The General Danced at Dawn by George MacDonald Fraser

Author:George MacDonald Fraser [Fraser, George MacDonald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007477029
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1970-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Whisky and the Music

The ignorant or unwary, if asked whether they would rather be the guests of an officers’ mess or a sergeants’, would probably choose the officers’. They might be motivated by snobbery, but probably also by the notion that the standards of cuisine, comfort, and general atmosphere would be higher. They would be dead wrong.

You will get a bit of the old haut monde from the officers in most units, although in a Highland regiment the native savagery has a tendency to show through. I remember the occasion when two Guards officers, guests of our mess, were having a delicate Sunday morning breakfast and discussing Mayfair and the Season with the Adjutant, himself an exquisite, when there entered the motor transport officer, one Elliot, a hard man from the Borders. Elliot surveyed the table and then roared:

“Naethin’ but toast again, bigod! You,” he shouted at the Adjutant, “ye bloody auld vulture, you, ye’ve been gobblin’ my plain bread!” And he wrenched the Adjutant’s shirt-front out of his kilt, slapped him resoundingly on the solar plexus, and ruffled his hair. This was Elliot’s way of saying good morning, but it upset the Guards. They just looked at each other silently, like two Jack Bennys, and then got slowly to their feet and went out, looking rather pale.

That would never happen in a sergeants’ mess. Sergeants are too responsible. They tend to be young-middle-aged soldiers, with a sense of form and dignity; among officers there is always the clash of youth and age, but with sergeants you have a disciplined, united front. And whereas the provisioning and amenities of an officers’ mess are usually in the hands of a president who has had the job forced on him and isn’t much good at it, your sergeants look after their creature comforts with an expertise born of long service in hard times. Wherever you are, whoever goes short, it won’t be the sergeants; they’ve been at the game too long.

Hogmanay apart, officers never saw inside our sergeants’ mess (“living like pigs as we do,” said the Colonel, “it would make us jealous”), so when Sergeant Cuddy of the signals section invited me in for a drink I accepted like a shot. We had been out in the desert on an exercise, and Cuddy and I had spent long hours on top of a sand-hill with a wireless set, watching the company toiling over the sun-baked plain below, popping off blanks at each other. Cuddy was a very quiet old soldier with silver hair; his first experience of signals had been with flags and pigeons on the Western Front in the old war, and I managed to get him to talk about it a little. It emerged that he had heard of, although he had not known, my great-uncle, who had been a sergeant with the battalion at the turn of the century.

“There’ll be a picture of him in the mess,” said Cuddy. And then, after a long pause, he added:

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