A Splendid Little War

by Derek Robinson

  She poured a quart of disinfectant into a bucket of soapy water and cleaned the body. When she finished the right arm and leg, she told Brazier: “Rigor has set in. I need you to flex those joints. Keep bending. Give the muscles some massage. Make him supple.” She washed the other limbs, and they turned the body over and she washed the back. Brazier had his tunic and tie off and his sleeves rolled up. There was a lot of Kenny to work on.

  They put him face-up again. Without the blood, the wounds made by the bullet-strikes were very obvious. Brazier began silently counting the sites of torn flesh, and gave up. What would it prove, anyway?

  “Glue,” she said. “We need glue. Or some sort of adhesive.”

  Brazier went away and talked to ground crew and came back with a small tin of aircraft dope. “For aeroplanes,” he said. “They use it to stick patches onto the fabric.”

  She sniffed it. “Exciting smell. We’ll try it.” She threaded a needle and made a single stitch that closed Kenny’s right eyelid, and brushed dope along the lids where they met. “Rather glossy,” she said. “But it seems to work.” She closed the left eye, and then did the same operation with his mouth. “Nobody likes to see a corpse with his mouth open,” she said. She stroked Kenny’s chin. “He needs to be shaved. Is your hand steady enough?” The sergeant said he thought so. “You shave. And wash his hair. I’ll start on the serious business. Emptying the arteries and so on,” she explained to Brazier.

  “I’m surprised he has any blood left in him.”

  “Be ready to be surprised.”

  The sergeant had brought a large syringe that he thought belonged to the Veterinary Corps. She filled it with embalming fluid, opened the right carotid artery in Kenny’s neck and the right femoral vein behind his knee, inserted the syringe in the carotid and began pumping. Old blood and other fluids spurted from the femoral, and from a few other gashes in the torso. She refilled many times and pumped many times, before she was satisfied that only embalming fluid was emerging. She stitched him up, and washed her hands in the bucket. “I’m starving,” she said. “I hope they remembered the mustard.”

  They sat on ammunition boxes and ate roast beef sandwiches.

  “If I may say so,” the adjutant said, “for a nurse you make a very competent surgeon.”

  She chewed, and looked out at the night, and drank some coffee. Brazier was beginning to regret his remark when she said: “Great-aunt Phoebe died and left me enough money to go to Cambridge. They allowed me to attend medical lectures but they wouldn’t let a woman take a degree. So, no Doctor Perry. Went to London, to Guy’s Hospital. Surgical nurse. Got my hands wet, learned a lot. I became the third hand when the surgeon got sweat in his eyes. Sometimes I was the fourth hand. After that, France. Plenty of work there, too much sometimes. Nobody cared about gender when his leg had been blown off. Isn’t that right, sergeant?”

  “Ah, the war. Those were the good old days,” the sergeant said.

  “Then they asked for volunteers for Russia. I told the Military Mission in Ekat I had as much experience as any doctor but they laughed. Actually laughed, ha-ha. So I joined the colonel’s train. And here we are.”

  “Interesting,” Brazier said. “The squadron needs a doctor. And if anyone laughs ha-ha, I’ll knock his block off.”

  “And he’ll come running to me.” Which made them chuckle. Nobody was laughing, not with the smell of formaldehyde heavy in the air.

  She finished her sandwich, washed her hands, and got down to the heavy work. “This is what’s known as the body cavities,” she said as she punctured the abdomen just north of the navel. “Here’s where we find out what he had for breakfast. Also supper and maybe lunch. I shall need more buckets.”

  The rush of escaping gases made the adjutant retreat a few paces. “You’ll need another uniform, won’t you?” he said. “I’ll fetch it.’

  “Don’t hurry,” she said. “The stench tends to linger.”

  Both flights assembled for dinner in the dining car. Conversation was sparse. Wragge and Oliphant, the flight leaders, discussed shows on the London stage. Oliphant spoke admiringly of “Chu Chin Chow”. Wragge recommended a revue at the Trocadero. They talked just loudly enough to avoid the discomfort of a total silence.

  Then the new C.O. came in and they stopped. Everyone stood. Hackett reached his place at the top table but he did not sit. He said: “Pilot Officer Lacey will read a message I have sent to the Military Mission H.Q.”

  “In single-handed combat against overwhelming odds,” Lacey began. His voice had the clarity of an actor with the gravity of an air marshal. Finest traditions … skill, audacity and resolution … ammunition was exhausted … gallantry remained unquenchable: phrases that made the younger pilots breathe deeply and stand tall.

  “Wing Commander Griffin’s funeral will be at ten tomorrow,” Hackett said. “Together with that of Air Mechanic Henderson.” He waited five seconds: a decent interval. “Now let dinner be served.”

  Chef had added a dash of sherry to the mushroom soup. Pedlow and Duncan each finished two bowls. Their concentration was impressive, and nobody interrupted them with conversation. Talk elsewhere was tentative and brief. “Merlin Squadron,” Maynard said. “Wasn’t there a wizard called Merlin?” Nobody cared to comment. Maynard gave up.

  The Beef Wellington was a big success, and there was a local red wine which wasn’t claret but by God it punched above its weight. Everyone relaxed. Maynard forgot his Merlin failure and said: “Good Lord. Just realized. Today’s my birthday. I’m twenty.”

  “Damn bad luck,” Wragge said. “The best is behind you, Maynard. Nothing left to look forward to but impending doom.”

  “Marriage,” Jessop said bleakly. “Fatherhood. Children.”

  “Deepest sympathy,” Dextry said. “Here’s to Daddy Maynard.” Everyone drank to that. Maynard squirmed, and felt his cheeks turn pink. “Daddy Maynard,” he muttered, trying to sound dismissive. Secretly he was pleased. He had a nickname. He was accepted.

  Dominic Dextry saw Pedlow align his cutlery and lean back. His plate was empty. He looked content.

  “I pinched your fly-rod, Pedders,” Dextry said. “And the reel.”

  “You’re a beast.”

  “I put them back.”

  “A cowardly beast.”

  “Well, the general opinion was that you were dead. Tommy Hopton had his greedy eye on the rod but I got in first.”

  “I took your fountain pen instead,” Hopton said. “I suppose you want it back now. Doesn’t work, anyway. No ink. Where d’you hide your ink?”

  Pedlow gave him a twisted smile. “Nowhere. It’s invisible ink. You’ll never find it. I hope that makes you feel really stupid.”

  “Oh … shattered. Quite flattened.” Hopton closed one eye and squinted at him through the other. “Why would you wish to use invisible ink?”

  “Damn the ink,” Dextry said. “Tell us about the crash.”

  “Didn’t crash,” Pedlow said. “Not as such. What happened was, Russia was five feet higher than indicated on my altimeter. If Russia had been in the right place, fine, no problem, three-point landing. As it was, I wiped out the undercarriage.”

  “Blame the instruments,” Duncan said.

  “After that we lost the prop, most of the wings, the fuselage and the tail. But not the engine. We could have rebuilt the aeroplane. Joe had a hammer and a ball of string.”

  “Then it caught fire,” Duncan said. “Not our fault. We were nowhere near. Hairy villager jumped on it and it burst into flames.”

  “Hairy villager,” Hopton said. “Was he the one who wanted your private parts on a plate?”

  “Oh, you know about that?” Pedlow said.

  “The whole squadron knows.”

  “They weren’t very private,” Duncan said. “Not in that village. They were on display at the drop of a hat.”

  “They dropped their hats to expose themselves?” Dextry said. “What peculiar people. In Ireland they’d say you were away
with the fairies.”

  “Well, they were peculiar,” Duncan said doggedly. “They thought Gerry was an angel. Because of his wings.” That produced a roar of laughter. Duncan didn’t join in. He aimed a finger at Dextry. “It’s no dafter than half the stuff you Irish Catholics believe about seeing the Virgin Mary up a tree and so on.”

  “Not guilty. Since Passchendaele, I’m an atheist.”

  “That’s nothing. I’m a Protestant,” Pedlow said. “All my family are Ulster Protestants. The worst kind. Ulster Prods are never happy unless everyone’s miserable.”

  Hackett murmured something to Oliphant. “No religion in the Mess,” Oliphant told them. “No religion, no politics, no women.”

  “Not much left,” Dextry said. “Oh, well.” Brandied peaches had arrived. Then there was the unusually sharp Cheddar. They felt well fed and unworried now that Pedlow’s crash had become a big joke. They settled down to inventing nicknames. In the R.F.C., every good squadron had lots of nicknames. Drunken Duncan was a start. Jessop talked balls so he was Junk Jessop. Oliphant sounded like an elephant: Tusker Oliphant. Dextry had crashed so often he was called Wrecks. Or even Rex. Tiger Wragge was obvious. The adj was always Uncle.

  Hackett wasn’t there to comment. He had left with Lacey. Nobody suggested giving Lacey a nickname. He was on the squadron but he wasn’t in the club.

  6

  “Uncle wants the colonel’s nurse to stay on as squadron doctor,” Hackett said. “You’ve got to be a captain to be an army doctor, haven’t you?”

  “Commission her,” Lacey said. “Make her a flight lieutenant.”

  “Can I do that? Yes, of course. Promoted in the field. Flight Lieutenant Perry. Good. I’ve done it.”

  They were in Lacey’s radio room, drinking port while Lacey tried to open the despatch case, using a bunch of keys found in Kenny’s bedroom. “Nothing works,” he said.

  “That bag’s damned heavy,” Hackett said. “He didn’t come here just to see we got paid.”

  The adjutant came in, carrying his tunic, his sleeves rolled up. “Well, he’s cleaned and gutted and sewn up and preserved and dressed in his best and boxed up for London,” he said. “And I hope they say thank-you but I don’t suppose they will. Is that port?”

  Lacey poured him a glass. “We’re stymied here. Maybe the colonel kept the key on his person.”

  “We would have found it. She emptied him of everything that mattered. Also a lot that you don’t want to hear about. Nurse Perry is a godsend.”

  “She’s Flight Lieutenant Perry,” Hackett said. “You’ve got your doctor. Now we need a locksmith. Is there a safe-cracker on the squadron?” Brazier shrugged.

  “In the cinema,” Lacey said, “they just shoot the lock out.”

  “It’s quarter-inch steel,” Brazier said. “A bullet would jam the mechanism.” His meaty fingers prodded the case. “Ox hide.” He opened a desk drawer and took out a trench knife. He hacked and slashed until the case fell open and despatches spilled onto the floor. “What you might call a short cut,” he said.

  Much of the mail was routine, but Hackett picked out a heavy buff envelope, sealed with red wax, addressed to Griffin. Inside it was a smaller envelope marked SECRET. Inside that were orders for the squadron to proceed to Ekaterinoslav with all speed. “Good,” he said. “We’re leaving. Off to join Denikin’s mob. I’m getting tired of this place.”

  “And you’ve got the D.S.O.” Lacey waved a letter. “Apologies from the War Office. Regrettable delay. They got you mixed up with another Hackett in the Pay Corps.” He shook the envelope. “No sign of the medal. Or the ribbon.”

  “Here, take this,” Brazier said. “Belonged to Kenny. His tunic was in tatters but I saved the ribbons.”

  Hackett smoothed out the little dark-green-and-blue strip. “Well, hell,” he said. “I must have done something to deserve it, but I’m buggered if I can remember what.” He heard the flat voice and asked himself if that was how a commanding officer should sound. Would Griffin have talked like that? Griffin talked big and aimed high. And was dead. Hackett cleared his throat and squared his shoulders. “First things first. Tomorrow’s funerals. Lacey: you’ll read the service. Uncle: get the graves dug; drill the pallbearers and the rifle-volley men. No cock-ups. I suppose I should say a few words.”

  “Lacey’s good at that,” Brazier said. “He’ll knock something together for you.”

  They sipped their port. Faintly came the sound of singing from the dining car. Lacey took a pencil and poked the ruined despatch case. “Damaged in action,” he said. “Strafed by Bolo fighters.”

  “Bastards,” Hackett said. “Ruthless bastards.”

  The squadron walked through the morning mist to the graves. Marching in formation was not possible on this springy turf with its patches of wet heather. The air crews and the ground crews formed a hollow square and waited. Nobody spoke, nobody moved. Everything was grey and damp and motionless. Jessop muttered: “What’s keeping them?”

  “Patience,” Dextry whispered. “Give the poor men their due. They’ll only die the once.”

  When the burial party came out of the mist, there was no precedence: the air mechanic was carried alongside the wing commander. The pall-bearers trod carefully, looking at the ground: nobody wanted to stumble. The C.O. walked behind, with the adjutant and Lacey. Then came six sergeants with rifles. Brazier had heard all about officers and their nervous trigger-fingers. He wanted trained and reliable men.

  “Hats off,” Oliphant said.

  Brazier lengthened his stride and got to the graves first. Planks had been placed across them. He watched carefully as the coffins were lowered onto the planks and the pall-bearers took a pace back. There was ample room; Brazier had been up at dawn, showing the plennys exactly where to throw the earth. He nodded to the C.O. Hackett did not respond. He was looking at the eastern sky, at a yellowish hazy blur where the sun was failing to burn through the mist. Brazier turned to Lacey and raised his eyebrows.

  “We are gathered here to bury our two comrades,” Lacey said. It sounded fatuous, as he knew it would: everyone knew why they were there. Still, the padre always said it, so maybe it was a legal requirement. “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,” Lacey announced confidently. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

  That was a very sound opener. Lacey had given some thought as to how he should handle this burial service, and he knew that he couldn’t beat a solid, simple yet familiar reassurance that things aren’t as bad as they look. The Church knew how to buck up a glum congregation. Never die. Promises. Rich promises. After that, warm their hearts with loud hurrahs. He had some ideas for that too. But first there was Psalm 130.

  Apologetic. That was the tenor of 130. It was full of suffering and inadequacy and pleading for help. God knows why the adjutant’s British Army Pocket Book, 1917 put Psalm 130 in Appendix III, Burial Service, but Lacey wasn’t going to waste the squadron’s time by telling them, for instance, that the Lord shall redeem Israel from all his sins. He was prepared to make a gesture towards the Almighty, and so he read verses one and six:

  “Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice … My soul fleeth unto the Lord: before the morning watch, I say, before the morning watch.”

  Enough of that. The morning had already begun; this was it. He closed the Pocket Book. Now for the heartwarming fanfare. He filled his lungs and orated:

  Now God be thanked

  From this day to the ending of the world!

  Blow, bugle, blow! Was there a man dismayed?

  Who rushed to glory, or the last parade?

  Land of our birth, we pledge to thee:

  Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!

  He glanced at the adjutant. Brazier had a small, sardonic smile. He was shaking his head, almost in wonder. Lacey charged on:

  Armed with thunder, clad with wings,

&
nbsp; Men like eagles hunt their foes.

  At home in the heavens, and heaven’s their home.

  See! In the sunrise their epitaph glows.

  Hackett heard none of it. He was thinking of the other funerals he had attended, a few in England, where pilot training was famously deadly, the rest in France. Too many to remember. Long ago he had learned the trick of coping with funerals: you told yourself that the coffin was empty, the chap had been posted, so forget him. Often it really was half-empty, with sandbags to make up the weight. But this show was somehow different. He hadn’t come to Russia for this. He’d come to fly, to put on a show for the Russkis, to bag a few Bolos. Not to put men he knew in holes at ten on a foggy morning.

  There was a long silence. Everyone was waiting.

  He stepped forward and spoke the few words that Lacey had written for him, sturdy stuff about the supreme sacrifice and the fighting spirit that beat the Hun and about memories that would never fade. He ended with a scrap of verse which Lacey said was written by a British soldier who now lay dead, far from home. “If I should die,” Hackett said, “think only this of me: that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.”

  The pall-bearers stepped forward and grasped the straps. The planks slid away. Lacey said his bit about man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and so on. Wing Commander Griffin and Air Mechanic Henderson vanished smoothly from sight. Brazier gave the order and the six sergeants fired a perfect volley, reloaded, fired again. Those who wished, came forward and scattered earth on the coffins. That was that. Two more chaps had been posted.

  HANG THE KAISER

  1

  A night of rain had cleared the sky over London and washed the smoke away. The lapse was temporary: the smoke would be back; but for one morning at least, London got the full benefit of a summer sun in a cloudless sky, and the warmth put the city in a good temper. In the parks the grass was greener. At street corners the flower stalls were brighter. And on the steps of the Home Office, Jonathan Fitzroy felt too cheerful to stand still, and he clicked his fingers in a bad imitation of a gypsy rhythm. He stopped when an army officer got out of a taxi and limped towards him. “Colonel Johnson?” he said. “I’m Fitzroy.”