This is supposedly the first of three books of "hilarious stories of the most disastrous soldier in the British Army." I read it in an omnibus called The Complete McAuslan. But McAuslan himself is mostly an incidental character here; he's a central figure in the last two stories, but only mentioned in passing - in kenning-style, the same two or three specific epithets each time - before that.
And this first book of McAuslan stories, originally published in 1970, has the title The General Danced at Dawn. Now, if you are me, you probably have a kind of dance in mind: this is not that. It's some complicated Scottish square-dancing kind of thing, all big men in kilts hurling each other across a dirt floor in a very, very masculine and military way. Apparently, this dance - George MacDonald Fraser, writing for an audience that I gather already knew everything he would tell them, never bothers to explain anything - is done in groups of four, typically four or eight. This one general, in town for a big fancy inspection of the unnamed Highland regiment that is the core of the stories, wants to go bigger - first a dance of sixteen, then of thirty-two, then sixty-four, and, the legend goes, even bigger before dawn that night.
The general himself supervised the dancing, and the dancing ran during the night, up to dawn. So, no, the "general" did not "dance" at "dawn."
Fraser himself was a junior officer in a Highland regiment right at the end of WWII; this (and I gather the succeeding two McAuslan books) are fictionalizations of his time there - these books are supposedly by a "Lieutenant Dand MacNeil," and are made up of stories that I believe originally appeared in some kind of magazine for old soldiers. They're loosely linked, told in chronological order, and the narrator is consistent and particular - not quite Fraser, but a fictional pose he can use to tell these cleaned-up, rearranged versions of things that I suppose really did happen, to him or to other soldiers back in those days.
So this is a collection of in-jokes, of men now all dead. Some of the in-jokes are general enough to be Scottish, or more generally British, or just men-under-arms. But a lot of it is this era, this war, these traditions of this kind of regiment, and if you're not a super-centenarian Scotsman with a Burma stripe, large chunks of the McAuslan oeuvre will be opaque to you.
It is pleasant and amusing - Fraser was always a sprightly, entertaining writer, even when he was indulging his most obscure tendencies. But, for an American of my generation or younger, it is very much an artifact from a strange and antique land, a dispatch from a world long dead and traditions that, as far as I know, may still be running in some form among bekilted men over in Old Blighty but that have never come within a thousand miles of my life.
I came to this book because I read the whole Flashman series back in the '90s - that's Fraser's core work; it's great; I recommend it highly for anyone who can stand reading about a real bastard of an antihero - and hit his other novels and even some of his nonfiction back then as well. The McAuslan books were the biggest chunk of Fraser I hadn't read. And now I know why: they're not for me, or for anyone on my side of the Atlantic.
Well, that's fine. I'm not so arrogant to demand that everything center me. If you are more British or military than I am, you may well find more here familiar to you.
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