“I suppose I’ll have to write a report on this,” the PRO said half-heartedly over bacon and eggs next morning.
”Then we’d better not be getting back to Seoul,” O’Donovan said. “We’ll have to stay until everything’s cleared up. In the Brigade . . . “
For once I did not mind his saying it, because when he did a look of horror came into the PRO’s eyes. He probably foresaw the interminable paperwork, the official questions and answers, the court of inquiry, that might result if a report of the incident suggested that we had been grossly negligent and if O’Donovan insisted on a chance formally to try to clear himself. The PRO probably foresaw a lot of days spent not chasing rare Korean butterflies.
”I don’t want to hold you chaps up with a lot of red tape,” he said magnanimously. “I imagine the stove was defective. A lot of them are. I’m sure the tent can be written off without a lot of bother for you.”
On the way back to Seoul, O’Donovan and I both commented that it was fortunate that the other’s stubbornness had not resulted in major embarrassment. I made one concession.
”All things considered, that cap of yours is probably an asset.”
”It was probably just as well that you’re from the Baltimore Sun,” O’Donovan responded courteously. “After all, most of the tents that get burned in this country are American ones. It was the least we could do to let you burn one of ours.”
The next time we went up to the Commonwealth Division press camp was for O’Donovan’s St. Patrick’s Day party, which, it was generally agreed, was the social high light of the season.
Tables were arranged lengthwise along two sides of the mess tent as a bar and a buffet. There was a prodigious quantity of NAAFI food and drink, augmented by delicacies such as smoked salmon, smoked oysters, and caviar, which were specially flown over from Tokyo. O’Donovan had sent out formal invitations (Carriages at Three O’clock), which filled the tent with generals, including a group of bewildered Canadians from Ottawa who had arrived in Korea only the day before for a quick inspection tour of the battle zone and had expected rigors.
The Black Watch sent over some pipers in full dress uniforms. They swaggered superbly in small circles around the stove and inflated the tent with the heroic, vibrant, nasal scream of Scottish martial music. They concluded the exhilarating concert with the newest addition to their regimental repertoire, “Arirang”, a traditional Korean air, melodically similar to, and as plaintive as, “Over the Sea to Skye”.
John Ridley demonstrated his fortitude and grace as a matador, adding substance to accounts of his activities in Spain. The captain who had spent the night with O’Donovan and me in the Japanese hotel played fervently the part of the bull, using two quart bottles of Asahi beer as horns. In one headlong charge that was confused in the daringly late swirl of Ridley’s tablecloth cape, the bull collided heavily with the stove, and another incineration seemed imminent; but the stovepipe was straightened successfully and the party continued unabated, unspoiled even when the commanding general of the Commonwealth Division, in the throes of jitterbugging, painfully wrenched the shoulder of a young lady in the uniform of one of the United Nations’ relief agencies. The mishap caused widespread consternation, partly because she was one of the very few women present. A medical officer, who had not been wholly abstemious during the past several hours, examined her there and then and declared her A-1, and she went on dancing almost as uninhibitedly as before.
All these festivities took place within range of Chinese artillery. If the enemy had known of the extraordinary concentration of high-ranking British officers and journalists in that tent that night, a single accurate shell might have wrought havoc in Whitehall, if not in Fleet Street.
”We don’t want to believe it,” as Stephen Barber, of the London News Chronicle, pointed out; “it’s hard to accept; but the fact is that we are all expendable, all of us. None of our papers, in America or England, would have the slightest difficulty in replacing any of us within a week.”
The thought was a sobering one, but not too. It was a very, very good party.
(Better than Working, Patrick S Catling, 1960)