The Silent Weaver Read Free Page B

precautions . . .’
    â€˜Our main task for the first period of time,’ said DonaldJohn MacKenzie, ‘was looking after and training the ponies, being kitted out with saddles and fighting equipment’.
    We trained in front of Beaufort Castle on the ponies. They went round in a wide circle and on command we slid off the tail end of our ponies and jogged by the side of the following one for a bit and then sprang off the ground on to the pony’s back and this went on for some time. Included in the scheme was sitting back to front, sideways, on our backs, on our bellies on the back of the ponies, always with the pony trotting in a circle. For the first while we were very stiff and sore all over, especially our posteriors as we spent hours in the saddle or bareback, but soon we were very competent riders.
    One squadron swam its ponies across the River Beauly in midwinter spate. Another rode through the county seat of Dingwall wearing gas masks, prompting a letter to the
Ross-shire Journal
which wondered why their horses had no such protection. They played football and shinty and badminton, and were entertained by Sir Harry Lauder. They were sometimes allowed rough game shooting, and when they were not they poached pheasant. The Lovat Scouts was a largely Gaelic-speaking regiment, and in ‘B’ Squadron little else was heard. At that time over 90 per cent of the Uist population spoke Gaelic as a native first language, and roughly 30 per cent spoke no English. The islanders’ non-commissioned officers usually gave instructions and orders in Gaelic, introducing such terms as ‘Bren gun’ and ‘respirator’ to its vocabulary.
    They were given a thorough medical inspection. Fifteen Scouts were discharged as unfit for service, and another 21 were limited to Home Service. Those 36 men did not include Trooper Angus MacPhee from Iochdar.
    After seven months spent training in the hills and glens ofthe eastern Highlands, early in April 1940 the Lovat Scouts were sent to stables and billets near Sutton-on-Trent in the English Midlands. The Hebrideans and the horses of ‘B’ Squadron entrained at Beauly Station. The population of the town turned out to wave them off, and to hear the strains of their pipes disappear quickly down the track to Inverness, the Scottish Lowlands and the south.
    The truth was that by the spring of 1940, the British Army did not know what to do with its mounted Highland soldiers and their garron ponies. The war had not turned out as might have been anticipated in 1936. The Lovat Scouts’ deployment to ‘a minor theatre of war’, which had been mooted four years earlier, no longer seemed practical. ‘A minor theatre of war’ had probably suggested some distant, trackless part of the British Empire which required policing.
    In April 1940 any such ambition was almost redundant. The conflict seemed likely to be a battle of survival for the two main Allies, Britain and France. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had signed a non-aggression pact and carved up Poland. Fascist Italy had thrown in her lot with the German Axis. Finland was engaged and neutralised by the Soviets. Adolf Hitler clearly had his eye on the other militarily vulnerable nations of Scandinavia and the Low Countries as well as France. If they all fell – as they would – the archipelago of islands which comprised the United Kingdom would be isolated and effectively surrounded.
    In such interesting times the Lovat Scouts arrived in Nottinghamshire. Their commanding officers had tried to get them posted across the Channel to help with the defence of France, but it was decided that ‘the flat country of Flanders canhardly be considered the ideal terrain for the employment of the Lovat Scouts’. Some mention was made of Palestine, where the army’s residual equine – rather than mechanised – cavalry regiments were already deployed, but as quickly