The Complete McAuslan (16 page)

‘You can’t put me on another train,’ I said. ‘I mean, they’ll be wanting me for court-martial or something.’ And I gave him a very brief break-down.

‘For God’s sake,’ he said. ‘You were cheeky to a half-colonel! Well, you insubordinate thing, you. It’ll have to keep, that’s all. You weren’t the only one who was getting uppish last night, you know. Some people gunned up a convoy near Nazareth, and apart from killing half a dozen of us they did for a United Nations bigwig as well. So there’s activity today, d’you see? Among other things, there aren’t enough perishing subalterns to put in charge of troop trains. Now, get the hell out of here, and get on that train!’

I got, and made my way to the buffet, slightly elated at the idea of making good my escape on the 8.30. Not that it would do any good in the long run; the Army always catches up, and the half-colonel was the vindictive sort who would have me hung up if it took him six months. In the meantime I wasn’t going to see much of the famous old city of Jerusalem; eating my scrambled eggs I wondered idly if some Roman centurion had once arrived here after a long trek by camel train, only to be told that he was taking the next caravan out because everyone was all steamed up and busy over the arrest of a preaching carpenter who had been causing trouble. It seemed very likely. If you ever get on the fringe of great events, which have a place in history, you can be sure history will soon lose it as far as you are concerned.

I got the 8.30, and there was hardly a civilian on it; just troops who behaved themselves admirably except at Gaza, where there was the usual race in the direction of Ahmed’s back street banking and trust corporation; I just pretended it wasn’t happening; you can’t fight international liquidity. And then it was Cairo again, just sixteen hours since I had left it, and I dropped my papers with the R.T.O., touched my revolver butt for the hundred and seventeenth time to make sure I still had it, and went back to the transit camp, tired and dirty. I went to sleep wondering where the escaping Jew had got to by this time, and why Sergeant Black had let him go. It occurred to me that the Jew might have had a pretty rough time in Jerusalem, what with everyone’s nerves even more on edge with the Nazareth business. Anyway, I wasn’t sorry he had got away; all’s well that ends well; I slept like a log.

All hadn’t ended well, of course; two mornings later a court of inquiry was convened in an empty barrack-room at the transit camp, to examine the backsliding and evil behaviour of Lieutenant MacNeill, D., and report thereon. It consisted of a ravaged-looking wing-commander as president, an artillery major, a clerk, about a dozen witnesses, and me, walking between with the gyves (metaphorically) upon my wrists. The redcap at the door tried to keep me out because I didn’t have some pass or other, but on finding that I was the star attraction he ushered me to a lonely chair out front, and everyone glared at me.

They strip a man’s soul bare, those courts of inquiry. With deft, merciless questioning they had found out in the first half hour not only who I was, but my rank and number; an officer from the transit camp deponed that I had been resident there for several days; yet another certified that I had been due out on such-and-such a flight; an airport official confirmed that this was true, and then they played their mastercard. The pilot of the aircraft (this is sober truth) produced an affidavit from his co-pilot (who was unable to attend because of prickly heat) that I had not, to anyone’s knowledge, boarded the plane, and that my seat had been given to Captain Abraham Phillipowski of the Polish Engineers, attached to No. 117 Field Battery, Ismailia.

They were briefly sidetracked because the president plainly didn’t believe there was such a person as Captain Abraham Phillipowski, but once this had been established to their satisfaction the mills of military justice ground on, and another officer from the transit camp described graphically my return after missing the plane, and my despatch to Jerusalem.

The president wanted to know why I had been sent to Jerusalem; witness replied that they had wanted to keep me employed pending a court of inquiry into why I had missed my plane; the president said, pending this court, you mean; witness said yes, and the president said it seemed bloody silly to him sending a man to Jerusalem in between. Witness said huffily it was no concern of his, the president said not to panic, old boy, he had only been making a comment, and witness said all very well, but he didn’t want it appearing in the record that he had been responsible for sending people to Jerusalem when he hadn’t.

The president suggested to the clerk that any such exchange be deleted from the record (which was assuming the proportions of the Greater London telephone directory, the way the clerk was performing with his shorthand), and I unfortunately coughed at that moment, which was taken as a protest. A judicial huddle ensued, and the president emerged, casting doubtful glances at me, to ask if I had anything to say.

‘I forgot my gun,’ I said.

He seemed disappointed. ‘He forgot his gun,’ he repeated to the clerk.

‘I heard,’ said the clerk.

‘All right, all right!’ cried the president. ‘Keep your hair on.’ He looked at me. ‘Anything else?’

‘Should there be?’ I asked. It seemed to me that they hadn’t really started yet, but I wasn’t volunteering information about events on the train, which seemed to me to dwarf such trivia as my missing my plane in the first place.

‘Dunno,’ said the president. He turned to the clerk. ‘How do we stand, old boy?’

‘He forgot his gun, he missed the plane,’ said the clerk bitterly. ‘That’s what we’re here to establish. What more do you want?’

‘Search me,’ said the president. ‘You did miss the plane, didn’t you?’ he asked me.

‘That’s irregular,’ bawled the clerk. ‘At least, I think it is. You’re asking him to convict himself.’

‘Rot,’ said the president. ‘He hasn’t been charged, has he? Anyway, old boy, you’re mixing it up with wives not being able to testify against their husbands.’

‘I need a drink,’ said the clerk.

‘Good show,’ said the president. ‘Let’s adjourn, and then you can type all this muck out and we’ll all sign it. Any objections, objection overruled. Smashing.’

The proceedings of that court occupied about forty-five minutes, and heaven knows how many sheets of foolscap, but it did establish what it had set out to do – that I had negligently failed to take a seat on an aircraft. It was all carefully forwarded to my unit, marked attention Commanding Officer, and he blew his stack, mildly, and gave me three days’ orderly officer for irresponsible idiocy – not so much for missing the aircraft as for causing him to waste time reading the report. But of Black, and the escaping Jew, and threats, and insubordination, and currency offences there was never a word.

And, as my grandmother would have said, that is what happened on the Cairo-Jerusalem railway.

The Whisky and the Music

The ignorant or unwary, if asked whether they would rather be the guests of an officers’ mess or a sergeants’, would probably choose the officers’. They might be motivated by snobbery, but probably also by the notion that the standards of cuisine, comfort, and general atmosphere would be higher. They would be dead wrong.

You will get a bit of the old haut monde from the officers in most units, although in a Highland regiment the native savagery has a tendency to show through. I remember the occasion when two Guards officers, guests of our mess, were having a delicate Sunday morning breakfast and discussing Mayfair and the Season with the Adjutant, himself an exquisite, when there entered the motor transport officer, one Elliot, a hard man from the Borders. Elliot surveyed the table and then roared:

‘Naethin’ but toast again, bigod! You,’ he shouted at the Adjutant, ‘ye bloody auld vulture, you, ye’ve been gobblin’ my plain bread!’ And he wrenched the Adjutant’s shirt-front out of his kilt, slapped him resoundingly on the solar plexus, and ruffled his hair. This was Elliot’s way of saying good morning, but it upset the Guards. They just looked at each other silently, like two Jack Bennys, and then got slowly to their feet and went out, looking rather pale.

That would never happen in a sergeants’ mess. Sergeants are too responsible. They tend to be young-middle-aged soldiers, with a sense of form and dignity; among officers there is always the clash of youth and age, but with sergeants you have a disciplined, united front. And whereas the provisioning and amenities of an officers’ mess are usually in the hands of a president who has had the job forced on him and isn’t much good at it, your sergeants look after their creature comforts with an expertise born of long service in hard times. Wherever you are, whoever goes short, it won’t be the sergeants; they’ve been at the game too long.

Hogmanay apart, officers never saw inside our sergeants’ mess (‘living like pigs as we do,’ said the Colonel, ‘it would make us jealous,’) so when Sergeant Cuddy of the signals section invited me in for a drink I accepted like a shot. We had been out in the desert on an exercise, and Cuddy and I had spent long hours on top of a sand-hill with a wireless set, watching the company toiling over the sun-baked plain below, popping off blanks at each other. Cuddy was a very quiet old soldier with silver hair; his first experience of signals had been with flags and pigeons on the Western Front in the old war, and I managed to get him to talk about it a little. It emerged that he had heard of, although he had not known, my great-uncle, who had been a sergeant with the battalion at the turn of the century.

‘There’ll be a picture of him in the mess,’ said Cuddy. And then, after a long pause, he added: ‘Perhaps ye’d care to come in and see it, when we go back to barracks?’

‘Will it be all right?’ I asked, for regimental protocol is sometimes a tricky thing.

‘My guest,’ said Cuddy, so I thanked him, and when we had packed up the exercise that afternoon I accompanied him up the broad steps of the whitewashed building just outside the barracks where the sergeants dwelt in fortified seclusion.

In the ante-room there was only the pipe-sergeant, perched in state at one end of the bar, and keeping a bright eye on the mess waiters to see that they kept their thumbs out of the glasses.

‘Guest. Mr MacNeill,’ announced Cuddy, and the pipey hopped off his stool and took over.

‘Come away ben, Mr MacNeill,’ he cried. ‘Isn’t this the pleasure? You’ll take a little of the creature? Of course, of course. Barman, where are you? Stand to your kit.’

I surveyed the various brands of ‘the creature’ on view behind the bar, and decided that the Colonel was right. You would never have seen the like in an officers’ mess. There was the Talisker and Laphroaig and Islay Mist and Glenfiddich and Smith’s Ten-year-old – every Scotch whisky under the sun. How they managed it, in those arid post-war years, I didn’t like to think.

I’m not a whisky man, but asking for a beer would have been unthinkable; I eventually selected an Antiquary, and the pipe-sergeant raised his brows and pursed his lips approvingly.

‘An Edinburgh whisky,’ he observed judicially. ‘Very light, very smooth. I’m a Grouse man, myself.’ He watched jealously as the barman poured out the very pale Antiquary and gave me my water in a separate glass (if you want to be a really snob whisky drinker, that is the way you take it, in alternate sips, a right ‘professional Highlander’ trick). Then we drank, the three of us, and the pipe-sergeant discoursed on whisky in general - the single malts and the blends, and ‘the Irish heresies’, and strange American concoctions of which he affected to have heard, called ‘Burboon’.

Sergeant Cuddy eventually interrupted to say that I had come to view the group photographs lining the mess walls, to see my great-uncle, and the pipe-sergeant exclaimed in admiration.

‘And he was in the regiment? God save us, isn’t that the thing?’ He bounded from his stool and skipped over to the row of pictures, some of them new and grainy-grey, others deepening into yellow obscurity. ‘About when would that be, sir? The ‘nineties? In India? Well, well, let’s see. There’s the ‘02, but that was in Malta, whatever they were doing there. Let’s see – Ross, Chalmers, Robertson, McGregor – all the teuchters, and look at the state of them, with their bellies hanging over their sporrans. I’d like to put
them
through a foursome, wouldn’t I just.’ He went along the row, Cuddy and I following, calling out names and bestowing comments.

‘South Africa, and all in khaki aprons. My, Cuddy, observe the whiskers. Hamilton, Fraser, Yellowlees, O’Toole-and what was he doing there, d’ye suppose? A right fugitive from the Devil’s Own, see the bog-Irish face of him. Murray, Johnstone —’

‘I mind Johnstone, in my time,’ said Cuddy. ‘Killed at Passchendaele.’

‘.— Scott, Allison – that’ll be Gutsy Allison’s father, Cuddy. Ye mind Gutsy.’ The pipe-sergeant was searching out new treasures. ‘Save us, see there.’ He pointed to a picture of the ‘twenties. ‘Behold the splendour there, Mr MacNeill.’ I looked at a face in the back rank, vaguely familiar, grim and tight-lipped. ‘He’s filled out since then,’ said the pipe-sergeant. ‘Seventeen stone of him now, if there’s an ounce. That’s our present Regimental Sergeant-Major. Anderson, McColl, Brand, Hutcheson —’

‘Hutcheson got the jail,’ said Cuddy. ‘He played the fiddle for his recreation, and went poaching with snares made from violin strings. An awfy man.’

They chattered on, or at least the pipey chattered, and I made polite murmurs, and at last they ran my great-uncle to earth, reclining at the end of a front row and showing his noble profile in the Victorian manner. Showing as much of it, anyway, as was visible through his mountainous beard: he gave the impression of one peering through a quickset hedge.

‘Fine, fine whiskers they had,’ cried the pipe-sergeant admiringly. ‘You don’t get that today. Devil the razor there must have been among them, the wee nappy-wallahs of India must have done a poor, poor trade at the shaving, I’m thinking. He’s a fine figure, your respected great-uncle, Mr MacNeill, a fine figure. Ye have the same look, the same keek under the brows, has he not, Cuddy? See there,’ and he pointed to the minute portion of my ancestor that showed through the hair, ‘isn’t that the very spit? Did ye know him, sir?’