The Complete McAuslan (65 page)

Most great military blunders stem from the good intentions of some high-ranking buffoon, but in fairness it has to be said that the Brigadier was seeing McAuslan at his best - awestruck dumb, naked save for identity discs and khaki shorts which gave no real idea of how revolting he looked in uniform, and engaged in the only work of which he was capable; to wit, carrying heavy and unbreakable objects across level ground under supervision. Even so, one good look at that neanderthal profile should have warned even a staff officer; perhaps he was short-sighted, and the lunch had been quite exceptional.

Strictly speaking it isn’t a Brigadier’s business to interfere in minor promotions, and if when he phoned the barracks he’d got the Colonel or Bennet-Bruce they would have thanked him for his recommendation and then forgotten about it. But in their absence he got Errol, who could have given lessons in mischief to Loki, and when the Brigadier said that a tape should be stuck on McAuslan’s arm forthwith, our temporary commander said he would be delighted to comply; he’d often thought McAuslan was due for a boost upstairs, and he would take the liberty of congratulating the Brigadier for having spotted talent from his Olympian height, or words to that effect. Knowing Errol’s line of oil, I imagine the Brigadier may have wondered if he shouldn’t have put McAuslan straight up to sergeant.

So there it was: the appointment of 14687347 McAuslan, J., to lance-corporal (acting, unpaid) went on company orders that afternoon, and my reaction, on returning from a hard day in the transport shed and suffering a minor apoplexy when I heard the news, was to inquire of Errol if he had gone doolaly, and if not, what was he playing at?

‘Respecting the wishes of my superiors,’ he said languidly, with his feet on the desk. ‘Have some tea.’

‘Are you kidding? Look – hasn’t anyone told you about McAuslan? The brute’s illiterate, his crime sheet’s as long as a toilet roll, he’s had to be forcibly washed God knows how often, he doesn’t know left from right, can’t tell the time of day, and is, at a conservative estimate, the dirtiest and dumbest bad bargain His Majesty’s made since Agincourt!’

‘You paint a pretty picture,’ he said. ‘Care to argue with the Brigadier, Mr MacNeill?’

‘Care to explain to the Colonel, Captain Errol? He’ll have your guts for garters.’

‘I’m just the slave of duty. When Brigadiers say unto me, go – I’ve gone already.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘it isn’t on. For one thing, my Jocks won’t wear it. Can you see them taking orders from that . . . that walking tattie-bogle? They’ll mutiny.’

‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, he’s been promoted. What d’you want me to do – bust him straight back? Without a reason?’

‘I’ve just given you about seventeen!’

‘For not promoting him, yes. Not for busting him. There’s a difference. The deed’s been done, he’s got his stripe, and he’s entitled to his chance.’ He raised a mocking eyebrow. ‘You ought to appreciate that – you’ve been a lance-jack yourself, and see where it got you.’

‘You’re a bastard, you know that?’

‘So they tell me,’ said Errol complacently. ‘Come on, let’s have a drink and I’ll play you fifty up before dinner.’

It was only when my initial outrage at the Brigadier’s folly (and Errol’s malicious acquiescence) had subsided that the enormity of the thing really sank in. McAuslan simply couldn’t begin to be a lance-corporal. You just had to picture the sequence of events when he shambled out, looking as though he’d just been cut down from the Tyburn gibbet, with a new stripe on his sleeve: the Jocks would collapse in mirth, McAuslan would give an order, it would not be taken seriously, and he would charge someone with disobedience – assuming he knew how. Then what? How could I, with a straight face, punish an honest soldier for ignoring an order given by a deadbeat whose military unfitness was a battalion byword? It might even be argued that McAuslan, whose imperative vocabulary consisted mainly of ‘Sharrup!’ and ‘Bugger off!’ was incapable of giving a lawful command. Suddenly the Nuremberg trial took on a whole new aspect, and I had to fight down a vision of the Tartan Caliban sitting in the dock scratching himself while the Nazi war criminals scrambled to keep away from him. More immediate pictures presented themselves: McAuslan, whose mere touch brought rust, inspecting rifles . . . McAuslan reprimanding someone for slovenliness . . . McAuslan calling the roll when he couldn’t even read. It was all a nightmare, impossible.

The effect on discipline would be disastrous. It was also, incidentally, most unfair to the man himself. Lance-corporal (which is an appointment, without even the dignity of a rank) is the most thankless number you can draw in the Army, a dogsbody’s job with responsibilities but no real power, as I knew from experience of which Errol had reminded me, although he probably didn’t know that I’d been a lance-jack no fewer than four times and been busted back to private on three of them – for losing, on different occasions, a tea-urn, a member of my section, and a guardroom.
⁵
I had painful memories of trying to take charge, at the age of nineteen, of ten men all older and longer served than I was, of being the butt both of superiors and subordinates, and of the shame of those three reductions to the ranks. The fourth promotion, in Burma, was different; then it was life or death, with no time for doubts or indecisions, and I had kept my stripe. But it’s no fun, having that one tape (look what it did to Hitler) and for McAuslan, with all his natural handicaps, I could see it being traumatic.

I was dead wrong. Whoever suffered from that promotion, it wasn’t him. He took to that stripe like a Finnish sailor to schnapps; you’d have thought he’d been born with it. With the help of a new suit of khaki drill (issued, I later discovered, on the orders of the unpredictable Errol) he managed to look semi-human for his first few hours in authority, and in that time he became, in his own mind at least, a lance-corporal. He didn’t look, act, or sound like one, but he plainly
felt
like one, God help us. The presence of that newly-blancoed white chevron on his ill-fitting sleeve seemed to fill him with aggressive confidence, and he lumbered around like a badly-wrapped mummy bellowing irrelevant orders at anything that moved. And like many a dim-wit before and since he got by on the sheer force of his own ignorance and the tolerance of those around him. Greeted with derision by his section, he didn’t seem to notice; having reduced the elementary business of marching them to the transport sheds to a shambolic rout, he simply blared abuse – and they got there, eventually; after all, they knew the way. With no idea of how to organise a work-gang, he just repeated, with coarse embellishments, the orders of the full corporal in overall charge, and since no one paid any attention, no harm was done. He thought he was doing fine.

He wouldn’t have survived ten minutes of normal military duty, but supervising men as they heave planks and trestles around is simple stuff, and with the battalion away there was a relaxed and informal atmosphere undisturbed by parades, bugle calls, sergeant-majors, and the usual disciplinary apparatus with which he couldn’t have begun to cope.

To our shame, Sergeant Telfer and I kept out of the way. Our unspoken excuse was that we had to oversee the hanging above the bandstand of the Waterloo Picture, a gigantic oil painting (by Lady Butler, I think) which normally hung in the mess but was publicly displayed on this annual occasion. It showed the great moment which was the regiment’s pride, when our predecessors, having taken everything the French could throw at them, had caught hold of the stirrup leathers of the advancing Scots Greys and launched themselves against the overwhelming strength of Napoleon’s army in what posterity calls the Stirrup Charge; there has never been anything like it in war, and the Emperor himself is said to have stared in disbelief at ‘those Amazons’ and ‘the terrible grey horses’. We hung it just so, in its massive gilt frame, and as we worked we could hear, from the far end of the great echoing shed, sounds of the New Order being imposed on Three Section: McAuslan’s raucous bellows of ‘Moo-ove yersels, ye idle bums, or Ah’ll blitz ye!’ and ‘Ah heard that, Fletcher! Whit d’ye think this is on mah sleeve – Scotch mist?’ responded to with derisive obscenities. Obviously the section thought him a great hoot.

I knew that wouldn’t last long. Being ordered about by McAuslan might be an amusing novelty for a few hours, especially when the orders were superfluous, but they’d get fed up fast enough when the orders mattered and had to be obeyed, and the total unfitness of the thing came home to them. We had an example of this when Telfer put Three Section to tidying up the outside approaches to the sheds and I suggested that the stone borders of the paths could do with a lick of whitewash. Before Telfer could translate this into an order, Lance-Corporal Grendel, who had been lurking attentively, sprang into executive action.

‘Whitewash, sur! Right, sur, right away!’ He lurched forward, tripping on his untied laces, full of martial zeal. ‘Youse men – Forbes, Fletcher, Leishman! Get yersels doon ra Q.M. store! Get ra whitewash’n’brushes! C’moan, c’moan, c’moan, Ah’m no talkin’ tae mysel’! Moo-ove, ye shower, or Ah’ll be havin’ ye!’

The sheer volume and violence of it was paralysing. For a moment they stared in disbelief; then, as it dawned that the joke was no longer a joke, and the Despised Unwashed was become the Voice of Authority, Fletcher’s jaw tightened angrily and I caught his eye just in time.

‘Right, off you go,’ I said. ‘Three cans should do, and six brushes. Carry on, you three.’ They went, Fletcher casting a baleful glance at McAuslan who, ill-dressed in a little brief and insanitary authority, pursued them with invective. It was like listening to a Guards Drill Sergeant finally cracking up.

‘Ye hear that, ye middens? Three drums’n’six brushes, an’ don’t be a’ bluidy day aboot it! Ah’m watchin’ ye, Fletcher! Ah’ve got your number, boy! Double, ye horrible heap, ye! Keep the eye doon, Forbes, or yer feet won’t touch! Moo-ove yer idle body, Leishman, Ah can see ye —’

‘Take it easy, Corporal,’ I said, ‘they’re going.’ He wheeled round obediently, falling over himself and scrambling to disorderly attention, and I was about to advise him to moderate his word of command when I caught the glazed fanatical gleam in his eye and realised that the brute was drunk with power; the heady wine of authority was coursing through his system, and he was ready to decimate whole armies. It was quite frightening, in a bizarre way: McAuslan as Captain Bligh. A new and alarming prospect opened up – mutiny, for if this personality change was permanent it could only be a matter of time before Fletcher or some other indignant soul planted the tyrant one and qualified for a court-martial. Already I could hear the Colonel’s incredulous question: ‘You say Fletcher assaulted a superior? Who, for heaven’s sake?’ and my hollow reply: ‘Lance-Corporal McAuslan, sir . . .’ No. Something would have to be done, and speedily, whether the Brigadier and Errol liked it or not.

I was still debating the possibility of sending McAuslan on leave, or hiring Arab thugs to kidnap him, when we finished work for the day. Three Section, I was relieved to see, fell in of their own accord and marched back to the barrack-block paying no heed to Mad Lejeaune of the Legion, who lumbered in their wake, bawling the step – not only out of time with the squad, but with himself, too. His new uniform was fit only for the incinerator by this time, and his stripe was starting to come loose, which I hoped was an omen.

And then in a moment it was all out of my hands and forgotten about. Errol was just coming off the phone when I entered the company office, and before I could begin an impassioned plea for McAuslan’s reduction to the ranks on whatever pretext, he was issuing orders.

‘You know Bin’yassar Convent, don’t you? The Mother Superior’s been on the line to Brigade – it seems a big caravan of desert buddoo have shown up at the oasis, and she doesn’t like the look of them. You’ll take Eleven Platoon, battle order, three days’ rations, they’ll wear their tartans, and I’m giving you a piper. Get out there right away, sit down in the convent, and show the flag – you know the drill. It’s almost sure to be a false alarm, but we’ve got to keep the old girl happy. Right, move!’

It was a routine operation I had performed before, which was presumably why I’d been picked this time. The convent was about thirty miles away, on the very edge of the big desert, a relic of the days when the Crusaders patrolled the caravan trails. From time immemorial it had been occupied by the Sisters of some Order or other, and since it was in our protected zone we were occasionally called on to ferry supplies, make road repairs, and stand guard against possible emergencies. The North Sahara is one of the last lawless places on earth, or was then, and its inhabitants spend much of their time moving around; they may be anything from the gentlest of nomad herdsmen to Hoggar slavers and Targui gun-runners, and when they suddenly materialise on your doorstep it is as well to take precautions. The Mother Superior wasn’t a nervous woman, but as she explained in broken English when the platoon and I arrived that evening, some of her nuns were, and would we please play our music to reassure them and warn off these desert intruders.

Looking south from the high convent wall I couldn’t blame the nuns; there must have been two or three hundred black or red tents pitched round the palms of the oasis a mile away, with camel and horse herds as well as the usual goats. A reek of bitter smoke and other interesting African aromas drifted across the low sandhills, with the murmur of a great multitude. Through my binoculars I could make out groups of armed riders swathed in black, but whether they were wearing the veils which would have identified them as Touareg I couldn’t be sure. It was unlikely, so close to the coast. In fact, it all looked a good deal more romantic and sinister than it was; I doubted if tribesmen had laid a finger on Bin’yassar Convent in seven centuries, and the greatest danger from the present incursion was the cholera with which they would undoubtedly contaminate the local wells.

However, there was the drill to go through, starting with the piper playing on the wall at sunset to let the Bedouin know we were in residence, and a parade outside next morning, with kilts and fixed bayonets. Highlanders are the most conspicuous troops there are, which was why we got this sort of job; the wildest of wild men in North Africa (or anywhere else for that matter) can recognise ‘Cock o’ the North’ when they hear it, and know they are in touch with the Army – it’s not a threat or even a warning so much as a signal, and unless they are really looking for trouble it has only one practical effect: they come closer to gaze silently on these strange northern barbarians in their weird green skirts and funny hats, and to listen to the eerie thrilling sound which fascinates the native ear from Casablanca to the South Seas. (Maybe we
are
one of the Lost Tribes; I wouldn’t be surprised.)