paid no heed.

‘I hold you responsible, sergeant,’ he told Black. ‘He must be handed over to the military police in Jerusalem for questioning, and, I imagine, subsequent trial and sentence. You will . . .’