The Complete McAuslan (45 page)

And when finally he had gone, he’d left me full of fine thoughts, in which I soldiered on and became Colonel of the Regiment myself, some day, maybe a general, even, with five rows of gongs, and an honourable record, and a paragraph in
Who’s Who.
I tried to convince myself that he hadn’t given exactly the same pep-talk to every subaltern in the battalion, but concluded that he probably had. Anyway, I applied for the appropriate signing-on forms, swithered over them, filled them in, kept them three weeks in my desk – and finally tore them up.

It wasn’t just that the Colonel himself had gone by then (the new man was all right, in his precise, formal way, but not my kind of C.O., really), that the Adjutant had announced, with Bertie Woosterish cries, that he was going to take his demobilisation and make a pile in the City, bowler-hat and all, or that new subalterns were coming in and the atmosphere was changing, with the last happy-go-lucky vestiges of war-time soldiering going out and the somehow more austere sense of peace coming in. It was simply a realisation that (as Socrates and the boys no doubt said themselves) I wasn’t a professional soldier.

I wondered, contemplating that broadsword on the last afternoon, how many Highland Scots really were. To fight briefly in a good cause, or for money, or for fun – these are reasons in the Highland tradition, but dedication to a lifetime of soldiering was something else.

I shoved the sword back in its scabbard, and took it across to the pipe-band office – responding, on the way, with a rude gesture to Lieutenant MacKenzie’s cry of ‘There goes the D′Artagnan of D Company; his father was the finest swordsman in France.’ The pipey was perched behind his desk, looking as usual like a parrot bent on mischief; I don’t remember saying goodbye to him, but I recollect that somewhere in the store-room behind him someone was singing ‘Macgregor’s Gathering’ in a nasal Gaelic tenor:

Glenstray and Glen Lyon no longer are ours
We’re landless! – landless! – landless Gregora!

And the pipey, wagging his head, remarked:

‘That’s the Macgregors for ye; aye greetin’ about something.’

And I felt really sad, then, at the thought of leaving it all – but cheered myself up with the thought that tomorrow I’d be a free agent again, not subject to discipline or bugle-calls or King’s Regulations (which was pathetic, when you think of the disciplines and calls and regulations of a civilian working life). I wouldn’t have to feel responsible any more, for anyone but myself – certainly not for thirty-six hard-bitten, volatile and contrary Scotsmen who for their part could not wait to kiss the army goodbye. I would miss them, but there were definite compensations. Wee Wullie, for one, could put the entire military police force in hospital, Private Fletcher could start a Jocks’ Trade Union, the whole platoon could mutiny and take to the hills, and I, the footloose civilian, could say it was nothing to do with me.

Biggest bonus of all, I could no longer be called to account for the vagaries of 14687347, Private McAuslan, J. He, henceforth, could get tight, or go absent, or set fire to his billet, or fall in the Clyde, or assault the Lord Provost, or lose the atomic bomb (he’d scored four out of six on those, so far) and no one could turn a reproachful eye on me. After tomorrow, he was on his own.

Tomorrow, as it turned out, was a long day. I had a premonition that it was going to be when the truck came to pick me up at first light to catch the morning train out of Edinburgh; there, snuggled up by the tailboard, and looking like the last man off the beach at Dunkirk, was the original Calamity Jock himself. By his hideous snuffling, and the fact that he appeared to be in the terminal stages of pneumonia, I deduced that he had spent his last night in the Army celebrating; he was so hung over you could have pegged him on a line. He gave me a ghastly, red-rimmed grin as I threw my valise over the tailboard, and croaked:

‘Hullaw, rerr, sir.’

‘Morning, McAuslan. How are you?’

‘Smashin’, sir.’ He coughed retchingly, plucked a mangled cigarette end from the corner of his mouth, and wheezed: ‘Goad, Ah’ll hiv tae give these up. Hey, but, we’re gettin’ oor tickets the day, aren’t we, sir?’

‘That’s right,’ I said, and beat a hasty retreat to the front cab. I had no desire to encourage conversation with a McAuslan who would become increasingly garrulous as he emerged from his excesses of the night before. There was a long train journey to the demobilisation centre at York, and while I was nominally in charge of the party – there were four other Jocks in the back with McAuslan – the farther I could stay away from him the better I’d like it. If you think my non-fraternising policy deplorable, I can only reply that you haven’t seen McAuslan drying out. For that matter, you wouldn’t seek his company if he was stone-cold sober.

The truck rolled off, and I imagine we had gone all of thirty yards before he fell over the tailboard. It transpired that he thought he had forgotten his kitbag, had risen in alarm, and toppled shrieking into the void. He was crawling out of a deep puddle like some monster emerging from Jurassic swamps, vituperating horribly, when we picked him up and bundled him into the truck again, his companions handling him gingerly.

‘Tak’ yer hands aff ma body!’ was all the thanks they got.

‘Look at the state ye’ve got me in! Me in ma best battle-dress, too! Lookarit! Covered in glaur!’

If anything, I’d have said immersion in the puddle had cleaned it slightly; his best battle-dress, so-called, would have evoked cries of revulsion along Skid Row. He subsided in the truck, grunting and mumping and pawing the water from the greasy line of medal ribbons tacked above his left breast-pocket, from which the button was inevitably missing. As I retrieved a sodden packet of Woodbines from the puddle where he had dropped it, I had a sudden thought.

‘McAuslan,’ I said, ‘have you got your travel warrant and paybooks?’ One thing I didn’t need was McAuslan without the documents necessary to speed him smoothly out of my life.

He suspended his toilet to rummage, breathing heavily, and produced from the recesses of his clothing two tattered lumps of paper, like very old manuscripts that have lain neglected in a damp tomb; they proved to be his Army paybooks, parts I and 2. But no travel warrant; he goggled dirtily when I demanded where it was, wiped his nose, and said he didnae know aboot that, but. So we had to wait, and I stamped impatiently and consulted my watch, while one of the Jocks ran back to company office, and by sheer luck returned with the warrant, which McAuslan had neglected to draw from the clerk.

‘Keep it, Sempill,’ I told the Jock. ‘Don’t let it, or him, out of your sight. You,’ I snarled at McAuslan, ‘sit still, or so help me I’ll turn you over to the redcaps for . . . for conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline, and you’ll never get out of the Army, see?’

‘Yessir. Right sir. No’ kiddin’, sir.’ The threat obviously got through to him. He was poking at the contents of his Woodbine packet; a few dripping little cylinders rapidly disintegrating into mush in his palm. ‘See ma bluidy fags.’

‘Oh, Lord,’ I said, ‘take these.’ And I thrust my cigarette packet into his hand, and ran to the cab. We broke the speed limit all the way up Leith Walk, and arrived at Waverley Station in the nick of time to catch the train. McAuslan was last aboard, roaring in panic as he retrieved his kitbag, which had somehow slipped half-down between train and platform as we moved off. From my carriage window I saw bag and man being dragged to safety by his mates; imagine King Kong on the Empire State Building, wearing a balmoral bonnet and being enveloped in rising clouds of steam, and you have the picture.

I can’t say I enjoyed that journey. Travel in British trains in the immediate post-war period was slow, uncomfortable, and involved frequent clanking halts in the middle of nowhere. It seemed inevitable that McAuslan would take it into his head to descend at one of these, and rootle under the wheels, or take off into the wilds of Berwickshire, or pull the communication cord. I stood nervously in the corridor all the way to Newcastle, being trampled and shoved and leaned on – you didn’t expect to get a seat in those days – and waiting for the noises of alarm and excursion to break out farther down the train, where he and his associates were. But he was reserving his energies, apparently, for when we got over the border.

Once we reached England, he began to exhibit his best form; his hangover had presumably receded. During the halt at Newcastle he lost his bonnet in the men’s lavatory and started an altercation in the refreshment room where, he alleged, they were trying to short-change him over the price of a pie and a cup of tea. (Since he could barely count beyond five, I wasn’t prepared to take his word for it.) At Durham he tried to climb, smoking and coughing thunderously, into a nonsmoker, whence he was ejected by an indignant dowager. He called her a cheeky auld bizzum and she threatened to complain to his commanding officer. (I was in the adjacent corridor, averting my gaze and trying to look inconspicuous.) At Darlington, where I allowed him one pint of beer at his earnest request, I was silly enough to take my eye off him, and when the guard’s whistle blew he was nowhere to be seen. Fortunately the train did one of those hesitant starts, clanking a few yards and stopping, and our frantic search eventually discovered him on another platform, wrestling with one of those little football machines, all encased in glass, in which two teams of tiny metal men kick at a ball in response to little levers which you work on the outside. Beautifully ugly little Victorian creations, which seem to have vanished now. McAuslan, full of animation, was yanking the handle and roaring: ‘Come away the Rangairs! Itsa goal! Aw, Wullie Waddell, he’s the wee boy!’

We pried him loose, ignoring his cries that he was entitled to his penny back, and just managed to get him into the guard’s van.

At York, which we reached in the afternoon, we parted. The Jocks were taken off by a warrant officer, and I went to the officers′ mess, relieved in the knowledge that McAuslan would spend his last two hours in the Army under competent military control.

‘See yez at the kittin’-oot centre,’ said he as we went our separate ways, and I confess to a momentary hope that we might miss each other; for all the attachment that had grown up between us in our chequered acquaintance, I’d had, on the whole, just about enough.

It’s one of the tricks of memory that all I can remember of my actual demobilisation is playing table billiards in the mess while waiting for the formalities to begin; of the process which turned me from a trusty friend of King George into a civilian I can recall nothing, beyond signing something, and being given a small booklet which was my actual discharge, and informed me that I was entitled to keep the permanent title of lieutenant, to wear my uniform for one more month, if I wanted to, and to consider myself a Reservist Class A. They thanked me, politely, and told me that if I followed the signs in the corridor I would arrive at the kitting-out centre, where I would be issued with civilian clothes, the gift of the Government.

It was a huge place, like an aircraft hangar, with row upon row of counters, and suits hanging on racks, and great square cardboard boxes. There were armies of little men helping the newly-fledged civilians to make their choice, and great throngs of figures in various stages of khaki undress wandering about, rather bewildered, feeling the material as though they didn’t quite believe it was there. I remember a stout captain in the Loyals, in his vest and service dress trousers, doubtfully examining a civilian shirt and saying that he didn’t care for stripes, actually, and a grizzled little corporal of Sherwood Foresters comparing a thick grey Army issue sock in one hand, and a dark blue civilian one in the other; his bare feet were thrust into black civilian shoes.

I took two shirts – any shirts – and collars, and a brass stud from the tray provided, and walked round to where the suits were. They were mostly brown and blue, and a long line of men in their underclothes were struggling into trousers, and adjusting braces, and queuing up for the long mirrors, in front of which they stood looking rather embarrassed, turning this way and that and patting their stomachs, while the rest of us waited our turn. The only thing in common was the close-cropped Army hair-style; for the rest there were pale-looking men who had spent their service in stores and offices, and bronzed mahogany muscle-men from the Far East and the North African garrisons – the man in front of me, bronzed and bare to the waist, had a crude blue-and-red tattoo on his arm, showing a knife impaling a skull, with underneath ‘Death Before Disonour’ (one spelling mistake for a Hogg Market tattooist wasn’t bad). Underneath his right shoulder, when he turned, was the white star-shape of a bullet wound, and I speculated on whether it was the Jap 300 rifle that had done it, and where – anywhere between Silchar Track and the Pegu Yomas, probably. Behind me was a stout and impatient exwarrant officer, holding in his belly under the unaccustomed brown worsted trousers, and muttering: ‘Bloody army, bloody organisation, can’t even get rid of us decently. Have you seen the quality of this rubbish? I wouldn’t give it for a blanket to our dog.’

The strange thing was, where you would have expected cheerful chatter and laughter, from men who had travelled hopefully for so long, and were now arriving, there was very little noise at all; indeed, they seemed quietly irritable, as though the bleak utility of the new civilian clothing was symbolic, and they didn’t much like the look of it. Was this what civvy street was going to be like?

On a long table to one side lay the battle-dress jackets of those waiting to try their new suits; I wish I had a picture of it. There were the shoulder flashes – Buffs, Green Howards, Durhams, Ox and Bucks, Devons, K.O.Y.L.L, North Staffords, King’s Own, the yellow lion of the Scottish Division, the shoulder flash of the Sappers, the red and blue of the Artillery, the Welsh black pigtail flash, and my own green and yellow strip of tartan; the blancoed stripes and the cloth officers’ pips; the little red service chevrons, the Tate and Lyle badge of a regimental sergeant-major; the glittering crown and stripes of a colour-sergeant. And the ribbons – the well-known ′Spam′ of 1939-45, the yellowish rectangle of North Africa, the tricolour of France and Germany, the green-striped ribbon of the Italian campaign, the watered colours of the Atlantic Star, and the red-yellow-blue of Burma. And the badges in the caps – the Britannia of the Royal Norfolks, who alone can take a lady into barracks; the back-to-back of the Gloucesters, the red hackle of the Black Watch, the St Andrew’s Cross of the Camerons (‘two crossed bars o’ quarter-master’s soap wi’ auld Wimberley keekin’ ower the top,’ as the pipey used to say); the Maltese Cross of the Border Regiment, the flag-carrying lamb of the Queen’s, the brown cockade of Ulster, and the white horse of Hanover. A lot of service, a lot of time; a lot of long hot and cold marches to battles whose echoes had died away, and the owners, who had spent so many years earning the little badges, were now devoting all their minds to trouser-creases and shoulder-padding.