We talked and laughed and reminisced, and to my boundless delight he leafed through the books, commenting and quoting with that ironic little grin that I remembered so well; he seemed genuinely pleased with them, and what with happiness and the single malt I forgot all about the plane I was supposed to be catching, and just sat there content, studying the lined brown face and hooded bright eyes, and listening to the clipped Edwardian drawl of three generations ago. At last he said:
‘I’ve only one bone to pick with you, young fella.’ He flipped open The General Danced at Dawn and nailed the preface with a gnarled forefinger. ’Yes, there it is. What the devil d’you mean by saying “The Highland battalion in this book never existed”?’ He sat back, pipe clamped between his teeth, and fixed me with a frosty grey eye. ‘You know perfectly well it existed. You were in it, weren’t you? I commanded the dam’ thing, I ought to know – ’
’Yes, sir, I know – but I can’t pretend that all the things in the stories actually happened . . . not in our battalion, anyway ―’
‘And here again,’ he went on, ignoring me. ‘This next phrase, or clause, or whatever you call it: “inasmuch as the people in the stories are fictitious”. That’s rot. In fact, I’m not sure it isn’t libellous rot. Am I a fiction?’ He sat upright, regarding me sternly over his pipe, looking extremely factual. ‘Are you? Can you look me in the eye and tell me that McAuslan never existed? I’m dam’ sure you can’t – because he did.’
‘Yes, but that wasn’t his real name – ’
‘Of course it wasn’t. His real name was Mac—.’ He grinned triumphantly. ‘Wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, my God,’ I said. ‘Yes, it was. D’you know, sir, you’re the only person who’s ever identified him – ’
‘You surprise me. I’d have thought that anyone who’d ever seen the brute closer than half a mile would have recognised him in the book at once.’
‘Mind you,’ I said, ‘he’s slightly composite. I mean, the character in the book is 90 per cent Mac—, but there’s a bit of another chap in him as well.’
‘Quite so. Private J—, of C Company. Sandy-haired chap, with a slight squint, shirt-tail kept coming out.’
I stared at the man in disbelief. ‘How on earth did you know that?’
‘Your trouble,’ said the Colonel patiently, ‘is that you think no one else in the battalion ever noticed anything. It was perfectly obvious – whenever you had McAuslan doing something that wasn’t characteristic of Mac—, I thought: “He’s got that wrong. That’s not like Mac— at all. Who is it?” And then I remembered J—, and realised that you’d tacked a little of him into the character. Sometimes you changed people over altogether. Take the second-in-command . . . the man you’ve made the second-in-command was actually in our first battalion, and you never met him till we got back to Edinburgh, isn’t that so?’ He smiled at me knowingly, and took a smug sip of Glenfiddich.
‘Yes, his real name was R—. That’s the fellow. You’re an unscrupulous young devil, aren’t you?’ He leafed over a few pages. ‘Ah, yes, Wee Wullie – why did you call him that? You couldn’t hope to disguise the real man. Not from anyone who knew him.’
‘Law of libel – and a bit of delicacy,’ I explained. ‘After all, he’s a pretty rough diamond, as I’ve described him.’
‘Well, so he was, wasn’t he? And he comes out pretty well, in your story.’ He studied his glass for a long moment. ‘No more heroic than he really was in fact, though. You’ll have to tell the true story some day, you know.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I will.’
‘See that you do.’ He picked up the book again, chuckled, frowned, and laid it down. ‘Anyway, you shouldn’t have said the battalion didn’t exist, or that the people were fictitious, or given the impression that the stories were made up – ’
‘Well, they’re a mixture – a lot of fact and a bit of fiction. The trouble is, the bits people think are fictitious – ’
‘Are usually the truest bits of the lot. I know. The Palestine train, and the football team in Malta, eh? And the haunted fort, and the one-hundred-and-twenty-eightsome reel?’
‘Well, there’s a bit of exaggeration here and there – and I have said that I’ve used my imagination – ’
‘As if you ever had any! Mark you – you’ve certainly used it in one direction.’ He made a performance of filling his pipe, grumbling to himself and looking across the room. ‘You’ve been far too dam’ kind to that old Colonel,’ he said gruffly.
It was my turn to study my glass. ‘Not half as kind as he was to me,’ I said.
We finished the bottle, and in an alcoholic haze I glanced at my watch and realised I had a bare forty minutes to get to Heathrow for my flight to Zagreb.
‘Yugoslavia?’ said the Colonel. ‘What the devil are you going there for? Ghastly place – nothing but mountains and Bolshevik bandits.’
I explained that I was going out to write a film script – or part of a script. Another writer had done the original, but there had been cast changes and various alterations were wanted, including a new ending.
‘Most films are tripe,’ said the Colonel firmly. ‘Bambi wasn’t bad, though. What’s this one about?’
‘Our special service people in the war . . . blowing up a bridge to stop a German advance. Partisans and all that.’
‘Sounds all right,’ admitted the Colonel. ‘Who’s making it – our people or the Yanks?’
‘They’re American producers, I believe.’
‘Well, for God’s sake don’t let them have our chaps going about shouting “On the double!” and “Left face!” and saluting with their hats off. Damned nonsense!’
I dropped him off near his home in Chelsea, and the last I ever saw of him was the tall spare figure in tweeds leaning on his stick and throwing me a salute which I returned (without a hat on) as the taxi sped away. For the next year or two we exchanged Christmas cards, and now and then I heard odd scraps of gossip about him. He’d been on holiday in the Middle East, in a country where some crisis had blown up all of a sudden, and British nationals had had to be evacuated quickly ― he’d taken charge, quite unofficially, of the evacuation, and everyone had got out safely. Another time, he’d visited our battalion in Northern Ireland, going out with a street patrol at night, just to get the feel of things, an octogenarian in a flak-jacket.
And then one morning I got a phone call to say that he had died, in Erskine Hospital above the Clyde, where old Scottish soldiers go. And because he was, as fairly as I could depict him, the Colonel of these stories, I inscribe this book to his memory, with gratitude and affection, and no qualms whatever about identification:
Lieutenant-Colonel R. G. (Reggie) Lees
2nd Battalion, Gordon Highlanders
‘Ninety-twa, no’ deid yet’—
1
ile = oil (castor oil).
2
The Pioneer was a legendary hotel in Bombay during the last war where, it was said, deserters from the forces in India could find a clandestine passage back to Britain, being smuggled out on homeward-bound ships. Finlayson Green is a pleasant, tree-shaded sward near the Singapore waterfront; it used to be said that if a deserter loitered there long enough, furtive little Chinese would appear and offer to arrange his passage to Australia.
3
Sir Harry Aubrey de Vere Maclean (1848-1920), joined the Army in 1869, fought against Fenian raiders in Canada, and in 1877 entered the service of Sultan Mulai Hassan of Morocco as army instructor. In an adventurous career lasting more than thirty years ‘Kaid Maclean’ became something of a North African legend: he was the trusted adviser of the Sultan and his successor, campaigned against rebel tribes, survived court intrigues, journeyed throughout Morocco and visited the forbidden city of Tafilelt, and was once kidnapped (at the second attempt) and held to ransom by insurgents. Although unswervingly loyal to his employer, he was recognised as an unofficial British agent, and was created K.C.M.G. when he attended King Edward VII??
?s coronation as one of the Moroccan delegation. Maclean was a genial, popular leader although, as his biographer remarks, ‘being of powerful physique he was able to deal summarily with insubordinate individuals’. He was an enthusiastic piper who also played the piano, guitar, and accordion. (See the Dictionary of National Biography.)
4
Which is long and complex, and may be found in McAuslan in the Rough.
5
The tea-urn is presumably still lying somewhere near the summit of Scafell Pike. The man who went missing from my section, on a night exercise in Norfolk, turned up the following day, drunk. The guardroom was an enormous bell-tent which was removed from over my sleeping head by Royal Scots Fusiliers and Cameronians celebrating Hogmanay at Deolali, India.
6
A famous department store on the Port Said waterfront, correctly spelled Simon Arzt but known to servicemen as ‘Simon Arts’.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
THE GENERAL DANCED AT DAWN
Monsoon Selection Board
Silence in the Ranks
Play Up, Play Up, and Get Tore In
Wee Wullie
The General Danced at Dawn
Night Run to Palestine
The Whisky and the Music
Guard at the Castle
McAuslan’s Court-Martial
McAUSLAN IN THE ROUGH
Bo Geesty
Johnnie Cope in the Morning
General Knowledge, Private Information
Parfit Gentil Knight, But
Fly Men
McAuslan in the Rough
His Majesty Says Good-Day
THE SHEIKH AND THE DUSTBIN
The Servant Problem
Captain Errol
The Constipation of O’Brien
The Sheikh and the Dustbin
McAuslan, Lance-Corporal
The Gordon Women
Ye mind Jie Dee, Fletcher?
Extraduction
George MacDonald Fraser, The Complete McAuslan
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