The Complete McAuslan (57 page)

‘We’ll do the paratrooper stunt,’ said he, stuffing tobacco into his eager pipe. ‘You know, chaps taken out in closed trucks dropped in pairs at intervals, so that they haven’t the foggiest where they are. Each pair has a map, a compass, and a box of matches, and they find their way home again. Test of skill and initiative; first-class, absolutely. Give platoon commanders – ’ he prodded his pipe-stem at MacKenzie and me ‘ – like Kenny and Dand a chance to prove their points, eh?’

MacKenzie and I looked at each other, mentally computing what the harvest might be if our platoons were dropped by night in desert country and had to find their way back. I didn’t fancy it, myself; night exercises are tricky at the best of times, but conducted on the edge of the Sahara, with people like McAuslan staggering about in circles unaided, they could be suicidal.

‘Of course,’ said the Colonel, reading our thoughts, ‘we’d stick close to the coast, among the villages; don’t want anyone striking out for the Congo by accident, do we?’

‘Well, sir,’ I began cautiously, trying not to think of McAuslan let loose in an unsuspecting Arab village in the dark,. ‘I’m not sure – ’

‘I am,’ said the Adjutant happily. ‘Your man McAuslan will never make it, for one. Dammit, he can get lost in the canteen. Drop him from a closed truck and he’s liable to turn up twenty miles out to sea.’

‘Not he,’ said MacKenzie, derisively. ‘He can’t stand water, which is why Dand’s chaps have to wash him from time to time.’

Which was true, but I was too busy thinking to resent it.

‘You did say, sir,’ I addressed the Colonel, ‘that the idea would be to drop people in pairs?’

‘No so fast,’ said MacKenzie. ‘I get it – you’ll see to it that McAuslan is teamed up with some map-reading genius who’ll find his way home for him. No soap, Dandy; you send him out with an ordinary member of your platoon, or there’s no bet.’

‘What is the bet?’ said the second-in-command, emerging from behind his decanter.

‘That McAuslan, dropped from a closed truck at night, with an average Jock from Dand’s platoon as his sidekick, won’t find his way back to a given point within a reasonable time. Hang it all,’ he added, for despite being a MacKenzie and red-haired, he was a reasonable youth, ‘it isn’t really a bet at all, it’s a stone-cold cert. I’ll go easy with you, you silly MacNeill,’ he went on to me. ‘I’ll make it a straight hundred lire – or a slap-up dinner at the club. Well?’

I was nailed to the wall, of course; I’d talked myself into it. I rescued the port before the M.O. could get his hands on it, poured an inspirating glass, and thought, while they watched me.

‘Stop looking so damned MacNeillish,’ grinned MacKenzie. ‘Put up or climb down.’

‘This would be a full-scale company exercise — three platoons, all ranks, dropped in pairs?’ I looked at the Colonel, and he nodded. ‘Usual form,’ he said, which was all I wanted to know. MacKenzie leaped in, all suspicion.

‘You can’t partner McAuslan yourself, mind. It’s got to be an average Jock – ’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll send him out with Wee Wullie.’

The Adjutant looked surprised. ‘That’s handicapping yourself a bit, isn’t it? Wee Wullie′s not exactly your brightest star. I mean, I concede that if you sent McAuslan out with Captain Cook, they’d both probably finish up at the bottom of a well, but. . .’

Wee Wullie, I should explain, was my platoon incorrigible, a rugged giant of extraordinary strength and evil temper, given to alcoholic excesses on a heroic scale which frequently involved him with the military police and provost staff. He would have been posted or locked up for ever long ago, for his crime sheet was encyclopaedic, but Wee Wullie had a fighting record from the war that counter-balanced his misdemeanours, and the Colonel, who had known him from way back, was as sentimentally protective as a mother-hen. He was eyeing me thoughtfully as the Adjutant spoke; like me, the Colonel knew that Wee Wullie had once performed an incredible solo march in the Western Desert in ’42, carrying a German prisoner most of the way. But his feat had been distinguished for its sheer endurance, not for his sense of direction; he wasn’t, I was ready to admit, the ideal choice to pilot such a walking disaster as McAuslan through desert country in the dark. But the Colonel had said that the exercise would take the ‘usual form’; I knew exactly what that meant, and MacKenzie either didn’t or had forgotten.

‘Wee Wullie’s the man I want dropped with McAuslan,’ I said. ‘You can’t complain that he’s an above-average Jock for skill and intelligence. All right, Kenny, you’re on for a hundred lire.’

‘Me too,’ said the Adjutant, with that innocent, sporting look that English gentlemen assume when they know they’ve got the opposition cornered. ‘I was in on this to start with; my jibes and taunts got MacNeill all steamed up, and I want my whack at his money.’

‘Wagering is sinful and an abomination,’ sighed the Padre. ‘Will ye be wanting odds, Dand?’

I absorbed as much of the anti-McAuslan money as I felt my £9 a week salary could afford – the Colonel for once hung back on a bet, which was comforting – and went away to think, avoiding the second-in-command, who had surfaced again from his port, and wanted to ask me if
Chicks’ Own
wasn’t that comic paper of his youth in which the animals wore clothes – there was some damned tiger in short pants, as he recalled . . . I made my excuses and slipped out to the verandah. I’d been a mug; McAuslan couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag, and would undoubtedly get lost on an unprecedented, nay monumental, scale. It wasn’t losing the lire I minded – well, not all that much, anyway – it was the credit of the thing. Subalterns are proud of their platoons, and I was obsessively proud of mine, McAuslan included. Unwashed, ugly, useless, accident-prone, illiterate, and altogether fit to be first stoker at Gehenna he might be, but he was one of my Jocks – and he’d been good enough to go in at Alamein and beyond. And he tried – he tried
me
, but that wasn’t the point.

Could he conceivably chart a course across several miles of unknown country by night? No, he couldn’t. Neither, probably, could Wee Wullie – but the Colonel had said ‘usual form’, and therein lay the one gleam of hope.

The kind of exercise the Colonel envisaged, you see, isn’t merely a test of map-reading skill. What happens is that a whole company, officers, N.C.O.s, Jocks and all, are loaded into trucks after dark, the tarpaulins are pulled down, and the trucks are driven away perhaps six or seven miles. The occupants are dropped in pairs, with maps, etc., at intervals of perhaps five minutes each, on an arc of a huge semi-circle whose centre is the home base to which they must find their way before dawn. But that’s only the half of it. In between them and home another company is dropped, whose duty it is to prevent the first company getting through.

You can guess the results. I’ve played this particularly brutal game half a dozen times, in England, India, Palestine and elsewhere, and it invariably finished up as a series of fearful brawls in the dark. I recall one nightmare at Bangalore where I was teamed up with an enthusiastic Sikh cadet who believed that the best way of outwitting our fellow-students was to stalk them through the gloom and hit them with an entrenching-tool handle. And a similar exercise near Nazareth which ended as a pitched battle between Coldstream Guardsmen and the R.A.F. Regiment, with myself as an unfortunate umpire in between, firing Verey flares and futilely blowing my whistle.

In fact it has this virtue, that it is probably the best training for real warfare – night fighting, at any rate – that you can possibly get. There are those, like my Sikh, who treat it simply as an excuse for a good turn-up, which is really to miss the point. At their best, night exercises teach the young soldier that darkness, which he has learned to fear from childhood, is really a friend; that patience, and waiting, and lying doggo for hours if necessary, pay off far better than boldness and initiative. I wasn’t exactly a cat-eyed Mohican myself, but by the time the Burma campaign was over I had learned that in the dark he who stays still stays longest. Twenty years later, when I woke up at home one chilly night, and thought I heard mysterious noises downstairs, I was delighted to find that I could still glide out into the gloom without a sound or even a creaking board, every nerve alert, totally self-possessed and controlled, right up to the moment when I missed by footing on the stairs and crashed roaring into the hall and broke my toe. But you know what I mean.

However, knowing what my company was like, I had a pretty fair idea that any night exercise was liable to end in mayhem, which was why I wanted to team McAuslan with Wee Wullie. Skilled map-readers and night guides they might not be, but any opposition who tried to bar their progress would be well advised to take a couple of Rugby League teams along; McAuslan could, in his own phrase, ‘handle himsel”, but Wee Wullie, giving of his best, was about as manageable as a rogue elephant in steel-toed boots. He could, at least, preserve McAuslan from capture in the early stages of the exercise; meanwhile the rest of the platoon and I would be combing the African night for them, and would shepherd them safely in to base.

It was at least feasible, provided the eccentric pair, the idiot misfit and the Cowcaddens Caveman, didn’t go badly astray, or break a leg, or start an Arab uprising, before we found them. That would be the dicey part, calling for some clever stalking and enormous luck; my hopes were not raised by their performance on the brief night lesson which I conducted for the platoon on the regimental football pitch on the eve of the exercise itself, to give them a refresher course on using the stars and night map-reading. Wee Wullie arrived on the parade about two-thirds drunk (his normal condition, I realised with sudden misgivings, on any night after the canteen closed) and with a piece of rusty barbed wire tangled round his right ankle; he had evidently picked it up by accident somewhere, without noticing, which gives you a notion of what Wee Wullie was like. He stood there, swaying gigantically in the gloom, like Talus the Man of Brass with a bonnet on top, breathing heavily and reeking like a spirit vault. McAuslan I identified in the dark by his hideous sniffing, and when they and the rest of the platoon had settled down, and all were craning obediently up at the beautiful starlit black sky, I started in.

‘That’s the North Star, there – easily identifiable because it never moves, and the two end stars of the Plough, just there, always point directly at it. Well, not exactly directly, but as near as dammit. You’ve got the Plough, McAuslan? That thing there, like a bloody great ladle – that’s roughly how it’ll be pointing tomorrow night, and since you’ll be in the desert south of here, the North Star is roughly in the direction you want to make for. Okay?’ I sought for some familiar allusion that might fix it in what passed for his memory. ‘That’s north, see – in that direction. That’s where Glasgow is, near enough. Right? Just remember, Glasgow’s the direction you’re heading if you go north.’

It was risky, of course; I didn’t want the night exercise to finish with McAuslan on Argyle Street, but that was a chance one had to take.

‘Aye, right, sir. Ah’ve got it covered.’ Seen in dim profile, peering up into the heavens, he looked like some prehistoric moon-worshipper. “At’s a North Star, there – Ah’ll find it the morra nicht, nae bother – cannae miss; it’s right ower the Naafi.

‘Oh, my God. You won’t be standing here tomorrow night; you won’t be able to see the Naafi. You’ll be out in the desert; you’ll have to find it from the Plough, don’t you see?’

‘Aw.’ He thought about this. ‘Lotta stars, in’t there? See, there’s the Constipation of O’Brien.’

For a giddy moment I thought I had misheard him. Faintly I asked:

‘What did you say?’

‘The Constipation of O’Brien. See, up there – ’ he placed one sloth-like paw on my shoulder and pointed with the other. “Ere it’s. Thon’s O’Brien – ye can see the star that’s his heid, and they’s his airms, an’ his legs, an’ they three wee stars is his belt, an’ they ither stars is his – ’

‘Dear God,’ I said, ‘the Constellation of Orion. How the – yes, yes, that’s it, McAuslan! That’s splendid! Well done! But how on earth did you know that?’

‘Och, the Padre showed me them, in a book he’s got. Efter you wis tellin′ me aboot the compass aye p’intin’ north, an’ said we wis gaunae look at the stars, Ah thought Ah micht as weel get genned up aforehand. So Ah asked the Padre.’ For a fleeting moment I wondered, why the Padre; was there in McAuslan’s unfathomed mind a connection between religion and the astral bodies, between the cosmos and . . .? ‘Ah seen the book lyin’ on his desk wan day when Ah had tae clean oot his office when Ah wis on jankers,’ he went on, shattering my speculation. ‘So Ah asked him yesterday, an’ he showed me a’ aboot O’Brien, an’ Gasser an’ Bollocks, the Heavenly Twins, an’ – ’

To say that I was astonished is to say nothing; I was gratified, deeply. McAuslan taking so much interest as to conduct his own personal researches was something new, and highly encouraging. I congratulated him again on his zeal, and felt so uplifted that I expanded perhaps rather incautiously in answering a question from one of the other Jocks on the difference between True and Magnetic North. (One north, I felt, was probably as many as McAuslan could cope with, and I had skirted the subject previously.) I know that in answering the Jock I exceeded my remit by remarking that Columbus, on his great voyage, had been much disturbed to see that the compass needle gradually ceased to point directly to the North Star as he sailed west; this brought a horrified squawk from McAuslan, clamouring for an explanation of this heresy, and I would probably have been on that football pitch until 4 a.m., explaining with a sleeping platoon around me, but fortunately at this point Wee Wullie was resoundingly ill, and in the ensuing confusion I dismissed the parade. McAuslan, incidentally, lost the way back to his barrack-block, which was a full two hundred yards away – possibly he was still intent on studying the Constellation of Orion and its internal disorders – and Wee Wullie had to be carried to bed. Not good omens, however you looked at them.