The Complete McAuslan. George Fraser MacDonald
stand, old boy?”
“He forgot his gun, he missed the plane,” said the clerk bitterly. “That’s what we’re here to establish. What more do you want?”
“Search me,” said the president. “You did miss the plane, didn’t you?” he asked me.
“That’s irregular,” bawled the clerk. “At least, I think it is. You’re asking him to convict himself.”
“Rot,” said the president. “He hasn’t been charged, has he? Anyway, old boy, you’re mixing it up with wives not being able to testify against their husbands.”
“I need a drink,” said the clerk.
“Good show,” said the president. “Let’s adjourn, and then you can type all this muck out and we’ll all sign it. Any objections, objection overruled. Smashing.”
The proceedings of that court occupied about forty-five minutes, and heaven knows how many sheets of foolscap, but it did establish what it had set out to do—that I had negligently failed to take a seat on an aircraft. It was all carefully forwarded to my unit, marked attention Commanding Officer, and he blew his stack, mildly, and gave me three days’ orderly officer for irresponsible idiocy—not so much for missing the aircraft as for causing him to waste time reading the report. But of Black, and the escaping Jew, and threats, and insubordination, and currency offences there was never a word.
And, as my grandmother would have said, that is what happened on the Cairo—Jerusalem railway.
The ignorant or unwary, if asked whether they would rather be the guests of an officers’ mess or a sergeants’, would probably choose the officers’. They might be motivated by snobbery, but probably also by the notion that the standards of cuisine, comfort, and general atmosphere would be higher. They would be dead wrong.
You will get a bit of the old haut monde from the officers in most units, although in a Highland regiment the native savagery has a tendency to show through. I remember the occasion when two Guards officers, guests of our mess, were having a delicate Sunday morning breakfast and discussing Mayfair and the Season with the Adjutant, himself an exquisite, when there entered the motor transport officer, one Elliot, a hard man from the Borders. Elliot surveyed the table and then roared:
“Naethin’ but toast again, bigod! You,” he shouted at the Adjutant, “ye bloody auld vulture, you, ye’ve been gobblin’ my plain bread!” And he wrenched the Adjutant’s shirt-front out of his kilt, slapped him resoundingly on the solar plexus, and ruffled his hair. This was Elliot’s way of saying good morning, but it upset the Guards. They just looked at each other silently, like two Jack Bennys, and then got slowly to their feet and went out, looking rather pale.
That would never happen in a sergeants’ mess. Sergeants are too responsible. They tend to be young-middle-aged soldiers, with a sense of form and dignity; among officers there is always the clash of youth and age, but with sergeants you have a disciplined, united front. And whereas the provisioning and amenities of an officers’ mess are usually in the hands of a president who has had the job forced on him and isn’t much good at it, your sergeants look after their creature comforts with an expertise born of long service in hard times. Wherever you are, whoever goes short, it won’t be the sergeants; they’ve been at the game too long.
Hogmanay apart, officers never saw inside our sergeants’ mess (“living like pigs as we do,” said the Colonel, “it would make us jealous”), so when Sergeant Cuddy of the signals section invited me in for a drink I accepted like a shot. We had been out in the desert on an exercise, and Cuddy and I had spent long hours on top of a sand-hill with a wireless set, watching the company toiling over the sun-baked plain below, popping off blanks at each other. Cuddy was a very quiet old soldier with silver hair; his first experience of signals had been with flags and pigeons on the Western Front in the old war, and I managed to get him to talk about it a little. It emerged that he had heard of, although he had not known, my great-uncle, who had been a sergeant with the battalion at the turn of the century.
“There’ll be a picture of him in the mess,” said Cuddy. And then, after a long pause, he added: “Perhaps ye’d care to come in and see it, when we go back to barracks?”
“Will it be all right?” I asked, for regimental protocol is sometimes a tricky thing.
“My guest,” said Cuddy, so I thanked him, and when we had packed up the exercise that afternoon I accompanied him up the broad steps of the whitewashed building just outside the barracks where the sergeants dwelt in fortified seclusion.
In the ante-room there was only the pipe-sergeant, perched in state at one end of the bar, and keeping a bright eye on the mess waiters to see that they kept their thumbs out of the glasses.
“Guest. Mr MacNeill,” announced Cuddy, and the pipey hopped off his stool and took over.
“Come away ben, Mr MacNeill,” he cried. “Isn’t this the pleasure? You’ll take a little of the creature? Of course, of course. Barman, where are you? Stand to your kit.”
I surveyed the various brands of “the creature” on view behind the bar, and decided that the Colonel was right. You would never have seen the like in an officers” mess. There was the Talisker and Laphroaig and Islay Mist and Glenfiddich and Smith’s Ten-year-old—every Scotch whisky under the sun. How they managed it, in those arid post-war years, I didn’t like to think.
I’m not a whisky man, but asking for a beer would have been unthinkable; I eventually selected an Antiquary, and the pipe-sergeant raised his brows and pursed his lips approvingly.
“An Edinburgh whisky,” he observed judicially. “Very light, very smooth. I’m a Grouse man, myself.” He watched jealously as the barman poured out the very pale Antiquary and gave me my water in a separate glass (if you want to be a really snob whisky drinker, that is the way you take it, in alternate sips, a right “professional Highlander” trick). Then we drank, the three of us, and the pipe-sergeant discoursed on whisky in general—the single malts and the blends, and “the Irish heresies”, and strange American concoctions of which he affected to have heard, called “Burboon”.
Sergeant Cuddy eventually interrupted to say that I had come to view the group photographs lining the mess walls, to see my great-uncle, and the pipe-sergeant exclaimed in admiration.
“And he was in the regiment? God save us, isn’t that the thing?” He bounded from his stool and skipped over to the row of pictures, some of them new and grainy-grey, others deepening into yellow obscurity. “About when would that be, sir? The ’nineties? In India? Well, well, let’s see. There’s the ’02, but that was in Malta, whatever they were doing there. Let’s see—Ross, Chalmers, Robertson, McGregor—all the teuchters, and look at the state of them, with their bellies hanging over their sporrans. I’d like to put them through a foursome, wouldn’t I just.” He went along the row, Cuddy and I following, calling out names and bestowing comments.
“South Africa, and all in khaki aprons. My, Cuddy, observe the whiskers. Hamilton, Fraser, Yellowlees, O’Toole—and what was he doing there, d’ye suppose? A right fugitive from the Devil’s Own, see the bog-Irish face of him. Murray, Johnstone—”
“I mind Johnstone, in my time,” said Cuddy. “Killed at Passchendaele.”
“—Scott, Allison—that’ll be Gutsy Allison’s father, Cuddy. Ye mind Gutsy.” The pipe-sergeant was searching out new treasures. “Save us, see there.” He pointed to a picture of the ’twenties. “Behold the splendour there, Mr MacNeill.” I looked at a face in the back rank, vaguely familiar, grim and tight-lipped. “He’s filled out since then,” said the pipe-sergeant. “Seventeen stone of him now, if there’s an ounce. That’s our present Regimental Sergeant-Major. Anderson, McColl, Brand, Hutcheson—”
“Hutcheson