Into this idyll had surged Wee Wullie, staggering drunk and bawling for McGarry to come out and fight. For a moment his voice had almost drowned the bugle, and then (because he was Wee Wullie with 30 years’ service behind him) he had slowly come to attention and waited, swaying like an oak in a storm, until the call was ended. As the last note died away he hurled aside his bonnet, reeled to the foot of the guard room steps, and roared:
“Coom oot, McGarry! Ah’m claimin’ ye! Ye’ve had it, ye big Hielan’ stirk! Ye neep! Ye teuchter, ye!”
McGarry came slowly out of the guard room, nipping his cigarette, and calmly regarded the Neanderthal figure waiting for him. It looked only a matter of time before Wee Wullie started drumming on his chest and pulling down twigs to eat, but McGarry simply said,
“Aye, Wullie, ye’re here again. Ye comin’ quiet, boy?”
Wullie’s reply was an inarticulate bellow and a furious fist-swinging charge, and five minutes later McGarry was kneeling over his prostrate form, patting his battered face, and summoning the guard to carry the body inside. They heaved the stricken giant up, and he came to himself just as they were manhandling him into the cooler. His bloodshot eyes rolled horribly and settled on McGarry, and he let out a great cry of baffled rage.
“Let me at ’im! Ah want at ’im!” He struggled furiously, and the four men of the guard clung to his limbs and wrestled him into the cell.
“Wheesht, Wullie,” said McGarry, locking the door. “Just you lie doon like a good lad. Ye’ll never learn; ye cannie fight McGarry when ye’re fu’. Now just wheesht, or I’ll come in tae ye.”
“You!” yelled Wullie through the bars. “Oh, see you! Your mither’s a Tory!”
McGarry laughed and left him to batter at the door until he was tired. It had become almost a ritual with the two of them, which would be concluded when Wullie had sobered up and told McGarry he was sorry. It was Wullie’s enduring problem that he liked McGarry, and would fight with him only when inflamed by drink; yet drunk, he could not hope to beat him as he would have done sober.
I thought of these things as I looked into the cell at Wee Wullie asleep. On that wild Hogmanay I should, of course, have used my authority to reprimand and restrain him, and so prevented the unseemly brawl with the provost sergeant, but you don’t reprimand a rogue elephant or a snapped wire hawser, either of which would be as open to sweet reason as Wee Wullie with a bucket in him. The fact that he would have been overwhelmed by remorse afterwards for plastering me all over the guard room wall would not really have been much consolation to either of us. So I had remained tactfully in the background while Sergeant McGarry had fulfilled his regimental duty of preserving order and repressing turbulence.
And now it had happened again, for the umpteenth time, but this time it was bad. From what McGarry had told me, Wee Wullie had laid violent hands on a military policeman, which meant that he might well be court-martialled—which, inevitably, for a man with a record like his, would mean a long stretch in the glasshouse at Cairo.
“He’ll no’ get away wi’ it this time, poor loon,” said McGarry. “It’ll be outwith the battalion, ye see. Aye, auld Wullie, he’ll be the forgotten man of Heliopolis nick if the redcaps get their way.” He added, apparently irrelevantly, “For a’ the Colonel can say.”
I left the guard room and walked across the starlit parade ground through the grove of tamarisks to the white-walled subalterns’ quarters, wondering if this was really the finish of Wee Wullie. If it was, well, the obvious thing to do would be to thank God we were rid of a knave, an even bigger battalion pest than the famous Private McAuslan, the dirtiest soldier in the world, an Ishmael, a menace, a horrible man. At the same time …
All that was really wrong with Wee Wullie was his predilection for strong drink and violent trouble. He was drunk the first time I ever saw him, on a desert convoy passing under Marble Arch, that towering monument to Mussolini’s vanity which bestrides the road on the Libyan border. I had noticed this huge man, first for his very size, secondly for his resemblance to the late William Bendix, and lastly for his condition, which was scandalous. He was patently tight, but still at the good-humoured stage, and was being helped aboard a truck by half a dozen well-wishers. They dropped him several times, and he lay in the sand roaring. I was a green subaltern, but just experienced enough to know when not to intervene, so I left them to it, and eventually they got him over the tailboard. (It is astonishing just how often an officer’s duty seems to consist of looking the other way, or maybe I was just a bad officer.)
In the battalion itself he was a curious mixture. As far as the small change of soldiering went, Wullie was reasonably efficient. His kit at inspections was faultless, his knowledge and deportment exact, so far as they went, which was just far enough for competence. In his early days he had been as high as sergeant before being busted (I once asked the Adjutant when this had been, and he said, “God knows, about the first Afghan War, I should think”), but in later years the authorities had despaired of promoting him to any rank consistent with his length of service. Occasionally they would make him a lance-corporal, just for variety, and then Wullie would pick a fight with the American Marines, or tip a truck over, or fall in alcoholic stupor into a river and have to be rescued, and off would come his stripe again. He had actual service chevrons literally as long as his arm, but badges of rank and good conduct he had none.
Yet he enjoyed a curiously privileged position. In drill, for example, it was understood that there were three ways of doing things: the right way, the wrong way, and Wee Wullie’s way. His movements were that much slower, more ponderous, than anyone else’s; when he saluted, his hand did not come up in a flashing arc, but jerked up so far, and then travelled slowly to his right eyebrow. On parade, there was some incongruity in the sight of a platoon of wee Gleska keelies and great-chested Aberdonians (who run to no spectacular height, as a rule) with Gargantua in their midst, his rifle like a popgun in his huge fist, and himself going through the motions with tremendous intensity, half a second behind everyone else. There was almost a challenge in the way he performed, as though he was conscious of being different, and yet there was about him a great dignity. Even the Regimental Sergeant Major recognised it, and excused much.
This was when he was sober and passive. Even then he was withdrawn and monosyllabic; only when he was slightly inebriated could he be described as sociable. Beyond that he was just outrageous, a dangerous, wickedly powerful ruffian whom only the redoubtable McGarry could manage single-handed.
Yet there was in the battalion a curiously protective instinct towards him. It seemed to emanate from the Colonel, who had ordered that Wullie was never to be brought before him for disciplinary action except when it was unavoidable. Thus his crimes and misdemeanours were usually dealt with at company level, and he got off fairly lightly. When the Colonel did have to deal with him he would consign Wullie to the cells and afterwards try to find him a quiet niche where he would be out of trouble, invariably without success. When he was made medical orderly he got at the M.O.’s medicinal brandy and wrecked the place; he lost the job of padre’s batman through his unceasing profanity; attached to the motor transport section he got tremendously high and put a three-ton truck through a brick wall (“I always said that particular experiment was sheer lunacy,” said the Adjutant. “I mean, a truck was all he needed, wasn’t it?”). An attempt was even made to get him into the band, and the little pipe-sergeant was scandalised. “He has no sense of time, colonel sir,” he protested. “Forbye, look at the size of his feet, and think of that clumph-clumph—clumphing on the great ceremonial parades.”
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