The ‘Jocks’ at war

Press, 15 April 1978, Page 17

The ‘Jocks’ at war

Charlie Company. By Peter Cochrane. Chatto and Windus. 179 pp. $13.55. (Reviewed by Michael Pugh) “There’s a lot of damn fool talk about this being a mechanised war and an air war and a commercial war. All wars are infantry wars,” says a character in Evelyn Waugh’s “Put Out More Flags.” Of course he was right, and it is useful to have a perspective of the fighting in the Middle East and Italy from infantry company level, in this instance C Company, 2nd Battalion. Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders. Cochrane saw almost continuous service with the unit, first as a 2nd lieutenant and later as company commander. He was not only a courageous man (he won the D.S.O. for leading an assault on Keren in Eritrea — and then in captivity had both legs stripped of gangrenous flesh without anaesthetic), but was also an able officer who seems to have been

endowed with that priceless, if indefinable, quality we call common sense. He refused, for example, to insist on drill or spit and polish for its own sake, and he believed in explaining the purpose of any task to his men. Occasionally his advice on getting the best out of troops smacks of sermonising. Moreover, he belonged to a different cultural background (which included Oxford) from the men in the ranks, some of whom had joined up because they preferred the army to unemployment or the pits. It is therefore an account in the intellectual tradition, though with ordinary prose, of Montague, Sassoon and Graves. However, Cochrane does communicate the strength of regimental feeling and it is interesting to learn that the “Jocks” got on splendidly with the Indians (the Camerons were part of the 4th Indian Division for a while). They also had a clannish approach to soldiering.