The Complete McAuslan (9 page)

And on another occasion he did me a great service. It was shortly after his Hogmanay escapade, and I was again orderly officer and was supervising the closing of the wet canteen. The joint was jumping and I hammered with my walking-stick on the bar and shouted, ‘Last drinks. Time, gentlemen, please,’ which was always good for a laugh. Most of them drank and went, but there was one bunch, East End Glaswegians with their bonnets pulled down over their eyes, who stayed at their table. Each man had about three pints in front of him; they had been stocking up.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Get it down you.’

There were a few covert grins, and someone muttered about being entitled to finish their drinks – which strictly speaking they were. But there was no question they were trying it on: on the other hand, how does a subaltern move men who don’t want to be moved? I know, personality. Try it some time along the Springfield Road.

‘You’ve got two minutes,’ I said, and went to supervise the closing of the bar shutters. Two minutes later I looked across; they were still there, having a laugh and taking their time.

I hesitated; this was one of those moments when you can look very silly, or lose your reputation, or both. At that moment Wee Wullie, who had been finishing his pint in a comer, walked past and stopped to adjust his bonnet near me.

‘Tak’ wan o’ them by the scruff o’ the neck and heave ‘im oot,’ he said, staring at me, and then went out of the canteen.

It was astonishing advice. About the most awful crime an officer can commit is to lay hands on an other rank. Suppose one of them belted me? It could be one hell of a mess, and a scandal. Then one of them laughed again, loudly, and I strode across to the table, took the nearest man (the smallest one, incidentally) by the collar, and hauled him bodily to the door. He was too surprised to do anything; he was off balance all the way until I dropped him just outside the doorway.

He was coming up, spitting oaths and murder, when Wee Wullie said out of the shadows at one side of the door:

‘Jist you stay down, boy, or ye’ll stay down for the night.’

I went into the canteen again. The rest were standing, staring. ‘Out,’ I said, like Burt Lancaster in the movies, and they went, leaving their pints. When I left the canteen Wee Wullie had disappeared.

And now he was probably going to disappear for keeps, I thought that night after seeing him in the cell. How long would he get for assaulting a redcap? Two years? How old was he, and how would he last out two years on the hill, or the wells, or whatever diversions they were using now in the glasshouse? Of course, he was as strong as an ox. And what had McGarry meant, ‘For a’ the Colonel can say’?

What the Colonel did say emerged a few days later when the Adjutant, entering like Rumour painted full of tongues, recounted what had taken place at Battalion H.Q. when the town Provost Marshal had called. The P.M. had observed that the time had come when Wee Wullie could finally get his come-uppance, and had spoken of general courts-martial and long terms of detention. The Colonel had said, uh-huh, indeed, and suggested that so much was hardly necessary: it could be dealt with inside the battalion. By no means, said the P.M., Wee Wullie had been an offence to the public weal too long; he was glasshouse-ripe; a turbulent, ungodly person whom he, the P.M., was going to see sent where he wouldn’t hear the dogs bark. The Colonel then asked, quietly, if the P.M., as a special favour to him, would leave the matter entirely in the Colonel’s hands.

Taken aback the P.M. protested at length, and whenever he paused for breath the Colonel would raise his great bald hawk head and gently repeat his request. This endured for about twenty minutes, after which the P.M. gave way under protest – under strong protest – and stumped off muttering about protecting pariahs and giving Capone a pound out of the poor box. He was an angry and bewildered man.

‘So the matter need not go to the General Officer Commanding,’ concluded the Adjutant mysteriously. ‘This time.’ Pressed for details, he explained, in a tone that suggested he didn’t quite believe it himself, that the Colonel had been ready, if the P.M. had been obdurate, to go to the G.O.C. on Wee Wullie’s behalf.

‘All the way, mark you,’ said the Adjutant. ‘For that big idiot. Of course, if the G.O.C. happens to have been your fag at Rugby, I dare say it makes it easier, but I still don’t understand it.’

Nor did anyone else. Generals were big stuff, and Wullie was only one extremely bad hat of a private. The Colonel called him several other names as well, when the case came up at orderly room, and gave him 28 days, which was as much as he could award him without sending him to the military prison.

So Wullie did his time in the battalion cells, expressing repentance while he cleaned out the ablutions, and exactly twenty-four hours after his release he was back inside for drunkenness, insubordination, and assault, in that he, in the cookhouse, did wilfully overturn a cauldron of soup and, on being reprimanded by the cook-sergeant, did strike the cook-sergeant with his fist . . .

And so on. ‘I don’t know,’ said the Adjutant in despair. ‘Short of shooting him, what
can
you do with him? What
can
you do?’

He asked the question at dinner, in the Colonel’s absence. It was not a mess night, and we were eating our spam informally. Most of the senior officers were out in their married quarters; only the second-in-command, a grizzled major who was also a bachelor, represented the old brigade. He sat chewing his cheroot absently while the Adjutant went on to say that it couldn’t last for ever; the Colonel’s curious – and misguided – protection of Wee Wullie would have to stop eventually. And when it did, Wee Wullie would be away, permanently.

The second-in-command took out his cheroot and inspected it. ‘Well, it won’t stop, I can tell you that,’ he said.

The Adjutant demanded to know why, and the second-in-command explained.

‘Wee Wullie may get his deserts one of these days; it’s a matter of luck. But I do know that it will be over the Colonel’s dead body. You expressed surprise that the Colonel would go to the G.O.C.; I’m perfectly certain he would go farther than that if he had to.’

‘For heaven’s sake, why? What’s so special about Wee Wullie?’

‘Well, he and the Colonel have served together a long time. Since the first war, in fact. Same battalion, war and peace, for most of the time – joined almost the same day, I believe. Wounded together at Passchendaele, that sort of thing.’

‘We all know that,’ said the Adjutant impatiently. ‘But even so, granted the Colonel feels responsible, I’d have said Wee Wullie has overstepped the mark too far and too often. He’s a dead loss.’

‘Well,’ said the second-in-command, ‘that’s as may be.’ He sat for a moment rolling a new cheroot in his fingers. ‘But there are things you don’t know.’ He lit the cheroot and took a big breath. Everyone was listening and watching. ‘You know,’ said the second-in-command, ‘that after the battalion came out of France in ‘forty, it was sent to the Far East. Well, Wullie didn’t go with it. He was doing time in Sowerby Bridge glasshouse, for the usual offences – drunkenness, assault on a superior, and so on. When he came out the battalion had gone into the bag after Singapore, so Wullie was posted to one of our Terrier battalions in North Africa – it was Tom Crawford’s, in fact. I don’t suppose Tom was particularly happy to see the regiment’s Public Enemy Number One, but he had other things to think about. It was the time when the desert war was going to and fro like ping-pong – first Rommel on top, then us – and his battalion had taken a pretty fair hammering, one way and another.

‘Anyway, when Rommel made his big breakthrough, and looked like going all the way to Shepheard’s Hotel, Tom’s chaps were being pushed back with the rest. There was some messy fighting, and in it they picked up a prisoner – a warrant officer in the German equivalent of the service corps. They learned from him about the existence of one of those petrol dumps that Rommel had put down on an earlier push – you know the sort of thing, we did it, too. When you’re on the run you bury all the fuel you can, and when you come back that way, there it is. How they got this chap to spill the beans I don’t know, but he did.

‘Well, Tom saw at once that if they could scupper this buried dump it might be a telling blow to the Jerry advance, so he went after it. One of his company commanders, fellow called MacLennan, took off with a truck, a couple of Sappers, the German prisoner as a guide, a driver – and Wee Wullie. They took him along because he was big and rough, and just the chap to keep an eye on the Hun. And off they went into the blue to blow the dump sky-high.

‘It was away out of the main run, down to the southward, and it was going to be a near thing for them to get there before Rommel’s crowd, so they went hell for leather. They didn’t make it. Somewhere along the way the truck went over a land-mine, the driver was killed, and MacLennan’s knee-cap was smashed. The Sappers and Wullie and the Hun were just shaken, but the truck was a complete write-off. And there they were, miles behind their own retreating brigade, stranded in the middle of God knows where, and no way of getting home but walking.’

The second-in-command’s cheroot had gone out. He chewed it out of the side of his mouth, staring at the table-cloth.

‘You know what the desert’s like. If you haven’t got transport, you die. Unless someone finds you. And MacLennan knew the only people who might find them were the Germans, and that was a thin chance at best. If they’d made it to the dump it would have been different. As it was, they would have to shift for themselves – with about two days’ water and upwards of forty miles to go before they had even a reasonable chance of being picked up.

‘MacLennan couldn’t go, of course, with his leg smashed. He got them to make him comfortable in the lee of the wrecked truck, kept one water bottle himself, and ordered the four of them to clear out. One of the Sappers wanted to stay with him, but MacLennan knew there was no point to it. Barring miracles, he was done for. He just laid down the law to them, told them to head north, and wished them luck. We Wullie never said anything, apparently – not that that was unusual, since he was sober.

‘MacLennan watched them set off, into that hellish burning waste, and then settled down to die. He supposed his water might last him through the next day, and decided that whatever happened, he wouldn’t shoot himself. Cool boy, that one. He’s at Staff College now, I believe. But it didn’t come to that; his miracle happened. Up north, although he didn’t know it, Rommel was just coming to a halt near Alamein, and by sheer chance on the second day one of our long-range group patrols came on him just as he was drinking the last of his water.’

The second-in-command paused to relight his cheroot, and I noticed the Adjutant’s hand stray towards his glass, and stop half-way.

‘Well, they took MacLennan in,’ said the second-in-command, ‘and of course he got them on the hunt right away for the other four. It took them some time. They found one body about twenty miles north of where MacLennan had been, and another a little farther on. And when they were on the point of giving up, they found Wee Wullie. He was walking north, or rather, he was staggering north, and he was carrying the fourth chap in a fireman’s lift.

‘He was in a fearful state. His face was black, his tongue and mouth were horribly dried up, all his gear was gone, of course, and he must have been on the very edge of collapse. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear, he couldn’t speak – but he could march. God knows how long he’d been withour water, or how long he’d been carrying the other fellow; he was so done that when they found him they had to stop him, physically, in his tracks, because they couldn’t make him understand. One of them said afterwards’ – the second-in-command hesitated and drew on his cheroot – ‘that he believed Wee Wullie would just have gone on for ever.’

Knowing Wee Wullie, I could have believed it too. After a moment the Adjutant said: ‘That was pretty good. Didn’t he – well, he hasn’t any decorations, has he? You’d have thought, seeing he saved a comrade’s life – ’

‘It wasn’t a comrade,’ said the second-in-command. ‘He was carrying the German. And it didn’t save his life. He died soon after.’

‘Even so,’ said the Adjutant. ‘It was pretty bloody heroic.’

‘I’d say so,’ said the second-in-command. ‘But Wee Wullie’s his own worst enemy. When he was taken back to base and the hospital, he made a splendid recovery. Managed to get hold of drink, somehow, terrified the nursing staff, climbed out on the roof and sang “The Ball of Kirriemuir” at the top of his voice – all seventy-odd verses, they tell me. They tried to drag him in, and he broke a military policeman’s jaw. Then he fell off the roof and got concussion. It isn’t easy to hang gongs on a man like that. Although I dare say if it had been, say, MacLennan that he’d been carrying, and not the German, that might have made a difference.’

‘Well,’ said the Adjutant, ‘it would have made our Colonel’s attitude . . . well, easier to understand.’

‘Maybe that’s the point,’ said the second-in-command. ‘Wee Wullie tried to save an enemy. The German to him was really a nuisance – a dead loss. But he was prepared to risk his own life for him, to go all the way. I don’t know. Anyway,’ he added, looking as near embarrassment as was possible for him, ‘that may explain some of the things you haven’t understood about him. Why, as far as the Colonel is concerned, he can set fire to the barracks and murder half the redcaps in the garrison, but the Colonel will still be bound to go all along the line for him. So will I, if it means the G.O.C., and the High Command, the whole lot. And so will the battalion. It’s an odd situation. Oh, perhaps Wullie understands it and plays on it. So what? I know the Provost Marshal’s right: he’s a drunken, dangerous, disgraceful, useless ruffian. But whenever I see him at his worst, I can’t help thinking of him going through that desert, marching, and not falling. Just marching. Now, where’s the ludo set? There isn’t a subaltern can live with me on the board tonight.’