The Northern Garrisons

by Eric Linklater

  In the ship that took us to the Faeroes there was a Battery Sergeant-Major returning from ten days’ leave in Belfast. There had been a heavy raid while he was at home, and his house had been ruined. His wife and family had escaped unhurt, but in a neighbouring house his sister and her five children had all been killed together. … His voice, as he told me this, was under perfect control, but his eyes were like the eyes of a boxer who is waiting, watching, and ready for the chance to go in, toe to toe, and fight. There was a mild alarm one day, when it seemed as though there might be a submarine in the neighbourhood. In the smaller part of a split second the Sergeant-Major was beside me, and jerking a thumb at our twelve-pounder gun and the Naval ratings who manned it, he exclaimed, “I know all about them things. I’d better stand as relief to the crew. If anything happens to them, I can handle it.” Had he been given, at that moment, his choice of Heaven or a shot at a U-boat, he would have taken both: by shooting at the Hun and thinking himself in glory as he did so. A patient man, because discipline made him so. But discipline was riding him on the curb.

  In Shetland one day I was talking to one of the Sergeants of a battalion of Highland infantry: a young man, squarely built, fair and blue-eyed. His company had just returned from a long route march. A couple of pipers had led them on to their parade ground. It used to be a fish-quay, but served its new purpose well. When they were dismissed the men hurried to a row of huts that had been built for the noisy young women who, in peace-time, followed the herring fleet from port to port, and day after day, for months on end, gutted thousands of glimmering fish with tireless dexterity. But this year there will be no herring-gutters in Shetland, and the Highlanders have inherited their huts. They have good fireplaces in them, they are more homely and comfortable than the usual Nissen, and the soldiers are well pleased with such accommodation.

  Indeed the battalion had much apparent cause for satisfaction. The men were smart on parade, well drilled and very fit. The company which had just done a twenty-mile march, over hill-roads, showed no sign of weariness. Some of the men were already kicking a football about. Their food was good, and they had a pleasant little Regimental Institute. … The Sergeant to whom I was talking was reluctant to admit that anything could ever be wrong with service in his battalion. With sidelong glances at a Subaltern of his company he maintained, most resolutely, that neither he or any of the men had the smallest cause for grumbling. But at last, with a sort of desperation, he exclaimed, “Well, we’re all tired of just practising. We’re tired of doing attacks, and going up a hill only to find that the fellows on the other side are wearing tin hats the same shape as our own. We want something better than that. We want action.”

  “We must be patient” said the Subaltern.

  “Yes, sir. I know that. But it’s not easy,” said the Sergeant.

  “A Messerschmitt a Week Would Keep Them Happy”

  In another part of Shetland was a seaplane anchorage. It was surrounded by low hills, tiger-striped with snow, and a bitter wind ruffled the water. Airmen in woollen caps and long boots, whistling as they walked, passed each other on the streets of a camouflaged village of Nissen huts. On the beach, a yard or two from shore, lay the broken undercarriage of a Messerschmitt 110.

  Some distance from the anchorage there was an antiaircraft battery. The gunners were a mixed lot, but more than half of them came from North Wales. Their guns were beautifully clean—so much rubbing and polishing must have been inspired by a very passion for cleanliness—every bit of brass was shining, the ammunition lay bright and tidy in its racks. These were the guns that had brought down the Messerschmitt which lay in shallow water by the Air Force camp.

  Suddenly, a finger’s breadth above the crest of a snow-patched hill, an aeroplane appeared. It was probably one of ours, but the battery was in luck, and it might be hostile. The alarm was sounded. At the third stroke on the iron drum the doors of the living huts were thrown open, and a crowd of men came sprinting—not merely running, but sprinting—across the mud and snow. They flung themselves at the guns. The predictor-crew began to chant its litany. The long barrels pointed at the aeroplane, followed it along the line of the hill. In less than half-a-minute from the sounding of the alarm their shells would have been bursting round the target—had it only been a German. But fortune failed—it was a Blenheim. And the gunners lost their eager look. The zest of their movement was blown out. Enthusiasm dwindled into drill.

  Their camp lay in a singularly bleak and cheerless part of the country. Not a house was to be seen, and at that time of the year the moors were uninviting, the sea forbidding.

  “I work them hard,” said the Battery Commander, “and at night we have lectures and debates. We’ve made a football field—you can’t see it for the snow—and we’ve got a band. You must keep men occupied in a place like this. They’re very good on the whole, and sometimes I’m surprised when I realise how patient they are.”

  “A Messerschmitt a week,” said one of his Subalterns, “would keep them perfectly happy.”

  Garrison Virtue

  Patience. Not a spectacular virtue, but a supreme necessity for all the troops who guard the cliffs of Britain and watch the changing sky above. Patience on a gun-platform, patience in a field with a searchlight, patience on the piers where every day new cargoes are unloaded.

  I remember a day in Orkney in the winter of 1939. … On the edge of a cliff, seventy feet above the sea, a couple of men were sandbagging a corrugated iron shanty that housed the fine mechanism of a searchlight. A southeasterly gale was blowing, and they were wet with spray. They paused in their work to watch two cruisers, followed by destroyers, turn the corner of a rocky islet, and head into the sound for their anchorage. As they turned, and took the gale and the high-running sea on their beam, the ships leaned over so that the men on the cliff could see the whole expanse of their decks.

  They went back to work, and a moment later the lip of a broken wave, carried high by the wind, leapt over the cliff and soaked them to the skin.

  Three miles away, on the northern shore of the island, a little steamer lay at anchor while a boat made slow progress to a rudimentary stone pier. The boat was deep-laden with rations, beer, mail, sacks of coal, and half-a-dozen soldiers. A working-party, shivering on the pier, exchanged gloomy jokes about the prospect of its foundering.

  On a neighbouring island a section of a newly-arrived Field Company were building foundations for a cluster of wooden huts. Another section, off-loading hut-sections on the pier, had finished their task and were eating bread and bully in a cold corner. A drifter came in with a new cargo, spray lifting over its bow, and the Skipper, anxious about berthing in that high wind, roaring for someone to take a rope. One of the Sappers, a big man with his mouth full, went to his help. He addressed the Skipper with a kind of indignant tolerance. “Work, work!” he exclaimed, “nothing but —— work and never a word of —— thanks for it!”

  Across the bay some anti-aircraft gunners were contriving, with pieces of iron and casual wood, to make an elementary ablution-bench. They were living in tents and the tents were pitched on peat, because for miles around there was nothing else but peat. No one who has not lived in such conditions can realise the exasperating difficulty of securing a tent, against recurrent gales, in the yielding soil of a peat-bog; or the infuriating impossibility, in a rainy climate, of draining such a soil. The battery cooks, at work in makeshift kitchens—all draught and no shelter—were said, at that time, to show occasional signs of ill-humour.

  I went aboard a small steamer to cross the Flow. There was a Sergeant of the Royal Artillery there, who had been gun-busting in the south isles. Heaving ashore, hauling uphill, man-handling into position the guns for a new coast-defence battery. Heavy work—and cunning skilful work—with block and tackle, handspikes and rollers and great oaken chesses.

  Also on board was a very young, a slightly-built and tender-looking Lieutenant in the R.N.V.R. He was growing a beard, a yellow downy beard that did
no more than advertise his youth. His character, however, was sterner than his appearance, for he commanded a mine-sweeper, and was most happy to be in such employment. He was having a splendid time, he said, and there was only one thing that worried him. That was the difficulty of house-keeping for a crew of fifteen. Yes, he had a cook. But he wasn’t a really experienced cook. He had only been in the Navy for two or three months, and before that he had been the leader of a dance band. He had been sent to a cookery school for three days, but all he seemed to have learnt was how to make cheese-straws.

  Defence of Scapa

  On the Mainland—the mainland of Orkney, that is, for the people of Orkney very properly recognise no other—in what had formerly been a fishing hotel, the Staff was at work. Staff officers, though often spared the fury of the wind, had to make allowance for it in their calculations. They wrestled with ever-new problems of transport and accommodation, the rationing and administration of a command, already scattered over several islands and many miles of difficult country, that was growing in size and complexity every day. In the throes of construction they had to plan, against all manner of attack, the tactics of defence.

  The urgency of their task was clear. Under the ridged surface of Scapa Flow the torpedoed hulk of the Royal Oak was there to prove it. The Fleet had become a nomadic force, and would not again use Scapa Flow as a permanent anchorage till the Flow had been properly fortified.

  “Work, work!” said the Sappers building camps on field and moorland. “Nothing but —— work,” said the Gunners, hauling new guns to the brink of a cliff. “And never a word of —— thanks,” said the Infantry and the Pioneers, unloading at every pier the endless cargoes of timber and corrugated iron, of guns and trucks, stores of every kind and ammunition beyond counting.

  But they got their reward in the Spring of 1940, when the Fleet returned, and the Luftwaffe came soon after. The Luftwaffe made a series of heavy and determined attacks, on the islands and the ships that lay in their midst, and the newly-mounted guns fulfilled their purpose. The Orkney skies, that are familiar with the pale brilliance of the Northern Lights, became acquainted with a more lurid glare, and their northern peace was shattered by a fearful and victorious clamour. The Luftwaffe retired, hurt.

  But work continued. The strategic importance of Orkney and Shetland had been aggravated by Germany’s occupation of Norway, and this extension of the war made necessary a new conception of the part which the islands could, or might have to play. More troops arrived.

  I was out of Orkney for some time, and when I returned I was impressed by all the evidence of accomplishment. I had seen the beginning, and much of the growth, of the defences. Now they were in being. The ramparts of the Fleet were armed, and the garrison were trained men. The vital confusion had settled down and become a vital order. The guns were in position, ceaselessly manned. The cargoes of corrugated iron had become villages, and between the huts were tidy paths, in front of them gardens had been planted. The occupation was becoming a military civilisation. The troops had their own newspaper, their organised games, and reasonable amusement. They had a new appearance, better than the old. They were self-confident, well-muscled. They knew their work, and were fit for it.

  To see this transformation was a useful lesson in patience—that invaluable but undecorative virtue—for it was long and patient work which had created it.

  In the early months of the war the men, suddenly translated from the industrial south, regarded their service in these unknown islands as something of an adventure. Only a few of them enjoyed it. A few found early liking for the long line of the hills, rising bare and smooth against a lucent sky; for the rising fields, bearded with gold, or quiet in winter with the soft unbrushmarked colour of an old painting; for stone cottages and the deep triumphant blue of the lakes and the island firths. But many more disliked the loneliness and hated the recurrent gales. The men most poorly equipped, in education and intelligence, suffered most hardly from the change. Accustomed only to one environment, they had imagined no other, and had few resources in themselves with which to combat loneliness. It became apparent that education has greater uses then the levering of a man into a job that will pay him a living wage. Education may supply his mind with emergency rations. It may put muscle into his adaptability.

  Nowadays, when Orkney shows almost as many signs of military occupation as of its native life, the men find less to surprise them and more to make them comfortable. They are very healthy, and reasonably happy. Nowadays it is the people of Orkney who have more reason for complaint than the troops who are quartered in their fields. For soldiers, though pleasant neighbours, are uncommonly expensive when their camps diminish the acreage of a farming community whose land, to begin with, was none too plentiful. And aerodromes, though admirably of service to the whole country, are always disastrous to some parts of it. A concrete runway will ruin more ploughland than forty bomb-loads.

  But Orkney does not grumble when its precious fields are taken for the fight against Nazidom, and farmers’ wives, with fewer eggs to count than formerly, still find a few to give the soldiers who have become their friends. Hospitality, both in Orkney and Shetland, is a habit of the land, and in the island of Unst, in Shetland, a Sergeant told me with gravest warning: “Never go out visiting here unless you’ve got a good appetite. Because if you’re once inside a house, you’ll never be able to leave without eating one meal at the least, and it may well be more.”

  The islands have put their own men into the fighting services in generous numbers. In Orkney, at the outbreak of war, the garrison consisted entirely of local Territorials; and in many a croft in Shetland there was no one left but women, and perhaps one old man, to break the earth—with a long spade—against the spring sowing. But they are waiting, as patiently as the soldiers, for the harvest that will come at last. In Orkney, however, intermingled with patience, there is general determination that the remnants of the German Fleet, when finally they surrender, shall not be allowed to scuttle themselves, as did their predecessors, in Scapa Flow. For the Flow, in peace-time and fine weather, is a very lovely stretch of water, too good for a German graveyard.

  “Whaur Hae You Been a’ the Day?”

  There is, in Shetland, a collar of land on which a Scottish battalion had made its camp. I was listening, one evening in early spring, to its Pipes and Drums playing Retreat. It was a fine evening, with a cold north-easter blowing, and in the clear air the cliffs stood sharp and brown, the inlets of the sea were a pale bright blue. The band was playing well, with swagger and precision in its marching, with clean fingering, good notes, and a great flourish of drum-sticks. Then, above the drone of the pipes, we heard the drone of a returning aircraft. It was a Blenheim, coming home to roost. The band was playing Hielan’ Laddie:

  “Whaur hae you been a’ the day,

  Bonny laddie, Hielan’ laddie,

  Whaur hae you been a’ the day …”

  “Norway,” said the Pilot, when he joined us in the Highlanders’ mess.

  There is, in Orkney, an island that commands one of the entrances to Scapa Flow. There are batteries mounted on the cliff, and fulmars, riding the breeze, sail past the muzzles of the guns. Gannets with a silvery splash dive deep into the sound. On a spring morning, against the staccato coughing of anti-aircraft guns at practice, you may hear the drumming of a snipe. A crofter, ploughing his small field, must drive his plough through the shadow of a barrage-balloon. And women, coming from the byre, stand to watch a battleship go out, or destroyers with a bone in their mouth come racing in.

  Ask them where they have been, and what will the answer be?

  Narvik, the Denmark Strait, or anywhere between.

  A Note on the Author

  Eric Linklater was born in 1899 in Penarth, Wales. He was educated in Aberdeen, and was initially interested in studying medicine; he later switched his focus to journalism, and became a full-time writer in the 1930’s. During his career, Linklater served as a journalist in India
, a commander of a wartime fortress in the Orkney Islands, and rector of Aberdeen University. He authored more than twenty novels for adults and children, in addition to writing short stories, travel pieces, and military histories, among other works. He died in 1977.

  Discover books by Eric Linklater published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/EricLinklater

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  Ripeness Is All

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  The Goose Girl and Other Stories

  The Impregnable Women

  The Merry Muse

  The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea

  For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

  This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc,

  50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  First published in Great Britain in 1941 by His Majesty’s Stationery Office, London

  Copyright © 1941 Eric Linklater

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