The Sheik and the Dustbin. George Fraser MacDonald
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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