A Splendid Little War

by Derek Robinson

  “Enough. Let’s learn,” Wragge said. “Learn what we’ve forgotten. The sky is one big man-trap. Red, White, striped, makes no difference. Every minute we’re flying we search for the bastard who’s up there waiting to make us flamers. We find him first, we kill him first. Just because the Bolos are going backwards doesn’t make them rabbits.”

  “Even rabbits can bite,” Jessop said. “They’ve got those big rabbity teeth.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” Dextry said wearily. “Don’t you ever engage your brain before you open your mouth?”

  “We still have one good Camel,” Maynard said. “Borodin’s. Suppose one of us goes up and bags a Bolo? I mean, now. That would show them who’s boss, wouldn’t it? I volunteer.”

  “Not today, Daddy,” Wragge said. “Today we lick our wounds. Tomorrow we’re out for blood.”

  There was little for them to do. The Nines had all been test-flown. The Camels were being checked and patched and double-checked by ground crews in case a stray bullet had nicked a control wire. Wragge made his rounds (doctor, Lacey, adjutant, flight sergeants) and all was in order.

  Borodin, coached by a fitter, had mastered starting the Le Rhône rotary. It was midday, and hot. The air would be bumpy. Wragge had served, briefly, as an instructor at training fields in England that were rich in graves of Camel pupils who had taken off and failed to react quickly when the engine faltered and the fine-adjustment lever on the throttle demanded instant attention. No dual-control Camels: the pupil went up with only his wits to help him. Stall, spin, crash: a three-step dance of death. Wragge had seen it too often, had paid his half-crowns for too many wreaths and written the same letter to too many parents. Rarely to wives who were widows. Few pupils married at eighteen. So Borodin’s first flight could wait.

  The Number Nines had found the croquet set. Wragge took leave from the burden of command and challenged Tusker Oliphant to a match, the Toffs, or Camel pilots, versus the Peasants, or bomber louts. “No offence meant,” he said. Oliphant accepted. “We’ll win,” he said. “Losers to the guillotine.”

  The turf was lumpy and the ground sloped in several directions. The smack of mallet on wooden ball was usually followed by a cry of, “Bad luck, old man.” Sometimes, “Jolly hard cheese.”

  Lacey, Borodin and the squadron doctor came to watch. They sat in the back of the Chevrolet and drank white wine.

  “This is a very old Russian sport,” Borodin said. “Genghis Khan played it on horseback. Lacking croquet balls, he used the severed heads of captured princes.”

  “Not a gentleman,” Lacey said firmly.

  “Explain.”

  “No restraint. Greedy. Like a child in a sweetshop, wanting everything. Alexander the Great was another. Also our late C.O., Griffin.”

  “Before my time,” Susan Perry said. “I caught the funeral.”

  “He never really approved of me,” Borodin said. “I was a bloody foreigner.”

  “We shouldn’t blame him,” Lacey said. “It’s all a matter of breeding. In his case, somewhat lacking.”

  “Ah-ah,” she said. “The precious bloodline. How do you fit in, Lacey?”

  “Comfortably. The Laceys go back many centuries.”

  “So do I. So do we all.”

  Borodin said. “Last time I looked, my lot went back fifty thousand years.”

  “That’s not breeding,” Lacey said. “That’s reproduction.”

  “Lacey’s a snob,” she said.

  He gave her a crooked smile. “If I made the effort, I could be a clod, like most people,” he said. “But then, you wouldn’t get soft toilet paper, would you? Speaking of which, I had another signal from Mission H.Q. Their information is that Denikin has three squadrons of crack fliers helping his advance. All based on the aerodrome at Belgorod. Just a few miles from here.”

  “What does Denikin say?”

  “I can’t raise his H.Q. Perhaps they’re on the move. Perhaps they’re too busy fighting.”

  “I tried tapping the telegraph line but it’s dead,” Borodin said. “Which makes me wonder: if we can’t talk to Denikin’s staff, where did the British Mission H.Q. get its information about three squadrons of crack fliers?”

  “From Denikin’s Chief of Aviation. Colonel Subasnov was on a visit to Taganrog. Mission H.Q. said he was very helpful.”

  A croquet ball bounced off a wheel of the car. Wragge strolled over, swinging his mallet at the larger wildflowers. “Who’s winning?” the doctor asked. He kicked his ball into a better position. “Not us. I think Tusker’s team are cheating.” He took a mighty whack and the ball hit one of the Cossack ponies, which had been let out to feed. It shied, and then tried to eat the ball. “I think I scored a double bogey,” Wragge said. “Maybe a triple. This pitch is a disgrace.” He walked away. “Somebody shoot that animal before it ruins the game,” he shouted.

  6

  In the cool of the morning, Dextry coached Borodin on the many ways his Camel could kill him.

  They stood beside the fighter. A mechanic waited, his hands on the prop.

  “Examine the beast,” Dextry said. “All the heavy stuff, the engine, the guns, the fuel, the pilot, are grouped close together at the front. That’s why it’s called a Camel – the business end has a hump. Sopwiths can do this because the Le Rhône is a rotary engine, very compact. In a rotary the cylinders whizz round and round and take the prop with them.”

  “Air-cooled,” Borodin said. “Nice idea.”

  “Yes. But it has to spin at a hell of a lick in order to fly. If Charlie there were strong enough to hold the prop still so it can’t move, then your rotary would try to spin the whole aeroplane.”

  “Torque.”

  “And torque will try to kill you as soon as you take off. The starboard wing will drop and so will the nose. Correct immediately, give a hint more stick, maybe some throttle. If that wingtip touches you’ll cartwheel and Charlie will sweep up the bits and put them in a sack.”

  Borodin glanced at Charlie. “That’s correct, sir,” Charlie said. “Every little scrap.”

  “Now you’re up and you’ve mastered the torque, the engine has another attempt at murder,” Dextry said. “Sudden loss of power.”

  “I practised that yesterday. On the ground, of course. It’s the fine-adjustment, isn’t it? Nursing the needle.”

  “Be ready. Expect to lose power. Just tickle it. A rotary is a woman, it responds to a caress. Grab it and you’ll choke it and it’ll die and so will you. Which would be a waste, because in combat the Camel is the best there is. A wonderful killer of others. Alright, get in.”

  Borodin made himself comfortable, feet on the rudder pedals, stick between legs, and fastened the belt.

  “Here’s the final way she’ll kill you,” Dextry said. “She can manoeuvre like magic. When in doubt, chuck everything into a right-hand bank and nobody can follow you. You’ll turn so tightly it looks like you’ve gone through a revolving door. But …” He prodded Borodin’s shoulder. “It’s that bloody torque again. It drags the nose down and before you know it …” He clicked his fingers. “… your Camel’s in a power dive. Under a thousand feet, you’ll probably make a hole in the ground. The answer is—”

  “Opposing rudder,” Borodin said.

  “Lots of it, and quick. Don’t wait for trouble. Anticipate. Did they tell you about the button on the joystick?”

  “Yes. For blipping the engine. Switching it on and off to get the speed right on landing.”

  “Learn the art. You have a fine aristocratic nose. Make a crash landing and you’ll bash your nose against those gun-butts and spend the rest of your life, if you live, with what we call ‘Camel Face’. Not pretty. Are you ready to taxi? That’s what you’re going to do now. Simply taxi up and down the field a dozen times. Learn the basics.”

  Dextry walked away. He sat on the grass and watched Borodin go through the starting routine with Charlie. The engine roared, belched a smell of castor oil, idled, roared again, settled down to a stea
dy note. The chocks were removed. Borodin taxied away. Within fifty yards his tail was up. Within a hundred, he was flying.

  Fifteen minutes later, the C.O. came out and joined the flight leader. They watched the Camel make its approach, shedding height as it blipped its engine, until it seemed to flare its wings, nose up, while the wheels felt for the ground, made the smallest bump, and ran.

  “I told the idiot to taxi,” Dextry said. “Learn how to walk before he runs.”

  “Chew him out, if you like,” Wragge said. “He’s a natural. He joins the Flight.”

  Dextry walked to the Camel as Borodin was climbing down. “Nice machine,” Borodin said. “She wished to fly, so I went along for the ride.”

  “Understand this,” Dextry said. “That’s the last order you disobey. Briefing in half an hour.” He walked away. Charlie was waiting. “Arm and refuel, Charlie,” he told him.

  “He seems a nice gentleman, sir.”

  “Lovely manners,” Dextry said. “But can he kill?”

  Briefing took less than a minute. The Camels would climb to ten thousand. Form a very loose arrowhead. Count Borodin is in the Flight. We take a look at Belgorod, see what’s happening. H.Q. says the Whites have three squadrons based there. Do they know we’ve arrived? Maybe not. Stay awake. Questions? No? Good.

  The Camels were labouring at eight thousand feet, and toiling after another five hundred, so Wragge cut his losses and levelled out. He was gasping for breath, he had sparks before his eyes. Maybe the air was unusually thin today. Anyway, even a new Camel couldn’t fight worth a damn much above ten thousand. Huns just ran away from it. And these were not new Camels.

  Belgorod was in sight – little more than a small market town, not big enough to be fortified; probably owed its existence to the railway – when Wragge noticed a glitter down there. To get a better view he eased the Flight into a glide, but the glitter vanished. Then it returned. Sunlight off water. He tried to trace the river, but it wandered and he lost it. Then his eye caught another flicker of light, nowhere near the river, and he squinted hard and saw yesterday’s Halberstadt two-seater. Sun on its windscreen, probably. The machine was as tiny as a moth, almost camouflaged against the soft green countryside.

  Wragge waggled his wings and made sure everyone saw the Halberstadt. He thought about the situation. Assume it was a Red machine, up to no good, maybe reconnaissance, counting the troop trains. Maybe bombing. It must have seen Merlin Squadron being unloaded yesterday, so bombs were likely. But no escort? Already, Wragge was searching the blue immensity above him. Suppose the Halberstadt was bait. Those Spads – if they were Spads – had 200-horsepower Hispano-Suizas, big enough to outclimb any Camel. He had specks of oil on his goggles. What was that up there? A Spad or a speck? A short rattle of gunfire made his pulse jump. Dextry was waving, pointing. Far on the left-hand quarter was a smudge of aircraft, only slightly higher than the Camels.

  It matured and separated into a group of six. Three were the brown Spads. The others were a mixture: a Fokker Triplane, an all-red Nieuport, and what might be an Albatros. A mongrel lot. Flown by scruffs or aces? Wragge wondered and waited. His Flight was flying broadside-on to their approach. At four hundred yards all the Spads opened fire. Tracer probed and lost heart and fell below the Camels. “Optimistic,” he said, counted to three, and banked hard towards the enemy. Now it was a head-on charge.

  Jessop crouched and made himself small. Dextry kept his head up and looked for a gap to aim at. Maynard shouted: “Come to Daddy!” and was glad no-one heard. Borodin murmured a soldier’s prayer for a merciful death if death it must be. And the two formations met in a crash of noise and nothing else. They merged and separated in an instant. Nobody had fired. Firing was stupid if you were about to collide and aimless when you were not.

  Wragge banked hard right, the Camel’s trump card, and the Flight followed him. The Reds had scattered. The Spads climbed in three different directions and he chased the middle one until it was a distant blur in his gunsight. He turned and dived back to the fight, but there was no fight: just a huge and empty sky. No surprise. Air combat was like that. He searched and saw dots swirling with the pointlessness of bugs at dusk. He headed for them. One bug turned a hot red and dropped, trailing smoke. Not so pointless after all.

  When Jessop came out of the vertical bank, the Triplane swam into view, so he turned and fired and his bullet-stream bent as if blown sideways and nearly hit Maynard. Jessop shouted, and reversed bank, which created a huge skid that washed the Triplane out of sight. Not possible, bloody great Tripe couldn’t disappear like that. Jessop turned the bank into a roll and made that into a sweet barrel-roll and at the top he looked down at Maynard going the opposite way and firing at something, and simultaneously red and yellow tracer chased itself past Jessop, nibbled at his wingtip, made his Camel twitch, and for an instant Jessop was puzzled, how the devil did Maynard do that? He completed the barrelroll fast and Good Christ All Bloody Mighty the Tripe was back again. No mistakes this time. He worked to get behind it. Difficult. Damn thing never kept still.

  Maynard was looking the other way when Jessop missed him. He didn’t know whose guns they were, could have been one of three Bolos, not the Spads, they were gone. He banked and turned, looked left and right, banked again, looked up, looked back, banked again, never flew straight for more than ten seconds, never stopped searching. Maynard knew little about girls and sex but much about how to creep up behind an enemy and blow holes in him. He saw an all-red Nieuport chased by a Camel and an Albatros chasing the Camel, and he joined the hunt. He fired brief bursts at the Albatros, very long range but the Albatros took fright, put its nose down, and the Nieuport blew apart.

  Dextry was chasing it and the explosion amazed him: who did that? Maynard whooped with glee but he knew he hadn’t scored. He joined Dextry and they circled the fluttering bits of burning debris, the drifting smoke. Warplanes were dangerous. Sometimes incendiary bullets misfired, touched off a fuel tank, a pilot sat in a wooden frame covered with doped linen and stuffed with explosives behind a red-hot engine, of course some machines blew apart. Nobody said flying was safe.

  The flight was over. The Spads were out of sight, the Nieuport no longer existed, and the two survivors had quit in a hurry. Wragge chased them, for sport, and was outpaced. He returned and led the Flight to their landing ground next to the siding. On the way, they met the Halberstadt and shot it down. Its pilot made a brave attempt at a forced landing but the machine was hopelessly lopsided when it touched the ground, and it cartwheeled with surprising ferocity, every impact ripping off a part until there was little left but a trail of wreckage.

  7

  Lunch was taken. The Dregs was unusually quiet.

  When they landed, the C.O. had talked to Dextry. “We all got back,” he said, “but that’s the best that can be said.”

  “Sloppy. Half the time we got in each other’s way.”

  “We’ve forgotten what a real scrap is like. I don’t count the Halberstadt. To tell the truth, I felt sorry for the bloke.”

  “He didn’t put up much of a fight,” Dextry said. “In fact, he didn’t put up any fight at all.”

  That was one of several things which the pilots did not talk about at lunch. Nobody claimed the Nieuport. Nobody mentioned the near-collisions.

  When everyone had finished eating, Wragge said, “We’ll go again. This time I’ll take the Nines with us. If there’s an aerodrome at Belgorod and it’s ours, we’ll land there. If the Bolos are there, we’ll bomb the stupid place.”

  Tusker Oliphant led the Nines at three thousand feet, high enough to escape machine-gun fire from the ground, low enough to make a bombing run. The C.O. was a thousand feet above with the Camels. They followed the railway to Belgorod and nothing happened. No troops, no guns, no burning ruins. Few people in the streets, and nobody ran for shelter. A train stood in the station, the engine making a stick of brown smoke. That was the sum of the action.

  The squadron flew a wid
e circle around Belgorod and did not find an aerodrome. But two miles north of the town, Tiger Wragge saw a racecourse beside the railway line. At first he was surprised. Racing seemed an unlikely luxury, but then why not? All it needed was space and horses, and Russia had plenty of both. He took the Camel Flight right down to a hundred feet and cruised around the course, a simple oval of grass. A three-coach train stood in a siding. A flag as big as a bedsheet waved in the breeze. It had several colours, which was encouraging. A few soldiers came out to watch the aeroplanes.

  Wragge signalled to Borodin that he should land, and left Dextry in command. Borodin and the C.O. touched down on a wonderfully wide, flat, smooth stretch of grass, switched off, and got out.

  An officer on a horse cantered towards them.

  “I’m second fiddle now,” Wragge said. “This is your show.”

  The officer did not dismount. He was an expert horseman and he cut a good figure as he sat and looked down at them. Borodin introduced himself, and the officer dismounted very smartly, and saluted. Wragge strolled up and down while they talked, until Borodin said to him: “The train belongs to a supporter of Denikin, General Yevgeni Gregorioff. We are safe here. The nearest fighting is at Kursk, a hundred miles north. We are invited to meet General Gregorioff in his salon.”

  “Tell this chap I’m going to fire a signal flare,” Wragge said. “I don’t want to frighten his lovely horse.”

  He got the Very pistol from his Camel and sent the flare arcing into the sky. He dumped his flying coat and helmet in the cockpit. Now he was recognisably a squadron leader, with a slightly battered but rakish cap. “Lead on,” he said. Already the squadron was making its descent.

  General Gregorioff was a tubby little man, almost bald, with a thick black moustache that reached his chin. He greeted his guests cheerfully, without moving from a cane chair overflowing with pillows. His right leg rested on a stack of blankets. He had no English. He and Borodin exchanged compliments, and the count explained to Wragge that the general had very bad gout and was on medical leave from the Front. That explained the young and attractive nurse.