by Simon Raven
Now my broad plan, old bean, is this. The most closely guarded secret round here is the details of the big three-day exercise which we do down on Dartmoor next week. If Oozahunga (that’s his heathen name) can get so much as sixty seconds alone with the plans, which are kept in Colonel Ferrers-Box’s office, he can commit them to his miracle memory, charts, orders and all, and later disgorge them (in return for three promised bottles of Black & White) to yours truly, who will be then in a position to fuck the whole thing up, greatly to the discomfiture of Ferrers-Box, Kitby et al. The problem is to get Ouzou (the witty soubriquet which the Sandhurst contingent has devised for him) into Ferrers-Box’s office for long enough to make with his magic eyeballs while Ferrers-Box himself is out of it – a bit of a pill, this, as the place is tightly locked whenever Ferrers-Box leaves it for so much as five minutes. However, Ouzou’s privileges as a black will help us here. Ouzou, like all the Africans, is allowed access to his personal file (to see what Ferrers-Box and the rest are writing on it and to make sure he’s not being “discriminated” against); so that gets him into Ferrers-Box’s office easy enough, and once he’s there it shouldn’t be beyond your old chum’s ingenuity to goad F-B out of it for a minute or two, by doing something rude or annoying like letting off a thunder-flogger in the corridor.
I’m sending Ouzou in tomorrow morning. If that goes off all right, we’re set. Cunning old Fingel has already worked out the general principles involved in sabotaging the Dartmoor manoeuvre, and once he knows the exact arrangements, times, places, etc., which the staff are working by, he will concoct a final and precise scheme (which will almost certainly include further use of the egregious Oozahunga) for the total disruption of the affair and the ruinous humiliation of Ferrers-Box and his whole ghastly crew.
More news soon (I hope).
Love from
Fingel.
School of Infantry.
July 3
Old Bean,
Just a quickie, to say that Ouzou went in this a.m. and God was good to us. My tentative notion for distracting Ferrers-Box at the appropriate moment had been to fake a fire in the Staff Car Park under his window; but this wasn’t necessary, as one of the clerks mercifully had an epileptic fit in the outer office. While Ferrers-Box was thrusting steel rulers between the wretched fellow’s jaws, Ouzou got his peepers on the goodies for a clear two minutes.
He’s now busy here in my room, guzzling up his three bottles of whisky and making an exact transcript of all the orders, logistical and tactical, for the Dartmoor exercise, and all the pretty diagrams, panoramas and what not that go with them. As soon as he’s done, I can make a minute by minute and yard by yard analysis of the whole caboodle and work out exactly where and how Fingel must strike. More of this when I’ve done my homework.
Love from
Fingel.
School of Infantry.
July 4.
LOVELY OLD BEAN,
God has surely delivered the enemy into my hand. The Dartmoor manoeuvre turns out to be a real swine – but ideal for my farce-making purposes.
Each section is to be dumped at some point on the perimeter of Dartmoor at dusk, and then has to make its way by compass over hill and dale and river and bog to a central RV on a Tor of granite, where we’re all meant to arrive by 1 a.m. We shall then mount a night-attack in concert on a deserted farmhouse, having taken which we shall be allowed a few minutes off for bed and breakfast inside it before setting off once more to carry out reconnaissance by day etc., etc., etc., but none of the rest of it matters because Fingel will have wrecked the whole thing long before then.
The authorities’ plan is, you see, that each section, while en route to the RV at the Tor, will be commanded by a selected student and also attended by its own Instructor, who will give assistance in case of emergency and will clock up everyone’s marks for guts, bearing, initiative and all the other grisly qualities which they try to foster round here. Colonel Ferrers-Box will be awaiting us at the Tor to issue orders for the attack on the farmhouse, and at this stage a new lot of students will be appointed to command the sections during the attack. After the attack is over yet another new lot of students will be put in command of the sections – just in time for Ferrers-Box’s master-stroke, which is this: having told the new section commanders that they can stand their men down to snatch a bit of kip and eat their haversack rations for brekker, F-B will stage a counter-attack on the farmhouse, this to be carried out by a Company of local Territorials, who, of course, know the country like the back of their horny hands. The said Territorials will creep up by stealth armed with “flame-throwers”, i.e. with garden hoses worked off portable water-tanks; and the idea, a real Ferrer-Box specialité de la maison, is that they should drench all the exhausted students just as soon as they’re flat out with their eyes shut, thus causing much grief and confusion and providing a searing test of guts, bearing, initiative, et cetera.
Now, old bean. According to the lists which Ouzou memorised, our section is to be commanded by Ouzou himself on the compass march; by some little pig from Sandhurst during the attack on the farmhouse; and then by yours sincerely, Fingel, who is thus destined as the man that has to cope when the local squaddies start flooding the snoring subalterns. But observe, dear bean, how very neatly, with the benefit of my forbidden knowledge, the whole shocking affair can be restaged:
Ouzou, bribed by the promise of much Scotch, will pretend to lose the way to the Tor but will find it again before Kitby has to interfere (which he will anyhow be reluctant to do for fear of upsetting temperamental black Ouzou); meanwhile, however, Ouzou will have taken us near the farmhouse (of which, of course, we know the exact location) that is later to be attacked and counterattacked. This gives Fingel the chance to slip off in the dark to where the merry Terriers are making their preparations (their base was clearly marked on one of Ferrers-Box’s secret maps) and to pose as a messenger come from Ferrers-Box to order slight changes in plan.
The Territorials accept Fingel as genuine, first because they see the Captain’s pips on his shoulders, secondly because if he wasn’t pukkha he wouldn’t know about the plan at all, and thirdly because local yokels, however well they know their own country, know very little else. So Fingel now instructs them to fill their portable water-tanks with lubricant oil from the spare cans on the troop carriers that brought them across the moor earlier that day (an arrangement projected in F-B’s Logistic Notes) and to turn their “flame-throwers”, not into the parts of the farmhouse previously specified, but into the adjacent coach-house, which, as Fingel knows from one of F-B’s Administrative Diagrams, is where the Instructors are to take their rest. “We’re putting all the slackers in there, you see,” Fingel will tell the Territorials; “that oil should give them a bit of a shine, ha ha, what?” After exhibiting such further artful and affable nonchalance as may be necessary, Fingel then leaves the Territorial base, doubles round to rejoin Ouzou and the section, and is all present and correct when the section arrives on the Tor. Awful Kitby has not noticed Fingel’s absence (a) because Fingel is one of fifteen students all strung out on a moonless night (trust Ferrers-Box for that), and (b) because Ouzou tortures Kitby by waving the map battily about and making eccentric (if eventually correct) calculations as to the direction next to be followed.
So. Ferrers-Box orders the night-attack, the little pig from Sandhurst leads our section during it, the empty farmhouse is misleadingly announced to have been “taken”, Fingel is appointed to command the section, and is then instructed, by foul Ferrers-Box or filthy Kitby, to bed the section down; after which F-B and Kitby go smirking off to the coach-house, relishing the misfortune in store for Fingel and his boys, and little knowing that they themselves are soon to be half-drowned in engine oil, which will pollute and well nigh asphyxiate them, rendering them and the other Instructors quite incapable of conducting the rest of the exercise.
Love from
Fingel.
The Depot,
Salop.
July 5
My dear Fingel,
Yours just received. A most amusing plan. But just a little chancy, dear? Do remember that a lot of the factors which are apparently going for you (e.g. boozy Ouzou and the pitch-black night) might perhaps change sides.
Love from
Simon.
School of Inf.
July 6
Dear Bean-O,
Don’t be a damp condom. Night-ops are Fingel’s Best Thing – remember how I smuggled us out of that cathouse in Nairobi when the Military Police raided the place.
We go down to Dartmoor tomorrow…
Love from
Fingel.
Royal Military Hospital,
Larkhill,
Wilts.
July 13, 1957
Old Bean,
Well now, where to begin?
We begin, I think, as indeed we shall end, with the ineffable Oozahunga. The mistake I’d made at the very beginning was to let him get at the whisky before he had completed his transcripts of the orders, etc., which he had seen in Ferrers-Box’s office. To be fair, he did a very accurate job of most of it; but by the time he was three-quarters down the first bottle he was liable to boob somewhere, and indeed, as it turned out, he had.
It was, like all the classic errors, a simple matter of transposition. According to Ouzou’s transcript, you may remember, he himself was to command our section on the compass march, some whipper-snapper from Sandhurst was to command us during the night-attack, and I was then to take over for the rest period, when we were meant to be biffed by the Terriers. In fact Ouzou was quite right about the attack but he’d inadvertently switched the command for the two other events. When it came to the point, I was put in charge for the compass march, and he, Ouzou, for the rest period (what there was of it). Which was, when I thought about it, a far more plausible Ferrers-Box arrangement, as the night-march offered the maximum likelihood of shaming discredit for the man in charge, which was just what Ferrers-Box would wish for me.
But however that might be, the immediate problem was this: as section commander I should now be very much under Kitby’s eye for the whole march and there was no chance at all that I should be able to slip away to the Terrier base and give my revised orders about the employment of the “flame-throwers”. Luckily (as I then thought) I had time to have a quick word alone with Ouzou, who of course was the only other person privy to my plan, and persuade him to be messenger to the Terriers (though just how he was going to convince them of his bona fides I was far from sure), an office which he undertook in return for the immediate hand-over of the flask of whisky I was carrying and the promise of more on tap later. After that we started on our march across the soggy moor. When it came to the stage at which I had to bend our route (in order to get Ouzou within reasonable distance of the Territorial base) Kitby gave me a malignant look, hoping for total failure, but that was one of the happier moments of the night, as Ouzou slunk off undetected and I had the pleasure of watching Kitby writhe with disappointment when, after a bit of palaver with the map, I got the section going in the right direction again. So far, then, all had gone to plan; and when Ouzou at length rejoined the rear of the section (again unnoticed save by me) just before we reached the Tor, and gave me a broad African grin, it seemed that we were well on the way to success. I had no time to question Ouzou before the attack started, as I was busy being “debriefed” about the march by Ferrers-Box, but that great toothy leer of his must surely mean that all was well, and I went into the assault a very happy soldier.
I should not have been so happy had I known what had passed between Ouzou and the Terriers. As I have since deduced from piecing things together, what happened was roughly this:
Ouzou arrived at their base smelling of my whisky and flashing his enormous gnashers, and was greeted by a pink-faced Major who’d had twice the amount to drink that Ouzou had. They got on together famously. Any doubt the Major had about Ouzou’s authority to change the orders on behalf of Ferrers-Box was soon dispelled (a) by more whisky and (b) by the grandoise badges of rank worn by Second Lieutenants in Ouzou’s potty native Army – not single pips, like our warts have, but bloody great gold palm-trees which cover half the shoulder. So this Major thought that Ouzou was some young African tiger, at least a Colonel, on secondment, and listened with deference when Ouzou told him what to do.
“You pour dat water right out of dose portable tanks, man,” Ouzou said, “and fill dem up with petrol instead.”
“Petrol, sir?” said the Major, for even he was a little daunted by this.
“Dat’s what de man said. Dat stuff wot you put into dem lorry-machines,” he said. “Dat stuff dat smell bad.”
I should explain that Ouzou, like many Africans of recent emergence, is not mechanically minded. (It is one of their few endearing traits.) Ouzou drew no particular distinction between lubricating oil and fuel oil, between different types of fuel oil, between three-tonners and troop-carriers – he drew no distinctions of this banausic kind at all; and I had not had time, during the brief period I had to teach him his message, to press them upon him.
“But surely,” said the Major, “Colonel Ferrers-Box doeshn’t want ush to spray all his shubalterns with petrol? A bit dicey, you know.”
“It ain’t going to be sprayed on goddamn subalterns,” Ouzou said. By which he meant, of course, that it was destined for Colonel Ferrers-Box and the Instructors. This, however, he could not reveal, and being at that moment distracted by the failure of my flask to yield any more whisky and by the kind offer of the Major’s bottle, he forgot to add any further instructions whatever and made no mention of the coach-house. It was, as even in his state he began to realise, high time he left to rejoin the section, and after a manic swallow at the Major’s bottle he did so.
The upshot was that the Major, on the strength of the little he had heard, understood first that there were now to be no subalterns in the farmhouse and secondly that his men were to spray the place, not with water but with petrol. Presumably, he thought in what was left of his mind, Ferrers-Box was getting up some last-minute dodge to add realism to the exercise (the farmhouse being War Department Property and in any case a mere shell). He did rather wish that jolly African Staff Officer had given more details, but then what could one expect of blacks, jolly they certainly were but not given to precision.
All this is what I did not know when I settled down in the farmhouse to await the arrival of the Terriers and the degradation of Ferrers-Box in the coach-house. Ouzou, who had been busy taking over command of the section and giving a lot of loud and unnecessary orders, had then refused information about his mission until treated to nine-tenths of the reserve whisky in my water-bottle…after which he was incapable of any communication other than, “They got the message, man, they got the message.” But this, on the face of it, was fairly reassuring. Anyway, nothing to do now but wait. Managing to ignore the Ouzou noises and the Ouzou smells on my immediate right, I began to doze…
…And was woken by a thin, high upper-class voice, which trillingly announced, “I say, chaps, there’s a very odd smell, somebody turn on a torch.”
In response to which, somebody (of course) lit a match, and the next moment we were all yelling and fighting our way into the open, Oozahunga (unharmed) being well in the van. The hullabaloo was heard in the coach-house and out stormed Ferrers-Box; while in the light of the now incandescent farmhouse the Territorial Major and a number of his men were standing foolishly about, looking dubiously at the “flame-throwers” in their hands.
“What the devil’s all this?” screamed Ferrers-Box at the Major.
For answer the Major pointed abjectly at Oozahunga, who in turn started to point at me. Luckily the din was still colossal, so –
“– You take the rap,” I hissed at Oozahunga; “they’ll let you off because you’re a nig – because you’re a foreigner and they won’t want a production about it. I’ll give you two cases of whisky.”
“Twe
nty cases,” said Ouzou, who was now stone sober. “This is mingi heap trouble for you, man.”
“Ten cases.”
“Fifteen, man.”
“Done.”
So Ouzou took the can – he’s been a real brick about that – with some tale about how he had stumbled on the Terrier base accidentally and had thought up “one good-damn hooray jokey-jokey” in order to “take out de piss from all dem damn toffee-nosed boys from Sandhurst School”. This admission has enabled the Commandant of Warminster to book him on to the slow boat for Hubba-Hubba or Beri-Beri or wherever, whither he will bear to his Government a diplomatic and propitiatory report which praises his “enthusiastic (if somewhat misapplied) sense of initiative” and mildly deprecates his part in causing the demise of two subalterns, who succumbed to incineration. As well as this report, Ouzou will take with him fifteen cases of Black & White whisky, the purchase of which, arranged with some difficulty from this hospital, has exhausted the funds I ran up for myself during Sergeant Mack’s Training Coy bonanza earlier this summer.
On the debit side, then, I am badly burned on the botty and, once again, flat broke. On the credit side, however, I shall miss the rest of that intolerable course at Warminster, and I have been an incidental element in bringing about the premature resignations of loathsome Ferrers-Box and ferocious Kitby, both of whom are held to have been negligent in supervising the student career of Oozahunga. Just about worth it, on balance.