McAuslan in the Rough

And that night, for the first time, the ghost of Fort Yarhuna walked.

That, at least, was the conclusion reached by Private McAuslan, student of the occult and authority on lonely desert outposts, whose Hollywood-fed imagination could find no other explanation when the facts reached his unwashed ears, as they did next morning. What had happened was this.

On the cold watch, the one from 2 to 4 a.m., the sentry on the parapet near the tower had seen, or thought he had seen, a shadowy figure under the tower wall, just along from his sentry beat. He had challenged, received no reply, and on investigating had found—nothing. Puzzled, but putting it down to his imagination, he had resumed his watch, and just before 4 a.m. he had felt—he emphasised the word—someone watching him from the same place. He had turned slowly, and caught a fleeting glimpse of a form, no more, but again the parapet had been empty when he went to look. He raised no alarm at the time, because, with Highland logic, he had decided that since there was nothing there, there was nothing to raise an alarm for, but he had told Sergeant Telfer in the morning, and Telfer told me.

I saw him in my office, a tall, fair, steady lad from the Isles, called Macleod. “You didn’t get a good clear sight of anyone?” I said.

“No, sir.”

“Didn’t hear anyone drop from the parapet, either into the fort or over the wall into the desert?”

“No, sir.”

“No marks to show anyone had been there?”

“No, sir.”

“Nothing missing or been disturbed, Sergeant Telfer?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Well, then,” I said to Macleod, “it looks like the four o’clock jump—we all know what can happen on stag; you think you see things that aren’t there …”

“Yes, sir,” said Macleod, “I’ve had that. I wouldnae swear I saw anything at all, sir.” He paused. “But I felt something.”

“You mean something touched you?”

“Nat-at-at, sir. I mean I chust felt some-wan thair. Oh, he wass thair, right enough.”

It was sweating hot in the office, but I suddenly felt a shiver on my spine, just in the way he said it, because I knew exactly what he meant. Everyone has a sixth sense, to some degree, and most of its warnings are purely imaginary, but when a Highlander, and a Skye man at that, tells you, in a completely matter-of-fact tone, that he has “felt” something, you do not, if you have any sense, dismiss or scoff at it as hallucination. Macleod was a good soldier, and not a nervous or sensational person; ne meant exactly what he said.

“A real person—a man?” I said, and he shook his head.

“I couldnae say, sir. It wasnae wan of our laads, though; I’m sure about that.”

I didn’t ask him why he was sure; he couldn’t have told me.

“Well, he doesn’t seem to have done any damage, whoever he was,” I said, and dismissed him. I asked Telfer, who was a crusty, tough Glaswegian with as much spiritual sensitivity as a Clyde boiler, what he thought, and he shrugged.

“Seein’ things,” he said. “He’s a good lad, but he’s been starin’ at too much sand.”

Which was my own opinion; I’d stood guard often enough to know what tricks the senses could play. But Macleod must have mentioned his experience among his mates, for during the morning, while I was supervising the water-drilling, there came Private Watt to say that he, too, had things to report from the previous night. While on guard above the main gate, round about midnight, he had heard odd sounds at the foot of the wall, outside the fort, and had leaned out through an embrasure, but seen nothing. (Why, as he spoke, did I remember that P.C. Wren story about a sentry in a desert fort leaning out as Watt had done, and being snared by a bolas flung by hostile hands beneath?) But Watt believed it must have been a pi-dog from the village; he wouldn’t have mentioned it, but he had heard about Macleod …

I dismissed the thing publicly, but privately I couldn’t help wondering. Watt’s odd noises were nothing in themselves, but considered alongside Macleod’s experience they might add up to—what? One noise, one sand-happy sentry—but sand-happy after only two weeks? And yet Fort Yarhuna was a queer place; it had got to me, a little, in a mysterious way—but then I knew I was devilled with too much imagination, and being the man in charge I was probably slightly jumpier with responsibility than anyone else.

I pushed it aside, uneasily, and could have kicked the idiot who must have mentioned the word “ghost” some time that day. That was the word that caught the primitive thought-process of McAuslan, and led him to speculate morbidly on the fate of the graveyard garrison of Fort Zinderneuf, which had held him spellbound in the camp cinema.

“It’ll be yin o’ they fellas frae Bo Geesty,” he informed an admiring barrack-room. “He’s deid, but he cannae stay aff parade. Clump-clump, up an’ doon the stair a’ night, wi’ a bullet-hole in the middle o’ his heid. Ah’m tellin’ ye. Hey, Macleod, did your bogle hiv a hole in his heid?”

“You’ll have wan in yours, McAuslan, if ye don’t shut upp,” Macleod informed him pleasantly. “No’ that mich will come oot of it, apart from gaass.”

My batman, who told me about this exchange, added that the fellas had egged McAuslan on until he, perceiving himself mocked, had gone into sulky silence, warning them that the fate of Bo Geesty would overtake them, an’ then they’d see. Aye.

And thereafter it was forgotten about—until the following morning, at about 5 a.m., when Private McLachlan, on guard above the main gate, thought he heard unauthorised movement somewhere down in the parade square and, being a practical man, challenged, and turned out the guard. There were two men fully awake in the gate-guardroom, and one of them, hurrying out in response to McLachlan’s shout, distinctly saw—or thought he distinctly saw—a shadowy figure disappearing into the gloom among the buildings across the square.

“Bo Geesty!” was McAuslan’s triumphant verdict, for that side of the square contained the old stables, the company office, and Keith’s and my sleeping-quarters, and not a trace of anyone else was to be found. And Keith, who had been awake and reading, was positive that no one had passed by following McLachlan’s challenge (“Halt-who-goes-there! C’moot, ye b—— o’ hell, Ah see ye!”)

It was baffling, and worrying, for no clue presented itself. The obvious explanation was that we were being burgled by some Bedouin expert from the oasis—but if so, he was an uncommon good second-storeyman, who could scale a twenty-foot wall and go back the same way, unseen by sentries (except, possibly, by Macleod), and who didn’t steal anything, for the most thorough check of stores and equipment revealed nothing missing. No, the burglar theory was out. So what remained?

A practical joker inside? Impossible; it just wasn’t their style. So we had the inescapable conclusion that it was a coincidence, two men imagining things on successive nights. I chose that line, irascibly examined and dismissed McLachlan and his associates with instructions not to hear or see mysterious figures unless they could lay hands on them, held a square-bashing parade of both platoons to remind everyone that this was a military post and not Borley Rectory, put the crew of the drilling-truck to work again on their quest for a well, and retired to my office, a disquieted subaltern. For as I had watched the water-drill biting into the sand of the square, another thought struck me—a really lunatic idea, which no one in his right mind would entertain.

Everything had been quiet in Fort Yarhuna until we started tearing great holes in the ground, and I remembered my hopes that we wouldn’t disturb any historic buried ruin or Mythraic temple or ancient tomb or—anything. You see the train of thought—this was a fort that had been here probably since the days when the surrounding land had been the Garden of Eden—so the Bedouin say, anyway—and ancient places have an aura of their own, especially in the old desert. You don’t disturb them lightly. So many people had been through this fort—Crusaders, barbarians, Romans, Saracens, and so on, leaving something of themselves behind forever, and if you desecrate such a place, who knows what you’ll release? Don’t misunderstand me, I wasn’t imagining that our drilling for water had released a spirit from its tomb deep in the foundations—well, not exactly, not in as many words that I’d have cared to address to anyone, like Keith, for example. That was ludicrous, as I looked out of my office and watched the earthy soldiery grunting and laughing as they refilled yet another dead hole and the truck moved on to try again. The sentry on the gate, Telfer’s voice raised in thunderous rebuke, someone singing in the cookhouse—this was a real, military world, and ghosts were just nonsense. More things in heaven and earth … ex Africa semper aliquid novi … Private McAuslan’s celluloid-inspired fancies … a couple of tired sentries … my own Highland susceptibility to the fey. … I snapped “Tach!” impatiently in the fashion of my MacDonald granny, strode out of my office and showed Private Forbes how to take penalty kicks at the goal which the football enthusiasts had erected near the gate, missed four out of six, and retired grinning amidst ironic cheers, feeling much better.

But that evening, after supper, I found myself mounting the narrow stairway to the parapet where the sentries were just going on first stag. It was gloaming, and the desert was taking on that beautiful star-lit sheen under the purple African sky that is so incredibly lovely that it is rather like a coloured postcard in bad taste. The fires and lights were twinkling away down in the village, the last fawn-orange fringe of daylight was dwindling beyond the sand-hills, the last warm wind was touching the parapet, the night stillness was falling on the fort and the shadowy dunes, and Private Brown was humming “Ye do the hokey-cokey and ye turn aroond” as he clattered up the stairway to take his post, rifle in hand. Four sentries, one to each wall—and only my imagination could turn the silhouette of a bonneted Highlander into a helmeted Roman leaning on his hasta, or a burnoused mercenary out of Carthage, or a straight-nosed Greek dreaming of the olive groves under Delphi, or a long-haired savage from the North wrapping his cloak about him against the night air. They had all been here, and they were all long gone—perhaps. And if you smile at the perhaps, wait until you have stood on the wall of a Sahara fort at sundown, watching the shadows lengthen and the silence creep across the sand invisible in the twilight. Then smile.

I went down at last, played beggar-my-neighbour with Keith for half an hour, read an old copy of the Tripoli Ghibli for a little while longer, and then turned in. I didn’t drop off easily; I heard the midnight stag change over, and then the two o’clock, and then I must have dozed, for the next thing I remember is waking suddenly, for no good reason, and lying there, lathered in sweat that soaked the clean towel which was our normal night attire, listening. It took a moment to identify it: a cautious scraping noise, as of a giant rat, somewhere outside. It wasn’t any sound I knew, and I couldn’t locate it, but one thing was certain, it hadn’t any business to be going on.

I slid out and into my trousers and sandals, and stood listening. My door was open, and I went forward and listened again. There was no doubt of it; the sound was coming from the old stable, about twenty yards to my left, against the east wall. Irregular, but continuous, scrape-scrape. I glanced around; there were sentries visible in the dying moonlight on the catwalks to either side, and straight ahead on the gate-wall; plainly they were too far away to hear.

As silently as possible, but not furtively, for I didn’t want the sentries to mistake me, I turned right and walked softly in front of the office, and then cut across the corner of the parade. The sentry on the catwalk overhead stiffened as he caught sight of me, but I waved to him and went on, towards the guardroom. I was sweating as I entered, and I didn’t waste time.

“Get Sergeant Telfer, quietly. Tell him to come to the stable, not to make a sound. You three, come with me; you, McNab, up to the parapet, and tell the sentries on no account to fire until I give the word. Move.”

Thank God, you don’t have to tell Jocks much when there’s soldiering to do; within five minutes that stable was boxed as tight as a drum—four of us in front of it, in line, crouching down; two riflemen some yards behind, to back up, and two men with torches ready to snap on. The scraping sound was still going on in the stable, quite distinctly, and I thought I could hear someone gasping with exertion. I nodded to Telfer, and he and one of the Jocks crept forward to the stable door, one to each of the heavy leaves; I could see Telfer’s teeth, grinning, and then I snapped—“Now!”, the doors were hauled back, the torches went on—and there they were.

Three Arabs, glaring into the torch-light, two of them with shovels, a half-dug hole in the floor—and then they came hurtling out, and I went for the knees of the nearest, and suddenly remembered trying to tackle Jack Ramsay as he came weaving through our three-quarters at Old Anniesland, and how he’d dummied me. This wasn’t Ramsay, though, praise God; he came down with a yelp and a crash, and one of the Jocks completed his ruin by pinning him by the shoulders. I came up, in time to see Telfer and another Jock with a struggling Arab between them, and the third one, who hadn’t even got out of the stable, being submerged by a small knot of Highlanders, one of whom was triumphantly croaking “Bo Geesty!” No doubt of it, McAuslan had his uses when the panic was on.

We quieted the captives, after a moment or two, but there wasn’t a word to be got out of them, and nothing to be deduced from their appearance except that they weren’t genuine desert Buddoos, but more probably from the village or some place farther afield. Two of them were in shirts and trousers, and none of them was what you would call a stalwart savage; more like fellaheen, really. I consigned them to the guardroom, ordered a fifty per cent stand-to on the walls, and turned to examine the stable.

They had dug a shallow hole, no more, in the middle of the stable, and the reek was appalling. Camel stables are odorous at the best of times, and this one had been accommodating beasts, probably, since Scipio’s day. But we had to see what they’d been after, and since a good officer shouldn’t ask his men to do what he won’t do himself … I was eyeing one of the fallen shovels reluctantly when a voice spoke at my elbow.

“Jings!” it said. “Hi, sir, mebbe it’s treasure! Burried treasure!”

I wouldn’t have thought McAuslan’s deductive powers that fast, myself, but he explained that there had been treasure in Bo Geesty—“a jool, the Blue Watter, that Bo Geesty pinched aff his aunty, so he did.” From the glittering light in his eye I could see that his powers of identification would shortly lead him to the dream-stage where he was marrying Susan Hayward, so I indicated the shovel and asked him would he like to test his theory.

He began digging like a demented Nibelung, choking only occasionally as his shovel released noxious airs, exclaiming “Aw, jeez!” before falling to again with energy. His comrades stood aside as he hurled great lumps of the ordure of centuries from the hole—even for McAuslan, I decided this was too much, and offered to have him spelled, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He entertained us, in gasps as he dug, with a synopsis of the plot of Beau Geste, but I can’t say I paid much attention, for I was getting excited. Whatever the Arabs had been after, it must be something precious—and then his shovel rang, just like the best pirate stories, on something metallic.

We had it out in another five minutes, and my mounting hopes of earth-shaking archaeological discovery died as the torches revealed a twentieth-century metal box for mortar bombs—not British, but patently modern. I sent the others out, in case it was full of live ammo., and gingerly prised back the clasps and raised the lid. It was packed to bursting with papers, wedged almost into a solid mass, because the tin had not been proof against its surroundings, and it was with some difficulty that I worked one loose—it was green, and faded, but it was undoubtedly a bank-note. And so were all the rest.

They were, according to the Tripoli police inspector who came to examine them next day, pre-war Italian notes, and totally worthless. Which was a pity, since their total face value was well over a hundred million lire; I know, because I was one of the suffering members of the court of inquiry which had to count them, rank, congealed and stinking as they were. As the officer who had found them, I was an obvious candidate for membership of that unhappy court, when we got back to the battalion; I, a Tripoli police lieutenant, a major from the Pay Corps, and a subaltern from the Green Howards, who said that if he caught some contagious disease from this job he was going to sue the War Office. We counted very conscientiously for above five minutes, and then started computing in lumps; the Pay Corps man objected, and we told him to go to hell. He protested that our default of duty would be detected by higher authority, and the Green Howard said that if higher authority was game enough to catch him out by counting this lot note by note, then higher authority was a better man than he was. We settled on a figure of 100,246,718 lire, of which we estimated that 75,413,311 were too defaced to be accepted as currency, supposing the pre-war Italian government were still around to support them.

For the rest, the court concluded that the money had been buried by unknown persons from Yarhuna village, after having possibly been looted from the Italian garrison who had occupied the fort early in the war. The money had lain untouched until water-drilling operations, conducted by Lieutenant D. MacNeill, had alarmed the villagers, who might have supposed that their treasure was being sought, they being unaware that it was now quite worthless. Hence their attempts to enter the fort nocturnally on at least three occasions to remove their hoard, on the last of which they had been detected and apprehended. It was difficult to see, the court added, that proceedings could justifiably be taken against the three captured Arabs, and their release was recommended. Just for spite we also consigned the notes themselves to the care of the provost marshal, who was the pompous ass who had convened the court in the first place, and signed the report solemnly.

“Serve him right,” grunted the Green Howard. “Let him keep them, and press ’em between the leaves of his confidential reports. Or burn ’em, if he’s got any sense. What, you’re not taking one of them, are you?—don’t be mad, you’ll catch the plague.”

“Souvenir,” I said. “Don’t worry, the man it’s going to is plague-proof.”

And when I handed it over, with a suggestion that it should be disinfected in a strong solution of carbolic, McAuslan was enraptured.

“Och, ta, sir,” he said, “that’s awfy decent of ye.”

“Not a bit; you’re welcome if you want it. You dug it up. But it’s worthless, mind; it won’t buy anything.”

He looked shocked, as though I had suggested an indecency.

“Ah widnae spend it,” he protested. “Ah’ll tak’ it hame, for a souvenir. Nice to have, like—ye know, tae mind us of bein’ inna desert.” He went slightly pink. “The fellas think Ah’m daft, but Ah liked bein’ inna fort—like inna Foreign Legion, like Gairy Cooper.”

“You’ve been in the desert before, though. You were in the 51st, weren’t you—Alamein and so on?”

“Aye, so Ah wis.” He sniffed thoughtfully, and rubbed his grimy nose. “But the fort wis different.”

So it was, but I didn’t quite share his happy memories. As a platoon commander, I was painfully aware that it was the place where Arabs had three times got past my sentries by night. One up to them, one down to us. I was slightly cheered up when—and this is fact, as reported in the local press—a week later, the warehouse where the provost marshal had deposited his noisome cache was broken into by night, and the caseful of useless lire removed. There was much speculation where it had gone.

I can guess. Those persistent desert gentlemen probably have it down in Yarhuna village to this day, and being simple men in some things, if not in breaking and entering, they doubtless still believe that it is a valuable nest-egg for their community. I don’t know who garrisons Fort Yarhuna now—the Libyans, I suppose—but if there’s one thing I’d bet on, it is that when the military move out again, shadowy figures will move in under the old carved gate by night, and put the loot back in a nice safe place. And who is to question their judgement? Fort Yarhuna will still be there a thousand years after the strongest banks of Europe and America have passed into ruins.

Johnnie Cope in the Morning

When I was a very young soldier, doing my recruit training in a snowbound wartime camp in Durham, there was a villainous orderly sergeant who used to get us up in the mornings. He would sneak silently into our hut at 5.30 a.m., where we were frowsting in our coarse blankets against the bitter cold of the room, suddenly snap on all the lights, and start beating the coal-bucket with the poker. At the same time two of his minions would rush from bunk to bunk screaming:

“Wake-eye! Wake-eye! I can see yer! Gerrup! Gerrup! Gerrup!”

And the orderly sergeant, a creature devoid of pity and any decent feeling, would continue his hellish metallic hammering while he shouted:

“Getcher cold feet on the warm floor! Har-har!” and sundry obscenities of his own invention. Then all three would retire, rejoicing coarsely, leaving behind them thirty-six recruits suffering from nervous prostration, to say nothing of ringing in the ears.

But it certainly woke us up, and as I did my first early morning fatigue, which consisted of dragging a six-foot wooden table-top down to the ablutions and scrubbing it with cold water, I used to contrast my own miserable lot with that of his late majesty Louis XIV of France, whose attendants used a very different technique to dig him out of his scratcher. As I recalled, a valet in velvet-soled shoes used to creep into the royal bedchamber at a fairly civilised hour, softly draw back the curtains a little way, and then whisper: “It is my humble duty and profound honour to inform your majesty that it is eight-thirty of the clock.” That, now, is the way to break the bad news, and afterwards the body of majesty was more or less lifted out of bed by a posse of princes of the blood who washed, fed, watered and dressed him in front of the fire. No wooden tables to scrub for young Louis.

And as I wrestled with my brush in the freezing water, barking my knuckles and turning blue all over, I used to have daydreams in which that fiend of an orderly sergeant was transported back in time to old Versailles, where he would clump into the Sun-King’s bedroom in tackety boots at 5.30, guffawing obscenely, thrashing the fire-irons against the fender, and bawling:

“Levez-vous donc, Jean Crapaud! Wake-eye, wake-eye! Getcher froid pieds on the chaud terre! I can see yer, you frog-eating chancer! Har-har!”

While I concede that this kind of awakening could have done Louis XIV nothing but good, and possibly averted the French Revolution, the whole point of the daydream was that the orderly sergeant would undoubtedly be flung into an oubliette in the Bastille for lëGse majesté, there to rot with his red sash and copy of King’s Regulations, while virtuous recruits in the twentieth century drowsed on until the late forenoon.

And while I stood mentally picturing this happy state of affairs, and sponging the icy water off the table-top with the flat of my hand, the sadistic brute would sneak into the ablutions and turn the cold hose on us, screaming:

“Two minnits to gerron rifle parade, you ’orrible shower! Har-har! Mooo-ve or I’ll blitz yer!”

I wonder that we survived that recruit training, I really do.

You may suppose that that orderly sergeant’s method of intimating reveille was as refined a piece of mental cruelty as even a military mind could devise, and I daresay if I hadn’t later been commissioned into a Highland regiment I would agree. But in fact, there I discovered something worse, and it used to happen once a week, regularly on Friday mornings. In nightmares I can hear it still.