But that evening, after supper, I found myself mounting the narrow stairway to the parapet where the sentries were just going on first stag. It was gloaming, and the desert was taking on that beautiful star-lit sheen under the purple African sky that is so incredibly lovely that it is rather like a coloured postcard in bad taste. The fires and lights were twinkling away down in the village, the last fawn-orange fringe of daylight was dwindling beyond the sand-hills, the last warm wind was touching the parapet, the night stillness was falling on the fort and the shadowy dunes, and Private Brown was humming ‘Ye do the hokey-cokey and ye turn aroond’ as he clattered up the stairway to take his post, rifle in hand. Four sentries, one to each wall – and only my imagination could turn the silhouette of a bonneted Highlander into a helmeted Roman leaning on his hasta, or a burnoused mercenary out of Carthage, or a straight-nosed Greek dreaming of the olive groves under Delphi, or a long-haired savage from the North wrapping his cloak about him against the night air. They had all been here, and they were all long gone – perhaps. And if you smile at the perhaps, wait until you have stood on the wall of a Sahara fort at sundown, watching the shadows lengthen and the silence creep across the sand invisible in the twilight. Then smile.
I went down at last, played beggar-my-neighbour with Keith for half an hour, read an old copy of the Tripoli Ghibli for a little while longer, and then turned in. I didn’t drop off easily; I heard the midnight stag change over, and then the two o’clock, and then I must have dozed, for the next thing I remember is waking suddenly, for no good reason, and lying there, lathered in sweat that soaked the clean towel which was our normal night attire, listening. It took a moment to identify it: a cautious scraping noise, as of a giant rat, somewhere outside. It wasn’t any sound I knew, and I couldn’t locate it, but one thing was certain, it hadn’t any business to be going on.
I slid out and into my trousers and sandals, and stood listening. My door was open, and I went forward and listened again. There was no doubt of it; the sound was coming from the old stable, about twenty yards to my left, against the east wall. Irregular, but continuous, scrape-scrape. I glanced around; there were sentries visible in the dying moonlight on the catwalks to either side, and straight ahead on the gate-wall; plainly they were too far away to hear.
As silently as possible, but not furtively, for I didn’t want the sentries to mistake me, I turned right and walked softly in front of the office, and then cut across the corner of the parade. The sentry on the catwalk overhead stiffened as he caught sight of me, but I waved to him and went on, towards the guardroom. I was sweating as I entered, and I didn’t waste time.
‘Get Sergeant Telfer, quietly. Tell him to come to the stable, not to make a sound. You three, come with me; you, McNab, up to the parapet, and tell the sentries on no account to fire until I give the word. Move.’
Thank God, you don’t have to tell Jocks much when there’s soldiering to do; within five minutes that stable was boxed as tight as a drum – four of us in front of it, in line, crouching down; two riflemen some yards behind, to back up, and two men with torches ready to snap on. The scraping sound was still going on in the stable, quite distinctly, and I thought I could hear someone gasping with exertion. I nodded to Telfer, and he and one of the Jocks crept forward to the stable door, one to each of the heavy leaves; I could see Telfer’s teeth, grinning, and then I snapped – ‘Now!’, the doors were hauled back, the torches went on – and there they were.
Three Arabs, glaring into the torch-light, two of them with shovels, a half-dug hole in the floor – and then they came hurtling out, and I went for the knees of the nearest, and suddenly remembered trying to tackle Jack Ramsay as he came weaving through our three-quarters at Old Anniesland, and how he’d dummied me. This wasn’t Ramsay, though, praise God; he came down with a yelp and a crash, and one of the Jocks completed his ruin by pinning him by the shoulders. I came up, in time to see Telfer and another Jock with a struggling Arab between them, and the third one, who hadn’t even got out of the stable, being submerged by a small knot of Highlanders, one of whom was triumphantly croaking ‘Bo Geesty!’ No doubt of it, McAuslan had his uses when the panic was on.
We quieted the captives, after a moment or two, but there wasn’t a word to be got out of them, and nothing to be deduced from their appearance except that they weren’t genuine desert Buddoos, but more probably from the village or some place farther afield. Two of them were in shirts and trousers, and none of them was what you would call a stalwart savage; more like fellaheen, really. I consigned them to the guardroom, ordered a fifty per cent stand-to on the walls, and turned to examine the stable.
They had dug a shallow hole, no more, in the middle of the stable, and the reek was appalling. Camel stables are odorous at the best of times, and this one had been accommodating beasts, probably, since Scipio’s day. But we had to see what they’d been after, and since a good officer shouldn’t ask his men to do what he won’t do himself . . . I was eyeing one of the fallen shovels reluctantly when a voice spoke at my elbow.
‘Jings!’ it said. ‘Hi, sir, mebbe it’s treasure! Burried treasure! ’
I wouldn’t have thought McAuslan’s deductive powers that fast, myself, but he explained that there had been treasure in Bo Geesty – ‘a jool, the Blue Watter, that Bo Geesty pinched aff his aunty, so he did.’ From the glittering light in his eye I could see that his powers of identification would shortly lead him to the dream-stage where he was marrying Susan Hayward, so I indicated the shovel and asked him would he like to test his theory.
He began digging like a demented Nibelung, choking only occasionally as his shovel released noxious airs, exclaiming ‘Aw, jeez!’ before falling to again with energy. His comrades stood aside as he hurled great lumps of the ordure of centuries from the hole – even for McAuslan, I decided this was too much, and offered to have him spelled, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He entertained us, in gasps as he dug, with a synopsis of the plot of Beau Geste, but I can’t say I paid much attention, for I was getting excited. Whatever the Arabs had been after, it must be something precious – and then his shovel rang, just like the best pirate stories, on something metallic.
We had it out in another five minutes, and my mounting hopes of earth-shaking archaeological discovery died as the torches revealed a twentieth-century metal box for mortar bombs – not British, but patently modern. I sent the others out, in case it was full of live ammo., and gingerly prised back the clasps and raised the lid. It was packed to bursting with papers, wedged almost into a solid mass, because the tin had not been proof against its surroundings, and it was with some difficulty that I worked one loose – it was green, and faded, but it was undoubtedly a bank-note. And so were all the rest.
They were, according to the Tripoli police inspector who came to examine them next day, pre-war Italian notes, and totally worthless. Which was a pity, since their total face value was well over a hundred million lire; I know, because I was one of the suffering members of the court of inquiry which had to count them, rank, congealed and stinking as they were. As the officer who had found them, I was an obvious candidate for membership of that unhappy court, when we got back to the battalion; I, a Tripoli police lieutenant, a major from the Pay Corps, and a subaltern from the Green Howards, who said that if he caught some contagious disease from this job he was going to sue the War Office. We counted very conscientiously for above five minutes, and then started computing in lumps; the Pay Corps man objected, and we told him to go to hell. He protested that our default of duty would be detected by higher authority, and the Green Howard said that if higher authority was game enough to catch him out by counting this lot note by note, then higher authority was a better man than he was. We settled on a figure of 100,246,718 lire, of which we estimated that 75,413,311 were too defaced to be accepted as currency, supposing the pre-war Italian government were still around to support them.
For the rest, the court concluded that the money had been buried by unknown persons
from Yarhuna village, after having possibly been looted from the Italian garrison who had occupied the fort early in the war. The money had lain untouched until water-drilling operations, conducted by Lieutenant D. MacNeill, had alarmed the villagers, who might have supposed that their treasure was being sought, they being unaware that it was now quite worthless. Hence their attempts to enter the fort nocturnally on at least three occasions to remove their hoard, on the last of which they had been detected and apprehended. It was difficult to see, the court added, that proceedings could justifiably be taken against the three captured Arabs, and their release was recommended. Just for spite we also consigned the notes themselves to the care of the provost marshal, who was the pompous ass who had convened the court in the first place, and signed the report solemnly.
‘Serve him right,’ grunted the Green Howard. ‘Let him keep them, and press ’em between the leaves of his confidential reports. Or burn ’em, if he’s got any sense. What, you’re not taking one of them, are you? – don’t be mad, you’ll catch the plague.’
‘Souvenir,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry, the man it’s going to is plague-proof.’
And when I handed it over, with a suggestion that it should be disinfected in a strong solution of carbolic, McAuslan was enraptured.
‘Och, ta, sir,’ he said, ‘that’s awfy decent of ye.’
‘Not a bit; you’re welcome if you want it. You dug it up. But it’s worthless, mind; it won’t buy anything.’
He looked shocked, as though I had suggested an indecency.
‘Ah widnae spend it,’ he protested. ‘Ah’ll tak’ it hame, for a souvenir. Nice to have, like – ye know, tae mind us of bein’ inna desert.’ He went slightly pink. ‘The fellas think Ah’m daft, but Ah liked bein’ inna fort – like inna Foreign Legion, like Gairy Cooper.’
‘You’ve been in the desert before, though. You were in the 51st, weren’t you – Alamein and so on?’
‘Aye, so Ah wis.’ He sniffed thoughtfully, and rubbed his grimy nose. ‘But the fort wis different.’
So it was, but I didn’t quite share his happy memories. As a platoon commander, I was painfully aware that it was the place where Arabs had three times got past my sentries by night. One up to them, one down to us. I was slightly cheered up when – and this is fact, as reported in the local press – a week later, the warehouse where the provost marshal had deposited his noisome cache was broken into by night, and the caseful of useless lire removed. There was much speculation where it had gone.
I can guess. Those persistent desert gentlemen probably have it down in Yarhuna village to this day, and being simple men in some things, if not in breaking and entering, they doubtless still believe that it is a valuable nest-egg for their community. I don’t know who garrisons Fort Yarhuna now – the Libyans, I suppose – but if there’s one thing I’d bet on, it is that when the military move out again, shadowy figures will move in under the old carved gate by night, and put the loot back in a nice safe place. And who is to question their judgement? Fort Yarhuna will still be there a thousand years after the strongest banks of Europe and America have passed into ruins.
Johnnie Cope in the Morning
When I was a very young soldier, doing my recruit training in a snowbound wartime camp in Durham, there was a villainous orderly sergeant who used to get us up in the mornings. He would sneak silently into our hut at 5.30 a.m., where we were frowsting in our coarse blankets against the bitter cold of the room, suddenly snap on all the lights, and start beating the coal-bucket with the poker. At the same time two of his minions would rush from bunk to bunk screaming:
‘Wake-eye! Wake-eye! I can see yer! Gerrup! Gerrup! Gerrup!’
And the orderly sergeant, a creature devoid of pity and any decent feeling, would continue his hellish metallic hammering while he shouted:
‘Getcher cold feet on the warm floor! Har-har!’ and sundry obscenities of his own invention. Then all three would retire, rejoicing coarsely, leaving behind them thirty-six recruits suffering from nervous prostration, to say nothing of ringing in the ears.
But it certainly woke us up, and as I did my first early morning fatigue, which consisted of dragging a six-foot wooden table-top down to the ablutions and scrubbing it with cold water, I used to contrast my own miserable lot with that of his late majesty Louis XIV of France, whose attendants used a very different technique to dig him out of his scratcher. As I recalled, a valet in velvet-soled shoes used to creep into the royal bedchamber at a fairly civilised hour, softly draw back the curtains a little way, and then whisper: ‘It is my humble duty and profound honour to inform your majesty that it is eight-thirty of the clock.’ That, now, is the way to break the bad news, and afterwards the body of majesty was more or less lifted out of bed by a posse of princes of the blood who washed, fed, watered and dressed him in front of the fire. No wooden tables to scrub for young Louis.
And as I wrestled with my brush in the freezing water, barking my knuckles and turning blue all over, I used to have daydreams in which that fiend of an orderly sergeant was transported back in time to old Versailles, where he would clump into the Sun-King’s bedroom in tackety boots at 5.30, guffawing obscenely, thrashing the fire-irons against the fender, and bawling:
‘Levez-vous donc, Jean Crapaud! Wake-eye, wake-eye! Getcher froid pieds on the chaud terre! I can see yer, you frog-eating chancer! Har-har!’
While I concede that this kind of awakening could have done Louis XIV nothing but good, and possibly averted the French Revolution, the whole point of the daydream was that the orderly sergeant would undoubtedly be flung into an oubliette in the Bastille for lèse majesté, there to rot with his red sash and copy of King’s Regulations, while virtuous recruits in the twentieth century drowsed on until the late forenoon.
And while I stood mentally picturing this happy state of affairs, and sponging the icy water off the table-top with the flat of my hand, the sadistic brute would sneak into the ablutions and turn the cold hose on us, screaming:
‘Two minnits to gerron rifle parade, you ’orrible shower! Har-har! Mooo-ve or I’ll blitz yer!’
I wonder that we survived that recruit training, I really do.
You may suppose that that orderly sergeant’s method of intimating reveille was as refined a piece of mental cruelty as even a military mind could devise, and I daresay if I hadn’t later been commissioned into a Highland regiment I would agree. But in fact, there I discovered something worse, and it used to happen once a week, regularly on Friday mornings. In nightmares I can hear it still.
On the other six days of the week reveille was sounded in the conventional way at six, by a bugler on the distant square playing the famous ‘Charlie, Charlie, get out of bed’. If you were a pampered brute of an officer, you used to turn over, mumbling happily, and at six-thirty your orderly would come in with a mug of tea, open the shutters, lay out your kit, and give you the news of the day while you drank, smoked, and coughed contentedly.
But on Fridays it was very different. Then the duty of sounding reveille devolved on the battalion’s pipes and drums, who were bound to march round the entire barrack area, playing full blast. The trouble was, in a spirit of schadenfreude comparable with that of the Durham orderly sergeant’s, they used to assemble in dead silence immediately outside the junior subalterns’ quarters, inflate their beastly bags without so much as a warning sigh, poise their drum-sticks without the suspicion of a click, and then, at a signal from that god-forsaken demented little kelpie of a pipe-sergeant, burst thunderously into the squealing cacophony and ear-splitting drum rolls of ‘Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye waukin’ yet?’
Now, ‘Johnnie Cope’ is one of the most magnificent sounds ever to issue from musical instruments. It is the Highlanders’ war clarion, the tune that is played before battle, the wild music that is supposed to quicken the blood of the mountain man and freeze the foe in his tracks. It commemorates the day two and a half centuries ago when the broadswords came whirling out of the mist at Prestonpans
to fall on Major-General John Cope’s redcoats and cut them to ribbons in something under five minutes. I once watched the Seaforths go in behind it against a Japanese-held village, and saw for the first time that phenomenon which you can’t really appreciate until you have seen it – the unbelievable speed with which Highland troops can accelerate a slow, almost leisurely advance into an all-out charge. And I’ve heard it at military funerals, after ‘Lovat’s Lament’ or ‘Flowers of the Forest’, and never failed to be moved by it. Well played, it is a savage, wonderful sound, unlike any other pipe march – this, probably, because it doesn’t truly belong to the Army, but to the fighting tails of the old clansmen before the government had the sense to get them into uniforms.
But whatever it does, for the Jocks or to the enemy, at the proper time and occasion, its effect at 6 a.m. on a refined and highly-strung subaltern who is dreaming of Rita Hayworth is devastating. The first time I got it, full blast at a range of six feet or so, through a thin shutter, with twenty pipers tearing their lungs out and a dozen side-drums crashing into the thunderous rhythm, I came out of bed like a galvanised ferret, blankets and all, under the impression that the Jocks had Risen, or that the MacLeods were coming to settle things with me and my kinsfolk at long last. My room-mate, a cultured youth of nervous disposition, shot bolt upright from his pillow with a wordless scream, and sat gibbering that the Yanks had dropped the Bomb, and, as usual, in the wrong place. For a few deafening moments we just absorbed it, with the furniture shuddering and the whole room in apparent danger of collapse, and then I flung open the shutters and rebuked the musicians, who were counter-marching outside.