The Complete McAuslan

  ‘Ah wis jist gaun ower the bridge for a – ’ McAuslan was beginning, but fortunately the rest was lost in Gunner upbraidings and demands for explanation. I hustled him to his feet, whispering sharply to him to keep his lip buttoned, for I knew the half had not been told unto me, and whatever it was I didn’t want the Gunners to hear it. They weren’t in the mood.

  ‘How the blazes did he get through?’ demanded the Captain. ‘Dammit, our posts were as tight as a tick – he couldn’t have!′ Aggrievedly he added: ‘Nobody saw him!’

  ‘That,’ I pointed out, perhaps tactlessly, ‘is the object of the exercise. You confirm he’s still got his tags, and he put out the lamp? Fine; let’s go, McAuslan.’

  We left them recriminating, and I got him in the lee of a truck. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Talk.’

  ‘Ah wis jist gaun ower the bridge for . . . tae do . . . Ah mean . . .’ he began miserably, holding his drawers up. ‘Ah mean, Ah wantit fur tae relieve mysel’. Ah wis fair burstin’, honest, so Ah wis,’ he continued earnestly. ‘No kiddin’, sur, Ah didnae mean tae break their lamp, straight up, but yon man roared at me, an’ Ah jist couldnae help it. An’ Ah wis burstin’ – ’

  ‘That’s all right, McAuslan; it doesn’t matter. How in God’s name did you manage to get in at all? The last thing I saw you were out yonder, with a Gunner breathing down your neck. Didn’t he catch you?’

  ‘Aw, him.’ He made a dismissive gesture, unwisely with the hand holding his pants up, and grabbed them just in time. ‘Big animal he wis. He got haud o’ me, an’ sat on ma heid, but Ah wis too fly fur ‘im. Ye see, when he says ‘Gin’ tae me, Ah says “Gin” back tae him. ‘Whit′s that?′ says he. ′Gin′, says Ah. ‘Ah’m on your side, Jimmy.’ An’ the silly big soad let me up, an’ Ah clattered ‘im wan an’ left ’im haudin’ himsel’. He wis a right mug, yon,’ added McAuslan, with some satisfaction.

  ‘Well I’m damned!’ I said reverently. Talk about peasant cunning. ‘But how on earth did you get in – I mean, not only within sight of the lamp, but actually up to it? That was . . . well, marvellous – they had sentries everywhere!’

  ‘Ah, weel, ye see,’ he said, hitching up his underwear and assuming a professorial pose, ‘it wis like this. When Ah got awa’ frae the mug — ‘Gin’, says he, wid ye believe it? – Ah took a look fur ra North Star, but Ah couldnae see the bluidy thing. It must hiv gone oot, or somethin’. Onywye, Ah wis aboot fed up wi’ the map-readin’ lark – Ah mean, Ah could’ve done it nae bother, efter a’ ye’d tellt me, but Wee Wullie had loast ra map, an’ ra compass – och, he’s a right big eedjit, yon,’ said McAuslan with feeling. ‘Nae sense, an’ him half-fleein’ wi’ rum. He’s an awfy man in drink, so he is. An’ he’s nae use wi’ a map, onywye. He wis wandered. He wandered me, Ah don’t mind tellin’ ye,’ he added indignantly. ‘So when Ah got awa’ frae the mug, Ah hid in a ditch fur a wee while, an’ along comes a truck. It stoaped, so Ah crawled underneath, so’s they widnae see me. They wis Gunners, an’ soon they brought along some o’ oor boys that they’d nabbed, an’ pit them in ra truck, an’ startit up. An’ Ah wis fed up trampin’ through the sand, so Ah jist catched hold o’ the pipes unner ra truck, an’ got me feet roon’ them, an’ they brung me in. An’ when they stoapt by the brig Ah jist let go an’ cam’ oot, an’ Ah wis burstin’ somethin’ hellish, so Ah went fur – ’

  ‘Stop, stop,’ I said, trying to take it in. By his own account he had travelled about a mile clinging to the bottom of a three-ton truck, with a desert road speeding by a couple of feet beneath his ill-covered rump. I shuddered, and looked at him with awe. Initiative, I was thinking, determination, endurance . . . map-reading and compass work not so hot, admittedly, but maps aren’t everything.

  ‘Ah’m sorry aboot the lamp, though, sur . . . it was a accident, Ah didnae see the thing, an’ when he shoutit Ah jist breenged intae it, an’ . . . Ah suppose,’ he added, wrinkling his urchin face dolefully, ‘that it’ll mean anither stoppage oot ma’ pey, an’ Ah’m still payin’ fur the tea urn Ah dropped on cookhoose fatigue, an’ MacPherson’s glasses, an’ . . .’

  ‘No,’ I said emphatically, ‘it won’t be stopped out of your pay. Or if it is, you’ll easily be able to pay for it out of the three hundred lire you’ve earned tonight. Never mind why.’ I looked at him, backed up defensively against the truck, clutching his revolting drawers, knuckling his grubby nose. ‘Son, you’re great. Just don’t tell anyone how you got through to the lamp, understand? They didn’t spot you, so they’re not entitled to know. Right – hop into the truck and we’ll get you back to barracks, and you can change out of your evening clothes. Well done, McAuslan.’

  ‘Och, ta very much, sur. That’s awfy good o’ ye,’ said McAuslan – but he said it with a strained, worried look which puzzled me until he added, pleadingly: ‘Afore Ah get intae ra truck . . . Ah’m still burstin’, no kiddin’ . . .’

  For the record, MacKenzie and the Adjutant and the Padre paid up like gentlemen — suspicious gentlemen, but I didn’t enlighten them. I turned the money over to McAuslan, enjoining him to put it straight into saving certificates for himself and Wee Wullie. They didn’t, I’m afraid. Instead they went on a magnificent toot the following Saturday, which concluded with Wee Wullie staggering back to barracks with McAuslan on his back finding his way, he alleged, by the stars. I might have taken more satisfaction in the success of his navigation if I hadn’t been the orderly officer who met them at the gate.

  The Sheikh and the Dustbin

  When I was a young soldier, and had not yet acquired the tobacco vice (which began with scrounging cigarettes at routemarch halts when everyone else lit up and I felt left out) I used to win cross-country races. This surprised me, for while I had been athletic enough at school I had never been fleet of foot; in the infants’ egg-and-spoon race, and later in the hundred yards, I would come labouring in well behind the leaders, and as a Rugby full-back I learned to be in the right place beforehand because I knew that no amount of running would get me there in time if I wasn’t. So it was a revelation, when the Army hounded us out in the rain to run miles across soggy Derbyshire in P.T. kit, to discover that I could keep up a steady stride and finish comfortably ahead of the mud-splattered mob, winning 7s. 6d. in saving certificates and having the Company Sergeant-Major (who was seventeen stone, all fat, and smoked like a chimney) wheeze enthusiastically: ‘Aye, happen lad′ll mek a Brigade rooner! Good at all sport, are yeh, MacNeill? Play football, roogby, cricket, do yeh? Aye, right, yeh′ll be left inner in’t coompany ’ockey team this art’noon, an’ report to’t gym fer boxin’ trainin’ on Moonday. Welter-weight, are yeh – mebbe middle-weight, we’ll see. Done any swimmin’, ‘ave yeh? ‘Ow about ′igh joomp . . . ?’ That’s the military mind, you see; if you’re good at one thing, you’re good at everything.

  It didn’t take long to convince him that I’d never held a hockey stick in my life and was a wildly unscientific boxer, but being a resourceful old warrant officer he made good use of my running ability, in a rather unusual way – and did much to advance my military education. For during those weeks of basic training I was detailed several times to escort prisoners to the military jail, the idea being that if during the journey by rail and road a prisoner somehow won free of the Redcap to whom he was handcuffed, I would run him down — what I was to do when I caught him was taken for granted. It never came to that; all our malefactors went quietly to the great grim converted factory at Sowerby Bridge which was the North Country’s most feared and fearsome glasshouse and remains in my memory as one of the most horrible places I have ever seen. If my cross-country talents did nothing else, they won me a first-hand look at an old-style military nick which convinced me that, come what might, I was going to be a good little soldier.

  The bleak walls and yards with their high wire-meshed gates, the lean, skull-faced guards screaming high-pitched, the crop-headed inmates doubling frantically wherever they went, our prisoner having to strip naked at high speed in the cold recept
ion cell under the glaring eye of what looked like a homicidal maniac in khaki – all these were daunting enough, but what chilled my marrow was the sight of a single, everyday domestic object standing outside a doorway: an ordinary dust-bin. Only this one had been burnished until it gleamed, literally, like silver; you could have shaved at it without difficulty. The mere thought of how it had got that way told me more about Sowerby Bridge than I wanted to know; think about it next time you put out the rubbish.

  I don’t suppose that military prisons are quite as stark as that in this enlightened age (where did they go, those gaunt, shrieking fanatics of staff men? Do they sit, in gentle senility and woolly slippers, watching Coronation Street?) but in their time they were places of dreadful repute – Stirling, and Aldershot (whose glazed roof is supposed to have inspired the name ‘glasshouse’); Heliopolis, outside Cairo, where prisoners were forced to run up and down the infamous ′Hill′, and Trimulghari, in India, home of the soul-destroying well drill in which wells had to be filled and emptied again and again and again. Perhaps rumour made them out worse than they were, but having been inside Sowerby Bridge, I doubt it. Reactionary old soldiers speculate wistfully on their reintroduction for modem criminals and football hooligans, forgetting that you can no more bring them back than you can bring back the world they belonged to; like conscription, they are just part of military history – for which the football hooligans can be thankful.

  However, this is not a treatise on glasshouses, and if I have reflected on them it is only because they are part of the train of thought that begins whenever I remember Suleiman ibn Aziz, Lord of the Grey Mountain, who had no connection with them personally. But he was a military prisoner, and belongs in the same compartment of my memory as Sowerby Bridge, and barred windows, and Lovelace’s poem to Lucasta, and ‘jankers’, and McAuslan and Wee Wullie labouring on the rockpile, and the time I myself spent in cells as a ranker (the sound of that metal-shod door slamming is one you don’t forget in a hurry, when you’ve been on the wrong side of it), and all my varied thoughts and recollections about what the Army used to call ‘close tack’. Detention, in other words, and if it has two symbols for me, one is that gleaming dustbin and the other is old Suleiman.

  He was quite the unlikeliest, and certainly the most distinguished prisoner ever to occupy a cell in our North African barracks. I won’t say he was the most eccentric, because those bare stone chambers at the back of the guardroom were occasionally tenanted by the likes of McAuslan and Wee Wullie, but he was more trouble than all the battalion’s delinquents put together – something, fortunately, which happened only on Hogmanay, when it was standing-room only in the cells and Sergeant McGarry’s provost staff were hard pressed to accommodate all the revellers.

  They were busy enough during the rest of the year, too, but not because our Jocks were rowdier than any other soldiers; if our cells were well used it was because the Colonel, unlike some commanders, refused to use the glasshouse as a dumping-ground for incorrigibles. To him, a man in Heliopolis was a dead loss to the regiment, and a failure, and he would move heaven and earth to keep our worst offenders out of the Big House – especially if they had been good men at war. Wee Wullie’s record of violence and drunkenness should have put him on the Hill for years – but Wullie had played the soldier when it counted, in the Western Desert, and the regiment had a long memory. As it did for the remarkable Phimister, a genuine hero of Japanese captivity who must thereafter be forgiven for spending more time on the run from the Redcaps than he did on parade. It wasn’t easy, and the Colonel had to do some inspired string-pulling on occasion, but no one doubted it was worth it. A Highland regiment is a family, and settles its own differences within itself – if that sounds trite, it’s true. So when Phimister went walkabouts yet again and was picked up trying to board a tramp steamer in Tunis, or Wullie overturned a police jeep and battled with its occupants, or McAuslan went absent and tried to pawn a two-inch mortar in the bazaar (so help me, it’s a fact), there was no thought of shipping them to the glasshouse; they did their time in our own cells under the iron hand of McGarry, digging and carrying in sweltering heat, deprived of tobacco and alcohol, and safely locked in at night. It was genuine hard labour, they hated it, it kept them out of trouble, and as McGarry used to say:

  ‘They come tae nae herm wi’ me. What? They were never so weel aff in their lives! Wullie’s sober an’ McAuslan’s clean, an’ that’s mair than ye can say when they’re on the ootside. I don’t gi’e them any bother – an’ by God they don’t gi’e me any.’

  Looking at McGarry, you might have feared the worst from that last remark. All provost staff tend to resemble galley oversees, and he was rather like an outsize Ernest Brognine playing Ivan the Mad Torturer, but the appearance was deceptive. Despite barrack-room gossip, McGarry never laid hands on a man unless he was hit first, in which case he hit back - once. (The exception was Wee Wullie, who had to be hit several times.) For the rest, McGarry got by on presence and personality; the mere sight of that huge figure at the top of the guardroom steps, thumbs hooked in the top of his kilt as he coldly surveyed the scene, was the most potent disciplinary force in the battalion.

  It was into this strange guardroom world that Suleiman ibn Aziz came unexpectedly on a summer night. I was orderly officer, and had just finished the routine inspection of prisoners to make sure they were still breathing and not trying to tunnel their way out. There were two in residence: McAuslan starting fourteen days after his brief career as a mortar salesman, and Phimister as usual. I was signing the book when I noticed that one of the four vacant cells was open – and within there was an undoubted rug on the floor, a table, chair, chest-of-drawers, jug and wash-basin, and in place of the usual plank and blanket there was a pukka bed, with sheets and pillows. I thought I must be seeing things.

  ‘Who in the world is that for?’ I asked. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve got the Brigadier in close tack!’

  ‘Nae idea, sir,’ said McGarry. ‘I just got word tae have a cell ready, an’ then the Adjutant himsel’ turns up tae see tae the furniture. It’s no’ a regular client, anyway.’

  ‘Somebody from outside? He must be pretty special. But why us?’

  ‘Strongest jyle in the province, this,’ said McGarry, not without satisfaction. ‘God kens what kind o’ sodgers Mussolini built this barracks for, but he wasnae takin’ ony chances wi’ his defaulters. These walls is six feet thick. There’s tae be a special sentry on the door, too.’

  This was unprecedented – as was the appearance of the Colonel, Adjutant, and second-in-command at the main gate just after Last Post, when a staff car arrived bearing the Provost Marshal and a small figure in a black burnous and silver-trimmed kafilyeh handcuffed to a Redcap escort. He stood sullenly while the Colonel and the Provost Marshal conferred briefly, and then he was uncuffed and brought up the guardroom steps for delivery to McGarry; I had only a glimpse of a lean, lined swarthy face with an enormous beak of a nose and a white tuft of beard, and two bright angry eyes glaring under the kafilyeh hood. They hustled him inside, and the Adjutant, who had been hovering like an agitated hen, beckoned me to follow to his office, where the Colonel was sounding off at the Provost Marshal:

  ‘. . . and you can tell G.H.Q. that I don’t take kindly to having my barracks turned into a transit camp for itinerant bedouin. What did you say the beggar’s name was?’

  ‘Suleiman ibn Aziz, sir,’ said the P.M. ‘Known in Algeria as the Lord of the Grey Mountain, apparently.’ He hesitated, looking apologetic. ‘In Morocco they call him the Black Hand of God. So I’m told, sir.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ said the Colonel. ‘How long are we supposed to keep him?’

  ‘Just a week or two, I hope – until the French come to collect him. I know it’s a nuisance, sir, but there’s really nothing to worry about; he’s over seventy.’

  ‘I’m not in the least worried,’ snapped the Colonel, who didn’t like the P.M. at the best of times. ‘Nor am I a damned innkeeper. W
hy’s he so important, anyway?’

  ‘Well, sir,’ said the P.M., looking impressive, ‘I’m sure you’ve heard of Abd-el Krim . . . ?′ The Adjutant’s head came up at that famous name; like me, he knew his P. C. Wren. The Colonel frowned.

  ‘Krim? The chief who led the Riff Rebellion in Algeria, back in the twenties? Gave the French Foreign Legion a hell of a dance, didn’t he? Yes, I’ve heard of him . . .’

  ‘The Red Shadow!’ said the Adjutant brightly, and the Colonel gave him a withering look.

  ‘Thank you, Michael, you can play a selection from The Desert Song later.’ He turned back to the P.M. ‘I thought Krim surrendered to the French 20 years ago – what’s this bird got to do with him?’

  ‘Absolutely right, sir, Krim did surrender,’ said the P.M. ‘But Suleiman didn’t. He’d been Krim’s right-hand man from the start of the Riff revolt, near the turn of the century, commanded his cavalry – he was the man who drove the Legion out of Taza in ’24, overran their forts, beat up their columns, played hell all over. Real Beau Geste stuff,’ he was going on enthusiastically, until the Colonel raised a bleak eye from scraping his pipe. ‘Yes, well . . . he had something like 20,000 Riffs behind him then, but when the French really went to town in ’26 Krim packed in with most of ’em, and Suleiman was left with just a handful. Swore he’d never give up, took to the Moroccan mountains, and has been hammering away for twenty years, off and on – raiding, ambushing, causing no end of trouble. The French captured him twice, but he escaped both times.’ The P.M. paused. ‘The second time was from Devil’s Island.’

  There was silence, and the Colonel stopped scraping for a moment. Then he asked: ‘Where did you learn all this?’