Highland Family

THE BLACK WATCH & THE KING'S ENEMIES (384 pp.)--Bernard Fergusson--Crowe// ($5).

"This is your regiment--you inspect it," said King George VI to Queen Elizabeth when they went to see a battalion of the Black Watch in 1939. That the royal remark was not a nrere passing-of-the-buck due to occupational fatigue was certified by two facts: 1) the Queen of England is the colonel in chief of the Black Watch, and 2) no Briton, king or commoner, could ever be too tired to inspect one of the most famous and glamorous outfits in British army annals.

The Black Watch (so called from its somber Scottish tartan and original duties as a Highland guard) was first organized as a regiment in 1739. Families of three counties (Perth, Angus, Fife) supplied most of the first recruits, have continued to do so ever since, making the Black Watch "in truth a family, with ... ancestors and descendants." For 200 years the infantrymen of the Watch marched to war in kilts; with the coming of World War II they were ordered--to prevent identification--into common khaki uniforms. "But damn it!" roared an enraged Jock on hearing this shocking news, "We want to be identified!"

Pipes & Pawkiness. The Black Watch has fought in every British war since the time of its founding. In World War II its six battalions took part in "nearly every principal campaign" the world over --the roster of its fighting stations reads like a wartime atlas: Flanders, Somaliland, Greece, Crete, Tobruk, Alamein, Tripoli, Burma, Sicily, Italy, Normandy, the Rhine. When peace came, Field Marshal Earl Wavell (himself a Black Watch officer) gave to his former Aide-de-Camp Bernard (Beyond the Chindwin) Fergusson the job of historian to the six battalions and their Commonwealth affiliates--a "family" of widespread proportions.*

Every regimental history is doomed, by nature, to be at best partly uninteresting to the average reader, at worst wholly uninteresting even to members of the regiment concerned. But able Author Fergusson has done all that can be done to explain the Black Watch to the remotest commuter without ever failing in his duty as scrupulous recorder. The skirl of the Black Watch pipes, the pawky character of its men, and the family feeling that pervades and binds them--all these do much to raise The Black Watch above the level of mere soldierly documentation.

Adversity & Mettle. Upheld in all their battles by a tradition that somehow combined (as in the U.S. Marines) unbending obedience and discipline with fearless frankness and individualism, the Black Watch had small respect for top-brass rulings that offended their habits and sense of custom. "Halt, wha's that?" snapped a sentry one night. "Come, come," said the approaching officer, "that's no way to challenge. Ask me the password." "This is nae time for your bloody kiddin'," snapped the sentry. "Whit's your bloody name?"

When taken prisoner, the Jocks became more intractable than ever and were often shifted from ordinary P.W. camps to military prisons for a varied list of offenses, e.g., "Dunlop, five years for sabotage; Dykes, four years for breaking a picture of Hitler over the head of a guard; Thomson, five years for making an unprintable remark about Hitler . . ." Black Watchers were not only disrespectful prisoners, they were restless ones. Every captured officer of the regiment made at least one effort to escape.

It was adversity, in fact, that brought out the mettle of the Jocks and their officers. Imprisoned by the Germans, the Watch's General Victor Fortune tartly informed his captors that he would not

tolerate guards with dirty boots, later sent for the assistant commandant of the camp and sternly reminded him : "I am a General. I am entitled to a sentry with a fixed bayonet." On the day he was trans ferred to another prison, the general showed up "as smartly dressed as though he had been going on a ceremonial parade.

His step was brisk and his back as straight as a ramrod. He passed through two rows of cheering [British] officers, and after turning at the gate to salute them, he acknowledged the salute of the German escort, who by that time had learned to salute him."

* Including the Black Watch of Canada, the Transvaal Scottish, the New South Wales Scottish, the New Zealand Scottish, the Tyneside Scottish.

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