The Complete McAuslan. George Fraser MacDonald
fire.
It is twenty years and more since I was in India. My battalion was down on the Sittang Bend, trying to stop the remnants of the Japanese Army escaping eastwards out of Burma – why we had to do this no one really understood, because the consensus of opinion was that the sooner Jap escaped the better, and good luck to him. Anyway, the war was nearly over, and one lance-corporal more or less on the battalion strength didn’t make much difference, so they sent me out of the line to see if a War Office Selection Board would adjudge me fit to be commissioned.
I flew out and presented myself to the board, bush-hat on head, beard on chin, kukri on hip, all in sweaty jungle green and as tough as a buttered muffin. Frankly, I had few hopes of being passed. I had been to a board once before, back in England, and had fallen foul of a psychiatrist, a mean-looking little man who bit his nails and asked me if I had an adventurous spirit. (War Office Selection Boards were always asking questions like that.) Of course, I told him I was as adventurous as all get-out, and he helped himself to another piece of nail and said cunningly:
“Then why don’t you sign on to sail on a Norwegian whaler?”
This, in the middle of the war, mark you, to a conscript. So, thinking he was being funny, I replied with equal cunning that I didn’t speak Norwegian, ha-ha. He just loved that; anyway, I didn’t pass.
So I flew out of Burma without illusions. This particular board had a tough reputation; last time, the rumour went, they had passed only three candidates out of thirty. I looked round at my fellow applicants, most of whom had at least three stripes and seemed to be full of confidence, initiative, leadership, and flannel – qualities that Selection Boards lap up like gravy – and decided that whoever was successful this time it wasn’t going to be me. There were two other Fourteenth Army infantrymen, Martin-Duggan and Hayhurst, and the three of us, being rabble, naturally drifted together.
I should explain about Selection Boards. They lasted about three days, during which time the candidates were put through a series of written and practical tests, and the Board officers just watched and made notes. Then there were interviews and discussions, and all the time you were being assessed and graded, and at the finish you were told whether you were in or out. If in, you went to an Officer Cadet Training Unit where they trained you for six months and then gave you your commission; if out, back to your unit.
But the thing that was universally agreed was that there was no known way of ensuring success before a Selection Board. There were no standard right answers to their questions, because their methods were all supposed to be deeply psychological. The general view throughout the Army was that they weren’t fit to select bus conductors, let alone officers, but that is by the way.
One of the most unpleasant features of a Selection Board was that you were on test literally all the time. At meal times, for instance, there was an examining officer at each table of about six candidates, so we all drank our soup with exaggerated care, offered each other the salt with ponderous politeness, and talked on a plane so lofty that by comparison a conversation in the Athenaeum Club would have sounded like an argument in a gin-mill. And all the time our examiner, a smooth, beady gentleman, kept an eye on us and weighed us up while pretending to be a boon companion.
It wasn’t too easy for him, for at our second meal I displayed such zeal in offering him a bottle of sauce that I put it in his lap. I saw my chances fading from that moment, and by the time we fell in outside for our first practical test my nerves were in rags.
It was one of those idiotic problems where six of you are given a log, representing a big gun-barrel, and have to get it across a river with the aid of a few ropes and poles. No one is put in command; you just have to cooperate, and the examiners hover around to see who displays most initiative, leadership, ingenuity, and what-have-you. The result is that everyone starts in at once telling the rest what to do. I had been there before, so I let them argue and tried to impress the Board by being practical. I cleverly tied a rope round the log, and barked a sharp command to Martin-Duggan and Hayhurst. They tugged on the rope and the whole damned thing went into the river. At this there was a deadly silence broken only by the audible scribbling of the examiners, and then the three of us sheepishly climbed down the bank to begin salvage operations.
This set the tone of our whole performance in the tests. Given a bell tent to erect we reduced it to a wreck of cord and canvas inside three minutes; ordered to carry from Point A to Point B an ammunition box which was too heavy for one man and which yet did not provide purchase for two, we dropped it in a ditch and upbraided each other in sulphurous terms, every word of which the examiners recorded carefully. Asked to swing across a small ravine on a rope, we betrayed symptoms of physical fear, and Hayhurst fell and hurt his ankle. Taking all in all, we showed ourselves lacking in initiative, deficient in moral fibre, prone to recrimination, and generally un-officer-like.
So it went on. We were interviewed by the psychiatrist, who asked Hayhurst whether he smoked. Hayhurst said no—he had actually given it up a few days before—and then noticed that the psychiatrist’s eyes were fixed on his right index finger, which was still stained yellow with nicotine. My own interview was, I like to think, slightly less of a triumph from the psychiatrist’s point of view. He asked me if I had an adventurous spirit, and I quickly said yes, so much so that my only regret about being in the Army was that it prevented me from signing on to sail on a Norwegian whaler.
If, at this point, he had said: “Oh, do you speak Norwegian, then?” he would have had me over a barrel. But instead he fell back on the Selection Board classic, which is: “Why do you want to be an officer?”
The honest answer, of course, is to say, like Israel Hands, “Because I want their pickles and wines and that,” and to add that you are sick of being shoved around like low-life, and want to lord it over your fellow-man for a change. But honest answer never won fair psychiatrist yet, so I assumed my thoughtful, stuffed look, and said earnestly that I simply wanted to serve the army in my most useful capacity, and I felt, honestly, sir, that I could do the job. The pay was a lot better, too, but I kept that thought to myself.
He pursed up and nodded, and then said: “I see you want to be commissioned in the—Highlanders. They’re a pretty tough bunch, you know. Think you can handle a platoon of them?”
I gave him my straight-between-the-eyes look which, coupled with my twisted smile, tells people that I’m a lobo wolf from Kelvinside and it’s my night to howl. Just for good measure I added a confident, grating laugh, and he asked with sudden concern if I was going to be sick. I quickly reassured him, but he kept eyeing me askance and presently he dismissed me. As I went out he was scribbling like crazy.
Then there were written tests, in one of which we had to record our instant reactions to various words flashed on a blackboard. With me there was not one reaction in each case, but three. The first was just a mental numbness, the second was the reaction which I imagined the examiners would regard as normal, and the third (which naturally was what I finished up writing down) was the reaction which I was sure would be regarded as abnormal to a degree. Some people are like this: they are compelled to touch naked electric wiring and throw themselves down from heights. Some perverse streak makes them seek out the wrong answers.
Thus, given the word “board”, I knew perfectly well that the safe answer would be “plank” (unless you chose to think that “board” meant “Selection Board”, in which case you would write down “justice”, “mercy”, or “wisdom”). But with the death wish in full control I had to write down “stiff”.
Similarly, reason told me to react to “cloud”, “father”, and “sex” by writing down “rain”, “W. G. Grace”, and “birds and bees”. So of course I put down “cuckoo”, “Captain Hook”, and “Grable”. To make matters worse I then scored “Grable” out in a panic and wrote “Freud”, and then changed my mind again, scoring out “Freud” and substituting “Lamour”. Heavy breathing at my elbow at this point attracted my attention, and there was one of the examiners, peeking at my paper with his eyes bugging. By this time I was falling behind in my reactions, and was in such a frenzied state that when they eventually flashed “Freud” on the board I think my response was “Father Grable”. That must have made