British Voices (20 page)

Later I was to discover I had made the right decision. In 1919 we seconded officers were being urged to transfer to the MG Corps, and told thereby we would get quicker promotion; yet in a year or so the whole MG Corps was disbanded, MG's were once more given to Infantry Battalions to man, and most of the regular officers in that Corps drifted into the Tank Corps, amongst them Nasmith and Freddie Garrett.

I now enjoyed my time at Aldershot very much, as a spare captain I had little work to do, and very little responsibility, and after five years of war, and war conditions, it was a very pleasant interlude.

The commanding officer was George Sorel-Cameron, who certainly looked the part. Very smart and well turned out, and with a good word of command, he was a fine horsemen. He was as straight as a dye, and was popular with all ranks. He had been a prisoner almost all the war, and being a slow thinker, he did not know much about what was then up to date soldiering.

The second-in-command was Aldecron, one of the very few Regular Army English officers we had in the Camerons. He, too, was a very popular if eccentric officer, with a gallant war record. He had been shot through the head in the Boer War, and we thought, rightly or wrongly, this was what accounted for his eccentricities.

The then Regimental Sergeant Major was a great character, ‘Big Jimmie'Templeton, DCM, from Kinloch Rannoch. A fine figure of a six foot Highlander, and at one time a deer stalker, with a splendid war record. He was though, unfortunately, a hard drinker. He was a magnificent RSM of the old type, whereby all the soldiers felt to see that their Glengarry was cocked at the right regimental angle, and all their brass buttons were correctly done up, when he was seen a hundred yards away.

Our own Company Sergeant Major was Neil McCaskill, DCM, a fine character, and a west coast gaelic speaking Highlander from the island of Bernera. He spoke his English in the Gaelic idiom usually beginning all sentences with the words, ‘I wasss thinking ...'

I could not have had around me a nicer lot of officer contemporaries of my own age, most of whom were to be my great friends for life. Owing to the recent war, we were all substantive captains, so with our war medals and decorations, and the experience that went with them, there was bound to be a considerable gulf between us, and the few young subalterns in the Battalion who had seen little or no active service.

We called ourselves, in fun, the ‘Captains' Union', and if Donald Cameron, the Adjutant, put us on duty in the afternoon, we used to protest vociferously; though I may say quite without avail.

There was Angus Collier, later to be best man at my wedding, as I was at his; some day to become a major general. There was Phil Christison, later to command a Corps in much Burma fighting, to be C-in-C Scotland and a Knight Cross of the British Empire. Colin Cameron, a fine all round athlete, who was later to do splendid work for the regiment as retired officer at our depot at Cameron Barracks, Inverness. Pringle-Pattison, or PP as he was universally known, my companion at the Stirling nursing home, son of a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh; and Ian Maxwell, a Catholic, whose mother was a Lovat Fraser, a most pleasant companion, but to whom punctuality meant nothing, much to the worry of his faithful CSM.

When I first rejoined the regiment, also serving at Aldershot was Puggie Stewart of Kinlochmoidart, who had command of a Battalion with distinction in Salonika at a very early age, and Lawrence Sloane, DFC, our best athlete, who had also played rugby football for Scotland, but these two were shortly to retire still as regimental captains; I did not therefore get to know them as well as the others.

But if we had but little work to do at this period, this certainly did not apply to games and athletics. Except at weekends, almost every afternoon saw us playing strenuous rugby or hockey, and most of us were in strict training with the Jocks. About two days a week we were all herded into the gymnasium after the mess dinner where we were put through vigorous physical training by the RSM himself.

It was entirely due to the RSM Templeton that I achieved some prowess as a runner, a sport I had never cared for, and never attempted since my Sandhurst days. Every Saturday morning, the entire unit were ordered on a cross-country run, except those over the age of 30. We were gradually graded into packs according to our ability, and after a few weeks I found myself promoted to the fast pack, in which were the Battalion cross country runners. In a month or so, I found myself detailed for the Army and Command Cross Country races; gruelling affairs that afforded me no pleasure, and, in addition, picked too for the regiment in the half mile and mile.

In the rugby fifteen we played the maximum number of officers then allowed, which was eight, as except for our handful of Borderer Jocks from Hawick, Selkirk and the like towns, none of our men had ever played the rugby code. In the football team, on the other hand, no officer from the regiment was good enough to play in the first eleven, with the sole exception of David Macdonald, the charming son of a famous Cameron major and quartermaster, who had been at George Watson's school and played football there.

Thanks to the encouragement of the Adjutant, Donald Cameron, and the drive of the RSM, we, the Camerons, soon became very successful at all games and sports at Aldershot, winning many competitions, which at once did much to raise the morale of our Jocks, and make them proud of their regiment.

So, for me, some halcyon months passed by, only interrupted by a few small alarms. At one time we were under definite orders to go at short notice to Memel in East Prussia on the Baltic to supervise a plebiscite, and optimistic as the young always are, most of us at once laid in large stocks of shot gun cartridges for the geese, and wild fowling, which was reported to be very good in those parts. However, at the last minute, and after our advance party had already left, the move for some reason or other was cancelled.

It was really the first time, in all my six years spent in soldiering, that I had lived in a peace time Mess of the Regular Army, and this, too, I found very pleasant, after years of war and active service.

In those days the ante-room was closed to officers for half an hour before Mess dinner to let the waiters tidy up and open windows, etc., while we officers bathed and put on mess kit, and the tight strapped trews, this of course included stiff white shirts. When we gathered in the mess room, summoned by the Orderly piper, no smoking was allowed, and sherry and bitters was the normal ante-room drink.

We then walked in behind the senior officer dining, and sat down to a five course dinner. As soon as the port wine had circulated, officers were free to leave the table, but most nights of the week we sat on and talked for, maybe, another half hour. Mess dinner every night was, therefore, a leisurely affair, lasting in all anything up to a couple of hours.

To drink beer or stout at mess was unheard of, though one could of course drink water, as was smoking a pipe, even in the ante-room. I think most of us drank whiskey and soda, and a few brandy and soda. In those days this was not expensive. Spirits were always served to each officer, already mixed with soda, in a small glass mug, which was allowed on the table. No wine bottle, however, was ever allowed to rest on the table, and was put on the floor at the person's foot.

Needless to say, no ladies' name was ever mentioned in mess or ante-room, and military ‘shop', though allowed in the ante-room, was not encouraged at the mess table. I am, now, sometimes asked by young officers, what we talked about night after night in Mess. It is difficult to remember, but my recollection is that we covered a wide field. I suppose, in those days, a third of us were university men, and certainly we, of the self called ‘Captain's Union', who often sat together, had a wide range of interests.

Phil Christison was something of a naturalist, and was later to write a book on Indian birds. Angus Collier had always a hankering for ancient history.

Family history was already becoming a leisure hobby of mine. Again, thanks to the war, we had all travelled widely, and between us had covered the Western Front, Gallipoli, Salonika, East Africa and the Arctic. Again, most of us had common interests, as regards what ‘Punch' used to term as ‘huntin', shootin', and fishin''.

But, of course, the real bond linking us all was that we were intensely proud of our regiment, and its great record, and almost equally proud of the whole Highland Brigade.

To encourage the standard of piping in the regiment, we usually had the day's Orderly piper playing round the Mess table every night, except, of course, Sundays, when these was no Mess dinner, and a cold supper was served. Once a young Hebridean piper was playing in the Mess for the first time. When the time came for him to stand and play his strathspay and reel, he walked to the nearest corner of the room, firmly turned his back on us all at table, and played his tunes facing the wall. On being asked afterwards why he had done this, he replied: ‘I was chust that nervous, I couldn't face all the chentlemen.'

In the late spring HM King George V, our Colonel in Chief of the Camerons, visited Aldershot, and stayed in the Royal Pavilion, Aldershot then being a military station where no less than two Divisions had their Headquarters and the bulk of their 24 Infantry Battalions were actually stationed. He held a Review on Laffans Plain, and I had the honour of marching past my company, as the massed pipes played the
Pibroch O'Dhomnuill Dubh
.

In May 1920, we received sudden orders to move to County Cork in Southern Ireland; then the storm centre of what was known in Ireland as ‘the troubles'. We travelled by sea from Southampton in the HMT
Czaritea
, the same ship that had taken me a year before to Archangel, and the stewards in the saloon assured me we ate exactly the same menus as in 1919. At that time, soon after the Great War and with some rationing still in force, the food seemed to us, of the 8th MG Battalion, as excellent; now, a year later and used to an excellent peacetime officer's mess in Aldershot, we rated the menus as rather indifferent. Life is always so much a mere matter of comparisons.

On arrival in Ireland our Battalion headquarters moved into a camp called Belmont Hutments, at Queenstown, now called Cobh, and we found outlying detachments in such places as Ballincollig, Middleton, Killeagh and Youghal. All around us those who were now called our enemies, the Sinn Féiners, all wore plain clothes, had their arms hidden, and spoke good English.

It was very difficult for some weeks to teach the Jocks that we were now in what was largely a hostile country, and that maybe 75 per cent of all local inhabitants, both men and women, viewed us with enmity, active or passive; though these sentiments were largely hidden.

We had to learn our job the hard way. Very soon after our arrival an unsuspecting road patrol, with their rifles stupidly clipped on to the side of their bicycles, were surrounded in a village street by a number of young men supposedly playing a game of hurley on the village green, a game akin to our own Highland Shinty. They apparently made friendly remarks and gestures, and gradually closed in on the cyclists. A few seconds later they had knocked the Jocks off their bicycles with their hurley sticks, and held up the men with revolvers. They removed the rifles' ammunition and bicycles of the soldiers, and they released them to return, under the NCO in charge, to our camp, very ashamed.

During the next few weeks, while moving about the Irish roads between our various detachments, small parties of our Battalion were ambushed and some men were killed and wounded, and one officer, a young subaltern, Ian Begg, by seizing the wheel from a wounded driver beside him, and though badly wounded himself, managed to drive his vehicle right through an ambush at high speed, for this he was later given an MBE.

Then occurred an even worse rebuff to our pride. Another young officer, with a small working party, was ordered to demolish an army hut in Queenstown. He very unwisely ordered his men to pile their arms, and then put them to work with picks and shovels some 30 yards or so away from their firearms.The job took him several days and, worst of all, he followed exactly the same practise each day.

On the third or fourth day, while the party were at their work, a volley of shots suddenly rang out. The sentry over the arms fell a casualty, several Sinn Féiners then jumped out of the windows of the ground floor of some houses close by, and covered the surprised workers with rifles, shot guns and revolvers, and meanwhile a motor van drove up close to the piked arms, and a Sinn Féiner or two bundled them up into the motor and drove off.

The whole Battalion felt very angry and ashamed that day. We, a famous regiment, had lost ten or twelve rifles to the rebels with but one casualty, the sentry; and without our having fired a shot. However, we were now learning our lesson, that we must be ever vigilant of all local Irish, and all were our enemy unless we knew them to be otherwise.

Thereafter we lost no more arms, and soon we began in our turn to capture hidden arms and to inflict casualities on our hidden plain clothes enemy. It was, however, most frustrating and unpleasant work for us all, and certainly we soldiers felt that we were not being given a free enough hand by Parliament to deal with the situation with which we were faced.

Soon after the fiasco in Queenstown when our working party lost all their rifles, the soldiers discovered that two girls, daughters of a loyalist, who had attended a troop's dance had had all their hair shaved off by local Sinn Féiners for so doing, as a reprisal for their behaviour. This was reported to the civil authorities, but no action was taken, and indeed practically the whole civil and police authority had already broken down.