Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  “Jackass!” Marriott chased him, tripped him, and pretended to jump on him.

  “Hello,” said Moggy Cattermole, trudging past. “What’s going on?”

  “Rain dance,” said Fitzgerald.

  “Keep it up,” Cattermole told Marriott. “I could do with a break.”

  Nobody disagreed. The weather was on Rex’s side, and there was no end in sight to his close-formation training. They found it physically tiring and mentally exhausting. “I don’t know why I’m so whacked,” Miller complained to Flip Moran. “All I have to do is fly straight and watch you.”

  Moran twitched his nose, which was about as demonstrative as Moran ever got. “Doing the right thing is never tiring,” he said. “What takes it out of you is making sure you don’t do the wrong bloody thing.”

  Miller thought about that. “It’s not as if the Hurricane’s a bitch to fly,” he said. “She keeps station beautifully. But now that we’re all on top of each other you can’t relax for an instant. It’s such bloody hard work, Flip.”

  “Perhaps that’s the idea.”

  “Perhaps.” Miller looked at his fingernails, and quickly shoved his hand in his pocket. “Oh well … Come and have a drink.”

  Most of the pilots were drinking more; not a lot more, but enough for the adjutant to notice. He also noticed that some—Stickwell and Miller, particularly—seemed not to be sleeping well. Others—Gordon, Starr, Cox—were going to bed earlier than usual. This was not altogether surprising. On top of Rex’s formation training, Headquarters at Rheims kept the squadron fairly busy with patrols at section strength in the hope of catching a careless intruder; so far, few had been seen and none had been caught. All in all, life was becoming a grind. But when Kellaway suggested as much to the flight commanders they quickly put him straight. “I have no complaints, uncle,” Moran said. “None at all. Nor does any man in my flight.”

  “Of course not, Flip. Far be it from me to interfere. I thought one or two of the chaps were looking somewhat shattered, that’s all.”

  “They’re not shattered,” Barton said. “They’re just not used to hard work. Did you hear about this morning? Last thing we did was squadron in vic—the ace-of-diamonds pattern—only inverted.”

  “What you used to call upside down,” Moran said.

  “In close formation?” Kellaway was amused and amazed. “Gosh.”

  “Not particularly close,” Moran said.

  “But close enough for some,” Barton added.

  “My stars … Well, as long as everyone’s happy.”

  “They’re not paid to be happy,” Moran said. “They’re paid to fly.”

  “True, true. But upside down …” The adjutant chuckled.

  “It keeps the sun out of their eyes.”

  “Next week we’re going to start flying backward,” Barton said, “to keep the dust out of our eyes.”

  Kellaway said: “Talking of flying backward, did I ever tell you—”

  “Yes,” Moran said firmly. “Several times.”

  “Oh.”

  “Tail-Slide Thompson,” Barton said.

  “That’s the chap. Mad as a—”

  “He climbed into the wind and if the wind was stronger than he was, the plane slid backward,” Barton said. “We know.”

  “People say it’s impossible, but I saw him do it. I even saw him land backward, once, on Salisbury Plain.” The adjutant used his hands to mime landing backward. “Tommy was in a Farman Shorthorn. You could land those things at twenty miles an hour. Well, maybe not twenty. Ridiculously slow, anyway. Call it twenty. And if the breeze was doing, say, twenty-one miles an hour—”

  “He was bound to end up going backward,” Barton said.

  “That’s right. In fact—”

  “He stuck his tail-skid in the grass and snapped it off,” Moran said. “You told us, uncle.”

  “Did I?” Kellaway dropped his hands. “Lots of people won’t believe it. You’d be surprised.”

  “Listen, adj,” Moran said, “if you want to do something for us, for God’s sake have a word with the CO about his bloody dog.”

  “Reilly? What’s Reilly been up to?”

  “He keeps pissing on people,” Moran said. Kellaway laughed, but the other two did not. “You wait till he soaks your bags too, uncle,” Barton said. “You won’t find it so funny. He got me yesterday. I was standing on the terrace after breakfast, and damn me if Reilly didn’t wander up and squirt all over my left leg.”

  “Your left leg! You don’t say.” The adjutant was intrigued. “Does Reilly really make a habit of this … this habit?”

  “See what you can do, adj,” Moran said. “Otherwise someone’s going to boot the beast into the middle of next week.”

  “Dear me, we can’t have that,” Kellaway said. “It’s bad luck to kick the squadron mascot. Awful things might happen.”

  “I can imagine,” Moran said.

  Kellaway and Skull stood on the roof of the Hôtel de Ville in the center of Nancy, and looked out across the Place Stanislas. It was early afternoon and the light was perfect, filtered through high, flat cloud that held a soft luminosity. It suited the grace and spaciousness of this elegant square, with its tall, big-windowed buildings, topped with balustrades. The city reminded the adjutant of Bath but he decided against mentioning this; Skull was bound to have something perceptive and difficult to say in reply, and Kellaway wasn’t all that interested in architecture anyway. He sniffed the air and breathed deeply. “I like autumn,” he said. “Don’t you? Sweeping up the leaves and making bonfires. Apples. Chestnuts. Logs. Football. That sort of thing.” He stared thoughtfully across the rooftops. “Squirrels,” he added after a moment “Bright little animals. I’ve always had a soft spot for squirrels.”

  “Indeed you have,” Skull said. “We all have. It’s called skin.”

  “Skin?”

  “They bite. Squirrels have sharp teeth and evil tempers. You should think of them as tree-rats. They can be rabid, you know.”

  “Squirrels? Surely not.”

  “There was a tree outside the library in my college at Cambridge that was infested with squirrels. They used to beg for titbits, and then bite people. Mainly the dons, of course. Undergraduates rarely used the library.”

  “Good Lord.” Kellaway reviewed this news from all angles, and came up with an explanation. “They couldn’t have been normal squirrels,” he said.

  “The Master ordered them destroyed,” Skull said. “A man came and put poison in the holes in the tree.”

  Kellaway sighed. “Why can’t people be a bit more tolerant?” he asked.

  “Greedy little brutes,” Skull said. “Not worth saving.”

  “Oh, rubbish! Squirrels aren’t greedy. And besides—”

  “I was referring to the dons,” Skull said. “They constantly took food into the college library. One kept finding their crusts in the Britannica. The sound of gnawing and belching was quite deafening at times. It’s not as if they were clever men; they were very stupid. That’s probably why they ate so much: to compensate for their lack of intelligence. I suggested to the Bursar that the squirrels be infected with bubonic plague in order to raise the intellectual standing of the college, but he had no imagination. A dull man.”

  The adjutant took a short walk to the corner of the parapet. He didn’t know whether he believed Skull’s story or not, but he knew that he liked squirrels and he liked autumn and he felt that somehow he was being cheated out of his simple pleasures. “It seems a dirty trick to kill a bunch of squirrels just for behaving like squirrels,” he said.

  “Oh, the squirrels didn’t die. They simply moved to another tree.”

  “Ah.” Kellaway felt better. “Sensible creatures.”

  “Yes. The tree died, of course. Poisoned.”

  “Here they come.” Kellaway’s ears had picked up the faint groan of aircraft engines, and the two men turned to face the noise.

  Hornet squadron appeared from the southwest, flying
at five hundred feet in their basic ace-of-diamonds formation. They crossed the city at no great speed, turned and came back. By this time the roar had brought people into the streets and the Place Stanislas was thickly dotted with watchers. Rex waggled his wings, and the squadron changed shape to sections-close-astern; the stretched arrowhead. They held that for ten seconds. He signaled again. The Hurricanes casually, swiftly, expertly relocated themselves in a diagonal line to his right. Another signal: the line divided and formed two single files, in parallel. The leaders banked outward and peeled back, the next machine following and so on until the formation was again in two straight lines, retracing its course. Now the leaders simultaneously performed a slow roll. The second planes copied them, and so the maneuver corkscrewed its way down the flights, until the tail-end Hurricanes were rolling and leveling out together. “Oh, good show!” Kellaway cried. He was taking photographs as fast as he could wind on the film. In the square, people could be heard clapping and whistling and shouting.

  The display went on for another five minutes. It ended with the squadron climbing to three thousand feet, turning and swooping fast over Nancy in the shape of a giant letter N, soaring away to regroup, and then diving back in a formation that depicted the Cross of Lorraine. “Brilliant!” Kellaway shouted. They flashed past, and the bellow of engines flooded the square. At the edge of town Rex’s Hurricane suddenly angled up and led the squadron into the sky. The emblem was outlined sharply like a great sword. They climbed hard, and soon they were lost to sight.

  Going downstairs, Kellaway had a new bounce to his stride. “Weren’t they magnificent?” he said. “I mean, what teamwork!”

  “Very entertaining,” Skull said.

  “It was all so artistic, and yet there was such … such …” Kellaway clenched his fist, striving to capture the right word. “Such power. Immense power. D’you know what I mean?”

  “Thoroughly enjoyable,” Skull said. “Very pleasing to the eye.”

  “I bet you we’ve done the frogs’ morale a power of good. The boys looked really marvelous. It makes you feel proud, doesn’t it?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Oh, come off it, Skull. Where’s your patriotism?”

  “My dear Kellaway, you can be childishly simpleminded at times. You speak of that flying display as a work of art. I ask you: what is the function of the Hurricane fighter? It is to carry machine-guns which will fire bullets which will kill German airmen. The thing is simply a machine for killing people. Just like the tank, the battleship, and the rifle with bayonet. Of course you can dress up those instruments of death, you can put flags on them, you can give the men fine uniforms, you can play exhilarating march-music and you can stage all sorts of elaborate parades in which they perform complicated mass maneuvers, like a gymnastic display or a chorus-line, all of which may be more or less gratifying to the eye and ear. But the dressing-up is merely a cosmetic act designed to prettify and disguise the prime function, which is to kill.”

  They entered the foyer, a wide, marble-floored area. The adjutant was silent. “Correct me if I am wrong,” Skull said. “The tank exists to blow up enemy tanks. The battleship exists to drown enemy sailors. The bayonet exists so that the soldier can stab his opponent to death. The whole purpose of the armed forces can be summed up in one word: killing. Now, I don’t find that goal—in your words—marvelous, or magnificent, and try as I might I cannot bring myself to feel proud of it. Grateful, perhaps, as one is selfishly grateful for the existence of men who keep the sewage system working. But proud? No.”

  They emerged into the street. Some people passing by saw their uniforms, waved and shouted happily, and pointed upward. Kellaway grinned and waved back. “All I can say is, if that’s the way you feel, you’d better keep it to yourself, old man.” They got into the back of a staff car, and while the driver was still hurrying around to the front, Kellaway said: “Frankly, Skull, I’m surprised you joined the Reserve. With your opinions, the RAF seems completely the wrong place.”

  “Not at all. You forget that I am a historian. What’s happening now is history.”

  The car moved off. Kellaway looked out of the window. “Pretty sordid stuff, according to you,” he said.

  Skull shrugged. “One tries to be open-minded,” he said. “If anyone can show me the glamour in a man’s head getting blown off, I shall do my best to see it.”

  Hornet squadron had long since landed at Montornet when Kellaway and Skull arrived. Montornet was a big, modern aerodrome of the Armée de l’Air, with all-weather runways and tall hangars, occupied by two squadrons of French bombers, Potez 637’s The visit was the commandant’s idea: he thought the pilots might discuss concepts of attack and defense. Three bombers were drawn up on the concrete apron by the control tower, and everyone was clustered around them.

  The adjutant found Flip Moran squatting under the belly of one plane. A Frenchman stood beside him. Moran rapped the belly with his knuckles.

  “Big bombs?” Moran asked. “Beaucoup de bombs?”

  “Cent kilograms.”

  Moran stood up and looked at Kellaway.

  “Two hundred and fifty pounds,” Kellaway said.

  “Blind O’Reilly … Not much of a bang, is it?” He gave the Frenchman a wave of thanks. “Bonne chance.” They strolled away. “He’s going to need it,” Moran said.

  “Yes? Why?”

  Moran wrinkled his nose. “It’s just a sort of naughty girl’s Blenheim. No knickers, very vulnerable.”

  Rex came hurrying over. “Flip, old chap … Pop upstairs and swan about a bit with one of their kites, would you? It’s rigged up with cine-guns and they’re mad keen to show how good their gunners are. Do a few mock-attacks, that sort of thing.”

  Moran nodded. “Pretend to shoot it up.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Should I also try to shoot it down?”

  Rex took off his cap, ran his fingers through his hair, and replaced his cap. The angle was just short of jaunty.

  “Better not,” he said. “They’re giving us dinner later on.”

  “Ah.” Moran’s habitually somber expression brightened a fraction. “We mustn’t spoil their appetites, then.” He went away.

  “Congratulations on the Nancy show,” the adjutant said. “All the inmates were full of admiration.”

  “So it seems. The mayor sent me a telegram.” Rex found the paper and unfolded it. “Félicitations … beau spectacle … avions formidables … toute confiance … victoire …” He tucked it away again. “The commandant gave it to me when we landed. Quick work, eh?”

  Kellaway nodded, and thought: Damn quick. It was only ten minutes’ flying time from Nancy to Montornet. “It got top priority, I suppose.”

  “Better than that. The mayor sent it yesterday. Look at the date.”

  “Yesterday? He hadn’t seen the show yesterday. How could—”

  “Oh, he knew what to expect. Besides, if he hadn’t sent it yesterday we probably wouldn’t have got it today, would we?”

  “True, true.”

  “Very logical, the French.”

  “Yes.”

  “Courteous, too. Pity their communications are so bloody awful.”

  There was a reception at three, preceding dinner at four: an early meal so that the visitors could fly home before darkness. Flip Moran came in at three-thirty, the outline of his goggles still showing, and got himself a drink. Moggy Cattermole turned and saw him. “Ah, the flying film star! Come and meet my friend, Captain … uh … Michelin.”

  “Lieutenant Martineau,” the Frenchman said. He was slim and pale and serious-looking.

  “This chap here is Errol Flynn,” Cattermole told Martineau. “He’s not much of a pilot but he’s a lousy actor.”

  “The name’s Moran.” They shook hands. “That’s a terrible thing, that Potez. You want to get rid of that fast.”

  “I have just talked with the pilot,” said Martineau. “He says he has you destroyed five, six times.�
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  “I had him destroyed before he ever saw me.”

  Martineau hunched his shoulders and pursed his lips. “The ciné will show,” he said. “You are dead by us.”

  “No you’re thinking of Rudolph Valentino,” Cattermole said. “He couldn’t fly, either.”

  “Moggy, piss off.”

  “See? Very temperamental,” Cattermole said to Martineau. “Ask nicely and you’ll get his autograph. Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, Maurice Chevalier.” Cattermole wandered away. “Greta Garbo,” he called. “Rin-Tin-Tin. Fu Manchu.”

  “Forget the cineé,” Moran said. “You’ve got blind spots everywhere and damn-all armor.”

  “We cover each other,” Martineau said. His English was neat and smooth. He held up both hands. “This machine covers that machine. Oui? When you attack, we shoot you in the … uh … Qu’est-ce-que-c’est …?” He knocked his hands together.

  “Crossfire.”

  “Oui, crossfire.” Martineau smiled gratefully.

  “But I’m not in the sodding crossfire,” Moran said.

  “Yes, that is where we catch you.”

  “I tell you I’m not bloody there.”

  “We practice it often,” Martineau said.

  Moran gave up. Cattermole came back and raised his glass. “Buster Keaton!” he said. “Groucho Marx!”

  “Donald Duck!” said a one-armed Frenchman. He too raised his glass.

  Cattermole joined that group. The one-armed man was a captain, elegantly uniformed, with a black eyepatch that made him even more dashing. He carried an ebony walking-stick hooked over his surviving arm. “You look like something out of Treasure Island,” Cattermole said. “Only smarter.”

  The captain merely looked back.

  “Jacques does not speak English,” another of the group explained.

  “Just as well,” Cattermole said. “I got him mixed up with Lord Nelson. Not a popular hero in France, I believe. Better start again … Groucho Marx!” he said to the captain.

  “Donald Duck.”

  They clinked glasses and drank. “What happened to the rest of him?” Cattermole asked the others.

  “A bridge,” one of them said. He had to stop and think of the words. “A bridge of a river. Jacques has had a problem. It is a little bridge, and he is in a big plane. You understand?”