'The General Danced at Dawn'
'The General Danced at Dawn'
During lockdown I wrote two articles on 'Novels about Musicians'. The links to these are at the foot of this article, which I hope will be the first of a short series on music in fiction.
'The General Danced at Dawn' is George MacDonald Fraser's 1970 short story, based on his experience as a lieutenant in a Highland Regiment in post-war North Africa. The author was 18 when he joined the army as a private soldier in 1943 and was posted to Burma. His jungle warfare experiences were published as 'Quartered Safe Out Here' and remain a candid and eye-opening account of a less-well known battle-front. Signing on as a regular soldier after the war gave him an unexpected promotion to Lieutenant at age 21, when he found himself in charge of 20 private soldiers, all still young, but like him toughened by the war. I was reminded of the story when reviewing at St Cecilia's Hall a concert by the multi-talented Hilary Michael and Richard Michael which ended in their very fast playing of Scottish dance reels on fiddle and piano.
The music in 'The General Danced at Dawn' and other stories in the collection is mostly bagpipe music, for me, like Fraser, an acquired taste and mostly appreciated in small doses. Dand MacNeill, his alter-ego, soon learns that battalion pipe-band practice, beginning with 'Hey Johnnie Cope' at full volume, is scheduled to take place on Friday mornings at 5.30 outside the bedrooms of the junior officers. He bluffs out his response to this full aural assault by sitting outside “studying” during the wake-up call, thus earning the Pipe Sergeant (Pipey's) grudging admiration. Friday night's officers' mess entertainment (where the ceremonial far outstripped the tinned tomato soup, rissoles and jam tart on the menu) began with the Pipe-Major playing a solo 20 minutes pibroch, the classical music of the pipes:
“A twenty-minute pibroch is no small thing at a range of four feet. Some liked it, some affected to like it, and some buried their heads in their hands and endured it. But in everyone the strange keening siren-sound at least provoked thought.”
There are pipes of various sizes, with a drone and a wind bag, in the traditional music of many countries. Scottish troops have taken pipers to battle since the middle ages (from the battle of the North Inch in 1398 until Aden in 1967) and pipe band music with formalised costume derived from military battle dress still has a ceremonial function in military tattoos, band competitions and in state funeral processions. The Great Highland bagpipe has a range of 9 notes from G below middle C to A above it, and is in the Mixolydian mode (roughly an A major scale with flattened 7th note). This means that every tune has a 'bum note' – another challenge to the unsympathetic hearer. And yet, nearly all Scots have a knowledge of pipe music: anyone who's ever danced a 'Gay Gordons' will have danced to a medley of pipe marches.
Fraser's story centres around the inspection visit of a General to the barracks. It's the last inspection before the battalion goes home and the popular Colonel retires, and everyone has rehearsed and cleaned up to put on a good show. On the day, everything that could go wrong goes wrong. The gate sentry drops his rifle while presenting arms, the canteen staff overturn the swill tub five seconds before the General arrives. “A fire broke out in the cookhouse, a bren-gun carrier broke down and Private McAuslan came back off leave, tastefully dressed in shirt and boots but no kilt” escorted by three military police who'd rescued him from a canal. (McAuslan, known as the dirtiest soldier in the army is the anti-hero in many of the stories.)
The battalion redeems itself in the dancing. They have been drilled by the Pipey at twice-weekly dancing practice, in a mixture of solo Highland Dances, and set Scottish Country dances. Both have their military history, ('The Reel of the 51st Division' was composed in by Lieutenant Jim Atkinson in a prisoner of war camp, and his intercepted instructions in a letter home baffled German codebreakers) as well as their 20th century gentrification in taught and competitive Highland dance for small girls and the formalisation of the rules of jigs, reels and strathspeys by the Scottish Country Dance association from 1924. (Modern Ceilidh dancing is its egalitarian off-shoot). The officers also perform for the Colonel's benefit at mess dinners where he tells them: “Now gentlemen, as you know there is Highland dancing with ladies present and there is Highland dancing. In Valletta in '21 I saw a 'Strip the Willow' performed in eighty-nine seconds and an 'Eightsome Reel' in two-minutes twenty-two seconds”
The Pipey hated this desecration of the fine footwork he'd been trying to instil - “he and Ninette de Valois would have got on a fair treat” - but goes along with it. And after the Officers' Mess dinner on the evening of the visit, the dancing unexpectedly went well. Nevertheless the General seemed a little irritated by the text-book foursome reel by the best dancers, and after the top-speed eightsome says, “ You know, I never cared much for the set stuff. Did you ever dance a sixteen-some?” and takes control: “Eight more officers on the floor.” It works and the dancers get the satisfaction that any complicated manoeuvre will give. “Tell you what, Pipey, back in the nineties Black Watch sergeants danced a thirty two-some.” The Pipe Sergeant reluctantly agrees that all things are possible...
As many readers will be aware, the eightsome reel has an introduction and an identical conclusion both danced by everyone, but the main part of dance consists of eight sections in which each dancer in turn takes the starring role, The 16-some requires 16 different sections, with the opening and closing movements which feature much birling becoming increasingly convoluted, and as the numbers increase the dances get longer and longer.
The thirty-twosome takes them up to midnight, and the General presses for a sixty-four-some “Five minutes later we were outside on the lawn, with truck headlights for illumination. It looked like a crowd scene from 'The Ten Commandments.' Officers, mess-waiters, batmen swung into the dance as the pipes shrilled, setting to partners, forming an enormous ring and heughing like things demented ….It took I'm told one hour and thirteen minutes, with the Fusiliers from the next door barracks, and various Arabs observing.”
The General is tireless and they embark on a one hundred-and-twenty-eightsome. “Some say that it actually happened and it was danced to a conclusion, all figures. All I remember is a heaving rushing crowd surging ponderously to the sound of the pipes, the General, the pipe-sergeant and a genuine Senussi in a burnous swept by roaring 'One, two, three'. I was part of a swinging human chain in which my immediate partners were the Fusiliers' cook-sergeant and the Italian cafe proprietor from down the road. It rose to a tremendous crescendo just as the first light of dawn stole over Africa, and then all faded away in the tartan-strewn morning.”
The General cries when he leaves and gives the barracks top marks in the inspection. George MacDonald Fraser on his return to civilian life was a journalist for twenty years, becoming briefly Editor of the Glasgow Herald before he turned to fiction, the first two volumes of these short stories coming out around the same time as the first of his Flashman novels, where he was able to match his passion for history with his characterisation of Arnold's bully from 'Tom Brown's School Days'. (Errol, an officer in the short stories, with a mysterious background and dubious methods, is surely an early prototype) and of course his humour. It's very difficult to find good comic writing. Well-written popular fiction like Fraser's and Colin Douglas's in his 'Houseman's Tale' and other medical novels about the Royal Infirmary still make me laugh. Both were published by Pan, with lurid cartoon covers, yet in both a sense of the ridiculous and some well-observed caricatures, served the clear purpose of describing what life was like in these working environments, the post-war army and the 1970’s and 80’s NHS. Fraser was brought up in Carlisle, but his father was a Scots GP. His Glasgow Academy education and his time in the army gave him a sensitive ear for all the gradations of Scots speech, from the patter of the soldiers “Sees the ba”, “a rerr terr” to the affected drawl of the upper ranks.
The books of short stories “The General Danced at Dawn” and 'McAuslan in the Rough' are easily available online. Football was the soldiers' passion and “Play Up, Play Up and Get Tore in' is an unlikely tale of the garrison's unexpected success in a football tournament. In my next article on music in the novels of J.L.Carr, I'll write about another unlikely triumph, 'When Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup.'
https://www.edinburghmusicreview.com/blog/novels-about-musicians-pt-1
https://www.edinburghmusicreview.com/blog/novels-about-musicians-pt-2
