He waggled his wings and waved, and as the Flight came together he searched below for a marker. He saw a wood shaped like a broken star: that would do.
He got the Flight between the sun and the camp, and dived. Nobody fired up at them. A handful of men ran. He got a clear view of rows of tents with well-trodden paths between them. The Camels buzzed the camp, low enough to wake the dead. Still no gunfire. As the C.O. pulled out and climbed away he glimpsed stampeding horses, scared by the racket. But no men.
The Camels flew a mile-wide circle around the tents and found nothing. Wragge’s fuel gauge read less than half-full, and it was unreliable. This was not the time or place to meet the Red air force. Combat drank petrol. Nobody wanted that. They headed south.
The landing ground was easy to find: just follow the rail line and find the rusty spur. The field looked wonderfully green, and the C.O. knew that something was badly wrong when he saw a Nine lying flat on its belly and another with its tail high and its nose buried in the grass. He landed, saw Oliphant waiting, taxied towards him, climbed out.
“We got strafed,” Oliphant said. “Ten minutes after you left. Three Spads, not the same bunch you saw, these were black. Caught us on the hop. My chaps did their best to get off the ground, but that one lost its wheels and looks like a pregnant duck, and that one overcooked his throttle so his tail came up too soon and he snapped his prop. Then the troops got the Lewis guns going and scared the Spads away, thank Christ.”
Wragge did some counting. “You’re one short, Tusker.”
“Ah … now for the bad news. Tommy Hopton did manage to get airborne. With Mickey Blythe. Naturally the Spads went for him and there was a hell of a scrap. We watched it all. They got him in the end. Three to one: pretty lousy odds. He was a flamer, Tiger. They both jumped.” He pointed to a distant wood. “Somewhere over there, probably. I’ve got search parties out.”
“Jesus Christ Almighty.”
“They did the right thing, Tiger. Taking off, I mean. Better to be up there than strafed down here. If you’d seen—”
“Yes, of course they did. No question about that. Absolutely the right thing. Tommy Hopton and Mickey Blythe … God help us. If only we’d been here.”
“Then maybe the Spads wouldn’t have come.”
“How did they know?”
Oliphant shrugged. “Spies? Or perhaps just chance.”
Wragge sat on the grass, and so did Oliphant. “I feel knackered, Tusker. And we didn’t find a damn thing except empty tents. We’re losing good men too fast. First Lowe, then Maynard, and now your two chaps do the right thing and …” He couldn’t find words, and gave up.
Already the ground crews were working on the Nines. It would be another long night for them. At dusk the search parties came back, empty-handed. There were tens of thousands of trees, they said, all in full leaf. Maybe they got caught in the branches, maybe not. Who could say?
It was a quiet evening in The Dregs, briefly enlivened when the C.O. came in with Borodin and a smart young Russian officer, heavy with gold braid.
“Gentlemen, this is General Polakov,” he said.
“Pokalov,” Borodin murmured.
“Well, I was close. He has ridden here post-haste with good news. He wishes to address you.”
Pokalov spoke for three minutes. He was brimful of energy and excitement, but it was still a long three minutes. They understood nothing until his final words: “Na Moskvu!” Borodin led the applause. Pokalov smiled and joined in.
“Please,” Wragge said to Borodin.
“The general congratulates the squadron on its stunning victories, and is proud to announce that the Bolsheviks have retreated to Orel, which with your help General Denikin will now take on his glorious way to Moscow.”
They waited. “Is that all?” Dextry said.
“What he failed to say is that three battalions of the enemy have shot their officers and deserted to join our ranks, and one Cossack cavalry brigade has tired of retreating and gone home. There are indications of a Bolo collapse.”
“Are there?” Jessop said. “Tell that to Tommy Hopton and Mickey Blythe.”
“We must expect casualties,” the C.O. said. “It’s the price we pay for victory.” Nobody applauded that. It had been a hard day and Wragge wanted to put it behind him. “What are Denikin’s plans?” he said to Borodin. “What does he want of us?”
“Ground-strafing at Orel.”
“Sweet blind O’Reilly,” Jessop said. “Haven’t we done our share of that? Strafing fixed defences is bloody dangerous.”
“Look at it this way,” the C.O. said. “One last Big Push and the enemy’s done for.”
“They told us that in France,” Dextry said. “Told us over and over again.”
“And we won in the end.” Wragge cranked up a smile and shook the general’s hand. “I think champagne is called for, don’t you?”
2
The search parties went out again next morning. The C.O. told the adjutant that he was damned if he would walk away and leave two dead men as if they didn’t matter. The adjutant agreed but, he said, the hard facts had to be faced. “I know, I know,” Wragge said. “A lot of good men vanished in France. Took off, never seen again. Lost. I know that, Uncle. Look, we’ll hold a memorial service of some kind. Get Lacey to sort something out. Noon today.”
The squadron doctor left the train after the morning sick parade and found Borodin waiting in the Chevrolet. “I asked the troops to unload it,” he said. “We could drive around. Might see something.”
“Rubbish. You just want to take me for a ride.”
“I was thinking of the search parties. They might need your professional advice.”
“About what? Two men jumped out of an aeroplane. They’re dead. What else?” She got in the car. “I don’t mind if you lie, all men lie, but don’t fudge the facts.”
He started the engine and they drove away “You sound as if you’ve had a rough morning.”
“I look at hairy, sweaty, male bodies every day, Borodin. How d’you think I feel?”
“Ah, but the men love you, Mrs Perry.”
“Some of them love themselves. There’s a mechanic who keeps coming back because he’s sure he’s ruptured himself, and you know where that usually happens.”
“Lower stomach?”
“Groin. I examine him, he lets out a long groan. He hasn’t got a hernia, but he’s proud of his pathetic manhood.”
“Let me guess. Abnormal.”
“Who cares? Size is an accident of birth. In France, in Forward Casualty Clearing, I saw a hundred naked men a day. Some wanted me to hold their hand, usually the ones who were dying, but nobody ever asked me to measure their genitalia, which was just as well because sometimes there was nothing left to measure.”
That silenced him. They had crossed the field and now he was driving carefully between Scots pines. “Where are we going?” she said.
“Anywhere. I too get tired of the company of men. Especially Englishmen.”
“What’s wrong with them? Apart from phantom hernias.”
“They thought they came to save Russia. Actually they came for the fun of flying aeroplanes at someone else’s expense. Now it’s not such fun and they’re turning sour. Russia’s fault, of course.”
“You sound a little sour yourself.”
He stopped the car beside a huge cypress. It had split down the middle and some branches almost touched the ground. “Do you like climbing trees?”
“Did once.”
“I climbed them with the Tsar. He enjoyed playing hide-and-seek, and he was happiest hiding up a tree. Come on.”
The branches were thick and horizontal and easy to climb. Squirrels fled and poked their heads out to watch the invaders. The doctor and the count found a comfortable perch thirty feet up. “This was a good idea,” she said. “I feel deliciously free. What did you and the Tsar talk about when you were hiding?”
“He told jokes. He wasn’t the Tsar then, onl
y the heir. Nobody laughed in the Imperial court. Too stuffy. I was just a boy, he made me laugh.”
“What sort of jokes?”
“Oh … silly riddles.” He thought. “What do you get when you cross a crocodile with a parrot?”
“Give up.”
“A big surprise when it bites your leg off and says, ‘Who’s a pretty boy, then?’ He found that hilarious. Sometimes he laughed so much that I had to finish telling the joke. Then he’d laugh even more.”
“He sounds like a cheerful chap.”
“He was cheerful when he was hiding. The rotten thing is he couldn’t hide forever, could he?”
“Nobody can. We all have to grow up.” She stroked his jaw. “You know, you’re not bad-looking, for a decadent bastard aristocrat. Have you another name? Apart from …”
“Pierre Alexander Porphyrevich. The last two are after my father. He was also a brilliant chemist. He taught at the St Petersburg School of Medicine for Women. Music and chemistry. Both a complete mystery to me.”
“You have an open mind, Pierre Alexander Thingummy, even if it is absolutely empty.”
“We should be getting back,” he said. “Susan Perry.” They climbed down.
Lacey welcomed the challenge.
His big problem was the absence of coffins and graves. A service needed a focus, a visible memorial. He talked to a flight sergeant and they sketched a wooden plaque, nailed to an upright. “Make it a bit wider,” the flight sergeant said, “and it looks sort of like a cross.”
“Excellent.” Lacey gave him the inscription.
He went to his Pullman, shut his eyes and put himself in the C.O.’s shoes. Then he wrote the eulogy. It took ten minutes: Lacey was fluent under pressure. That left him time to concentrate on the tricky bit, his own poetic contribution. The squadron expected verbal fireworks, and he’d exhausted Rupert Brooke. Lacey reached for his small library of British verse and got down to some serious larceny.
With half an hour to go, the flight sergeant brought him an armourer with a bugle. “The Marines left it behind, sir,” he said. “Miller here says he used to be in a Salvation Army band.” Lacey auditioned him on the spot. “Good enough,” he said. “You’ll close the show. After the rifles.” He inspected the plaque for spelling mistakes and found none, checked the depth of the hole dug by the plennys in the field, and told Wragge the order of battle.
At twelve noon the hollow square had formed. The flight sergeant held the post in its hole, not touching the plaque where the paint was still tacky. Brazier handed Wragge a spade and he shovelled some earth into the hole and gave the spade to an aircrew member who did his bit and passed it on until all the officers had helped erect the sign. Oliphant was last. He tramped the soil down firmly and stood back.
Wragge read aloud the inscription: In Memoriam, Thomas Hopton and Michael Blythe, Merlin Squadron, Royal Air Force, and the date. It was a calm morning, soft sunshine, good haymaking weather back in England. He spoke the lines Lacey had written, about how often in war the phrase Lost in action was used but never more tragically, and splendidly, than in this case. He said that Hopton and Blythe had died fighting and that they had known exactly what they were doing at the end, and it was an ending of great courage. He talked of their pluck and devotion to duty and huge strength of character. “Let this memorial, and this raw earth, be their burial ground,” he said.
Lacey allowed a long pause for the words to fade, and stepped forward and did his best to improve the tone of the occasion.
In our hearts believing
Victory crowns the just,
And that braggarts must
Surely bite the dust.
So bear the brunt and pay glad life’s arrears
Of pain, darkness and fears,
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The blackest minute lies in its grave.
Happy is England in the brave that die
For wrongs not hers and rights that loudly cry;
Happy in those that give, give and endure
The pain that never the new years may cure.
Nor law, nor duty bade them fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds.
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds.
He took a pace back. Three rifle volleys echoed back from the trees. The bugler sounded the “Last Post”. He cracked a couple of notes but nobody remembered that when he held the last, saddest note so sweetly that even Brazier gave a slight nod of approval. That was as good as a standing ovation. Lacey almost smiled.
3
The Camel Flight was getting smaller, so a few bomber crews had been invited to join The Dregs: Tusker Oliphant, Douglas Gunning, Prod Pedlow, Joe Duncan. They were expected to contribute to the conversation. At lunch, after the ceremony, Gunning broke the silence. “Ah, soup,” he said. “I like a drop of soup.”
Nobody added to that.
“Summer’s going fast,” Oliphant said.
“Not in Australia,” Jessop said. “Summer hasn’t begun there.”
“How did you get in the Corps, Junk?” Pedlow asked. “Who did you bribe? I ask because my mentally defective cousin wants a commission.”
“Is he any good at ground-strafing?” Dextry said. “He can have mine.”
“It’s true, about Australia,” Joe Duncan said. “They count backwards, they stand on their heads, and they have very hairy feet. To keep the sun off.”
“How did you get a commission?” Jessop said. “Find it in a Christmas cracker?”
“The thing about summer,” the C.O. said, “it’s getting to the end of the county cricket season, and cricket, I think you’ll agree, is what made Britain great. Any cricket news on your magic box, Lacey?”
“Alas, no.”
“Cricket. Is that the game they play with racquets?” Dextry said.
“You’re thinking of the University Boat Race,” Gunning said. “Who won that, Lacey?”
“Oxford. Or perhaps Cambridge. There was some dispute.”
“I joined a boat club once,” Jessop said, “but it fell apart when we put it in the water.”
“There’s a pint of arsenic in your soup, Junk,” Dextry said. “Drink up while it’s hot.”
“Used the wrong type of glue, you see,” Jessop said. “I joined it but … Never mind.” He stirred his soup. “Where can you get arsenic in Russia?”
“Drink up and I’ll tell you.”
“Nip in the air this morning,” Oliphant said. “Soon be autumn. Rugger season.”
“Not the same as cricket, is it?” Wragge said.
“Flannelled fools or muddied oafs,” Dextry said. “Take your pick.”
Merlin Squadron’s gypsy existence continued. Borodin heard from Denikin’s staff of an abandoned Red air force field about five miles this side of Orel. Wragge got the flights in the air and in tidy formation, and they circled the woods where Hopton and Blythe probably lay: a farewell gesture. They followed the railway north and, surprisingly, Denikin’s staff had forgotten their vranyo because the field was just where they said. Well, even staff officers tripped up occasionally.
The Nines landed. Wragge took the Camels onward to have a squint at Orel. They flew over great numbers of troops, guns, cavalry. Nobody was on the move. The railway was clogged with trains. None had steam up. Orel was safe for today.
The Camels took a good look at it from a thousand feet. Compared with Kharkov and Kursk, this was a small town with pretty little onion domes. The biggest building was the railway station. Orel was a quiet, civilized place where the citizens were too polite to fire guns at visiting aeroplanes.
The C.O. waved the other Camels away and dived hard, pulled out at little more than rooftop height and zigzagged across town, showed off with a vertical banking turn around the onion domes and made his exit on the other side. Some women shook their fists at him. He’d probably woken their sleeping infants. He climbed and picked up the Flight and the
y cruised home. No trade today. Maybe the Bolos had given up. What a swindle.
The train was on the move.
The adjutant, the doctor, Stevens and Lacey were playing whist in The Dregs. The track was in bad shape, and as the train swayed, it jolted the needle back to the start of the gramophone record. “What is that curious music?” Brazier said.
“American ragtime,” Lacey said. “Henry sent it. It’s by a man called Scott Joplin. The tune is “The Entertainer”. Joplin has been called the J.S. Bach of our time, but you don’t think much of Bach, so you won’t like Joplin.”
“On the contrary. His ragtime would make a good regimental march. Stick to ordering groceries, lad. That’s your level.” He played his card and took the trick.
“Chef says we’re nearly out of cheese,” Susan Perry said. “Can’t you order some more?”
“I can order whatever you like,” Lacey said. “But will it arrive? We’re five hundred miles from Taganrog. Any train not guarded by British troops is bound to be looted, probably by our allies.” He took the trick, and played a low club. “I can see your cards, Stevens.”
“They’re dreadful, aren’t they? I was hoping you’d feel sorry for me.”
“Play your six of clubs,” Brazier suggested.
“That card? It’s got jack of hearts written on it.”
A Splendid Little War Page 31