The Complete McAuslan (8 page)

‘Wan o’ the boys off the ship. Fella Peterson. He was gaun tae the toon, an’ Ah offered tae staun’ ‘im a drink. Ye remember,’ he went on earnestly, ‘ye told me tae fraternise. Well, we fraternised, an’ he got fu’. Awfy quick, he got fu’,’ McAuslan went on, and it was plain to see that his companion’s incapacity offended him. ‘He drank the drink Ah bought ‘im, and it made ‘im fleein’, and then he was buyin’ drink himself’ at an awfy rate . . .’

‘That was the thing, sir,’ explained the redcap. ‘This sailor had more money than you’ve ever seen; he looked like he’d robbed a bank. That was really why we pulled them in, sir, for protection. Weedy little chap, the sailor, but he had hundreds of pounds worth of lire on him.’

Suddenly a great light dawned. Peterson was the name of Samuels’ clerk, who had been going to place his bets for him, and McAuslan had obviously encountered him beforehand, and full of good fellowship had bought him liquor, and Peterson, the weedy little chap, must have been unused to strong waters, and had forgotten responsibility and duty and his captain’s orders, and had proceeded to go on an almighty toot. So it seemed obvious that whatever custom the bookies had attracted that day, Samuels’ had not been part of it. His money (and the ship’s funds and my jocks’ pay) was safely in the military police office safe, less what McAuslan and Peterson had expended with crying ‘Bring in!’ Samuels could make that up himself, and serve him right. Also, he could have fun explaining to the M.P.s just how one of his sailors came to be rolling about town with all that cash on his person.

‘McAuslan,’ I said, ‘in your own way you’re a great man. Tell me,’ I asked the redcap, ‘are you going to charge him?’

‘Well,’ said the redcap, ‘he wasn’t what you’d call incapably stinking, just happy. It was the sailor who was paralytic. He still is. So . . .’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Look, McAuslan, you’re a lucky man. You shouldn’t go about getting little sailors stotius . . .’

‘I was jist fraternisin’, honest . . .’

‘Right. You can fraternise some more. What I want you to do is go over to the ship, look out Lieutenant Samuels, and tell him, in your own well-chosen words, what happened today. Tell him the money’s in the M.P. safe. And then you might offer to buy him a drink; he’ll probably need one. And McAuslan, if he tries to hit you, you’re not to clock him one, understand? Remember, be fraternal and polite; he’s your superior officer and you wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings.’

We took our leave of the civil redcaps, and I watched McAuslan striding purposefully towards the harbour, bonnet down over his eyes, to break the glad news to Samuels. It was growing dusk, and all in all, it had been quite a day.

I saw McGlinchy many years after, from the top of a Glasgow bus. Although his fair hair was fading and receding, and his face looked middle-aged and tired, there was no mistaking the loose-jointed, untidy walk. He was carrying a string bag, and he looked of no account at all in his stained raincoat and old shoes. And then the bus took me past. I wondered if he remembered those few minutes out in the sunlight. Perhaps not; he wasn’t the kind who would think twice about it. But I remember McGlinchy when . . .

Wee Wullie

The duties of a regimental orderly officer cover pretty well everything from inspecting the little iced cakes in the canteen to examining the prisoners in the guardroom cells to ensure that they are still breathing. In our battalion, the cells were seldom occupied; the discipline imposed on our volatile mixture of Aberdonians and Glaswegians was intelligent rather than tough, and more often than not trouble was dealt with before it got the length of a charge sheet.

So when I walked into the guardroom for a late night look round and saw one of the cell doors closed and padlocked, and a noise issuing from behind it like the honking of a drowsy seal, I asked McGarry, the provost sergeant, who his guest for the night might be.

‘It’s yon animal, Wee Wullie,’ he said. ‘Sharrap, ye Glasgow heathen! He’s gey fu’ sir, an’ half-killed a redcap in the toon. They had to bring him here in a truck wi’ his hands tied and a man sittin’ on his heid. And afore I could get him in there I had to restrain him, mysel’.’

I realised that McGarry had a swelling bruise on one cheek and that his usually immaculate khaki shirt was crumpled; he was a big man, with forearms like a blacksmith, and the skin on his knuckles was broken. I was glad it wasn’t me he had had to restrain.

‘He’s sleepin’ like a bairn noo, though,’ he added, and he said it almost affectionately.

I looked through the grill of the cell. Wee Wullie was lying on the plank, snoring like an organ. Between his massively booted feet at one end, and the bonnet on his grizzled head at the other, there was about six and a half feet of muscular development that would have done credit to a mountain gorilla. One of his puttees was gone, his shirt was in rags, and there was a tear in his kilt; his face, which at the best of times was rugged, looked as though it had been freshly trampled on. On the palm of one outstretched hand still lay a trophy of his evening’s entertainment – a Military Police cap badge. In that enormous brown paw it looked about as big as a sixpence.

‘You did well to get him inside,’ I told McGarry.

‘Ach, he’s no’ bad tae manage when he’s puggled,’ said the provost. ‘A big, coorse loon, but the booze slows him doon.’

I had some idea of what McGarry called ‘no’ bad tae manage’. I recalled Hogmanay, when Wee Wullie had returned from some slight jollification in the Arab quarter having whetted his appetite for battle on the local hostelries, and erupted through the main gate intent on slaughter. It had been at that moment of the day which, for a soldier, is memorable above all others; the hour when the Last Post is sounded, and everything else is still while the notes float sadly away into the velvet dark; the guard stand stiffly to attention by the main gate with the orderly officer behind, and the guardroom lanterns light up the odd little ceremony that has hardly changed in essentials since the Crimea. It is the end of the Army’s day, peaceful and rather beautiful.

Into this idyll had surged Wee Wullie, staggering drunk and bawling for McGarry to come out and fight. For a moment his voice had almost drowned the bugle, and then (because he was Wee Wullie with 30 years’ service behind him) he had slowly come to attention and waited, swaying like an oak in a storm, until the call was ended. As the last note died away he hurled aside his bonnet, reeled to the foot of the guardroom steps, and roared:

‘Coom oot, McGarry! Ah’m claimin’ ye! Ye’ve had it, ye big Hielan’ stirk! Ye neep! Ye teuchter, ye!’

McGarry came slowly out of the guardroom, nipping his cigarette, and calmly regarded the Neanderthal figure waiting for him. It looked only a matter of time before Wee Wullie started drumming on his chest and pulling down twigs to eat, but McGarry simply said,

‘Aye, Wullie, ye’re here again. Ye comin’ quiet, boy?’

Wullie’s reply was an inarticulate bellow and a furious fistswinging charge, and five minutes later McGarry was kneeling over his prostrate form, patting his battered face, and summoning the guard to carry the body inside. They heaved the stricken giant up, and he came to himself just as they were manhandling him into the cooler. His bloodshot eyes rolled horribly and settled on McGarry, and he let out a great cry of baffled rage.

‘Let me at ’im! Ah want at ‘im!’ He struggled furiously, and the four men of the guard clung to his limbs and wrestled him into the cell.

‘Wheesht, Wullie,’ said McGarry, locking the door. ‘Just you lie doon like a good lad. Ye’ll never learn; ye cannie fight McGarry when ye’re fu’. Now just wheesht, or I’ll come in tae ye.’

‘You!’ yelled Wullie through the bars. ‘Oh, see you! Your mither’s a Tory!’

McGarry laughed and left him to batter at the door until he was tired. It had become almost a ritual with the two of them, which would be concluded when Wullie had sobered up and told McGarry he was sorry. It was Wullie’s enduring problem that he liked McGarry, and would fight with him only when inflamed by drink; yet drunk, he could not hope to beat him as he would have done sober.

I thought of these things as I looked into the cell at Wee Wullie asleep. On that wild Hogmanay I should, of course, have used my authority to reprimand and restrain him, and so prevented the unseemly brawl with the provost sergeant, but you don’t reprimand a rogue elephant or a snapped wire hawser, either of which would be as open to sweet reason as Wee Wullie with a bucket in him. The fact that he would have been overwhelmed by remorse afterwards for plastering me all over the guardroom wall would not really have been much consolation to either of us. So I had remained tactfully in the background while Sergeant McGarry had fulfilled his regimental duty of preserving order and repressing turbulence.

And now it had happened again, for the umpteenth time, but this time it was bad. From what McGarry had told me, Wee Wullie had laid violent hands on a military policeman, which meant that he might well be court-martialled – which, inevitably, for a man with a record like his, would mean a long stretch in the glasshouse at Cairo.

‘He’ll no’ get away wi’ it this time, poor loon,’ said McGarry. ‘It’ll be outwith the battalion, ye see. Aye, auld Wullie, he’ll be the forgotten man of Heliopolis nick if the redcaps get their way.’ He added, apparently irrelevantly, ‘For a′ the Colonel can say.’

I left the guardroom and walked across the starlit parade ground through the grove of tamarisks to the white-walled subalterns’ quarters, wondering if this was really the finish of Wee Wullie. If it was, well, the obvious thing to do would be to thank God we were rid of a knave, an even bigger battalion pest than the famous Private McAuslan, the dirtiest soldier in the world, an Ishmael, a menace, a horrible man. At the same time . . .

All that was really wrong with Wee Wullie was his predilection for strong drink and violent trouble. He was drunk the first time I ever saw him, on a desert convoy passing under Marble Arch, that towering monument to Mussolini’s vanity which bestrides the road on the Libyan border. I had noticed this huge man, first for his very size, secondly for his resemblance to the late William Bendix, and lastly for his condition, which was scandalous. He was patently tight, but still at the good-humoured stage, and was being helped aboard a truck by half a dozen well-wishers. They dropped him several times, and he lay in the sand roaring. I was a green subaltern, but just experienced enough to know when not to intervene, so I left them to it, and eventually they got him over the tailboard. (It is astonishing just how often an officer’s duty seems to consist of looking the other way, or maybe I was just a bad officer.)

In the battalion itself he was a curious mixture. As far as the small change of soldiering went, Wullie was reasonably efficient. His kit at inspections was faultless, his knowledge and deportment exact, so far as they went, which was just far enough for competence. In his early days he had been as high as sergeant before being busted (I once asked the Adjutant when this had been, and he said, ‘God knows, about the first Afghan War, I should think’), but in later years the authorities had despaired of promoting him to any rank consistent with his length of service. Occasionally they would make him a lance-corporal, just for variety, and then Wullie would pick a fight with the American Marines, or tip a truck over, or fall in alcoholic stupor into a river and have to be rescued, and off would come his stripe again. He had actual service chevrons literally as long as his arm, but badges of rank and good conduct he had none.

Yet he enjoyed a curiously privileged position. In drill, for example, it was understood that there were three ways of doing things: the right way, the wrong way, and Wee Wullie’s way. His movements were that much slower, more ponderous, than anyone else’s; when he saluted, his hand did not come up in a flashing arc, but jerked up so far, and then travelled slowly to his right eyebrow. On parade, there was some incongruity in the sight of a platoon of wee Gleska keelies and great-chested Aberdonians (who run to no spectacular height, as a rule) with Gargantua in their midst, his rifle like a popgun in his huge fist, and himself going through the motions with tremendous intensity, half a second behind everyone else. There was almost a challenge in the way he performed, as though he was conscious of being different, and yet there was about him a great dignity. Even the Regimental Sergeant Major recognised it, and excused much.

This was when he was sober and passive. Even then he was withdrawn and monosyllabic; only when he was slightly inebriated could he be described as sociable. Beyond that he was just outrageous, a dangerous, wickedly powerful ruffian whom only the redoubtable McGarry could manage single-handed.

Yet there was in the battalion a curiously protective instinct towards him. It seemed to emanate from the Colonel, who had ordered that Wullie was never to be brought before him for disciplinary action except when it was unavoidable. Thus his crimes and misdemeanours were usually dealt with at company level, and he got off fairly lightly. When the Colonel did have to deal with him he would consign Wullie to the cells and afterwards try to find him a quiet niche where he would be out of trouble, invariably without success. When he was made medical orderly he got at the M.O.’s medicinal brandy and wrecked the place; he lost the job of padre’s batman through his unceasing profanity; attached to the motor transport section he got tremendously high and put a three-ton truck through a brick wall (‘I always said that particular experiment was sheer lunacy,’ said the Adjutant. ‘I mean, a truck was all he needed, wasn’t it?’). An attempt was even made to get him into the band, and the little pipe-sergeant was scandalised. ‘He has no sense of time, colonel sir,’ he protested. ‘Forbye, look at the size of his feet, and think of that clumph-clumph-clumphing on the great ceremonial parades.’

In the end he was made the M.O.’s gardener, and he seemed to take to it. He did not do any actual gardening himself, but he could address the Arab gardeners in their own language, and got all the plants neatly arranged in columns of threes, dressed by the right, and in order of what he considered their seniority. For in his quiet moments there was a strong military sense in Wullie, as there should have been after 30 years in uniform. This was brought home to me in the only conversation of any duration I ever had with him, one day when I was orderly officer and was inspecting the whitewashed stones which Wullie’s Arabs were arranging in the headquarters plot. For some reason I mentioned to Wullie that I was not intending to stay in the Army when my number came up, and he said, with his direct, intent stare, ‘Then ye’re a fool, sir.’ Only Wullie could have called an officer a fool, in a way which carried no disrespect, and only Wullie would have added ‘sir’ to the rebuke.