The Complete McAuslan (62 page)

‘Good God! That’s it, of course! Morocco! It fits absolutely. Well, I’ll be damned!’ He beamed round in triumph. ‘The music of Harry Maclean! That’s what he was saying! Talk about a voice from the past. Oh, the poor old chap! The music of Harry Maclean . . .’

‘Who’s Harry Maclean?’ asked the Adjutant.

‘Kaid Maclean . . . oh, long before your time. Came from Argyll, somewhere. One of the great Scotch mercenaries . . . packed in his commission in the ’70s and went off to train the Sultan of Morocco’s army, led ’em against all sorts of rebels – of whom our guest in the guardroom would certainly be one: Maclean was still active when the Riffs broke loose. Amazing chap, used to dress as a tribesman (long before Lawrence), got to places no European had ever seen. Oh, yes, Suleiman would know him, all right – may have fought with
and
against him. And he remembers the music of Harry Maclean . . . you see, Maclean was a famous piper, always carried his bags with him. I heard him play at Gib., about 1920, when I was a subaltern – piped like a MacCrimmon! He was an old man then, of course – big, splendid-looking cove with a great snowy beard, looked more like a sheikh than the real thing!’
³
The Colonel laughed, shaking his head at the memory, and then his smile faded, and after a moment he said: ‘And we’ve got one of his old enemies in the guardroom. An enemy who remembers his music.’

There was quiet round the table. Then the second-in-command, who seldom said much, surprised everyone by remarking: ‘We ought to do something about that.’

‘Like what?’ asked the Colonel quickly.

‘Well . . . I’m not sure. But if this fellow Suleiman did know Maclean, it would be interesting to get him talking, wouldn’t it? Not that he’s shown himself sociable, but after today . . . well, you never know.’

‘Oh, I see.’ The Colonel sounded almost disappointed. ‘Yes, I suppose it would.’

‘Have him into the mess, perhaps,’ said the Senior Major. ‘Dinner, something like that?’ ‘He wouldn’t come,’ said Bennet-Bruce.

‘No harm in asking,’ said the second-in-command.

‘That’s what you think,’ said the Adjutant bitterly. ‘Every time I speak to him he just glares and turns his back – I’m beginning to think I’ve got B.O.’

‘Then don’t ask him,’ said the Senior Major. ‘Just bring him along, and once he’s here, chances are we can thaw him out.’

‘Ye daurnae offer him drink!’ protested the M.O.

‘Of course not – but we can lay on Arab grub, make him feel at home . . . well, it would be a gesture,’ said the second-in-command. ‘Show him that we . . . well, you know . . . I don’t suppose he’ll get many invitations, after he leaves here.’ He glanced at the Colonel, who was sitting lost in his own thoughts. ‘I move we ask him to the mess. What d’you think, sir?’

The Colonel came back to earth. ‘Certainly. Why not? Have him in tomorrow – make it a mess night.’ He pushed back his chair and went out, followed by the seniors.

‘Sentimental old bird, the skipper,’ said Errol.

′How d’you mean?’ said MacKenzie.

‘Well, he’s been on the wee wog’s side all along – who hasn’t? Now this Harry Maclean thing . . . it just makes having to turn Suleiman over to the French that much harder, doesn’t it?’

‘You’re a perceptive chiel,’ nodded the Padre.

‘It doesn’t make much odds,’ said the Adjutant gloomily. ‘It’s rotten whichever way you look at it.’ He glanced across at Errol who was flicking peanut shells at the Waterloo snuff-box. ‘What would you do . . . if it was you?’

‘If I were the Colonel – and felt as sorry for old Abou ben Adem as he does?’ Errol gave his lazy smile. ‘I certainly wouldn’t connive at his escape – which is the thought at the back of everyone’s mind, only we’re too feart to say so. I might write to G.H.Q., citing his war service and decrepitude, and respectfully submitting that the French be told to fall out – ’

‘He’s already done that,’ said the Adjutant. ‘Got a rocket for not minding his own business.’

‘Well,
shabash
the Colonel sahib! But that’s all, folks. He’s done his best – so all we can do is give Suleiman the hollow apology of a dinner to show our hearts are in the right place, and wish him
bon voyage
to Devil’s Island.’

‘That’s a lousy way to put it!’ snapped MacKenzie.

‘Only if you feel guilty, Kenny,’ said Errol. ‘I don’t. He’s a tough old bandit, down on his luck . . . and a damned bad man. No, I’d hand him over, with some regret, as the Colonel will. But unlike the Colonel I won’t vex myself wondering what Harry Maclean would have done.’

‘That’s a bit mystical,’ protested the Adjutant.

‘Is it? You’re not Scotch, Mike. The Colonel is – so he gets daft thoughts about . . . oh, after the battle . . . kinship of old enemies . . . doing right by the shades. Damned nonsense, but it can play hell with a Highlander in the wee sma’ hoors, especially if he’s got a drink in him. Read between the lines of
The Golden Bough
sometime.’ Errol stifled a yawn and got up. ‘It was written by a teuchter, incidentally.’

‘Interesting,’ said the Padre. ‘Well, what
would
Harry Maclean do about Suleiman?’

Errol paused at the door. ‘Shoot the little bugger, I should think. He probably spent half his life trying.’

Acting on the Senior Major’s advice, the Adjutant didn’t invite Suleiman formally, but simply conducted him to the mess, where we had assembled in the dining-room. The table was blazing with our two centuries’ worth of silver, much of it loot – Nana Sahib’s spoons, the dragon candlesticks from the Opium Wars, the inlaid Ashanti shield (now a fruit-bowl), the silver-gilt punchbowl presented by Patton in Normandy, the snuff-box made from the hoof of the Scots Greys’ drumhorse, the porcelain samovar given to a forgotten mercenary who had helped to stop the Turks at Vienna and whose grandson had brought it to the regiment. It was priceless and breathtaking; Suleiman could not doubt that he was being treated as a guest of honour. The Pipe-Sergeant had even bullied the Colonel into letting him compose a special air, ‘The Music of Suleiman ibn Aziz’ – it was impossible to stop the pipey creating new works of genius, all of which sounded like ‘Bonnie Dundee’ or ‘Flowers of the Forest’, depending on the tempo; it remained to be seen which had been plagiarised when the pipey strode forth to regale us after dinner.

Poor soul, he never got the chance. Suleiman took one look at the gleaming table, the thirty expectant tartan figures, the pipers ranged against the wall, the Colonel welcoming him to his seat – and straightway stormed out, raging and cursing in Arabic. Why, I’m still not sure; he must have known it was kindly meant, and we could only assume that he regarded all Franks as poison and any overture from them as an insult. The mess reaction was that it was a pity, but if that was how he felt, too bad. Strangely enough, it didn’t diminish the sympathy for him, and it was a reluctant Adjutant who had to tell him next day (Sunday) that the French were coming earlier than expected, and he would be leaving the following Thursday. Either because he was taken aback, or was still in a passion over the dinner fiasco, Suleiman let fly a torrent of abuse in
lingua franca,
shook his fist in the Adjutant’s face, and rounded things off by spitting violently on the floor.

Which was distressing, and hardly reasonable since he’d known he was going sooner or later, but the explanation emerged three nights after. On Monday he was still in a villainous temper, but McGarry thought he looked unusually tired, too, and he wouldn’t leave his cell to sit on the verandah. On Tuesday he kept his bed, sleeping most of the day. In the small hours of Wednesday morning he broke out.

He must have been working at the single bar of his cell window since his arrival, presumably calculating that he would have it loose by the end of the second week. The advance of the French arrival had upset his plans, and he had spent two and a half nights digging feverishly at the concrete sill – with what tool, and how he had not been detected, we never discovered. Only a chance look through the grille by the sentry discovered the bar askew, and thirty seconds later the guard were doubling out of barracks in the forlorn hope of catching a fugitive who had the choice of melting into the alleys of the city not far off, or vanishing into the Sahara which stretched for two thousand miles from our southern wall.

It was sheer blind luck that they came on him hobbling painfully along a dry ditch on the desert road; being reluctant to lay hands on an old man who was plainly on his last legs, they called on him to stop, but he just kept going, panting and stumbling, until they headed him off, when he turned at bay, lashing out, and after a furious clawing struggle he had to be carried bodily back to the guardroom, literally foaming at the mouth. Taken to a new cell, he collapsed on the floor, too exhausted to resist an examination by the M.O. which revealed what was already obvious – that he was an unusually hardy old man, and dead beat. Even so, an extra sentry was posted under his window.

There was no point in reporting the incident to the Provost Marshal, and for the last twenty-four hours before the French were due he was just confined to his cell, sitting hunched up on his cot, ignoring his food; having made his bid and failed he seemed resigned, with all the spirit drained out of him.

Then, late in the afternoon, he began to sing – or rather to chant, a high wailing cry not unlike the
muezzin’
s prayer call, but with a defiant note in it – the kind of thing which prompts the Highlander to remark: ‘Sing me a Gaelic song, granny, and sing it through your nose.’ It reminded me of something else, but I wasn’t sure what until the Padre, who happened to be in our company office, cocked an ear to the distant keening sound and quoted:

‘ “The old wives will cry the coronach, and there will be a great clapping of hands, for I am one of the greatest chiefs of the Highlands.”’

‘I never knew that,’ said Bennet-Bruce. ‘I always thought you were a clergyman from Skye.’

‘Pearls before swine,’ said the Padre. ‘I’m telling you what old Simon Fraser said before they took the head off him on Tower Green.’ He listened, eyes half-closed. ‘I wonder if our old buddoo isn’t saying the same thing.’

‘Why should he? No one’s going to cut his head off.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said the Padre. ‘But if that’s not a coronach then I never heard one.’

Whatever it was, it didn’t exactly set the feet tapping; the high wavering cry raised the hairs on my neck – and not on mine alone. The Colonel left his office early to get out of earshot, and the Adjutant, kept at his desk, was noticeably not his usual Bertie Woosterish self: he tore my head off over some routine inquiry, slammed his window shut, and gave vent to his feelings.

‘Gosh, I’ll be glad to get shot of him! Nothing but trouble! We didn’t
ask
to be landed with him, we’ve tried to make things as easy for him as we can, tried to be decent – and the little bastard spits in our eye, gets the Colonel in the doghouse with Cairo, treats
me
like dirt, tries to bust out – ’

‘Well, you can’t blame him for that, Mike.’

‘ – and generally gets right on the battalion’s collective wick! Of course I don’t blame him.′ The Adjutant stared gloomily out of the window. ‘That’s the trouble. I’m all
for
him. We all are – and he doesn’t even know it. He thinks we’re as big a shower as the French and G.H.Q. He hates our guts.’ He brooded at me in a pink, bothered way. ‘Why shouldn’t he? And why the hell should we worry if he does? You think I need a laxative, don’t you?’

‘I think you need some tea,’ I said. But I thought he was right: Suleiman, somehow, had got in among us, and it would have been nice to think that he knew we were on his side – for all the good
that
would do him. A selfish, childish wish, probably, but understandable.

Because I wanted to be there when he left, I had arranged to be orderly officer next day, and after dinner I went to tell McGarry that the French probably wouldn’t take him before noon. McGarry promised to have him ready; the few belongings that had come with him were in an unopened bundle in the office safe, and the man himself was asleep.

‘Nae wonder, after the fight he pit up. No’ the size o’ a fish supper, but it took four o’ them tae carry him in, an’ him beatin’ the bejeezus oot o’ them. Say that for him,’ McGarry nodded admiringly. ‘He’s game.’

Just how game we discovered next morning when the orderly took breakfast into the cell, and Suleiman came at him from behind the door like a wildcat, knocked him flying, ducked past McGarry, and was heading for the wide blue yonder when he went full tilt over McAuslan, who was scrubbing the floor. In the ensuing mêlée which involved two sentries (with McAuslan wallowing in suds imploring all concerned to keep the heid) Suleiman managed to grab a bayonet, and murder would have been done if McGarry had not weighed in, clasping both of Suleiman’s skinny wrists in one enormous paw and swinging him off his feet with the other. Even then the little sheikh had fought like a madman, struggling and kicking and trying to bite until, to the amazement of McAuslan:

‘. . . a’ the fight seemed tae go oot o’ him, an’ he lets oot sich a helluva cry, an’ ye know whit? He jist pit his heid on big McGarry’s chest, like a wean wi’ his mither, an’ grat. No, he wisnae bubblin’ – no’ that kinda greetin’, jist shakin’ an’ haudin′ on like there wisnae a kick left in him. An′ big McGarry pit him on his feet, an’ says: ‘Come on, auld yin’, an’ pits him back in the cell – an’ then turns on me, fur Goad’s sake, an’ starts bawlin’ tae get the flair scrubbit an’ dae Ah think Ah’m peyed tae staun’ aboot wi’ no’ twa pun’ o’ me hingin’ straight! Ye’d think it wis me had been tryin′ tae murder hauf the Airmy an’ go absent, no’ the wee wog!’

All this I learned when I checked the guardroom at nine – the facts from McGarry, the colour from Our Correspondent on Jankers. Suleiman had stayed quiet in his cell.

The French arrived at eleven in the Provost Marshal’s car and an escorting jeep: a major and captain in sky-blue kepis, a
sous-officier
in the navy tunic and red breeches of the Legion Etrangère, two privates with carbines, and a Moorish interpreter. The officers and the P.M. were escorted to the mess for hospitality while the rankers stayed with their vehicles; the
sous-officier,
a moustachioed stalwart with a gold chevron and no neck, paced up and down exchanging appraising glances with McGarry on the guardroom verandah.