country.' Conrad was on the point of saying, 'I didn't mean that,' and then thought better of it, and let Archie continue.
'Parts of Northern Ireland are very beautiful. Sometimes my job took me out of H.Q. for the best part of the day, visiting units in their posts all over the countryside. Some of those on the border were in beleaguered forts made from old police stations which one could only get to by helicopter for fear of ambush on the roads. It was great, flying over that country. Some of it I saw in spring and early summer. Fermanagh with all its lakes, and the Mountains of Mourne.' He stopped, and grinned wryly, shaking his head. 'Although one had to realize that they not only swept down to the sea, but to the badlands as well. The border.'
'Is that where you were?'
'Yes. Right in the thick of it. And different country again. Very green, small fields, winding country roads, lachans and streams. Sparsely populated. Tiny farms dotted about the place, grotty little homesteads surrounded by dead and broken machinery; old cars and tractors left to rot. But all quite pastoral. Peaceful. I found it impossible, sometimes, to relate such surroundings with what was going on.'
'It must have been rough.' *
'It was all right. We were all in it together. Being with your own Regiment is a little like being with your own family. You can cope with most things if you have your family around you.'
Archie fell silent again. The granite boulder made a painful resting place, and he had become uncomfortable. He shifted his position slightly, easing the strain on his leg. The younger dog, alert, moved in beside him, and Archie fondled her head with a gentle hand.
'Did you have your own barracks?' Conrad asked.
'Yes. If you can call a requisitioned clothing factory a barracks. It was all fairly rough and ready. We lived behind barbed wire, corrugated iron and sandbags, seldom saw daylight, and had little chance of exercise. We worked on one floor, went downstairs to eat, and upstairs to sleep. Scarcely the Ritz. I had a batman cum bodyguard who went everywhere with me, and even in plain clothes, we were never unarmed.
'One existed in a state of seige. We were never actually attacked, but there was always the threat of some sort of ambush or assault, so one was prepared for any of the various ploys for blowing a police or military establishment off the face of the earth. One of these was to hijack an armed Land Rover, load it with high explosives and then get the poor bugger at the wheel to drive it through the open gates of the barracks, park it and set it off from a distance. This actually happened once or twice, whereupon a device was conceived to deal with such a contingency. A solid concrete pit with a steep ramp. The idea was to drive the vehicle into the pit, and then run, shit-for-ginger and screaming warning like a maniac, before the whole caboodle blew up. The resultant devastation was still pretty formidable, but by and large, lives were saved.'
'Did that happen to you?'
'No, that didn't happen to me. I have nightmares about those bloody bomb pits, and yet it was never an experience that I had to endure. Strange, isn't it? But then there can be no explanation for the workings of one's own subconscious.'
By now Conrad had abandoned his inhibitions about curiosity. 'So what
Archie put his arm around his young dog, and she settled, to lie with her head on her master's tweeded knee.
'It was June. Early summer. Sunshine and blossom everywhere. Then an incident on the border at the crossroads near Keady. A bomb buried beneath the road, in a culvert. Two armoured vehicles- we call them Pigs- were out on border patrol, four men in each Pig. The bomb was detonated by remote control from over the border. One Pig was blown to smithereens and all four men with it. The other was badly damaged. Two men dead and two wounded. One of the wounded was the Sergeant in charge, and it was he who radioed back to H.Q. to report. I was in the Operations Room when the message and the details came through. On such occasions, for security reasons, no names are ever mentioned over the radio, but every man in the Battalion has his own Zap code, a number for identification purposes. So, as the Sergeant gave us the numbers, I knew exactly who had been killed and who was still alive. And they were all my men.'
'I told you, I was Officer Commanding the Administrative company rather than a rifle company. That meant I was in charge of the Signals, the Quartermaster, the Pay Office and the Pipes and Drums.'
'Pipes and Drums?' Conrad could scarcely keep the disbelief out of his voice. 'You mean you had a
'But of course. The Pipes and Drums are an important part of any Highland Regiment. They play Reveille and the Last Post, beat retreat on ceremonial occasions, provide the music for dancing and smoking concerts, and guest nights in the Officers' and Sergeants' Messes. And pipe the lament at funerals. 'The Flowers of the Forest.' The saddest sound on earth. But apart from being an integral part of the Battalion, every Piper and Drummer is, as well, an active service soldier and trained as a machine gunner. It was some of these men who were trapped in that ambush. I knew them all. One of them was a boy called Neil MacDonald, who was twenty-two years old and the son of the head keeper at Ardnamore-that's up at the head of our glen, beyond Tullochard. I first heard him piping at the Strathcroy Games, when he was about fifteen. That year he walked away with all the prizes, and I suggested that when he was old enough, he should join the Regiment. And that day, I listened to those Zap codes coming in, and I knew that he was dead.'
Conrad could think of no suitable comment to make, and so sensibly said nothing. A pause fell, not uncompanionable, and after a little, Archie, unprompted, went on.
'To deal with such emergencies there is always an Air Reaction Force at full alert. Two bricks of men…'
'Bricks?'
'You'd call them squads, and a Lynx helicopter ready and waiting for take-off. That day, I told the Sergeant to stand down, and I took his place and went with them. There were eight of us in the helicopter, the pilot and a crewman, five Jocks, and myself. It took less than ten minutes to get to the scene. When we reached the area, we circled to suss out exactly what had happened. The explosive, which had totally destroyed the first Pig, had left a hole in the road the size of a crater, and the second Pig was arse-over-tit in this. All around was littered with scraps of metal, clothing, mess tins, bits of camouflage netting, bodies, clothing, burning tyres. A lot of smoke, flames, the stench of burning rubber and fuel and paint. But no sign of movement. No sign of anything or anybody.'
Once more Conrad found himself astonished by what he thought of as an obvious discrepancy.
'You mean no local people, farmers, or ploughmen, hearing the explosion and running to investigate?'
'No. Nothing. In that part of the world no person goes within an arm's length of that sort of trouble, unless of course he wishes to be dead or kneecapped within the week. There was nobody, just the smoke and the carnage.
'There was a patch of grass, like a layby, alongside the road. The helicopter landed and we all piled out. Our immediate task was to stake out the area, and get out the wounded while the helicopter flew back to base to bring in the M.O.-the Medical Officer-and his boys. But the helicopter had scarcely taken off, and before we had time to shake out, we were caught in a hail of machine-gun fire from across the border. They were waiting for us, you see. Watching and waiting. Three of my Jocks were killed instantly, another was wounded in the chest, and I caught it in the leg. Shot to pieces.
'When the helicopter returned with the M.O. on board, myself and the worst of the wounded were flown straight to hospital in Belfast. The Sergeant didn't make it, he died on the way. In the hospital my leg was amputated above the knee. I stayed there a few weeks, and then was flown back to England to begin the long business of rehabilitation. Finally I returned to Croy, pensioned off with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.'
Conrad endeavoured to make a mental tally of the casualties, but lost count and gave up. 'So what did that particular incident achieve?' he asked.
'Nothing. A hole in the road. A few more British soldiers dead. The next morning, the IRA officially claimed responsibility.'
'Do you feel bitter about it? Angry?'
'Why? Because I've lost my leg? Because I have to hump myself around on this aluminium contraption? No. I was a Regular soldier, Conrad. Being shot to ribbons by an implacable enemy is one of the occupational hazards of being a soldier. But I could just as easily have been an ordinary civilian, a run of the mill guy, trying to get peacefully on with his own life. An old father, perhaps, gone to Enniskillen to mourn his dead son on Armistice Day, and ending
