Читать книгу The Sheik and the Dustbin - George Fraser MacDonald - Страница 5

Whenever I see television newsreels of police or troops facing mobs of rioting demonstrators, standing fast under a hail of rocks, bottles, and petrol bombs, my mind goes back forty years to India, when I was understudying John Gielgud and first heard the pregnant phrase “Aid to the civil power”. And from that my thoughts inevitably travel on to Captain Errol, and the Brigadier’s pet hawks, and the great rabble of chanting Arab rioters advancing down the Kantara causeway towards the thin khaki line of 12 Platoon, and my own voice sounding unnaturally loud and hoarse: “Right, Sarn’t Telfer - fix bayonets.”

Aid to the civil power, you see, is what the British Army used to give when called on to deal with disorder, tumult, and breach of the peace which the police could no longer control. The native constabulary of our former Italian colony being what they were - prone to panic if a drunken bazaar-wallah broke a window - aid to the civil power often amounted to no more than sending Wee Wullie out with a pick handle to shout “Imshi!”; on the other hand, when real political mayhem broke loose, and a raging horde of fellaheen several thousand strong appeared bent on setting the town ablaze and massacring the European population, sterner measures were called for, and unhappy subalterns found themselves faced with the kind of decision which Home Secretaries and Cabinets agonise over for hours, the difference being that the subaltern had thirty seconds, with luck, in which to consider the safety of his men, the defenceless town at his back, and the likelihood that if he gave the order to fire and some agitator caught a bullet, he, the subaltern, would go down in history as the Butcher of Puggle Bazaar, or wherever it happened to be.

That, as I say, was in the imperial twilight of forty years.ago, long before the days of walkie-talkies, C.S. gas, riot shields, water cannon, and similar modern defences of the public weal - not that they seem to make riot control any easier nowadays, especially when the cameras are present. We didn’t have to worry about television, and our options for dealing with infuriated rioters were limited: do nothing and get murdered, fire over their heads, or let fly in earnest. There are easier decisions, believe me, for a youth not old enough to vote.

The Army recognised this, and was at pains to instruct its fledgling officers in the techniques of containing civil commotion, so far as it knew how, which wasn’t far, even in India, with three centuries of experience to draw on. Those were the postwar months before independence, when demonstrators were chanting: “Jai Hind!” and “Pakistan zindabad!”, and the Indian police were laying about them with lathis (you really don’t know what police brutality is until you’ve seen a lathi charge going in), while the troops stood by and their officers hoped to God they wouldn’t have to intervene. Quetta and Amritsar were ugly memories of what happened when someone opened fire at the wrong time.

Bangalore, where I was completing my officers’ training course, was one of the quiet spots, which may have been why the authorities took the eccentric view that instruction in riot control could be imparted through the medium of the theatre. If that sounds unlikely, well, that’s the Army for you. Some genius (and it wasn’t Richard Brinsley Sheridan) had written a play about aid to the civil power, showing the right and wrong ways of coping with unrest; it was to be enacted at the garrison theatre, and I found myself dragooned into taking part.

That’s what comes of understudying Gielgud, which is what I like to think I had been doing, although he didn’t know it. In the last relaxed weeks of our officers’ training, a few of us cadets had been taking part in a production of The Harbour Called Mulberry for India Radio, with Cadet MacNeill as the Prussian general riveting the audience with his impersonation of Conrad Veidt; it was natural that when Gielgud’s touring company arrived in town with a double bill of Hamlet and Blithe Spirit, and some of his cast went down with Bangalore Belly, our amatuer group should be asked to provide replacements in case they needed a couple of extra spear-carriers. I was fool enough to volunteer, and while we were never required even to change into costume, let alone go on stage, we convinced ourselves that we were, technically, understudying the lead players - I mean to say, Bangalore Belly can go through unacclimatised systems like wildfire, and in our backstage dreams we could imagine being out there tearing the Soliloquy to shreds while Gielgud was carted off to the sick-bay. He wasn’t, as it happened, but no doubt he would have been reassured if he’d known that we were ready to step in.

That by the way; the upshot was that, having drawn attention to ourselves, my associates and I were prime targets when it came to choosing the cast for the aid-to-the-civil-power play, a knavish piece of work entitled Nowall and Chancit. I played Colonel Nowall, an elderly and incompetent garrison commander, which meant that I had to wear a white wig and whiskers and make like a doddering Aubrey Smith in front of a military audience whose behaviour would have disgraced the Circus Maximus. The script was abysmal, my moustache kept coming loose, the prop telephone didn’t ring on cue, one of the cast who took acting seriously dried up and fainted, and in the last act I had to order my troops to open fire on a rioting crowd played by a platoon of Indian sepoys in loin-cloths who giggled throughout and went right over the top when shot with blank cartridges. The entire theatre was dense with cordite smoke, there seemed to be about seven hundred people on stage, and when I stood knee-deep in hysterical corpses and spoke my deathless closing line: “Well, that’s that!” it stopped the show. I have not trod the boards since, and it can stay that way.

My excuse for that reminiscence is that it describes the only instruction we ever got in dealing with civil disorder. Considering that we were destined, as young second-lieutenants, to lead troops in various parts of the Far and Middle East when empires were breaking up and independence movements were in full spate, with accompanying bloodshed, it was barely adequate. Not that any amount of training, including my months as an infantry section leader in Burma, could have prepared me for the Palestine troubles of ‘46, when Arab and Jew were at each other’s throats with the British caught in the middle, as usual; the Irgun and Stern Gang were waging their campaign of terror (or freedom-fighting, depending on your point of view), raid, ambush, murder, and explosion were commonplace, the Argyll and Sutherlands had barbed wire strung across the inside corridors of their Jerusalem barracks, and you took your revolver into the shower. It was a nerve-racked, bloody business which you learned as you went along; commanding the Cairo-Jerusalem night train and conducting a security stake-out at the Armistice Day service on the Mount of Olives added years to my education in a matter of days, and by the time I was posted back to my Highland battalion far away along the North African coast I felt I knew something about lending aid to the civil power. Of course, I didn’t know the half of it - but then, I hadn’t met Captain Errol.

That wasn’t his real name, but it was what the Jocks called him because of his resemblance to Flynn, the well-known actor and bon viveur. And it wasn’t just that he was six feet two, lightly moustached, and strikingly handsome; he had the same casual, self-assured swagger of the man who is well content with himself and doesn’t give a dam whether anyone knows it or not; when you have two strings of ribbons, starting with the M.C. and M.M. and including the Croix de Guerre and a couple of exotic Balkan gongs at the end, you don’t need to put on side. Which was just as well, for Errol had evidently been born with a double helping of self-esteem, advertised in the amused half-smile and lifted eyebrow with which he surveyed the world in general - and me in particular on the day he joined the battalion.

I was bringing my platoon in from a ten-mile route march, which they had done in the cracking time of two and a half hours, and was calling them to march to attention for the last fifty yards to the main gate, exhorting McAuslan for the umpteenth time to get his pack off his backside and up to his shoulders, and pretending not to hear Private Fletcher’s sotto voce explanation that McAuslan couldn’t march upright because he was expecting, and might, indeed, go into labour shortly. Sergeant Telfer barked them to silence and quickened the step, and I turned aside to watch them swing past - it was a moment I took care never to miss, for the pride of it warms me still: my platoon going by, forty hard young Jocks in battle order, rifles sloped and bonnets pulled down, slightly dusty but hardly even breaking sweat as Telfer wheeled them under the archway with its faded golden standard. Eat your heart out, Bonaparte.

It was as I was turning to follow that I became aware of an elegant figure seated in a horse-ghari which had just drawn up at the gate. He was a Highlander, but his red tartan and white cockade were not of our regiment; then I noticed the three pips and threw him a salute, which he acknowledged with a nonchalant forefinger and a remarkable request spoken in the airy affected drawl which in Glasgow is called “Kelvinsaid”.

“Hullo, laddie,” said he. “Your platoon? You might get a couple of them to give me a hand with my kit, will you?”

It was said so affably that the effrontery of it didn’t dawn for a second - you don’t ask a perfect stranger to detach two of his marching men to be your porters, not without preamble or introduction. I stared at the man, taking in the splendid bearing, the medal ribbons, and the pleasant expectant smile while he put a fresh cigarette in his holder.

“Eh? I beg your pardon,” I said stiffly, “but they’re on parade at the moment.” For some reason I didn’t add “sir”.

It didn’t faze him a bit. “Oh, that’s a shame. Still, not to panic. We ought to be able to manage between us. All right, Abdul,” he addressed the Arab coachman, “let’s get the cargo on the dock.”

He swung lightly down from the ghari - not the easiest thing to do, with decorum, in a kilt - and it was typical of the man that I found myself with a valise in one hand and a set of golf-clubs in the other before I realised that he was evidently expecting me to tote his damned dunnage for him. My platoon had vanished from sight, fortunately, but Sergeant Telfer had stopped and was staring back, goggle-eyed. Before I could speak the newcomer was addressing me again:

“Got fifty lire, old man? ‘Fraid all I have is Egyptian ackers, and the Fairy Coachman won’t look at them. See him right, will you, and we’ll settle up anon. Okay?”

That, as they say, did it. “Laddie” I could just about absorb (since he must have been all of twenty-seven and therefore practically senile), and even his outrageous assumption that my private and personal platoon were his to flunkify, and that I would caddy for him and pay his blasted transport bills - but not that careless “Okay?” and the easy, patronising air which was all the worse for being so infernally amiable. Captain or no captain, I put his clubs and valise carefully back in the ghari and spoke, with masterly restraint:

“I’m afraid I haven’t fifty lire on me, sir, but if you care to climb back in, the ghari can take you to the Paymaster’s Office in HQ Company; they’ll change your ackers and see to your kit.” And just to round off the civilities I added: “My name’s MacNeill, by the way, and I’m a platoon commander, not a bloody dragoman.”

Which was insubordination, but if you’d seen that sardonic eyebrow and God-like profile you’d have said it too. Again, it didn’t faze him; he actually chuckled.

“I stand rebuked. MacNeill, eh?” He glanced at my campaign ribbon. “What were you in Burma?”

“Other rank.”

“Well, obviously, since you’re only a second-lieutenant now. What kind of other rank?”

“Well … sniper-scout, Black Cat Division. Later on I was a section leader. Why … sir?”

“Black Cats, eh? God Almighty’s Own. Were you at Imphal?”

“Not in the Boxes. Irrawaddy Crossing, Meiktila, Sittang Bend—”

“And you haven’t got a measly fifty lire for a poor broken-down old soldier? Well, the hell with you, young MacNeill,” said this astonishing fellow, and seated himself in the ghari again. “I’d heap coals of fire on you by offering you a lift, but your platoon are probably waiting for you to stop their motor. Bash on, MacNeill, before they seize up! Officers’ mess, Abdul!” And he drove off with an airy wave.

“Hadn’t you better report to H.Q.?” I called after him, but he was through the gate by then, leaving me nonplussed but not a little relieved; giving lip to captains wasn’t my usual line, but he hadn’t turned regimental, fortunately.

“Whit the hell was yon?” demanded Sergeant Telfer, who had been an entranced spectator.

“You tell me,” I said. “Ballater Bertie, by the look of him.” For he had, indeed, the air of those who command the guard at Ballater Station, conducting Royalty with drawn broadsword and white spats. And yet he’d been wearing an M.M. ribbon, which signified service in the ranks. I remarked on this to Telfer, who sniffed as only a Glaswegian can, and observed that whoever the newcomer might be, he was a heid-case - which means an eccentric.

That was the battalion’s opinion, formed before Captain Errol had been with us twenty-four hours. He had driven straight to the mess, which was empty of customers at that time of day, smooth-talked the mess sergeant into paying the ghari out of bar receipts, made free with the Tallisker unofficially reserved for the Medical Officer, parked himself unerringly in the second-in-command’s favourite chair, and whiled away the golden afternoon with the Scottish Field. Discovered and gently rebuked by the Adjutant for not reporting his arrival in the proper form, he had laughed apologetically and asked what time dinner was, and before the Adjutant, an earnest young Englishman, could wax properly indignant he had found himself, by some inexplicable process, buying Errol a gin and tonic.

“I can’t fathom it,” he told me, with the pained expression he usually reserved for descriptions of his putting. “One minute I was tearing small strips off the chap, and the next you know I was saying ‘What’s yours?’ and filling him in on the social scene. Extraordinary.”

Having found myself within an ace of bell-hopping for Captain Errol by the same mysterious magic, I sympathised. Who was he, anyway, I asked, and the Adjutant frowned.

“Dunno, exactly. Nor why we’ve got him. He’s been up in Palestine lately, and just from something the Colonel said I have the impression he’s been in some sort of turmoil - Errol, I mean. That type always is,” said the Adjutant, like a dowager discussing a fallen woman. “Wouldn’t be surprised if he was an I-man.”

“I” is Intelligence, and the general feeling in line regiments is that you can keep it; I-men are disturbing influences best confined to the higher echelons, where they can pursue their clandestine careers and leave honest soldiers in peace. Attached to a battalion, they can be unsettling.

And Captain Errol was all of that. As he had begun, with the Adjutant and me, so he went on, causing ripples on our placid regimental surface which eventually turned into larger waves. One of the former, for example, occurred on his first night in the mess when, within half an hour of their first acquaintance, he addressed the Colonel as “skipper”. It caused a brief silence which Errol himself didn’t seem to notice; officially, you see, there are no ranks in the mess, but junior officers (of whom captains are only the most senior) normally call the head man “sir”, especially when he is such a redoubtable bald eagle as our Colonel was. “Skipper” was close to the edge of impertinence - but it was said so easily and naturally that he got away with it. In fact, I think the Colonel rather liked it.

That, it soon became plain, was Errorl’s secret. Like his notorious namesake, he had great charm and immense style; partly it was his appearance, which was commanding, and his war record - the family of Highland regiments is a tight little news network, and many of the older men had heard of him as a fighting soldier - but most of it was just personality. He was casual, cocky, even insolent, but with a gift of disarmament, and even those who found his conceit and familiarity irritating (as the older men did) seemed almost flattered when he gave them his attention - I’ve seen the Senior Major, a grizzled veteran with the disposition of a liverish rhino, grinning sourly as Errol teased him. When he was snubbed, he didn’t seem to notice; the eyebrow would give an amused flicker, no more.

The youngest subalterns thought him a hell of a fellow, of course, not least because he had no side with them; rank meant nothing to Errol, up or down. The Jocks, being canny judges, were rather wary of him, while taking advantage of his informality so far as they thought it safe; their word for him was “gallus”, that curious Scots adjective which means a mixture of reckless, extrovert, and indifferent. On balance, he was not over-popular with Jocks or officers, especially among the elders, but even they held him in a certain grudging respect. None of which seemed to matter to Errol in the least.

I heard various verdicts on him in the first couple of weeks.

“I think he’s a Bad News Type,” said the Adjutant judicially, “but there’s no doubt he’s a character.”

“Insufferable young pup,” was the Senior Major’s verdict. “Why the devil must he use that blasted cigarette holder, like a damned actor?” When it was pointed out that most of us used them, to keep the sweat off our cigarettes, the Major remarked unreasonably: “Not the way he does. Damned affectation.”

“I like him,” said plump and genial Major Bakie. “He can be dashed funny when he wants. Breath of fresh air. My wife likes him, too.”

“Captain Errol,” observed the Padre, who was the most charitable of men, “is a very interesting chentleman. What d’ye say, Lachlan?”

“Like enough,” said the M.O. “I wouldnae let him near my malt, my money, or my maidservant.”

“See him, he’s sand-happy. No’ a’ there,” I heard Private McAuslan informing his comrades. “See when he wis Captain o’ the Week, an’ had tae inspect ma rifle on guard? He looks doon the barrel, and says: ‘I seem to see through a glass darkly.’ Whit kind o’ patter’s that, Fletcher? Mind you, he didnae pit me on a charge, an’ me wi’ a live round up the spout. Darkie woulda nailed me tae the wall.” (So I would, McAuslan.)

“Errol? A chanty-wrastler,” said Fletcher-which, from that crafty young soldier, was interesting. A chanty-wrastler is a poseur, and unreliable.

“Too dam’ sure of himself by half,” was the judgment of the second-in-command. “We can do without his sort.”

The Colonel rubbed tobacco between his palms in his thoughtful way, and said nothing.

Personally, I’d met plenty I liked better, but it seemed to me there was a deeper prejudice against Errol than he deserved, bouncy tigger though he was. Some of it might be explained by his service record which, it emerged, was sensational, and not all on the credit side. According to the Adjutant’s researches, he had been commissioned in the Territorials in ‘39, and had escaped mysteriously from St Valéry, where the rest of his unit had gone into the P.O.W. bag (“there were a few heads wagged about that, apparently”). Later he had fought with distinction in the Far East, acquiring a Military Cross (“a real one, not one of your up-with-the-rations jobs”) with the Chindits.

“And then,” said the Adjutant impressively, “he got himself cashiered. Yes, busted - all the way down. It seems he was in charge of a train-load of wounded, somewhere in Bengal, and there was some foul-up and they were shunted into a siding. Some of the chaps were in a bad way, and Errol raised hell with the local R.T.O., who got stroppy with him, and Errol hauled out his revolver and shot the inkpot off the R.T.O.’s desk, and threatened to put the next one between his eyes. Well, you can’t do that, can you? So it was a court-martial, and march out Private Errol.”

“But he’s a captain now,” I said. “How on earth—?”

“Chubbarao, and listen to this,” said the Adjutant. “He finished up late in the war with those special service johnnies who were turned loose in the Balkans - you know, helping the partisans, blowing up bridges and things and slaughtering Huns with cheese-wire by night. Big cloak-and-dagger stuff, and he did hell of a well at it, and Tito kissed him on both cheeks and said he’d never seen the like—”

“So that’s where he got the M.M.”

“And the Balkan gongs, and the upshot of it was that he was re-commissioned. It happens, now and then. And of late he’s been undercover in Palestine.” The Adjutant scratched his fair head. “Something odd there - rumours about terrorist suspects being knocked about pretty badly, and one hanging himself in his cell. Nasty business. Anyway, friend Errol was shipped out, p.d.q., and now we’re landed with him. Oh, and another thing-he’s to be Intelligence Officer, as if we needed one. Didn’t I say he was the type?” The Adjutant sniffed. “Well, at least it should keep him out of everyone’s hair.”

The disclosures of Errol’s irregular past were not altogether surprising, and they helped to explain his alakeefik attitude and brass neck. Plainly he was capable of anything, and having hit both the heights and the depths was not to be judged as ordinary mortals are.

His duties as I-man were vague, and kept him out of the main stream of battalion life, which may have been as well, for as a soldier he was a contradictory mixture. In some things he was expert: a splendid shot, superb athlete, and organised to the hilt in the field. On parade, saving his immaculate turn-out, he was a disaster: when he was Captain of the Week and had to mount the guard, I suffered agonies at his elbow in my capacity as orderly officer, whispering commands and telling him what to do next while he turned the ceremony into a shambles. Admittedly, since McAuslan was in the guard, we were handicapped from the start, but I believe Errol could have reduced the Household Cavalry to chaos - and been utterly indifferent about it. Doing well or doing badly, it was all one to him; he walked off that guard-mounting humming and swinging his walking-stick, debonair as be-damned, and advising the outraged Regimental Sergeant-Major that the drill needed tightening up a bit. (He actually addressed him as “Major”, which is one of the things that are never done. An R.S.M. is “Mr So-and-so”.)

Being casual in all things, he was naturally accident-prone, but even that did nothing to deflate him, since the victim was invariably someone else. He wrecked the Hudson Terraplane belonging to Lieutenant Grant, and walked away without a scratch; Grant escaped with a broken wrist, but there was no restoring the car which had been its owner’s pride.

He was equally lethal on blue water. Our garrison town boasted a magnificent Mediterranean bay, strewn with wrecks from the war, and sailing small boats was a popular pastime among the local smart set; Errol took to it in a big way, and from all accounts it was like having a demented Blackbeard loose about the waterfront. I gather there is a sailing etiquette about giving way and not getting athwart other people’s hawses, of which he was entirely oblivious; the result was a series of bumps, scrapes, collisions, and furious protests from outraged voyagers, culminating in a regatta event in which he dismasted one competitor, caused another to capsize, and added insult to injury by winning handsomely. That he was promptly disqualified did not lower the angle of his jaunty cigarette-holder by a degree when he turned up at the prize-giving, bronzed and dashing, to applaud the garrison beauty, Ellen Ramsay, when she received the Ladies’ Cup. She it was who christened him the Sea Hog - and was his dinner companion for many nights thereafter, to the chagrin of Lieutenant MacKenzie who, until Errol’s arrival, had been the fair Ellen’s favoured beau.

None of which did much for Errol’s popularity. Nor, strangely enough, did an odd episode which I thought was rather to his credit. The command boxing tournament took place, and as sports officer I had to organise our regimental gladiators - which meant calling for volunteers, telling them to knock off booze and smoking, letting them attend to their own sparring and training in the M.T. shed, and seeing that they were sober and (initially) upright on opening night. If that seems perfunctory, I was not a boxer myself, and had no illusions about being Yussel Jacobs when it came to management. Let them get into the ring and lay about them, while I crouched behind their corner, crying encouragement and restraining the seconds from joining in.

The tournament lasted three nights, and in winning his semifinal our heavyweight star, Private McGuigan, the Gorbals Goliath, broke a finger. Personally I think he did it on purpose to avoid meeting the other finalist, one Captain Stock, a terrible creature of blood and iron who had flattened all his opponents with unimagined ferocity; he was a relic of the Stone Age who had found his way into the Army Physical Training Corps, this Stock, and I wouldn’t have gone near him with a whip, a gun, and a chair. Primitive wasn’t the word; he made McAuslan and Wee Wullie look like Romantic poets.

Left to find a substitute willing to offer himself for sacrifice at the hands of this Behemoth, I got no takers at all, and then someone said he had heard that Errol used to box a bit, and must be about the right weight. There was enthusiastic support for this suggestion, especially from the older officers, so I sought the man out in his room, where he was reclining with a cool drink at his elbow, shooting moths with an air pistol - and hitting them, too.

“What makes you think I could take Stock, if you’ll pardon the expression?” he wondered, when I put it to him. “Or doesn’t that matter, as long as we’re represented?”

“Someone in the mess said you used to be pretty useful …”

“Did they now? That’s handsome of them.” He grinned at me sardonically. “Who proposed me - Cattenach?” This was the second-in-command, Errol’s principal critic. “Never mind. It’s not on, Dand, thanks all the same. I haven’t boxed for ages. Too much like work.”

“There’s no one else in the battalion,” I said subtly.

“Stop waving the regimental colours at me.” He picked off a large moth on the wing, bringing down a shower of plaster. “Anyway, I’m an interloper. Let Cattenach take him on if he’s so damned keen; God knows he’s big enough. No, you’ll just have to tell ‘em I’ve retired.”

So I reported failure, and there was disappointment, although no one was daft enough to suggest that Errol was scared. The Adjutant, who was a romantic, speculated that he had probably killed a man in the ring - his fiancée’s brother, for choice - and vowed never to box again; he would have joined the Foreign Legion, insisted the Adjutant, if it hadn’t been for the war. Others joined in these fine flights, and no one noticed the Colonel sauntering out of the mess, but later that evening he told me casually that I could pencil in Errol for the final; he had been persuaded, said the Colonel, filling his pipe in a contented way. Knowing his fanaticism where the battalion’s credit was concerned, I wondered what pressure he had applied, and concluded that he probably hadn’t needed any, just his gentle, fatherly insistence which I knew of old. He could have talked a salmon out of its pool, the same Colonel - and of course the possibility that his man might get half-killed wouldn’t even cross his mind.

It crossed mine when I saw Errol and Stock face to muzzle in the ring; so might Adonis have looked in the presence of a silverback gorilla. Stock stood half a head taller, two stone heavier, and about a foot thicker, especially round the brow. He came out at the bell like a Panzer tank - and Errol moved round him as though on rollers, weaving and feinting until he’d sized him up, and then began systematically left-handing him to death. It was Carpentier to the town drunk; Stock clubbed and rushed and never got near him until the second round, when he had the ill-judgment to land a kidney-punch. Errol came out of the clinch looking white and wicked, and thereafter took Stock apart with clinical savagery. The referee stopped it in the third, with Stock bloodied and out on his feet; Errol hadn’t a hair out of place, and I doubt if he’d been touched more than half a dozen times.

But as I said, he got no credit from that fight. It had been so one-sided that all the sympathy was for the battered Stock, and there was even a feeling that Errol had been over-brutal to a man who wasn’t in his class as a boxer. Which was unfair, since he had been reluctant to fight in the first place - my guess is that he knew exactly how good he was, and that Stock would be no contest. But if he compared the polite clapping as he left the ring with the thunder of applause for his groggy but gamely smiling opponent, it didn’t seem to worry him; he strolled back to the changing-room cool and unruffled as ever.

It was immediately after this that he finally fell from grace altogether, and the mixed feelings of the mess hardened into positive dislike. Two things happened to show him at his worst; neither was earth-shattering in itself, but in each case he displayed such a cynical indifference that even his friends could find no excuses.

In the first instance, he stole another man’s girl - and it wasn’t a case of cutting out someone like MacKenzie, the battalion Lothario, with Ellen Ramsay, whose admirers were legion (including even the unlikely Private McAuslan, whose wooing I have described elsewhere). Boy met, dated, and parted from girl with bewildering speed in post-war garrisons, and no harm done; Errol himself must have been involved with half the nurses, A.T.S., Wrens, and civilian females, and no one thought twice, except to note jealously that while the rest of us had to pursue, he seemed to draw them like a magnet.

But the case of Sister Jean was different. She was a flashing-eyed Irish redhead, decorative even by the high standard of the hospital staff, and her attachment to a U.S. pilot at the bomber base was the real thing, what the Adjutant called Poignant Passion, engagement ring, wedding date fixed, and all - until Errol moved in on the lady. I was on detachment at Fort Yarhuna during the crisis, but according to MacKenzie it had started with casual cheek-to-cheek stuff on the dance-floor at the Uaddan Club, progressing to dates, picnics, and sailing-trips on Errol’s dinghy while the American was absent on his country’s service, dropping sandbags on the desert (I quote MacKenzie). In brief, Jean had been beglamoured, her fiancé had objected, a lovers’ quarrel had ensued with high words flying in Irish and American, the ring had been returned, the pilot had got himself posted to Italy in dudgeon, and the hapless patients in Sister Jean’s ward were learning what life was like under the Empress Theodora.

“Talk about hell hath no fury,” said MacKenzie. “She’s lobbing out enemas like a mad thing. You see, not only is her romance with Tex kaput, bus, washed up; on top of that, the unspeakable Errol has given her the gate and is pushing around the new Ensa bint - who is a piece of all right, I have to admit. What women see in him,” he added irritably, “I’m shot if I know. The man’s a tick, a suede-shoe artist, a Semiramis Hotel creeper of the lowest type.”

“Didn’t anyone try to steer him away from Jean?” I asked, thinking of the Colonel, who when it came to intervening in his junior officers’ love lives could have given Lady Bracknell a head start. “Why didn’t you tackle him yourself?”

“Come off it. Remember what happened to Stock? Actually, Ellen Ramsay did get stuck into him at one stage … gosh, she’s a honey, that girl,” said MacKenzie, smiling dreamily. “I think I’ll take her grouse-shooting when we go home. You know, dazzle her with Perthshire … Eh? Oh, well, she tore strips off Errol, and he just laughed and said: ‘Why, darling, I didn’t know you cared,’ and swanned off, cool as be-damned, to take Jean swimming. And now, having wrecked her future, and Tex’s, he goes around blithe as a bird, as though nothing had happened. Yes - a total tick, slice him where you will.”

A fair assessment, on the face of it, and the temperature dropped noticeably in the mess when Errol was present, not that he seemed aware of it. Otherwise the incident was closed; for one thing, there were far more urgent matters to think about just then. Political trouble was beginning to brew in our former Italian colony, with noisy nationalist demonstrations, stoning of police posts by Arab gangs, and the prospect that we would be called out to support the civil administration. If there’s going to be active service, the last thing you need is discord in the mess.

Even so, Errol’s next gaffe came close to blowing the lid off with his bête noire, Cattenach, the second-in-command; it was the nearest thing I ever saw to a brawl between brother-officers, and all because of Errol’s bloody-minded disregard for other people’s feelings. He had set off early one morning to shoot on the salt flats outside the town, and came breezing in just as we were finishing breakfast, calling for black coffee and telling Bennet-Bruce that his shotgun (which Errol had borrowed, typically) was throwing left. Bennet-Bruce asked if he’d had any luck.

“Nothing to write to the Field about,” said Errol, buttering toast. “In fact, sweet dam’-all, except for a couple of kites near the Armoury. Weird-looking things.”

Cattenach lowered his paper. “Did you say near the Armoury? Where are these birds?”

“Where I left them, of course; somewhere around the Armoury wall. They weren’t worth keeping.”

Cattenach looked thoughtful, but went back to his paper, and it wasn’t until lunchtime that he returned to the subject. He brought his drink across from the bar and stopped in front of Errol’s chair, waiting until he had finished telling his latest story and had become aware that Cattenach was regarding him stonily. The second-in-command was a lean, craggy, normally taciturn man with a rat-trap mouth that made him look like one of the less amiable Norman barons.

“You may be interested to know,” he said curtly, “that the ‘kites’ you shot this morning were the Brigadier’s pet hawks.”

There was a startled silence, in which the Padre said: “Oh, cracky good gracious!”, and Errol cocked an incredulous, eyebrow. “What are you talking about - hawks? Since when do hawks stooge around loose, like crows!”

“They were tame hawks - something unique, I believe,” said Cattenach, enjoying himself in his own grim fashion. “A gift to the Brigadier from King Idris, after the desert campaign. Quite irreplaceable, of course, as well as being priceless. And you shot them. Congratulations.”

Well, you and I or any normal person would at this point have lowered the head in the hands, giving little whimpering cries punctuated by stricken oaths and appeals for advice. Not Errol, though; he just downed his drink and observed lightly:

“Well, why didn’t he keep them on a leash? I thought it was usual to put hoods over their heads.”

We stared at the man, and someone protested: “Oh, come off it, Errol!”, while Cattenach went crimson and began to inflate.

“Is that all you’ve got to say?” he demanded, and Errol regarded him with maddening calm.

“What d’you expect me to say? I’m sorry, of course.” If he was he certainly didn’t sound it. “I’ll send the old boy a note of apology.” He gave Cattenach a nod that was almost dismissive. “Okay?”

“Just… that?” growled Cattenach, ready to burst.

“I can’t very well do anything else,” said Errol, and picked up a magazine. “Unless you expect me to rend my garments.” To do him justice, I believe that if anyone else had brought him the glad news, he’d have shown more concern, but he wasn’t giving Cattenach that satisfaction - just his cool half-smile, and the second-in-command had to struggle to keep a grip on himself in the face of that dumb insolence. He took a breath, and then said with deliberation:

“The trouble with you, and what makes you such an unpleasant regimental liability, is that while most of us couldn’t care more, you just couldn’t care less.”

No one had ever heard Cattenach, who was normally a quiet soul, talk with such controlled contempt - and in the mess, of all places. A little flush appeared on Errol’s cheek, and he rose from his chair, but only to look Cattenach in the eye and say:

“You know, that’s extremely well put. I think I’ll enter it in the mess book.”

That was when I thought Cattenach was going to hit him - or try to, because Errol, for all his composure, was balanced like a cat. Suddenly it was very ugly, the Padre was making anxious noises, and the Adjutant was starting forward, and then Cattenach turned abruptly on his heel and stalked out. There was a toe-curling silence - and of course I had to open my big mouth, heaven knows why, unless I thought it was time to raise the conversation to a higher plane.

“Why can’t you bloody well wrap up, just for once?” I demanded, and was told by the Adjutant to shut up. “I think you’ve said enough, too,” he told Errol. “Right - who’s for lunch?”_

“I am, for one,” said Errol, unabashed. “Drama always gives me an appetite,” and he sauntered off to the dining-room, leaving us looking at each other, the Padre muttering about the pride of Lucifer, and the M.O., after a final inhalation of the Tallisker, voicing the general thought.

“Yon’s a bad man,” he said. “Mercy is not in him.”

That was a fact, I thought. Not only had he shown a callous disregard for the feelings of the Brigadier, bereaved of his precious pets, he had strained the egalitarian conventions of the mess to the limit in his behaviour to Cattenach - who, mind you, had been making a meal of his own dislike for Errol. It was all enough to make one say “Tach!”, as my grandmother used to exclaim in irritation, and lunch was taken in general ill-temper - except for Errol, who ate a tranquil salad and lingered over his coffee.

And then such trivia ceased to matter, for at 2.15 came the sudden alarm call from the Police Commissioner to say that the unrest which had been simmering in the native quarter had suddenly burst into violence: a mob of Arab malcontents and bazaar-wallahs were rioting in the Suk, pillaging shops and fire-raising; one of the leading nationalist agitators, Marbruk es-Salah, was haranguing a huge gathering near the Yassid Market, and it looked only a matter of time before they would be spilling out of the Old City and rampaging towards the European suburbs. Aid to the civil power was a matter of urgency - which meant that at 2.45 the two three-ton trucks bearing the armed might of 12 Platoon pulled up on the great dusty square east of the Kantara Bridge, and I reviewed the force with which I was expected to plug that particular outlet from the native quarter.

In theory, the plan for containing unrest was simple. The Old City, an impossible warren of tall crumbling buildings and hundreds of crooked streets and narrow alleys, spread out like a huge fan from the waterfront; beyond the semi-circular edge of the fan lay the European suburbs of the Italian colonial era, girdling the squalid Old City from sea to sea in a luxurious crescent of apartment buildings, bungalows, shops, restaurants, and broad streets - a looter’s paradise for the teeming thousands of the Old City’s inhabitants, if they ever invaded in force. To make sure they didn’t, the 24 infantry platoons of our battalion and the Fusiliers were supposed to block every outlet from the Old City to the New Town, and since these were innumerable, careful disposition of forces was vital.

Kantara was an easy one, since here there was an enormous ditch hemming the native town like a moat, and the only way across was the ancient bridge (which is what Kantara means) which we were guarding. It was a structure of massive stones which had been there before the Caesars, twenty feet broad between low parapets, and perhaps twice as long. From where I stood on the open ground at its eastern end, I could look across the bridge at a peaceful enough scene: a wide market-place in which interesting Orientals were going about their business of loafing, wailing, squatting in the dust, or snoozing in the shadows of the great rickety tenements and ruined walls of the Old City. Behind me were the broad, palm-lined boulevards of the modern resort area, with dazzling white apartments and pleasant gardens, a couple of hotels and restaurants, and beyond them the hospital and the beach club. It looked like something out of a travel brochure, with a faint drift of Glenn Miller on the afternoon air - and then you turned back to face the ancient stronghold of the Barbary Corsairs, a huge festering slum crouched like a malignant genie above the peaceful European suburb, and felt thankful for the separating moat-ditch with only that single dusty causeway across it.

“Nae bother,” said Sergeant Telfer. Like me, he was thinking that thirty Jocks with fifty rounds apiece could have held that bridge against ten times the native population - provided they were empowered to shoot, that is. Which, if it came to the point, would be up to me. But we both knew that was highly unlikely; by all accounts the trouble was at the western end of the Old City, where most of our troops were concentrated. Kantara was very much the soft option, which was presumably why one platoon had been deemed enough. They hadn’t thought it worthwhile giving us a radio, even.

Since it was all quiet, I didn’t form the platoon up, but showed them where, in the event of trouble, they would take up extended line, facing the bridge and about fifty yards from it, out of range of any possible missiles from beyond the ditch. Then they sat in the shade of the trucks, smoking and gossiping, while I prowled about, watching the market for any signs of disturbance, vaguely aware of the discussion on current affairs taking place behind me.

“Hi, Corporal Mackie, whit are the wogs gettin’ het up aboot, then?”

“Independence.” Mackie had been a civil servant, and was the platoon intellectual. “Self-government by their own political leaders. They don’t like being under Allied occupation.”

“Fair enough, me neither. Whit’s stoppin’ them?”

“You are, McAuslan. You’re the heir to the pre-war Italian government. So do your shirt up and try to look like it.”

“Me? Fat chance! The wogs can hiv it for me, sure’n they can, Fletcher? It’s no’ my parish. Hi, corporal, whit wey does the government no’ let the wogs have it?”

“Because they’d make a bluidy mess o’ it, dozy.” This was Fletcher, who was a sort of Churchillian Communist. “They’re no’ fit tae run a mennodge. Look behind ye - that’s civilisation. Then look ower there at that midden o’ a toon; that’s whit the wogs would make o’ it. See?”

So much for Ibn Khaldun and the architects of the Alhambra. Some similar thought must have stirred McAuslan’s strange mental processes, for he came out with a nugget which, frankly, I wouldn’t have thought he knew.

“Haud on a minnit, Fletcher - it was wogs built the Pyramids, wisn’t it? That’s whit the Padre says. Aye, weel, there ye are. They cannae be that dumb.”

“Those werenae wogs, ya mug! Those were Ancient Egyptians.”

“An Egyptian’s a wog! Sure’n he is. So don’t gi’ me the acid, Fletcher. Anyway, if Ah wis a wog, Ah wid dam’ soon get things sortit oot aboot indamapendence. If Ah wis a wog—”

“That’s a helluva insult tae wogs, right enough. Ah can just see ye! Hey, fellas, meet Abu ben McAuslan, the Red Shadow. Ye fancy havin’ a harem, McAuslan? Aboot twenty belly-dancers like Big Aggie frae the Blue Heaven?” And Fletcher began to hum snake-charmer music, while his comrades speculated coarsely on McAuslan, Caliph of the Faithful, and I looked through the heat haze at the Old City, and thought about cool pints in the dim quiet of the mess ante-room.

It came, as it so often does, with daunting speed. There was a distant muttering from the direction of the Old City, like a wind getting up, and the market-place beyond the bridge was suddenly empty and still in the late afternoon sun. Then the muttering changed to a rising rumble of hurrying feet and harsh voices growing louder. I shouted to Telfer to fall in, and from the mouth of a street beyond the market-place a native police jeep came racing over the bridge. It didn’t stop; I had a glimpse of a brown face, scared and staring, under a peaked cap, and then the jeep was gone in a cloud of dust, heading up into the New Town. So much for the civil power. The platoon were fanning out in open order, each man with his rifle and a canvas bandolier at his waist; they stood easy, and Telfer turned to me for orders. I was gazing across the bridge, watching Crisis arrive in a frightsome form, and realising with sudden dread that there was no one on God’s green earth to deal with it, except me.

It’s quite a moment. You’re taking it easy, on a sunny afternoon, listening to the Jocks chaffing - and then out of the alleys two hundred yards away figures are hurrying, hundreds of them, converging into a great milling mob, yelling in unison, waving their fists, starting to move towards you. A menace beats off them that you can feel, dark glaring faces, sticks brandished, robes waving and feet churning up the dust in clouds before them, the rhythmic chanting sounding like a barbaric war-song -and you fight down the panic and turn to look at the khaki line strung out either side of you, the young faces set under the slanted bonnets, the rifles at their sides, standing at ease - waiting for you. If you say the word, they’ll shoot that advancing mob flat, and go on shooting, because that’s what they’re trained to do, for thirty bob a week - and if that doesn’t stop the opposition, they’ll stand and fight it out on the spot as long as they can, because that’s part of the conscript’s bargain, too. But it’s entirely up to you - and there’s no colonel or company commander to instruct or advise. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve led a section in warfare, where there is no rule save survival; this is different, for these are not the enemy - by God, I thought, you could have fooled me; I may know it, but I’ll bet they don’t - they are civilians, and you must not shoot unless you have to, and only you can decide that, so make up your mind, Dand, and don’t dawdle: you’re getting nine quid a week, after all, so the least you can do is show some initiative.