The Complete McAuslan (43 page)

So certain victory had been taken from us, and now all was to play for at the last hole, where the pipe-sergeant was skipping with excitement on the tee. On hearing how we stood he sent a runner post-haste to Aix with the news, and then delivered himself.

Unbelievably, of the other four games we had won two and lost two, and but for the M.O.’s drunken folly we might even have been ahead 3-1. Pirie and the Adjutant had won, two and one (‘and oh, the style of yon Pirie, sir! Whaur’s yer Wullie Turnesa noo, eh?’). The two elderly majors, against all the odds, had triumphed at the eighteenth by one hole; it appeared that the corpulent Major Fleming, about to give up the struggle at the fifteenth, had been roused by his partner’s taunt that the girl in Kasr-el-Nil had said that she couldn’t abide fat men, and had told him (the partner) that she could never love a man as overweight as Fleming, who would certainly be dead of a stroke before he was forty. Inflamed, Fleming had carried all before him, and even with the Padre and M.O. going down to cataclysmic defeat, 9 and 7, the overall prospects had looked not bad. Macmillan and Bogle had fought back to level terms (‘and auld Bogle wi’ his guts in a sling and pechin’ sore, sore’) and at the sixteenth one of their opponents, whom the pipey had earlier reported as suffering from muscle strain, had wrenched his shoulder.

He had been about to give up and concede the game, when the Padre, happening by from the scene of his own rout, had suggested that our M.O., who had taken his flask for a sleep in the rough, be summoned to examine the sufferer. They roused the M.O. from beneath a bush, and after focusing unsteadily on the affected part he had announced: ‘In my professional opinion this man cannot be moved without imperilling his life. Call an ambulance.’ Alarmed, they had asked him what the Royal was suffering from, and he had replied: ‘Alcoholic poisoning’, and then collapsed himself into a bunker. So indignant had the injured Royal – a senior and extremely stiffish company commander – been that he had insisted on carrying on, and Bogle and Macmillan had lost, two down.

So it was up to the R.S.M. and me to win or lose the whole shooting-match, and as I looked at the huge eighteenth, with its broad fairway just made for the big driving of our opponents, I almost gave up hope. The worst of it was, if it hadn’t been for that grubby moron’s great flat feet we would have been walking home now, with the thing in the bag; he was mumping dolefully somewhere in the background. I knew I was silly, feeling so upset over a mere game, but what would you? One does.

I watched Melville drive off, and he must have been feeling the pressure, for he hooked shockingly into a clump of firs. Now’s your chance, I thought joyfully, and taking a fine easy swing I topped my drive a good twenty yards down the fairway. Shattered, I watched the R.S.M. prepare to play the second; he had said not a word during the McAuslan débâcle, but for once there was the beginning of a worried frown on the great brow, and with cause, for he sliced his shot away to the high outcrop of rock which ran between the fairway and the sea. The ball pinged among the crags, and then vanished on to the crest, far out in badman’s territory. To make it worse, Melville’s partner hit a colossal spoon from the trees, leaving them only a longish iron to the green.

This was plainly the end, I thought, as I set off up the bluff in search of the ball, with McClusky trailing behind. We tramped what seemed miles over the springy turf, and found the ball, nicely cocked up on a tuft with the ground falling away sharply ahead to the wide fairway, and three hundred yards off the green, hemmed in by broad deep bunkers. It was a lovely lie, downhill and wide open save for a clump of boulders about two hundred yards off on the right edge of the fairway; there was a following wind, the sea was sparkling, the sun was warm, and everything was an invitation to beat that ball to kingdom come and beyond. Anyway, there was nothing to lose, so I unshipped the old brassie, took a broad stance, waggled the clubhead, did everything wrong, lifted my heel, raised my head, turned my body, and lashed away for dear life. And so help me I leaned upon that ball, and I smote it, so that it rose like a dove in the Scriptures, whining away with an upward trajectory beyond the ken of man, and flew screaming down the wind.

I’ve never hit one like it, and I never will again. It was the Big One, the ultimate, and no gallery thundering with applause could have acknowledged it more appropriately than my own ruptured squawk of astonishment and McClusky’s reverent cry of: ‘Jayzus!’ For one fearful moment I thought it was going to develop a late slice, but it whanged into the clump of rocks, kicked magnificently to a huge height as it skidded on, fell within thirty yards of the green, and rolled gently out of sight somewhere beside the right-hand bunker.

We hurried down to join the others on the fairway, where Melville was unlimbering his three iron. He hit a reasonable shot, but was well short; his partner’s seven was way too high, and plumped into the short rough just off the green to left. My spirits soared; we were in business again with a stroke in hand, assuming the R.S.M. had a reasonable lie, which seemed probable. We made for the right-hand bunker; I thought I must be just short of it – and then my heart sank. We were in it; right in.

Foul trolls from the dark ages had dug that bunker. It was just off the green, a deep, dark hideous pit fringed by gorse, with roots straggling under its lips, and little flat stones among the powdery sand. My great, gorgeous brassie shot had just reached it, so that the ball was nestling beside a root, with just room for a man to swing, and eight feet of bank baring its teeth five yards in front of him. I’ve seen bunkers, and bad lies in them, but this was the nadir.

We looked, appalled, and then that great man the R.S.M. climbed down into the depths. McAuslan, hovering on the bunker’s edge, clubs at the high port, dropped everything as usual, but the R.S.M. simply snapped: ‘Number nine’; even he looked like one on whom the doom has come. He waited, hand out, eyes fixed on the barely-visible tip of the flag, while McAuslan rummaged among the irons on the grass, and handed one down to him. The R.S.M. took the club, and addressed the ball.

It was hopeless, of course; Nicklaus might have got out in one, but I doubt it. The R.S.M. was just going through the motions; he addressed the ball, swung down, and then I saw his club falter in mid-descent, an oath such as I had never heard sprang to his lips, but he was too late to stop. The club descended in a shower of sand, the ball shot across the bunker with frightful speed, hit a root, leaped like a salmon, curved just over the lip of the bunker, bounced, hung, and trickled away down the steep face of the bank on to the green. For a minute I thought it was going in, but it stopped on the very lip of the hole while the sounds of joy and grief from the people wildly rose.

For a moment I could only stare, amazed. I was aware that Melville was chipping on a yard short, and that his partner was holing the putt; they were down in six. I had a tiny putt, two inches at most, for a five and victory, and for the first time in that game the shade of my grandmother asserted herself, reminding me of Uncle Hugh, and chickens unwisely counted. ‘Never up, never in,’ I thought, and crouched over the ball; I tapped it firmly in, and that was the ball game.

The Royals were extremely nice about it; splendid losers they were, and there was much good-natured congratulation on the green itself, from our immediate opponents and the other players as well. I detached myself and looked for the R.S.M., but he was not in sight; I went over to the scene of his great shot, and there he was, still standing in the bunker, like a great tweed statue, staring at the club in his hand. And before him, Caliban to Prospero, McAuslan crouched clutching the bag.

‘McAuslan,’ the R.S.M. was saying. ‘You gave me this club.’

‘Aye – eh, aye, sir.’ He was snuffling horribly.

‘What club did I require you to give me?’

‘Ra number nine, sir.’

‘And what club did you give me?’

McAuslan, hypnotised, whimpered: ‘Oh, Goad, Ah dunno, sir.’

‘This, McAuslan,’ said the R.S.M. gravely, ‘is nott a number nine. It is, in fact, a number two. What is called a driving iron. It is not suitable for bunker shots.’

‘Zat a fact, sir?’

The R.S.M. took a deep breath and let it out again. He was looking distinctly fatigued.

‘Return this club to the bag,’ he said, ‘put the bag in my quarters, go to the sergeants’ mess – the back door – and tell the barman on
my
instructions to supply you with one pint of beer. That’s all for now – right, move!’

McAuslan hurled himself away, stricken dumb by fear and disbelief. As he clambered out of the bunker the R.S.M. added:

‘Thank you for bein’ my caddy, McAuslan.’

If McAuslan heard him, I’m sure he didn’t believe what he heard.

The R.S.M. climbed out heavily, and gave me his slight smile. ‘Thank you, sir, for a most enjoyable partnership; a very satisfactory concluding putt, if I may say so.’

‘Major,’ I said – my emotion and admiration were such that I had slipped into the old ranker’s form of address – ‘any infant could have holed it. But that bunker shot – man, that was incredible!′

‘Incredible indeed, sir. Did you see what I played it wi’? A number two iron – a flat-faced club, sir! Dear me, dear me. By rights I should be in there yet – and I would have been thanking McAuslan for that, I can tell you!’

‘Well, thank goodness he did give you the wrong club. You couldn’t have played a finer shot, with a nine or anything else.’

‘Indeed I couldn’t. Indeed I couldn’t.’ He shook his head. ‘By George, Mr MacNeill, we had the luck with us today.’

‘Hand of providence,’ I said lightly.

‘No, sir,’ said the R.S.M. firmly. ‘Let us give credit where it is due. It was the hand of Private McAuslan.’

His Majesty Says Good-Day

Nowadays, if ever my thoughts stray back across the years to Private McAuslan, I can feel a strange expression stealing across my face. I know, without glancing in the mirror, that I’m beginning to look like a large and truculent Uriah Heep, cringing but defiant, as though uncertain whether to grovel or hit out blindly. It’s a conditioned reflex, born from the countless times I’ve stood at the elbows of outraged colonels and company commanders, making placatory noises and muttering balefully that I’m sure the accused won’t do it again, given a second chance. (He did, though, every time.)

This is the penalty you pay for commanding the dumbest and dirtiest soldier in the world: on the one hand you have to chastise and oppress him for the good of his soul, and on the other you have to plead his cause and defend him, almost to the point of defiance, from the wrath of higher authority. The devil’s advocating I did for that man would have earned a standing ovation from Lincoln’s Inn; I can’t count the passionate appeals or the shameless distortions of King’s Regulations that I have advanced to excuse his tardiness, stupidity, dirt, negligence, and occasionally drunkenness and absence without leave. Not, admittedly, with great success. I would only add that if any young lawyer wants practice in defending deservedly lost causes, let him assume responsibility for McAuslan for one calendar month. After that, he’ll have nothing to learn.

I suppose, recalling the time I sweated through his court-martial for disobedience, or the occasion when he fell prone in an intoxicated condition, wearing only his shirt and one army boot, before an officer of general rank, that his last clash with military authority was trivial by comparison. I only remember it because it was the last, and took place, appropriately, on the day before he and I were demobilised. (There was a kind of awful kismet about the fact that he was with me to the end.) Yet, paltry though it was, it was essentially McAuslan, in that it demonstrated yet again his carelessness, negligence, and indiscipline, and at the same time his fine adherence to principle.

I had just taken my final company orders in the office, and was sitting reflecting solemnly that tomorrow I would be a soldier no more, and from that my grasshopper mind started musing on how certain other military men must have felt when their tickets finally came through. Not the great martial names; not the Wellingtons and Napoleons and Turennes, but some of those others who, like me, had been what Shakespeare called warriors for the working day – the conscripts, the volunteers, the civilians who followed the drum and went to war in their time, and afterwards, with luck, picked up their discharges and back money and went home. Not soldiers at all, really, and quite undistinguished militarily – people like Socrates and Ben Jonson, Lincoln and Cobbett, Bunyan and Edgar Allen Poe, Gibbon and Cervantes, Chaucer and John Knox and Daniel Boone and Thomas Cromwell. (McAuslan was trouble enough, but I’d hate to take responsibility for a platoon consisting of that lot.)

And yet, I found it comforting to think that they too, like McAuslan and me – and perhaps you – had once stood nervously on first parade in ill-fitting kit, with their new boots hurting, feeling lost and a long way from home, and had done ablutions fatigue, and queued for the canteen and cookhouse, and worried over the state of their equipment, and stood guard on cold, wet nights, and been upbraided (and doubtless upbraided others in their turn) as idle bodies and dozy men, and thought longingly of their discharge, and generally shared that astonishing experience which, for some reason, men seem to prize so highly. Having been a soldier. It doesn’t matter what happens to them afterwards, or how low or high they go, they never forget that ageless company they once belonged to. And if you think that there is not a special link between McAuslan and Socrates and Chaucer and Abe Lincoln, you are dead wrong.

I had just got to the point in my reverie where I was assuring the assembled Athenians that McAuslan’s habitual uncleanliness had probably rendered him immune to poison, when I heard the voice of the man himself raised raucously in the company store across the way. Not that that was unusual, but the form of words was novel.

‘That’s mines,’ he was protesting. ‘That’s ma private property. Sno’ yours. Smines. An’ Ah’m bluidy well keepin′ it, see? Ah’ve peyed for it!’