The Complete McAuslan (44 page)

‘What d’ye mean, paid for it? When did you ever pay for anything, McAuslan?’

I recognised the voice of young Sergeant Baxter – the same Baxter who, as an over-zealous corporal, had recently been responsible for McAuslan’s court-martial. That McAuslan had escaped untarnished had merely confirmed the evil relations between them. Privately, I didn’t care for Baxter; he was too officious, but he knew his stuff and was keen, and when Sergeant Telfer had returned to civilian life – as a hotel porter, and the hotel was lucky, in my opinion – it would have been unfair to deny Baxter his third tape. But he was woefully short of experience still, as his next words showed.

‘And get your heels together when you talk tae me, McAuslan!’ His voice was shrill. ‘An’ you address me as “sergeant”!’

‘That’ll be right!’ roared McAuslan. ‘Ah can jist see me. Ye’re no’ comin’ the acid wi’ me,
Sergeant —
Ah want it back, and I want it noo!′

‘Well, ye’re no’ gettin’ it, so fall oot!′ snapped Baxter, and I decided to intervene before they fell to brawling.

‘What’s all the noise, sergeant?’ I said, as I went into the store, and Baxter came rapidly to attention. He was pink with outrage, a pleasing contrast to the pastel grey of McAuslan’s contorted features. The greatest walking disaster to befall the British Army since Ancient Pistol was modishly clad in a suit of outsize denims in which he appeared to have been scraping the Paris sewers, but his fists were clenched and he was obviously on the brink of unlawful assault of a superior.

‘It’s this – this man, sir!’ said Baxter unnecessarily. ′He′s trying to lay claim to Army property!′

That was new; McAuslan’s normal behaviour with War Department equipment was to lose or defile it as quickly as possible. As it transpired, in this case he had done both.

‘It’s ma bay’net, sir!’ He looked to me in dishevelled appeal. ‘This bas –,
Sarn’t
Baxter – he’ll no gie it back tae me. An’ it’s mines! Ah’ve peyed for it!’

And sure enough, Baxter was holding a sheathed bayonet, one of the old sword type with the locking-ring that went on the short Lee Enfield, since superseded by other marks, although there were still a number of them about.

‘Haud yer tongue, McAuslan,’ said Baxter, and to me: ‘He’s due for demobilisation tomorrow, sir, and I was seein’ that he handed in all his kit properly – it’s in a disgraceful state, sir, there’s all kinds o’ things missin’, an’ nae foresight on his rifle, an’ the barrel red rotten wi’ rust, too – ’

‘Hold on a shake,’ I said, puzzled. ‘I didn’t know you were due out tomorrow, McAuslan.’ I had been acting company commander for the past three weeks, and had lost track of my platoon’s domestic affairs. ‘What’s your number?’

‘14687347PrivateMcAuslansah!’

‘Your demob number,’ I said patiently.

‘Oh. Hey. Aye. Eh – 57, sir.’

It was the same as mine, which was curious. ‘But you’ve been in the Army longer than I have – you were in the desert in ’42. How come you weren’t demobbed long ago?’

He pawed uncertainly with his hooves, ran a hand through his Gorgon locks – something that I hoped was a piece of old string fell out – and said uneasily:

‘Weel, see, sir, it’s like this. When Ah j’ined up, Ah got back-squadded a few times – ye know? An’ – ’

‘Back-squadded?’ scoffed Baxter. ‘I would think so. It took them two years tae learn you to slope arms.’

‘Ah got ma bluidy knees broon, onywye!’ McAuslan rounded on him. ‘More’n you ever did! Niver saw an angry German, you – ’

‘That’ll do, McAuslan,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

He muttered and looked at the floor. ‘An’ Ah did a bit o’ time, too – the glass-hoose at Stirlin’.’ Memory stirred his shuffled features into vengeful patterns. ‘There was this rotten big sarn’t inna Black Watch, right pig he wis, an’ he had a down on me, an’ he sortit me oot, and got me the jail. Oh, he was a right swine o’ a man, so he wis – ’

‘Yes, I see,’ I said. ‘And you’re going out tomorrow?’ Champagne at the War Office tonight, I thought. ‘And what’s all this about a bayonet?’

‘It’s mines,’ he said doggedly, glowering at the weapon in Baxter’s hand. ‘But Ah lost it, a while back, an’ they made me pey for it – stopped it oot ma money, they did.’ He blinked piteously at me, like a widow evicted. ‘They gie’d me anither bayonet – that’s it ower there, wi the rest o’ ma kit.’ He pointed to a mouldering heap lying on the floor on a torn ground-sheet; there was what looked like a large rusty nail among the debris, and I recognised it as one of the new pig-sticker bayonets.

‘How the hell did it get in that condition?’ I demanded.

‘Ah dunno.’ He wiped his nose audibly. ‘Ah think it must hae been the damp.’

He met my speechless glare, and wilted. ‘Ah’m sorry, sir, like. Ah′ll maybe gie it a wee clean.’ And he began rooting through his military effects, like a baboon poking among twigs.

‘Come out of that!’ I exclaimed hastily. ‘Leave it alone; the less it’s – disturbed, the better. Now, what about this other bayonet?’ I indicated the weapon in Baxter’s hand.

‘Well, sir, it’s mines, like Ah’m sayin’. See, Ah lost it, two year ago, in the Tripoli barracks, an’ had tae pey for it but Ah found it again the ither day, when Ah wis sortin′ oot ma kit for tae hand in tae the quartermaster. There it wis, wrapped up in a pair o’ ma auld drawers at the bottom o’ ma kitbag.’ He beamed through his grime, while I made the appalling deduction that the lower strata of his kitbag had lain undisturbed for two long years, old drawers and heaven knew what besides. I was just glad I hadn’t been there when he finally opened it all up; it must have been like excavating a catacomb.

‘But, see, sir,’ he went on earnestly. ‘Ah’ve handed in the pig-sticker they issued me wi’ when Ah lost ma auld bayonet. An’ Ah peyed for that auld bayonet. So noo that Ah’ve found it again, it belangs tae me. Sure that’s right, sir?’

This sounded like logic. I looked at Baxter.

‘He’s got a point,’ I said.

‘But, sir!’ Baxter protested. ‘It’s still Army issue. He – he cannae
buy
War Department weapons. I’m sure of that. I never heard of such a thing, sir.’

Neither had I – but that’s my McAuslan. If you’ve never heard of it – not so fast. He’s probably done it.

‘Well, since he has paid for it,’ I said, ‘at least he’s entitled to his money back.’

‘Ah’m no’ wantin’ ma money back,’ proclaimed McAuslan. ‘Ah want ma bay’net. Ah paid for that bay‘net. Smines. Sno’ yours – ’

‘Shut up,’ said Baxter indignantly. ‘Ye’re no’ gettin’ it.’

‘Aw, sure Ah am, sir? He’d niver’ve known it wis there, even, if he hadnae come pokin’ his nose in when Ah wis sortin’ oot ma things.’ You’re a better man than I am, Baxter, I thought. ‘He’s got nae right tae try tae tak’ it off me. Onywye, two o’ the boys that wis in ma platoon in the desert got keepin’ their side-arms, when they wis invalided oot in ‘42. Major MacRobert let them; he wis oor company commander then.’

Trust Big Mac. His company hadn’t been a company to him; it had been a fighting tail.

‘But you can get it credited to you, in money,’ I said.

‘Ah want the bay’net, sir. Ah had it a long time. Ah wis awfy sorry when I lost it.’ He scratched himself unhappily. ‘Ah had yon bay‘net since Ah j’ined up at Maryhill. Had it in a’ sorts o’ places. Inna desert, too. Sure an’ Ah did.’

All sorts of places, I knew, covered Tobruk, Alamein, and Cameron Ridge. I remembered the kukri, carefully oiled and polished, that lay at the bottom of my own trunk.

‘I think we could let him keep it,’ I said after a moment, ‘and just forget about it, Sergeant Baxter.’

‘Well, sir,’ he began doubtfully, but even he wasn’t looking quite so adamant. ‘It’s a dangerous weapon, sir – I don′t know if it’s legal . . . the police . . .’

‘We needn’t worry about that,’ I said. What Baxter meant was that to allow cold steel into the hands of a Glasgow man is tantamount to running guns to the Apaches, but I couldn’t see McAuslan flourishing his bayonet in gang warfare. He wasn’t the type – and uncharitably I reflected that the gangs were probably pretty choosy who they admitted, anyway.

Baxter held it out to him, and McAuslan took it, dropped it, cursed, scrabbled it up, wiped his nose, cleared his throat thunderously, and said, ‘Ta.’

‘Carry on, McAuslan,’ I said, and just to remind him that it wasn’t Christmas I added: ‘And now you’ve got it, you can clean the dam’ thing.’

He shambled off – and perhaps it was association of ideas, but when I went back to my billet the first thing I did was to get my broadsword out of the cupboard and look it over. I’d never used it, of course, although it had come close to drawing blood – mine – on one occasion. Back in North Africa, the old Colonel had been inflamed by something he had read in a book about Rob Roy; it had said, he told us, that in the old days many Highlanders had worn their broadswords on their backs, with the hilt at the right shoulder, so that they could whip them out more quickly than from the hip. We would do this on ceremonial occasions, and the English regiments would go green with envy. So he had us out behind the mess, practising, and how the Adjutant didn’t decapitate himself remains a mystery. Even the Colonel had to admit, reluctantly, that to have all his officers minus their right ears would present an unbalanced appearance, so the idea was shelved.

Anyway, even if I hadn’t drawn it since, there it was – the claymore, the great sword. You’re an odd kind of Highlander if you can slip your hand inside that beautiful basket-hilt without thinking of Quebec and Waterloo and Killiecrankie and Culloden and feeling the urge to kick off your shoes. I’d have to turn it over to the pipe-sergeant, now that I was leaving.

Naturally, I had mixed feelings about that, too. Perhaps I’d been looking forward for so long to being a civilian again that now it came as an anti-climax. When I’d been called up as a conscript during the war it had been a great adventure; I’d been an eager eighteen, brought up on war movies and Stouthearted Stories for Boys, I’d wanted to get into it, my friends were going into uniform, the Germans and Japanese patently needed sorting out, and I genuinely wanted to fight for my country. Soldiering was also obviously preferable to swotting in a university (which had turned me down, anyway).

And I suppose I had known, at the back of my mind, that when it was all over I would want to look back and say I’d been in it. (No doubts about survival, you notice.) As Dr Johnson pointed out, a man who hasn’t soldiered envies the man who has. Illogical, no doubt – immoral, even, by today’s standards - but understandable. My own guess is that old Sam privately regretted not being out in the ’45 himself, if only for the free beer and conversation.

But if my initial boyish enthusiasm had never quite rubbed off – although I′ll confess there was one night outside Meiktila, with the Japanese White Tigers fooling about round our observation post, when it had worn fairly thin – it had been modified. You could not serve in the British wartime army without being infected by ‘ticket’ mania – in other words, the anticipation of your eventual discharge. I’d dreamed about it from Derby to Deolali, from freezing parades in Durham to sweltering route-marches in Bengal; on the lower decks of troopers, with the hammock of Grandarse Green slung perilously two inches above me and five hundred bodies snoring close-packed around us; on night stags in Burma when the ‘up-you’ beasts croaked in the jungle and the moon-shadows hypnotised you as they crept towards your rifle-pit; in steamy Northern Naafis, where you hunched miserably over your mug of tea and spam sandwich with damp serge chafing your neck; in the white-washed stuffiness of my subaltern’s billet in Libya, when I lay awake wondering why my platoon seemed to find me an object of derision and dislike – in any of these places, if you had offered me my ticket I’d have snapped your hand off. (But I wouldn’t have missed it, not any of it.)

However, dreaming of your ticket is one thing; picking it up is another. Four years is a long time, when it covers the span from boyhood to manhood; you get used to the Army, and provided you’d come through in one piece, and your loved ones likewise, you could look back and say it hadn’t been a bad war. That may sound terrible – when I think of those slow-motion moments south of the Irrawady, and the Japanese corpse smell, and our own dead wrapped in blood-stained blankets, it sounds downright obscene – but it’s what my generation thought, and perhaps still does. Not, mark you, that we’d want to do it again, and the idea of our children doing it is simply unthinkable.

At any rate, in the last few months before my demobilisation I had pondered on getting out, and at one time had come close to staying in. That had been the old Colonel’s fault. Shortly before his own retirement he had loafed into my office one day, ostensibly to inspect some barrack-room repairs, but in fact to do his Ancient Mariner act. He had cornered me, discoursed at length on the joys of a soldier’s life, reviewed my own service so far, and hinted that, while permanent commissions were not easy to come by, a word or two in the right place . . . It was not put anything like as bluntly as that, and took about half an hour, while he sat, puffing at his lovat pipe, dusting tobacco fragments off his kilt, one leg crossed over the other, and wrapping his message up elegantly in reminiscence of service life, from Japanese prison camp to guard duty at Balmoral. And he convinced me, hands down; even years later, when I was an encyclopedia salesman in Canada, I never heard a sales pitch to equal it.

‘Whatever they say about this blasted bomb,’ he said finally, ‘we’re going to need soldiers, if only to walk over the ruins. And we’re the best there are, you know. And when the Empire goes, as it certainly will – ’ this was an old Colonel talking, in 1947 ’ – someone’s going to have to leave it tidy, so that it will take the native politicians that much longer to mess it up again.’ He rubbed his long nose, and did his bushy-browed Aubrey Smith grin. ‘It’ll all be done for nothing, of course, in the long run; always has been. Ask the Romans. But it’s still got to be done – was that your quarter-master, Blind Sixty, who passed the door just now? Wasn’t wearing his hat – whenever that man goes about without his bonnet on, there’s a crisis at hand. Someone been stealing four-by-two, probably. Anyway, young Dand, don’t you ever have tea for visitors in your office? In my young day, D Company hospitality was a byword . . .’