The Complete McAuslan (51 page)

One of the corporals saw me in the doorway and started to call the room to attention, but I flagged him down, and the platoon registered my appearance after their fashion.

‘Aw-haw-hey, Wullie! The man’s back!’

‘See, Ah told ye he hadnae gone absent.’

‘Hiv a good leave, sur?’

‘Way-ull! Back tae the Airmy again!’

‘Whit did ye bring us frae Rothesay, sur?’

‘Aye, it’ll be hell in the trenches the morn!′ and so on with their keelie grins and weird slogans, and very reassuring it was. I responded in kind by bidding them a courteous good evening, looked forward to meeting them on rifle parade at eight and kit inspection at ten, and acknowledged their cries of protest and lamentation. McGilvray came forward with my Sam Browne in one hand and a polishing rag in the other.

‘Yer leave a’right, sur? Aw, smashin’. Ah’m jist givin’ yer belt a wee buff – Captain McAlpine asked tae borrow it while ye were away, an’ ye know whit he’s like – Ah think he’s been hingin’ oot a windae in it; a’ scuffed tae hellangone! But the rest o’ yer service dress is a’ ready; Ah bulled it up when Ah heard ye wis back the night.’

Well, I thought to myself, you’re not John or Hans, thank God, but you’ll do. They can keep the professionals – and they can certainly keep McAuslan, and the farther away the better – and we’ll get by very nicely.

He was looking at me inquiringly, and I realised I had been letting my thoughts stray.

‘Oh . . . thanks, McGilvray. I saw your mother and great-uncle ; they’re fine. Come and finish the belt in my room and I’ll tell you about them.’ I was turning away when a thought struck me, and I paused, hesitating: I could sense that stern shade with her black ebony cane frowning down in disapproval from some immaculate, dusted paradise, but I couldn’t help that. ‘Oh, yes, and you’d better bring your socks with you.’

Sorry, Granny MacDonald, I thought, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

Captain Errol

Whenever I see television newsreels of police or troops facing mobs of rioting demonstrators, standing fast under a hail of rocks, bottles, and petrol bombs, my mind goes back forty years to India, when I was understudying John Gielgud and first heard the pregnant phrase ′Aid to the civil power’. And from that my thoughts inevitably travel on to Captain Errol, and the Brigadier’s pet hawks, and the great rabble of chanting Arab rioters advancing down the Kantara causeway towards the thin khaki line of 12 Platoon, and my own voice sounding unnaturally loud and hoarse: ‘Right, Sarn′t Telfer – fix bayonets.’

Aid to the civil power, you see, is what the British Army used to give when called on to deal with disorder, tumult, and breach of the peace which the police could no longer control. The native constabulary of our former Italian colony being what they were – prone to panic if a drunken
bazaar-wallah
broke a window – aid to the civil power often amounted to no more than sending Wee Wullie out with a pick handle to shout ‘Imshi!’; on the other hand, when real political mayhem broke loose, and a raging horde of fellaheen several thousand strong appeared bent on setting the town ablaze and massacring the European population, sterner measures were called for, and unhappy subalterns found themselves faced with the kind of decision which Home Secretaries and Cabinets agonise over for hours, the difference being that the subaltern had thirty seconds, with luck, in which to consider the safety of his men, the defenceless town at his back, and the likelihood that if he gave the order to fire and some agitator caught a bullet, he, the subaltern, would go down in history as the Butcher of Puggle Bazaar, or wherever it happened to be.

That, as I say, was in the imperial twilight of fifty years ago, long before the days of walkie-talkies, C.S. gas, riot shields, water cannon, and similar modern defences of the public weal – not that they seem to make riot control any easier nowadays, especially when the cameras are present. We didn’t have to worry about television, and our options for dealing with infuriated rioters were limited: do nothing and get murdered, fire over their heads, or let fly in earnest. There are easier decisions, believe me, for a youth not old enough to vote.

The Army recognised this, and was at pains to instruct its fledgling officers in the techniques of containing civil commotion, so far as it knew how, which wasn’t far, even in India, with three centuries of experience to draw on. Those were the postwar months before independence, when demonstrators were chanting: ‘Jai Hind!’ and ‘Pakistan zindabad!’, and the Indian police were laying about them with
lathis
(you really don’t know what police brutality is until you’ve seen a
lathi
charge going in), while the troops stood by and their officers hoped to God they wouldn’t have to intervene. Quetta and Amritsar were ugly memories of what happened when someone opened fire at the wrong time.

Bangalore, where I was completing my officers’ training course, was one of the quiet spots, which may have been why the authorities took the eccentric view that instruction in riot control could be imparted through the medium of the theatre. If that sounds unlikely, well, that’s the Army for you. Some genius (and it wasn’t Richard Brinsley Sheridan) had written a play about aid to the civil power, showing the right and wrong ways of coping with unrest; it was to be enacted at the garrison theatre, and I found myself dragooned into taking part.

That’s what comes of understudying Gielgud, which is what I like to think I had been doing, although he didn’t know it. In the last relaxed weeks of our officers’ training, a few of us cadets had been taking part in a production of
The Harbour Called Mulberry
for India Radio, with Cadet MacNeill as the Prussian general riveting the audience with his impersonation of Conrad Veidt; it was natural that when Gielgud’s touring company arrived in town with a double bill of
Hamlet
and
Blithe Spirit
, and some of his cast went down with Bangalore Belly, our amateur group should be asked to provide replacements in case they needed a couple of extra spear-carriers. I was fool enough to volunteer, and while we were never required even to change into costume, let alone go on stage, we convinced ourselves that we were, technically, understudying the lead players – I mean to say, Bangalore Belly can go through unacclimatised systems like wildfire, and in our backstage dreams we could imagine being out there tearing the Soliloquy to shreds while Gielgud was carted off to the sick-bay. He wasn’t, as it happened, but no doubt he would have been reassured if he’d known that we were ready to step in.

That by the way; the upshot was that, having drawn attention to ourselves, my associates and I were prime targets when it came to choosing the cast for the aid-to-the-civil-power play, a knavish piece of work entitled
Nowall and Chancit.
I played Colonel Nowall, an elderly and incompetent garrison commander, which meant that I had to wear a white wig and whiskers and make like a doddering Aubrey Smith in front of a military audience whose behaviour would have disgraced the Circus Maximus. The script was abysmal, my moustache kept coming loose, the prop telephone didn’t ring on cue, one of the cast who took acting seriously dried up and fainted, and in the last act I had to order my troops to open fire on a rioting crowd played by a platoon of Indian sepoys in loin-cloths who giggled throughout and went right over the top when shot with blank cartridges. The entire theatre was dense with cordite smoke, there seemed to be about seven hundred people on stage, and when I stood knee-deep in hysterical corpses and spoke my deathless closing line: ‘Well, that’s that!’ it stopped the show. I have not trod the boards since, and it can stay that way.

My excuse for that reminiscence is that it describes the only instruction we ever got in dealing with civil disorder. Considering that we were destined, as young second-lieutenants, to lead troops in various parts of the Far and Middle East when empires were breaking up and independence movements were in full spate, with accompanying bloodshed, it was barely adequate. Not that any amount of training, including my months as an infantry section leader in Burma, could have prepared me for the Palestine troubles of ’46, when Arab and Jew were at each other’s throats with the British caught in the middle, as usual; the Irgun and Stern Gang were waging their campaign of terror (or freedom-fighting, depending on your point of view), raid, ambush, murder, and explosion were commonplace, the Argyll and Sutherlands had barbed wire strung across the
inside
corridors of their Jerusalem barracks, and you took your revolver into the shower. It was a nerve-racked, bloody business which you learned as you went along; commanding the Cairo-Jerusalem night train and conducting a security stake-out at the Armistice Day service on the Mount of Olives added years to my education in a matter of days, and by the time I was posted back to my Highland battalion far away along the North African coast I felt I knew something about lending aid to the civil power. Of course, I didn’t know the half of it – but then, I hadn’t met Captain Errol.

That wasn’t his real name, but it was what the Jocks called him because of his resemblance to Flynn, the well-known actor and bon viveur. And it wasn’t just that he was six feet two, lightly moustached, and strikingly handsome; he had the same casual, self-assured swagger of the man who is well content with himself and doesn’t give a dam whether anyone knows it or not; when you have two strings of ribbons, starting with the M.C. and M.M. and including the Croix de Guerre and a couple of exotic Balkan gongs at the end, you don’t need to put on side. Which was just as well, for Errol had evidently been born with a double helping of self-esteem, advertised in the amused half-smile and lifted eyebrow with which he surveyed the world in general – and me in particular on the day he joined the battalion.

I was bringing my platoon in from a ten-mile route march, which they had done in the cracking time of two and a half hours, and was calling them to march to attention for the last fifty yards to the main gate, exhorting McAuslan for the umpteenth time to get his pack off his backside and up to his shoulders, and pretending not to hear Private Fletcher’s
sotto voce
explanation that McAuslan couldn’t march upright because he was expecting, and might, indeed, go into labour shortly. Sergeant Telfer barked them to silence and quickened the step, and I turned aside to watch them swing past – it was a moment I took care never to miss, for the pride of it warms me still: my platoon going by, forty hard young Jocks in battle order, rifles sloped and bonnets pulled down, slightly dusty but hardly even breaking sweat as Telfer wheeled them under the archway with its faded golden standard. Eat your heart out, Bonaparte.

It was as I was turning to follow that I became aware of an elegant figure seated in a horse-ghari which had just drawn up at the gate. He was a Highlander, but his red tartan and white cockade were not of our regiment; then I noticed the three pips and threw him a salute, which he acknowledged with a nonchalant forefinger and a remarkable request spoken in the airy affected drawl which in Glasgow is called ‘Kelvinsaid’.

‘Hullo, laddie,’ said he. ‘Your platoon? You might get a couple of them to give me a hand with my kit, will you?’

It was said so affably that the effrontery of it didn’t dawn for a second – you don’t ask a perfect stranger to detach two of his marching men to be your porters, not without preamble or introduction. I stared at the man, taking in the splendid bearing, the medal ribbons, and the pleasant expectant smile while he put a fresh cigarette in his holder.

‘Eh? I beg your pardon,’ I said stiffly, ‘but they’re on parade at the moment.’ For some reason I didn’t add ‘sir’.

It didn’t faze him a bit. ‘Oh, that’s a shame. Still, not to panic. We ought to be able to manage between us. All right, Abdul,’ he addressed the Arab coachman, ‘let’s get the cargo on the dock.’

He swung lightly down from the ghari – not the easiest thing to do, with decorum, in a kilt – and it was typical of the man that I found myself with a valise in one hand and a set of golf-clubs in the other before I realised that he was evidently expecting me to tote his damned dunnage for him. My platoon had vanished from sight, fortunately, but Sergeant Telfer had stopped and was staring back, goggle-eyed. Before I could speak the newcomer was addressing me again:

‘Got fifty lire, old man? ‘Fraid all I have is Egyptian ackers, and the Fairy Coachman won’t look at them. See him right, will you, and we’ll settle up anon. Okay?’

That, as they say, did it. ‘Laddie’ I could just about absorb (since he must have been all of twenty-seven and therefore practically senile), and even his outrageous assumption that my private and personal platoon were his to flunkify, and that I would caddy for him and pay his blasted transport bills – but not that careless ‘Okay?’ and the easy, patronising air which was all the worse for being so infernally amiable. Captain or no captain, I put his clubs and valise carefully back in the ghari and spoke, with masterly restraint:

‘I’m afraid I haven’t fifty lire on me, sir, but if you care to climb back in, the ghari can take you to the Paymaster’s Office in HQ Company; they’ll change your ackers and see to your kit.’ And just to round off the civilities I added: ‘My name’s MacNeill, by the way, and I’m a platoon commander, not a bloody dragoman.’

Which was insubordination, but if you’d seen that sardonic eyebrow and God-like profile you’d have said it too. Again, it didn’t faze him; he actually chuckled.

‘I stand rebuked. MacNeill, eh?’ He glanced at my campaign ribbon. ‘What were you in Burma?’

‘Other rank.’

‘Well, obviously, since you’re only a second-lieutenant now. What kind of other rank?’

‘Well . . . sniper-scout, Black Cat Division. Later on I was a section leader. Why . . . sir?’

‘Black Cats, eh? God Almighty’s Own. Were you at Imphal?’

‘Not in the Boxes. Irrawaddy Crossing, Meiktila, Sittang Bend – ’

‘And you haven’t got a measly fifty lire for a poor brokendown old soldier? Well, the hell with you, young MacNeill,’ said this astonishing fellow, and seated himself in the ghari again. ‘I’d heap coals of fire on you by offering you a lift, but your platoon are probably waiting for you to stop their motor. Bash on, MacNeill, before they seize up! Officers′ mess, Abdul!’ And he drove off with an airy wave.