The Complete McAuslan. George Fraser MacDonald

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      I went over to McGlinchy, who was drying his hair and whistling. I wanted to ask: What gets into you? Why don’t you play like that all the time? But I didn’t. I knew I wouldn’t ever find out.

      For no reason I suddenly thought of Samuels, and realised that he was off the hook. Resentment quickly followed relief: he was not only in the clear, he had probably made a small fortune. How lucky, how undeservedly lucky can you get, I thought bitterly: but for McGlinchy’s inexplicable brilliance Samuels would now be facing the certainty of court-martial and dismissal, possibly even prison. As it was he was riding high.

      Or so I thought until that evening, when I was summoned to the local bastille at the request of the Provost-Marshal, to identify a soldier, one McAuslan, who had been arrested during the afternoon. It appeared that he and an anonymous sailor had been making a tour of all the bars in town, and the sailor had eventually passed out in the street. McAuslan’s primitive efforts to minister to him had excited attention, and the pair of them had been hauled off by the redcaps.

      They brought him out of his cell, looking abominable but apparently sober. I demanded to know what he thought he had been doing.

      Well, it was like this, he and his friend the sailor had gone for a wee hauf, and then they had had anither, and …

      “He’ll be singing ’I belong to Glasgow’ in a minute,” observed the redcap corporal. “Stand to attention, you thing, you.”

      “Who was the sailor?” I asked, puzzled, for I remembered McAuslan’s antipathy to the ship’s crew.

      “Wan o’ the boys off the ship. Fella Peterson. He was gaun tae the toon, an’ Ah offered tae staun’ ’im a drink. Ye remember,” he went on earnestly, “ye told me tae fraternise. Well, we fraternised, an’ he got fu’. Awfy quick, he got fu’,” McAuslan went on, and it was plain to see that his companion’s incapacity offended him. “He drank the drink Ah bought ’im, and it made ’im fleein’, and then he was buyin’ drink himsel’ at an awfy rate …”

      “That was the thing, sir,” explained the redcap. “This sailor had more money than you’ve ever seen; he looked like he’d robbed a bank. That was really why we pulled them in, sir, for protection. Weedy little chap, the sailor, but he had hundreds of pounds worth of lire on him.”

      Suddenly a great light dawned. Peterson was the name of Samuels’ clerk, who had been going to place his bets for him, and McAuslan had obviously encountered him beforehand, and full of good fellowship had bought him liquor, and Peterson, the weedy little chap, must have been unused to strong waters, and had forgotten responsibility and duty and his captain’s orders, and had proceeded to go on an almighty toot. So it seemed obvious that whatever custom the bookies had attracted that day, Samuels’ had not been part of it. His money (and the ship’s funds and my jocks’ pay) was safely in the military police office safe, less what McAuslan and Peterson had expended with crying “Bring in!” Samuels could make that up himself, and serve him right. Also, he could have fun explaining to the M.P.s just how one of his sailors came to be rolling about town with all that cash on his person.

      “McAuslan,” I said, “in your own way you’re a great man. Tell me,” I asked the redcap, “are you going to charge him?”

      “Well,” said the redcap, “he wasn’t what you’d call incapably stinking, just happy. It was the sailor who was paralytic. He still is. So …”

      “Thank you,” I said. “Look, McAuslan, you’re a lucky man. You shouldn’t go about getting little sailors stotius …”

      “I was jist fraternisin’, honest …”

      “Right. You can fraternise some more. What I want you to do is go over to the ship, look out Lieutenant Samuels, and tell him, in your own well-chosen words, what happened today. Tell him the money’s in the M.P. safe. And then you might offer to buy him a drink; he’ll probably need one. And McAuslan, if he tries to hit you, you’re not to clock him one, understand? Remember, be fraternal and polite; he’s your superior officer and you wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

      We took our leave of the civil redcaps, and I watched McAuslan striding purposefully towards the harbour, bonnet down over his eyes, to break the glad news to Samuels. It was growing dusk, and all in all, it had been quite a day.

      I saw McGlinchy many years after, from the top of a Glasgow bus. Although his fair hair was fading and receding, and his face looked middle-aged and tired, there was no mistaking the loose-jointed, untidy walk. He was carrying a string bag, and he looked of no account at all in his stained raincoat and old shoes. And then the bus took me past. I wondered if he remembered those few minutes out in the sunlight. Perhaps not; he wasn’t the kind who would think twice about it. But I remember McGlinchy when …

       Wee Wullie

      The duties of a regimental orderly officer cover pretty well everything from inspecting the little iced cakes in the canteen to examining the prisoners in the guard room cells to ensure that they are still breathing. In our battalion, the cells were seldom occupied; the discipline imposed on our volatile mixture of Aberdonians and Glaswegians was intelligent rather than tough, and more often than not trouble was dealt with before it got the length of a charge sheet.

      So when I walked into the guard room for a late night look round and saw one of the cell doors closed and padlocked, and a noise issuing from behind it like the honking of a drowsy seal, I asked McGarry, the provost sergeant, who his guest for the night might be.

      “It’s yon animal, Wee Wullie,” he said. “Sharrap, ye Glasgow heathen! He’s gey fu’ sir, an’ half-killed a redcap in the toon. They had to bring him here in a truck wi’ his hands tied and a man sittin’ on his heid. And afore I could get him in there I had to restrain him, mysel’.”

      I realised that McGarry had a swelling bruise on one cheek and that his usually immaculate khaki shirt was crumpled; he was a big man, with forearms like a blacksmith, and the skin on his knuckles was broken. I was glad it wasn’t me he had had to restrain.

      “He’s sleepin’ like a bairn noo, though,” he added, and he said it almost affectionately.

      I looked through the grill of the cell. Wee Wullie was lying on the plank, snoring like an organ. Between his massively booted feet at one end, and the bonnet on his grizzled head at the other, there was about six and a half feet of muscular development that would have done credit to a mountain gorilla. One of his puttees was gone, his shirt was in rags, and there was a tear in his kilt; his face, which at the best of times was rugged, looked as though it had been freshly trampled on. On the palm of one outstretched hand still lay a trophy of his evening’s entertainment—a Military Police cap badge. In that enormous brown paw it looked about as big as a sixpence.

      “You did well to get him inside,” I told McGarry.

      “Ach, he’s no’ bad tae manage when he’s puggled,” said the provost. “A big, coorse loon, but the booze slows him doon.”

      I had some idea of what McGarry called “no’ bad tae managed”. I recalled Hogmanay, when Wee Wullie had returned from some slight jollification in the Arab quarter having whetted his appetite for battle on the local hostelries, and erupted through the main gate intent on slaughter. It had been at that moment of the day which, for a soldier, is memorable above all others; the hour when the Last Post is sounded, and СКАЧАТЬ