The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 42

But I’m a child of the Sixties! Peace and love were the goals of my generation.” “So am I!” he chuckled By Mary Gladstone

Armoured formations? Platoons? NCOs and other incomprehensible military acronyms? What was it that repelled me about the army? Was it the implicit violence, the uniforms or its uniformity that put me off? My generation had extolled individualism while my mother’s contemporaries conformed and were part of mass movements; they were people on the move, especially the march.

I belonged to a generation brought up on protest songs like Blowing in the Wind sung by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Some American contemporaries, although I was never well acquainted with any, were draft-dodgers, runaways from serving in the armed forces in Vietnam.

At home, most men a decade older than me were conscripted for National Service before the British Government began to phase it out in 1957. Most found the experience, at best a bore and at worst, unpleasant.

An abiding memory of my youthful attitude towards the military was from visiting Simon, who, on inheriting the Lockhart of Lee property in Lanarkshire, permitted the Territorial Army to practice their manoeuvres in his fields.

Indignant

As I watched men in camouflage crawling in the heather, I sniggered. “These men are defending your country!” my uncle was indignant. But I didn’t see it like that. I made a distinction between Angus and his Crabbe ancestors, regarding them as little more than mercenaries, servants of imperial Britain versus men of principle like the medieval crusader, Sir Symon Loccard, my Jacobite Macdonald ancestors, and more recently Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, and the Irish Republican Army.

I may not have agreed with the brutal practices of the latter but they were rebels with a cause nonetheless, not servants of their country policing its interests. When in 1968 Russia invaded Czechoslovakia, I saw the tank as a symbol of oppression, but as the years rolled by I realised that for Paris or inmates of a concentration camp like Auschwitz, the sight of an American, British or Russian tank signified liberation.

Soldiers could rape, pillage and kill but, depending upon the situation, they could also save, aid and impose order upon chaos.

But the experiences and attitudes of military personnel were an unknown, at least to me.

When war was declared in 1939 my father joined the RAF. After it was over he and his contemporaries, especially my mother’s surviving brothers, wanted to forget it all, and I inferred from their silence that they were antipathetic towards the armed forces.

When, in the 1970s a well-publicised campaign was waged to save the Argylls from disbanding, my family made little attempt to support it.

To cap it all, no nephew or niece and great-nephew or great-niece of Angus has chosen the armed forces as a career, and it seems that after many centuries of fighting for their country, our family had had enough.

To discover more about Angus, I needed to talk to officers and soldiers. It didn’t matter whom, so long as they were military. After several unhelpful telephone conversations with a retired brigadier and a majorgeneral, I came across ex-soldier Henry Hopkinson.

Battles

A slim man, with a hint of self-mockery, welcomed me at the front door of his bungalow in the southern outskirts of Edinburgh.

As I entered I noticed hanging on the wall a picture of Shiva, the multi-armed Indian goddess, but not until we were drinking our third mug of tea did I dare ask Henry if Indian goddesses and warfare combined.

“Is soldiering compatible with spirituality?” I ventured. “I thought they were hostile.” “Read the Bhagavad Gita,” he said. “It’s all about warfare!”

Thinking it over, I saw that monotheistic religions also embraced armed combat. The Old Testament is full of stories about the Israelites’ battles, while up and down the country, church congregations still sing hymns about Christian soldiers fighting the good fight.

“But I’m a child of the Sixties! Peace and love were the goals of my generation.”

“So am I!” he chuckled. “It didn’t stop me from joining the army, as a private, mind.

“My father had me down for Sandhurst as soon as I could talk, but when I was expelled from school, they wouldn’t accept me,” he grinned.

“All that flower power was huge attitude, you know. So, you’re a pacifist, Mary?” he said raising an eyebrow.

“If someone was about to rape your daughter and you had a gun or a knife, wouldn’t you use it?”

This question is always posed as the acid test of whether someone is or is not a pacifist. “Yes, I would!” I sighed. “No, I’m not a pacifist.”

I’d written to Henry to ask him what he learned on joining up and to explain the kind of equipment Angus would have used. “He would’ve had a rifle.” This mild-mannered man was an expert in weaponry. “I can strip one down, clean all the parts and assemble them to order, no bother!” he explained.

“Then, he would have had a few hand grenades. They’re called pineapples; they’re in 16 sections and shaped like the fruit.”

I then asked Henry what it was really like to be in the army. As a young soldier in 1966 he helped at Aberfan, a mining village in South Wales, where the contents of a slag heap had engulfed a primary school full of children.

Ruthlessness

He had also seen action in one of Britain’s former colonies. “In battle, rank is forgotten,” he explained, “officers and men address one and another by their first names.” This closeness nurtured also in pub, club, locker and boardroom has no female equivalent.

But it could turn like a worm and a steely ruthlessness take its place.

In a novel by Eric Linklater a sergeant shoots a junior officer when the latter loses his head in the face of the enemy. What did I want from my deceased uncle? Was he hero or anti-hero, courageous or a coward? When all’s said and done, what gave me the right to rake over the embers of his short life?

I feared I was no better than a nosy parker inspecting a pile of dirty linen.

After meeting Henry I visited Stirling Castle, headquarters until 1964 of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders. Crouching on top of a hill rising steeply from the city centre, the castle was once the home of Stewart kings; Mary Queen of Scots was crowned here in 1543. More on Monday.