Mediterranean Nights (44 page)

He was wild, of course—mad as a March hare—and the brass hats loathed him. He was only a Company Officer, and temporary commission at that, but he used to talk to the Divisional Staff in a way that the Colonel didn't dare; after all, he was the McReay of Dundrinan in private life, and to his mind the stockbrokers or pinhead regulars who had wangled red tabs in the war were either crooks or fools. He would have been broken a dozen times if it hadn't been for the pukka soldiers at G.H.Q. They knew too much about his exploits to scrap a useful man like Angus, and he was on Christian-name terms with most of them.

I always felt that if Angus ever came up against a really ugly situation, he was just the man to tackle it in an unorthodox way; but he was utterly incapable of doing the awful things those stories suggested; she must have been a lot to blame.

He had half a dozen of us up for a week's fishing on his water last spring, and when the others were leaving he pressed me to stay on. I was delighted, I always enjoy being with Angus, and the salmon were rising in the way you always hope for when you go to Scotland—but which so rarely happens in reality.

It was the second night that we were on our own. We'd had a long day fishing the water above the house, which is the best beat as you know, and a great day's fishing it was—I landed ten to my own rod,, and Angus eight, but he got an eighteen-pounder, so we reckoned that made us about square.

There's no fun like it, but it's tiring work, and after dinner we were glad enough to settle down in front of the great wood fire in the hall, which is never allowed to go out, night or day.

We lit our pipes and talked casually for a bit—then he stretched out that long body of his to its full length in the arm-chair, and kicked the logs into a blaze.

‘What's your theory about that spot of trouble last winter, Dick?' he asked suddenly.

‘I haven't got one,' I said.

He laughed. ‘Well, you're about the only man in Scotland who hasn't! Some think I'm all the saints and martyrs rolled into one, and others say quite openly that I ought to swing.'

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘There was bound to be a lot of talk, Angus, but it will die down—as far as I'm concerned I don't give a damn what happened—I'm sure you did the right thing.'

‘That's nice of you, Dick,' he laughed again; ‘thank the Lord most of the people whose friendship I value feel that way about it, and the others can go to the devil for all I care. I think it would interest you to hear the truth though, and I know you won't go back on me.'

‘Tell me if you want to,' I said, as I refilled my pipe, so he went on:

‘Well, it started in the bad old days of the war, when we were all young and full of good red blood. You remember I got knocked out at St. Simon on the very first day of the Boche drive for Paris—in March ‘eighteen, I mean. I was sent down to the clearing station in Ham, but that wasn't much good. By one o'clock in the morning troops were pouring through the town—legging it for all they were worth—the retreat had become a rout. Ninety per cent of the infantry in that sector had been either killed or captured, and half the gunners, too—but you know as much about that part of it as I do.

The thing that affected me was that in those twenty-four hours the whole of our organisation behind the lines had gone up in smoke, so instead of being sent back to England I landed up at a French hospital in Nice.

I was pretty sick about it at first, because only having a flesh wound in the thigh I should have been able to hobble about after a bit, and see a few people if I'd been at home—as it was I was marooned in the South of France.

It can be glorious down there in April and early May, and I soon found that it had at least one advantage—the French treated their wounded like human beings. They were most awfully decent as long as your medical report was progressing all right, and let you do jolly nearly as you pleased,
whereas you know what it was like at home. The old women and the Purity League who more or less ran the show treated convalescent officers as though they were convicts. Every kind of iniquitous restriction was enforced to keep the poor devils from having a decent time after the hell they'd been through.

It was curious, the French didn't talk a lot of gush about what heroes we were, but they showed a marvellous appreciation in a quiet, subdued sort of way; the war was a much more vital thing to them than to us. Anyhow, when I said that I'd like to run over to Corsica for a week or so, they made no sort of trouble at all.

It was in that hospital that I first met Bill Rankin. He seemed a decent sort of bloke; I always thought he was inclined to be a bit hard and selfish—but he was devilish good company—and most of the other British in the place were a pretty dull crowd, so we applied to go on this Corsican jaunt together.

There were hospitals in Bastia and Ajaccio, and we chose Ajaccio. Of course we stayed in a hotel, but we were attached to a hospital for treatment. The boats from Nice weren't running, so we had to travel down the coast, and take the one from Marseilles.

You've never been to Corsica, have you?—the island is a lovely sight when you come to it by sea, at dawn. The sun came up behind it when we were about fifteen miles away—all that we could see was a black mass rising out of the water with deep shadows in front and a dull glow behind, then gradually the mountains were tipped with gold, and as the sun burst over the top it became full day.

I don't know much about scenery, except the Scottish variety, but the bay of Ajaccio is marvellous, too. Clear blue water almost completely circled by the shore. White and lemon coloured houses, then a belt of bright green vegetation—above that the greys and browns of the scrub, white snow on the mountain peaks, and over all a clear blue sky—just like a picture postcard, only real!

We didn't think much of Ajaccio though, it's a one-eyed little place. We saw the house that Napoleon was born in, but the Corsicans are queer about old Boney. You'd think they'd be as proud as peacocks to have a great man like that born
in their rotten little island—but not a bit of it; when he was quite young they thought he was a promising lad because he took a minor part in one of their home-rule riots—but when he began to take an interest in France, they considered he had gone to the dogs.

If you ask a Corsican his views on Napoleon, you'll find he simply spits and says—‘Who was Bonaparte, after all?—what did he ever do for Corsica?' Talk about the British being insular! the Corsicans have got us beat to a frazzle. They like us, though. We owned the place at one time for a few years, and that was the only time they had self-government—they remember it to this day—we helped their great patriot leader, Paoli, too—but of course you bet we did it with our tongue in our cheek, just to make trouble for the French!

They're a lazy lot, those Corsicans—the women do all the work. The men sit gossiping in the square, under the trees which are pleached to form a shady canopy. Rankin and I got completely fed up after we'd spent a few days wandering round the town, so we thought we'd take a trip up to Corte in the interior.

It's a day's journey by train; not that the distance is anything remarkable, but you are going up—up—into the mountains all the time. That railway must have taken a bit of building—some of the viaducts across the gorges are a dizzy height, and the waterfalls look like the trickle in a rock-garden miles below. The woods are wonderful, thousands of acres, almost all chestnut—and they say it is hopeless for the police to attempt to capture a bandit if he once takes to the forest.

Corte is an ugly little town. It seems absurd to find those tall Italian houses there, in which twenty families herd together, when there's tons of room for everyone to have a garden—but that's what it's like—or rather the main street, which is pretty well all there is of it.

The hotel was a ghastly place—most of the food had so much garlic in it that we couldn't eat it, and the flies were a perfect plague, though you wouldn't expect to find them at such an altitude.

The trouble started when Rankin suggested that we should try to get a moufflon. In the old days, shooting moufflon in
Corsica really was fun, but the fools never troubled to preserve their game, and so moufflon has been almost shot out of existence.

Our landlord put us on to a chap called Caperno, said he might be able to arrange a shoot, so next morning we went to look him up.

He was a bit doubtful about it though we offered to pay him handsomely. Money means nothing to a Corsican—if it's going to give them any trouble to earn it they would rather go without. You can leave your cash lying about, too, nobody would dream of touching it—they'd murder you without a second thought, as I'm going to tell you—but they are as honest as the day is long, and wouldn't pinch a cent.

After Rankin had been trying to stir Caperno into activity for about ten minutes I was no longer interested in moufflon—I had seen the girl.

She was a glorious child, Dick. Dark, of course, as dark as night—with the oval face and olive skin of an Italian. The Corsicans are as near Tuscans as anything, though they pride themselves on being a race apart.

I just couldn't take my eyes off that girl, and she knew it, too—her eyelashes were as long as my fingernail, and never in my life have I seen a finer pair of eyes. She had one of those moist red mouths, too—a natural red, no filthy lipstick business—she was
heavenly
.

Rankin brought me back to earth by telling me that Caperno would try to arrange a shoot for us the following day, and we went off to look at the fort. It's an amazing place, that, built by the Genoese, if I remember, when they owned the island hundreds of years ago. One great single tower with sheer rock on three sides of it—if you fell off the top you'd sail down three hundred clear feet before you crashed on the rocks in the gorge below. I don't wonder they considered it impregnable—you can see across miles and miles of country, and on a clear day right over the Mediterranean to the shores of Tuscany on the Italian side.

When we got down to the bottom again, there was the girl—sitting on a stone bench outside the Fort—of course I spoke to her—there was a war on, and in another month I might be back in the middle of it, hanging on the wire with my guts blown out—and I was sick of V.A.D.s.

My French is pretty rotten, and hers wasn't much better, but we managed to get along. It's marvellous what you can do if the girl's pretty enough to make it worth your while to try.

I asked her to be a darling and show me the local scenery—pity the poor stranger—you know the usual sort of stuff—and she promised to meet me there again in the afternoon.

I had boiled eggs for lunch, I remember—it was the only way I could think of to avoid the garlic, but even then some of it seemed to get through the shell. Rankin was a bit huffy because I left him—I think he was jealous of my luck, but I was far too keen on the girl to worry about him.

She turned up all right, and took me for a walk in the
maquis
. The smell of the wild myrtle was glorious in that hot sun. There were dwarf pines and olive trees here and there, so that you couldn't see a soul unless they were within twenty yards.

After a bit we found a bank, and sat down in the sunshine. The whole place was drowsy with the heat, and not a sound anywhere except the droning of the insects. It was heavenly there on that golden afternoon.

We laughed and chatted together, although neither of us understood more than one word in ten of what the other said. I asked her to meet me again that evening, but she said that it would be impossible—she had only managed to slip out that afternoon because her father was away from home fixing up our shoot for the next day—in having met me at all she was running an awful risk.

I had no idea that they were so strict about their women in Corsica, and we're not used to that sort of thing, so it never entered my head till afterwards that I might land her in a mess; but in the meantime, well—I'm not much to look at, but I suppose my northern colouring had had the same devastating effect on her as her dark loveliness on me—what with her beauty going to my head like wine, and her willingness, and the sunshine, I had taken her—just as one takes a ripe peach off a sun-kissed wall.

By the time we parted, I was head over ears in love with that girl—that's how it was in those hectic war days—you made love first, and fell in love afterwards. As we walked back to the town I told her that I'd do a bit of lead-swinging—pretend
I didn't feel up to a long day's tramp after moufflon, and let Rankin go off with her father alone next morning—then we could spend the day together.

When we got to within half a mile of the town I left her to walk on alone, and gave her ten minutes' start so that we shouldn't be seen together, but when I came round the bend I ran right into her again.

She was standing in the middle of the road having no end of a row with a tall, dark chap. He had a long droopy moustache, and wore a black slouch hat—a typical Corsican peasant. He was going for her like the very devil, and I could see that it was about me from the look he gave me as I passed. I'd half a mind to stop and interfere, but I caught her eyes and it was evident that she didn't want me to butt in, so the only thing to do was to walk on and pretend I didn't know her.

After dinner that evening I was just leaving the hotel with Rankin for a stroll in the town, when the landlord stopped me. He was in a tremendous state of excitement. It seemed that the man I had seen talking to ‘the girl' was one Machio, and she was promised to him in marriage. The Corsicans don't give their young women the benefit of the doubt if they go walking in the woods with a chap—and Machio believed the worst. He had gone to her father and created hell; old Caperno had beaten her till she was half dead—and Machio was out looking for me with a gun.