McAuslan in the Rough. George Fraser MacDonald
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was the second-lieutenant who commanded Eleven Platoon—the garrison of Yarhuna was to be a two-platoon force—so I despatched him and the command to the fort, while I went with one section to Marble Arch for the drilling gear. It was a long, dusty, two-day haul east on the coast road, but we collected the drilling-truck from the Service Corps people, were shown how the special screw attached to its rear axle could drill a ten-foot shaft six inches across in a matter of minutes, and told that all we had to do was proceed by trial and error until we struck water.
I was in haste to get back along the coast and down to Fort Yarhuna to assume command before Keith did anything rash—young subalterns are as jealous as prima donnas, and convinced of each others’ fecklessness, and Keith was a mere pink-cheeked one-pipper of twenty years, whereas I had reached the grizzled maturity of twenty-one and my second star. Heaven knew what youthful folly he might commit without my riper judgement to steady him. However, we paused for a brief sight-see at Marble Arch which, as you may know, is one of the architectural curiosities of North Africa, being a massive white gateway towering some hundreds of feet out of the naked desert, a grandiose tombstone to Mussolini’s vanity and brief empire.
It was probably a mistake to stop and look at it: I should have remembered that in the section with me was Private McAuslan, the dirtiest soldier in the world, of whom I have written elsewhere. Short, be-pimpled, permanently unwashed, and slow-witted to a degree in the performance of his military duties, he was a kind of battalion landmark, like the Waterloo snuff-box. Not that he was a bad sort, in his leprous way, but he was a sure disaster in any enterprise to which he set his grimy hand. As his platoon commander, I had mixed feelings about him, partly protective but mostly despairing. What made it worse was that he tried to please, which could lead to all sorts of embarrassment.
When we got out of the truck to view the arch he stood scratching himself and goggling balefully up at it, inquiring of his friend Private Fletcher:
“Whit the hell’s yon thing?”
“Yon’s the Marble Arch, dozey.”
“Ah thought the Marble Arch wis in London. Sure it is.”
“This is anither Marble Arch, ye dope.”
“Aw.” Pause. “Who the hell pit it here, then? Whit fur?”
“The Eyeties did. Mussolini pit it up, just for the look o’ the thing.”
McAuslan digested this, wiped his grimy nose, and like the Oriental sage meditating on human vanity, observed: “Stupid big bastard”, which in its own way is a fair echo of contemporary opinion of Il Duce as an imperialist.
The trouble was that they wanted to climb the thing, and I was soft enough to let them; mind you, I wanted to climb it myself. And Marble Arch is really big; you climb it by going into a tiny door in one of its twin columns, ascending some steps, and then setting off, in total darkness, up an endless series of iron rungs driven into the wall. They go up forever, with only occasional rests on solid ledges which you find by touch in the gloom, and when you have climbed for about ten minutes, and the tiny square of light at the top of the shaft seems as small as ever, and your muscles are creaking with the strain of clinging to the rungs, you suddenly realise that the black abyss below you is very deep indeed, and if you let go. … Quite.
McAuslan, naturally, got lost. He strayed on to one of the ledges, apparently found another set of rungs somewhere, and roamed about in the stygian void, blaspheming horribly. His rich Parkhead oaths boomed through the echoing tunnels like the thunderings of some fearful Northern god with a glottal stop, and the ribaldries of the rest of the section, all strung out in the darkness on that frightening ladder, mocking him, turned the shaft into a deafening Tower of Babel. I was near the top, clinging with sweating fingers to the rungs, painfully aware that I couldn’t go back to look for him—it would have been suicide to try to get past the other climbers in the blackness—and that if he missed his hold, or got exhausted playing Tarzan, we would finish up scraping him off the distant floor with a spoon.
“Don’t panic, McAuslan,” I called down. “Take it easy and Sergeant Telfer’ll get you out.” Telfer was at the tail of the climbing procession, I knew, and could be depended on.
‘Ah’m no’ —— panickin’ ” came the despairing wail from the depths. “Ah’m loast! Ach, the hell wi’ this! —— Mussolini, big Eyetie git! Him an’ his bluidy statues!” And more of the like, until Telfer found him, crouched on a ledge like a disgruntled Heidelberg man, and drove him with oaths to the top.
Once at the summit, you are on a platform between two enormous gladiatorial figures which recline along the top of the arch, supporting a vast marble slab which is the very peak of the monument. You get on to it by climbing a short iron ladder which goes through a hole in the slab, and there you are, with the wind howling past, looking down over the unfenced edge at the tiny toy trucks like beetles on the desert floor, a giddy drop below, and the huge sweep of sand stretching away to the hazy horizon, with the coast road like a string running dead straight away both sides of the arch. You must be able to see the Mediterranean as well, but curiously enough I don’t remember it, just the appalling vastness of desert far beneath, and the forced cheerfulness of men pretending they are enjoying the view, and secretly wishing they were safely back at ground level.
We probably stayed longer than we wanted, keeping back from the edge or approaching it on our stomachs, because the prospect of descent was not attractive. Eventually I went first, pausing on the lower platform to instruct McAuslan to stay close above me, but not, as he valued his life, to tread on my fingers. He nodded, ape-like, and then, being McAuslan, and of an inquiring mind, asked me how the hell they had got they dirty big naked statues a’ the way up here, sir. I said I hadn’t the least idea, Fletcher said: “Sky-hooks”, and as we groped our way down that long, gloomy shaft, clinging like flies, a learned debate was being conducted by the unseen climbers descending above me, McAuslan informing Fletcher that he wisnae gaunae be kidded and if Fletcher knew how they got they dirty big naked statues up there, let him say so, an’ no’ take the mickey oot o’ him, McAuslan, because he wisnae havin’ it, see? We reached the bottom, exhausted and shaking slightly, and resumed our journey to Fort Yarhuna, myself digesting another Lesson for Young Officers, namely: don’t let your men climb monuments, and if they do, leave McAuslan behind. Mind you, leaving McAuslan behind is a maxim that may be applied to virtually any situation.
We reached Yarhuna after another two-day ride, branching off the coast road and spending the last eight hours bumping over a desert track which got steadily worse before we rolled through Yarhuna village and up to the fort which stands on a slight rise quarter of a mile farther on.
One look at it was enough to transport you back to the Saturday afternoon cinemas of childhood, with Ronald Colman tilting his kepi rakishly, Brian Donlevy shouting “March or die, mes enfants”, and the Riffs coming howling over the sand-crests singing “Ho!” It was a dun-coloured, sand-blasted square structure of twenty-foot walls, with firing-slits on its parapet and a large tower at one corner, from which hung the D Company colour, wherever Keith had got that from. Inside the fort proper there was a good open parade square, with barracks and offices all round the inside of the walls, their flat roofs forming a catwalk from which the parapet could be manned. It was your real Beau Geesty innit and it was while my section was debussing that I heard McAuslan recalling his visit to the pictures to see Gary Cooper in Wren’s classic adventure story. (“Jist like Bo Geesty, innit, Wullie? Think the wogs’ll get tore in at us, eh? Hey, mebbe Darkie’ll prop up wir deid bodies like that bastard o’ a sergeant in the pictur’.” I’ll wear gloves if I prop you up, I thought.)
Keith, full of the pride of possession, showed me round. He had done a good job in short order: the long barrack-rooms were clean if airless, all the gear and furniture had been unloaded, the empty offices and store-rooms had been swept clear of the sand that forever blew itself into little piles in the corners, and he had the Jocks busy whitewashing the more weatherworn buildings. Already it looked like home, and I remember feeling that self-sufficient joy that is one of the phenomena of independent command; plainly Keith and the Jocks felt it, too, for they had worked as they’d never have done in the battalion. I went through every room and office,