A Splendid Little War

by Derek Robinson

  They carried out a table and two benches. The woman brought chipped glass tumblers and a jug of red wine.

  “She speaks highly of the wine,” Borodin said. “She trod the grapes with her own bare feet.”

  The doctor took a sip. “That was last week,” she said. “The bacteria are dead by now.” She poured, and they drank to each other’s health.

  “I was hoping to find a gentleman’s outfitters,” Jessop said. “My underwear is in absolute tatters.”

  “I don’t think they have that sort of shop here,” Borodin said.

  “Then where do they buy their underwear?”

  “I rather think they don’t. Some member of the family knits it. In winter they sew themselves into a complete set, head to foot, and coat it with bear fat. They wear it until spring. The Russian winter can be brutal.”

  “I can’t imagine you coated in bear fat,” Susan Perry said.

  “Heavens, no. I speak of peasants. My English nanny took care of my underwear. Silk, usually … Hullo, what can we do for you?”

  A man had stopped at their table. Everything about him was ruined. His hair was tangled, his face was bruised and blackened by dried blood, his clothes were torn and stained. His army tunic lacked sleeves and his breeches had split at the seams. He had no shoes. He was trembling. His left arm hung at his side. In his right hand he held a pistol. He made a hoarse and angry statement.

  “He wants our money, or he will shoot us,” Borodin said. “He was wounded fighting the Reds and now nobody cares, he hasn’t eaten in a week, he says give him money or he fires.” He said a few words in Russian and got a grunt for an answer.

  Jessop was suddenly furious. “Listen, you squalid little peasant. I’ve had enough of you ungrateful Russians.” Jessop’s forefinger had been pounding the table. Now he thrust it at the robber. “We came ten thousand miles to risk our lives day in day out so you can live a decent civilized life and Russian rotters like you think you can wave a gun and get what you want. This table isn’t Russia, my friend. This is part of Britain. Put your stupid gun away and clear off.”

  The flood of words made the robber gape. Borodin translated, very briefly.

  “I said a damn sight more than that,” Jessop said.

  “I told him you thought he was an utter cad.”

  The robber mumbled something, and waved his pistol.

  “You have insulted him,” Borodin said, “and he will shoot you first.”

  “I don’t like the way his hand is twitching,” Susan Perry said. At that point the cook appeared with three plates of hot omelettes. The robber salivated so much that he dribbled down his chin. “Tell him to sit down and eat,” she said. Borodin did. The man sat and ate and drank from her glass. His left arm hung uselessly and he ate with his right hand, which meant he had to put down the pistol. Jessop’s hand sneaked across the table and stole it. His caution was wasted. The man had no time for anything but food. The cook watched with interest. Even in vodka dens like hers, customers rarely waved pistols. “More omelettes,” Borodin told her. “More wine.” She went. As the man finished one omelette, Jessop slid another in front of him.

  “He has a very bad abscess on his left arm,” the doctor said. “Unless it’s treated the whole arm could become infected, possibly gangrenous. He must come with us so I can treat it.”

  Borodin translated, and the man cried, although he did not stop eating and drinking. “I think that means he agrees,” Borodin said.

  Ten minutes later, Lacey arrived. “They didn’t have what I wanted, but I drew pictures and they’re getting it for me, later today. What’s wrong with him?” The man was asleep with his head on an empty plate.

  “He held us up.” Jessop waved the pistol. “But I read the riot act to him and he realized the folly of his ways.”

  “He was starving,” Susan Perry said. “We filled him up with omelettes and he conked out. He’s a wounded veteran.”

  “Probably a deserter,” Borodin said. “Who can blame him? Badly armed, badly led, badly fed. But deep down he’s got a heart of gold.”

  “He’ll need a jolly good scrub before you can find it,” Lacey said.

  They drove the man back to the trains. Chef made a platter of sandwiches and he wolfed them while she washed his arm and examined the abscess, swollen red and hard, blue in the centre, where the skin was so thin that she could see the yellow pus beneath, clearly ready to rupture; so she opened it and let the pus escape. This was painful but he didn’t flinch. The sandwiches took his full attention. She finished the treatment, covered the injury with lint soaked in boric-acid solution, bandaged the arm, and told him, through Borodin, to keep the bandages on for a week.

  Borodin gave him back the pistol – Jessop said it was broken anyway and wouldn’t fire – and he drove the patient and Lacey back to Orel. “It was a lot of needless fuss,” he told Lacey. “He waved his gun, and I said we’d give him fifty roubles if he’d stop being a nuisance, and he was happy with that. But Jessop had a fit of indignation and nearly picked a fight.”

  “Pilots,” Lacey said. “Excitable folk. Not you, Count.”

  “No, of course. I have your famous British stiff upper lip. I keep it in an old cigar box.”

  The week passed quickly. The air crews played their own version of polo, riding the ponies and swinging the croquet mallets at croquet balls. There were no rules, and nobody kept score. Perhaps there was no score.

  Wragge and Borodin watched. “We are a sporting nation,” Wragge said. “Reminds me.” He felt in his pockets for a piece of paper. “Meant to ask you. Goolie Chits. Worth doing?”

  Borodin read H.Q.’s signal. “This assumes the finder can read,” he said. “Odds are ten to one against. If he reads, will he understand? Fifty to one. If he understands, will he trust us? A thousand to one.” He folded the paper and gave it back. “This is Russia, Tiger.”

  “Oh, well. We haven’t any gold sovereigns, anyway.”

  The poker school reopened. It had closed when Dextry cleaned everyone else out and said he was keeping the money to show people the folly of gambling and besides, he needed it for his pension. After his crash, Uncle refused to release the money, even for I.O.U.s. Now there was pay to gamble with.

  Lacey bought many sacks of potatoes in Orel market; also eggs, milk, radishes and loaves of black bread as hard as wood. The value of the rouble was tumbling daily and he spent lavishly.

  He stayed in contact with the outside world. Signals from the British Military Mission H.Q. informed him that Captain Butcher had been transferred and that Captain Stokes, Grenadier Guards, would assume his duties.

  “Stokes is a fool,” the adjutant said. “I knew him in France. Wears a hairnet in bed.”

  “He says he needs a complete audit of squadron stores.”

  Brazier grunted. “Stop the war, H.Q. wants to count the bullets.”

  “The impertinence of it. I shall put Master Stokes in his place.”

  While Lacey wrote, Brazier wound up the gramophone and played Scott Joplin records. “Fig Leaf Rag” was good. Sprightly was the word for it. He liked “Magnetic Rag” too, you could imagine the regiment stepping out in style behind a smart band doing its best with “Magnetic Rag”. He wasn’t so keen on “Gladiolus Rag”. Didn’t have the same pep. Might make a slow march.

  Lacey stopped tinkering with his first draft, made a clean copy and showed it to him.

  Squadron is fighting for its life against Bolsheviks by day and tribal warriors of Georgi Godunov by night stop Inflicting heavy casualties stop Instances of gallantry too frequent to mention stop Morale holding good but where is trombone trumpet E flat banjo requested in last signal query stop Regret audit squadron stores impossible while under fire stop Suspect Red high command are intercepting signals stop If s o suggest communicate in Welsh Gaelic Portuguese Cherokee stop Squadron Leader T. Wragge Officer Commanding.

  Brazier read it. “The C.O. is losing his wits.”

  “The strain of battle.” />
  “If Stokes comes here to see for himself you’re skewered.”

  “We’re hundreds of miles by rail from H.Q. Two days’ travel, at least. Stokes won’t leave Taganrog.”

  Brazier yawned, and returned the paper, holding it by a corner between finger and thumb. “I’ve seen officers court-martialled for less than this. The war isn’t made so that you can write your Comic Cuts.” He put on his cap and picked up his blackthorn stick.

  “You may be right, Uncle,” Lacey said. “But if not for Comic Cuts, then what is it for?” Brazier didn’t stay to argue.

  2

  The C.O. sat in his Pullman and wondered how to improve the success of his Camels.

  Height and surprise were always a good start. If the Camel Flight could claw its way up to, say, eleven thousand, and place itself between the sun and the enemy, there was a good chance of surprising a formation at, say, eight thousand. The Camel was a small aeroplane. Even four might well get lost in the dazzle. But when the Camels dived for a great distance, they built up a great speed, at least a hundred and fifty miles an hour or more. Some said two hundred.

  That’s where the trouble began.

  Controlling the plunge became progressively harder. If the airflow started to spin the propeller faster than the power of the engine to turn it, the entire Le Rhône rotary might fail, might even blow up. Or the propeller might fly off and shatter. So – no long, full-blooded dive. It must be held in check.

  Even so, the guns were aimed by aiming the aircraft, and the Camels would reach the enemy at a speed that gave their pilots only brief seconds to fire before they must alter course. What’s more, their targets would not be steady as a rock, they would be swerving and sliding out of the gunsights. Next, their dive would put the Camels below the target. Now the enemy had the advantage of height.

  Wragge drew sketches of an interception. He closed his eyes and imagined the sequence of events, again and again. Always the Camels were too fast, always they had too little time. An idea presented itself so clearly that it had obviously been waiting patiently to be summoned from a corner of his brain.

  He sent for Jessop and Borodin.

  “See what you think of this,” he said. He had a sharp pencil and a fresh sheet of paper. “Here we are, high, lurking in the sun. Some Bolo machines appear below us, here. We let them fly on, and then we follow after them and dive, not at the enemy but behind him. Two or three hundred yards behind, where he’s still unlikely to see us. We continue with the dive until we’re below them and going in the same direction, and we pull out, use our speed to climb hard, bloody hard, almost vertically, so we’re pointing at their bellies. As we stall, we fire. Or, if you prefer, we fire as we stall. And keep firing as they fly through our bullet-stream. Then we fall out of the stall and the enemy, we hope, falls to pieces.”

  “And he never even saw us,” Borodin said. “In theory.”

  Jessop traced with his finger the final part of the Camels’ dive and their climb into a stall. “That’s the trick,” he said. “Getting that bit right.”

  “Distances are crucial,” Borodin said. “If we dive too far behind the target we might not catch it because it’s flying away. Dive too near and we might climb and overshoot it. This distance …” He took the pencil and drew a line from the start of the climb to the stall. “That must be exactly right.”

  “We’ll practise,” the C.O. said. “The Nines can be Bolos.”

  It took a long day’s work to find the right formula.

  The Nines cruised at four thousand and the Camels attacked from five thousand, sometimes more. Wragge experimented with angles and speeds of dive and distances of climb. Sometimes the Camels stalled too soon. Sometimes they stalled at the right height but the Nines were no longer there.

  They landed, ate lunch, and went up again, this time to eight thousand for the Nines and nearly ten for the Camels. Here the air was thinner and every action had to be adjusted. But at 3.45 p.m. they made the perfect, speedy, unseen interception and all three Camels hung in the air, aiming at the silhouettes of the Nines close above them, and then fell away. Everyone landed. Wragge had his formula in his head.

  He knew it wouldn’t last. Combat without violence was a nonsense, and violence had a way of making fools of planners. And the enemy wouldn’t cruise up and down as placidly as Tusker Oliphant’s Nines. But Merlin Squadron had not performed well lately, indeed not since Griffin vanished in a fit of futility; and Wragge wanted to do something they could all feel proud of.

  They had tea. Chef had baked muffins, which were ideal with the Gentleman’s Relish that Lacey had found in the bottom of a crate of tinned marmalade.

  A locomotive arrived, pulling nothing but carrying a lieutenant from Denikin’s staff. The squadron’s aid was requested. The White advance had been checked at a river between Orel and Tula, where the Red Army presented an unusually strong defence. Denikin’s armies would attack, of course, and scatter the enemy, an excellent opportunity for ground-strafing and bombing. A suitable landing field had been identified, six miles behind the lines. It was unmistakeable: three large flags had been erected in the middle of the field.

  Wragge thanked the lieutenant, asked him to have the flags reerected at the edge of the field, and said he hoped to arrive before sunset. The locomotive carried the lieutenant back to the battle.

  Next morning it rained, the first interference with Wragge’s formula. Cloud, as grey and woolly as an old blanket, didn’t help either: it shut out the sky at two thousand feet.

  The ground crews tested the engines, mopped out the cockpits, kept the bombs and bullets in the dry until ordered to arm. Everyone could hear the battle, rumbling away, six miles to the north. The adjutant listened. “Heavy artillery,” he said. “Red or White, impossible to say. Maybe both. God help the Poor Bloody Infantry.”

  Wragge and Oliphant sat over a pot of coffee in The Dregs. “This muck isn’t going to clear,” Wragge said. “Even if it does, your target must be the Red big guns.”

  “They’ll chuck all kinds of filth at us, there’s no escaping that. I mean, I hope to hell we do escape. Where will you be?”

  “Upstairs as usual. On guard duty.”

  Oliphant looked at the raindrops hurrying down the window. “We’ll make one run and hare for home,” he said. “And if any Nine gets shot down by Denikin’s idiots I shall be very cross.”

  An hour later they were all in the air, the Nines leading the Camels, everyone just skimming the cloud base. The battle lines were obvious, despite the rain: the flash and smoke of many artillery pieces, the massing of troops behind what were probably fords in the river, cavalry lurking, shell craters appearing in a burst of smoke: it was the same on either side of the river. This was the biggest clash of arms the squadron had seen since Tsaritsyn. As the Nines crossed the river, Oliphant took his Flight up into the cloud.

  Wragge cruised on. The cloud base was far more ragged than it seemed from the ground, and the Camels buffeted through these thick tatters. Ground fire contributed a scattering of hopeful ink-blots but the guns couldn’t find the height and they soon gave up. Windscreens were opaque with rain and the pilots didn’t even bother with goggles. All that mattered was the steady, friendly roar of a Le Rhône rotary.

  Wragge kept an eye on the time. After two minutes, as planned, the Nines reappeared, widely scattered as he knew they must be. They flew a wide half-circle while they formed up in line astern. Oliphant began the long dive towards the Red positions. The Nine was a heavy biplane and heavily loaded with bombs. Weight and height combined to build speed to its maximum. Oliphant hoped it would see his Flight safely home.

  The Camels watched. No Red aircraft were in sight. Not surprising. How could the enemy know exactly when the Nines would raid? But gunners on the ground, heavy-machine-gunners, light artillery, had ample time to see the line of Nines, flying fast but getting lower, and just as Oliphant knew they would, they chucked all kinds of filth at him.

  His head w
as out in the stinging gale of rain, his eyes clenched to slits, trying not to blink as he searched for big guns worth bombing. He saw a battery off to his left just as it fired, and he jinked the Nines to correct their approach. He dropped his whole load in one thankful happy high-explosive goodbye and enjoyed his bomber’s little leap of relief, and zigzagged out of this madhouse.

  Wragge waited until all the Nines had bombed and he climbed into the cloud.

  It was mysterious stuff, grey and gloomy, seemingly shapeless but populated with swirls and gusts that made an aeroplane drop or bounce or swerve. Some pilots hated cloud, refused to believe their instruments, feared that the cloud would never end, panicked and dived to escape. Sometimes they fell into clean air upside-down and hit a hilltop before they could recover their wits. Wragge knew that trust was the only way to beat cloud. Trust the instruments, trust the altimeter, trust the fact that he’d done it before and it worked. He ignored his senses and his Camel burst into a dazzling world of sun and an outrageous amount of blue sky.

  Jessop and Borodin followed, nowhere near him. They came together and searched the sky. Empty. They were at three thousand five hundred. Wragge took them up until he knew their propellers were clawing at the air, just short of ten thousand feet above an earth lost below cloud so white and so widespread that it defeated the eyes.

  They settled down to watch and to wait. They flew around a large invisible box: every five minutes Wragge turned them ninety degrees to the left, which meant that every twenty minutes they ended where they had begun, two miles high and alone in an immensity of air.

  Jessop didn’t like it. He was cold, his neck ached, he got bored easily even on patrols where you could see the ground, so this nothingness in every direction made time pass awfully slowly. He made a bored face at Borodin, and Borodin smiled back and gave a jolly wave. Jessop scowled. What had bloody Borodin got to be so bloody happy about?

  Borodin asked himself that question. It was a very long time since he had experienced happiness. Now, out of the blue – literally so, he was surrounded by the blue – a small rush of happiness had surprised him. Perhaps it was caused by a sense of escape. When he was on earth, nothing raised his spirits. His country was tearing itself apart, and both sides deserved to lose. Up here he was free from Russia and its suicidal folly. Not for long. Enjoy it while you can.