Free Magnus Merriman by Eric Linklater Page A

years.’
    The little man winked lewdly. Each hand held a glass of beer that Meiklejohn had bought for him. In a thin husky voice he began to sing:
    O, Jenny she’s ta’en a deep surprise,
    And she’s spewed a’ her crowdie,
    Her minnie she ran to bring her a dram,
    But she stood more need o’ the howdie.
    At Magnus’s other elbow McRuvie had just referred to Sergeant Denny’s regiment as the Kaiser’s Bodyguard.
    â€˜Away and play at Broken Squares!’ replied Denny ferociously.
    These twin vilifications—the former a bitter reference to a stain on the Gordons’ honour, the latter recalling an unhappy incident in the history of the Black Watch—brought the argument to a head. McRuvie hit Denny on the nose, and Denny knocked McRuvie down with a right hook to the jaw. The noise increased with this sudden excitementand a great deal of beer was spilled as everyone turned to so violent a centre of interest. Two barmen forced their way through the crowd, and without waste of time seized hold of Denny and flung him out of doors. Then they returned, and finding McRuvie preparing to follow his enemy they sternly warned him of the consequences, and by a timely reference to the police persuaded him to stay where he was.
    Meiklejohn was annoyed by this interruption of the little man’s ballad, but when on all sides, awakened by the regimental breeze, reminiscences of the war rose to the surface of men’s memories and into the thick yellow-lighted air fell the names of Givenchy and Sanctuary Wood and Poperinghe—half these ragged fellows, these slouching dole-men, these pot-bellied deformities, had once stood rigid and magnificent on parade, and marched behind the pipes with kilts swinging, and eaten their food under storm-clouds of death—when these memories found tongue Magnus was engaged in conversation by an ill-formed and evil-smelling lump of a man who proudly pulled up his trouser-leg and showed on his grimy skin a long and puckered scar.
    High Wood disputed with the Labyrinth, the mud at Louvencourt rivalled as a topic of humour and delight the carnage at Mont St Eloi. In red leather volumes in the Memorial on the Castle Rock were the myriad names of the Scottish dead, and here in the lively squalor of a lousy tavern were their comrades who had survived, and whose names were nowhere written—unless perhaps on the wall of a jakes. But they were alive and, for the moment, rich with their memories. They had marched on foreign soil and killed their country’s enemies. Thin-ribbed with hunger, or gross with civilian fat they might be, shambling in their gait and dismal in their dress they were, but once their buttons had shone bright, and their shoulders were square, and they were Gordons and Seaforths and Camerons. They had worn the Red Hackle, and ridden on jolting limbers, and swallowed with their ration beef the acrid taste of danger. Here, with foul shirts and fouler breath, were Mars’s heroes. Kings had fallen and nations perished, armies had withered and cities been ruined for this and this alone:that poor men in stinking pubs might have great wealth of memory.
    Magnus, perceiving this irony, was delighted by it, but Meiklejohn, with no military recollections of his own, was merely upset by the loss of his ballad-singer, who had disappeared in the commotion.
    â€˜What debased pleasure do you find in looking at that filthy sore?’ he asked Magnus, who was examining with interest the wound on the dirty man’s skin.
    Magnus answered:
    Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars
    And say: ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day’.
    â€˜Don’t quote that sentimental barbarian to me,’ said Meiklejohn irritably. ‘You miss the chance of hearing a damn fine Scots song and then you recite Shakespeare. This is a pub, not a girls’ school matinée.’
    â€˜What the hell has a girls’ school got to do with