The Complete McAuslan (24 page)

As battalion sports officer, I collected the shield along with my opposite number from the Camerons – when everything was tallied up it was discovered that our regiments had tied for first place – and the rest of the presentations went more or less according to plan: Wee Wullie did not fall down when he and the tug-of-war specialists came forward; the pipe-sergeant, I was intrigued to notice, for all his strictures on the winner of the dancing, cheered and applauded wildly when that worthy received his trophy. But what fascinated me most was to see McAuslan shamble up behind the Argyll padre to receive his runners-up award for the pillow-fight: someone should have photographed it – McAuslan getting a prize for something.

Being him, he hadn’t had time to change, and only last-minute modesty had caused him to put on his tunic above his sodden gym shorts; he was, as usual, in a state of acute anxiety, and he shook hands with the Duchess like a badly wound-up clockwork toy, clutching his prize of saving certificates as if it was a reprieve.

She smiled at him as he stood dripping and shuffling, and then – I’m prepared to believe that royalty are clairvoyant – to the statutory ‘Well done’ she added:

‘You must be dreadfully chilly; I’m sure you’ll be glad to get into your nice uniform again.’

It was kindly meant of course, and it was certainly kindly received. Probably only the R.S.M. and I appreciated the full irony of it, but McAuslan blossomed like a June flower. As if a court-martial wasn’t enough, here was a Duchess implying that he, McAuslan, wasnae dirty; for a moment he looked like Galahad receiving the victor’s crown from a Queen of Beauty, and it wouldn’t have astonished me if he had knelt and pressed the hem of her dress to his lips. But he did the Glasgow equivalent, which was to blush and say, ‘Och, ta, but,’ and then withdrew, trailing damp clouds of glory.

No doubt there was a moral in it somewhere; McAuslan, the dirtiest soldier in the world, getting prizes and escaping unscathed from courts-martial and having Duchesses paying him indirect compliments: considering, I decided that the kindly providence that watches over drunks and children must be guiding McAuslan’s destiny as well. I just hoped it wouldn’t work too hard; the kind of luck he’d been having he’d probably end up Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Mind you, we’ve had nearly as bad.

And that was it, apart from one trivial incident which shortened a few life expectancies and, to me at least, was a fitting epilogue to a fairly eventful few days. The children received their prizes right at the finish, and one of the last was the award to the winner and runner-up of the infants’ eighty-yard dash. The Quality were smiling indulgently as the little dears came forward, the Duchess was at her most charming, the crowd applauded loudly, and even R.S.M. Mackintosh wore a paternal expression.

And then little Donnie stepped forward to receive his second prize. The Duchess beamed on him fondly-in his little kilt, and with his normal lowering expression, he looked like a rather cute little Highland bull – shook his hand, and said:

‘I think you ran very well; and you were really unlucky not to win.’

To which the gentle child, lifting up his earnest gargoyle face, replied in the accent of Maryhill Road, but with fearful clarity:

‘Ach, yon Cameron —— tripped me. It was a —— swiz.’

There was a few seconds’ horrified frozen silence, in which the Duchess’s charming smile altered by not one fraction, and a ghastly sigh rippled through the ranks of the Quality. And then R.S.M. Mackintosh, his years of Guards’ training no doubt coming to his aid, leaned forward and said in a diplomatic whisper which was audible twenty yards away:

‘He is saying “Thank you very much”, Your Highness. In Gaelic.’

You cannot shake a Regimental Sergeant-Major; whatever the situation, he is unconquerable.

‘How very nice of him,’ said the Duchess, still smiling, as Donnie trotted away. ‘How awfully nice.’

You cannot shake a royal Duchess either.

McAUSLAN IN THE ROUGH

FOR
SIE, CARO, AND NICKY
SOME MORE STORIES

Bo Geesty

See this fella, Bo Geesty? Aye, weel, him an’ his mates, they wis inna Foreign Legion, inna fort, inna desert, an’ the wogs wis gettin’ tore in at them. An’ a’ the fellas inna fort got killt, but when the relief colyum arrived a’ the fellas inna fort wis staundin’ up at the wall, wi’ their guns an’ bunnets on, like they wis on guard. But they wis a’ deid. The fellas in the relief colyum couldnae make it oot; they thought the place must be hauntit. So they did. It wis a smashin’ picture, but.

– Private McAuslan, as critic, on the film of P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste

Fort Yarhuna lies away to the south, on the edge of the big desert. It was there, or something like it, in the days when the Sahara was still grassland; in more modern times it saw long-range patrols of Alexander the Great’s mercenaries from fair Cyrene across the sandhills eastward, and it received the battered remnants of Hannibal’s regiments after Zama. It was garrisoned by Roman legionaries before the Vandals swept into it from the west, or Arab riders from the Great Sand Sea brought the first camels and planted the date-palms in the little village beneath its walls; it shielded the Barbary rovers’ sea-nests until a little detachment of U.S. Marines marched across the desert to plant the Stars and Stripes for the first time on foreign soil. The Caliphs ornamented its gateway, the Crusaders built the little shrine in the courtyard, the Afrika Korps stored the petrol for their panzers in its stables, the Highland Division left their inevitable ‘H.D.’ trademark on its walls, and Private Fletcher (I suspect) scribbled ‘Kilroy was here’ and ‘Up the Celtic’ on its main gate. That was during the Twelve Platoon occupation, circa A.D. 1946.

The reason for Fort Yarhuna’s long existence is that it commands a crossing of the great caravan trails, the last oasis on the edge of nowhere. The great trains from the south, with their ivory and gold and slaves, paused here before the last lap north to Tripoli and Tunis, or before they turned eastward for Egypt; coming in the other direction, it was where the Mediterranean traders tightened their girths and sharpened their weapons against the Touareg bandits who infested the southern roads through the biggest wasteland in the world. Fort Yarhuna, in fact, has seen a lot of hard service and is a very hot station. Its importance to me is that it was my first very own independent command, and the significance of that is something which Hannibal’s men, and Alexander’s, to say nothing of the Romans, Vandals, Crusaders and Leathernecks, would be the first to appreciate.

Why we had to garrison it, nobody knew. The battalion was stationed on the coast, in civilisation, the war was over, and there was nothing to do except show the flag, bathe, beat retreat every Friday with the pipes and drums to impress the locals, and wait to be demobilised. But Higher Authority, in Cairo, decreed that Fort Yarhuna must be garrisoned – they may have had some vague fears of invasion from the Belgian Congo, or been unduly impressed by seeing
The Desert Song
, but more probably it was just military tidiness: Fort Yarhuna had always been manned, and it was officially in our battalion area. So, since I had been commissioned for six months and attained the giddy height of lieutenant, I was instructed to repair to Fort Yarhuna with two platoons, place it in a state of defence, occupy it for a month in the name of the King and the United Nations, close its gate at sunset, see that the courtyard was swept and free from litter, and in the event of an Arab uprising (I’m sure someone had seen
The Desert Song)
defend it to the last round and the last man etc., etc.

Of course, there wasn’t a chance in a million of an Arab uprising. Since the Italians had been heaved out in the war, all that the genial Bedouin wanted to do was carry on loafing in the sun, catching cholera and plodding his caravans through Yarhuna village from nowhere to yonder; the nearest thing to illegal activity was the local pastime of looting the debris of war which Montgomery’s and Rommel’s men had left spread over the countryside, for in those days the whole way from Egypt to Tunis was a great junkyard of burned-out tanks, wrecked trucks, abandoned gear, and lost ammunition dumps. And whatever Cairo thought, the local official opinion was that the Arabs could have it, and welcome.

I was more concerned at the possibility of a Twelve Platoon uprising. A month stuck in a desert fort would be no joy to them, after the fleshpots of the coast, and while six months had established a pretty good working relationship between me and my volatile command of Glaswegians and Aberdeenshire countrymen, I was a trifle apprehensive of being their sole authority and mentor so far away from the battalion, where you have the whole apparatus of Army, Colonel, Regimental Sergeant-Major and provost sergeant to back you up.

The Colonel, that kindly, crafty old gentleman, gave me sound advice before I set out. ‘Work ’em stupid,’ he said. ‘Every parade – reveille, first inspection, cook-house, and company office – must be on the dot, just as though you were in the battalion. Anyone drags his feet by as much as a second – nail him. I don’t care if half the detachment’s on jankers. But if you let ‘em slack off, or have time to be bored, they’ll be sand-happy before you know it. It can happen well inside a month; ennui has undermined more outpost garrisons than plague or enemy action, take my word for it.’ And he went on to tell me harrowing tales of Khyber forts and East African jungle stockades, called for another whisky, and assured me it would be great fun, really.

‘To keep you occupied, you’re to dig for water,
inside
the fort itself. The place hasn’t been occupied for years, but there’s got to be a well somewhere, the Sappers say. If one is found, it’ll save the water-truck coming down every second day. You can pick up the drilling equipment at Marble Arch depot – they’ll give you a driver to work it – while Keith takes the detachment down to Fort Yarhuna and settles ‘em in.’

Keith was the second-lieutenant who commanded Eleven Platoon – the garrison of Yarhuna was to be a two-platoon force – so I despatched him and the command to the fort, while I went with one section to Marble Arch for the drilling gear. It was a long, dusty, two-day haul east on the coast road, but we collected the drilling-truck from the Service Corps people, were shown how the special screw attached to its rear axle could drill a ten-foot shaft six inches across in a matter of minutes, and told that all we had to do was proceed by trial and error until we struck water.

I was in haste to get back along the coast and down to Fort Yarhuna to assume command before Keith did anything rash – young subalterns are as jealous as prima donnas, and convinced of each others’ fecklessness, and Keith was a mere pink-cheeked one-pipper of twenty years, whereas I had reached the grizzled maturity of twenty-one and my second star. Heaven knew what youthful folly he might commit without my riper judgement to steady him. However, we paused for a brief sight-see at Marble Arch which, as you may know, is one of the architectural curiosities of North Africa, being a massive white gateway towering some hundreds of feet out of the naked desert, a grandiose tombstone to Mussolini’s vanity and brief empire.

It was probably a mistake to stop and look at it: I should have remembered that in the section with me was Private McAuslan, the dirtiest soldier in the world, of whom I have written elsewhere. Short, be-pimpled, permanently unwashed, and slow-witted to a degree in the performance of his military duties, he was a kind of battalion landmark, like the Waterloo snuff-box. Not that he was a bad sort, in his leprous way, but he was sure disaster in any enterprise to which he set his grimy hand. As his platoon commander, I had mixed feelings about him, partly protective but mostly despairing. What made it worse was that he tried to please, which could lead to all sorts of embarrassment.

When we got out of the truck to view the arch he stood scratching himself and goggling balefully up at it, inquiring of his friend Private Fletcher:

‘Whit the hell’s yon thing?’

‘Yon’s the Marble Arch, dozey.’

‘Ah thought the Marble Arch wis in London. Sure it is.’

‘This is anither Marble Arch, ye dope.’

‘Aw.’ Pause. ‘Who the hell pit it here, then? Whit fur?’

‘The Eyeties did. Mussolini pit it up, just for the look o’ the thing.’

McAuslan digested this, wiped his grimy nose, and like the Oriental sage meditating on human vanity, observed: ‘Stupid big bastard’, which in its own way is a fair echo of contemporary opinion of Il Duce as an imperialist.

The trouble was that they wanted to climb the thing, and I was soft enough to let them; mind you, I wanted to climb it myself. And Marble Arch is really big; you climb it by going into a tiny door in one of its twin columns, ascending some steps, and then setting off, in total darkness, up an endless series of iron rungs driven into the wall. They go up forever, with only occasional rests on solid ledges which you find by touch in the gloom, and when you have climbed for about ten minutes, and the tiny square of light at the top of the shaft seems as small as ever, and your muscles are creaking with the strain of clinging to the rungs, you suddenly realise that the black abyss below you is very deep indeed, and if you let go . . . Quite.

McAuslan, naturally, got lost. He strayed on to one of the ledges, apparently found another set of rungs somewhere, and roamed about in the stygian void, blaspheming horribly. His rich Parkhead oaths boomed through the echoing tunnels like the thunderings of some fearful Northern god with a glottal stop, and the ribaldries of the rest of the section, all strung out in the darkness on that frightening ladder, mocking him, turned the shaft into a deafening Tower of Babel. I was near the top, clinging with sweating fingers to the rungs, painfully aware that I couldn’t go back to look for him – it would have been suicide to try to get past the other climbers in the blackness – and that if he missed his hold, or got exhausted playing Tarzan, we would finish up scraping him off the distant floor with a spoon.