A Splendid Little War

by Derek Robinson

  The cruiser sailed two hours later. Oliphant and Brazier stood at the rail, watching Novo fade away. “Well, Uncle, that was an utter shambles,” Oliphant said. “I can’t see that we did the slightest bit of good to anyone. If anything, we just helped to make a total balls-up of their whole stupid war.”

  “There’s a useful lesson to be learned,” Brazier said. “Interfere in someone else’s family quarrel and you’ll always end up with a bloody nose. And you’ll get no thanks.”

  “I’ll try to remember that, Uncle.”

  “Nobody else will, Tusker. The interfering will go on. And so will the bloody noses. You watch.”

  4

  It was raining in London; had been raining all day. Outside 10 Downing Street the policemen’s capes shone like polished lead. Lloyd George was in Geneva, lucky chap, putting in an appearance at talks about the League of Nations. Jonathan Fitzroy took the opportunity to hold a small sherry party at Number 10. It was an occasion to convey the P.M.’s gratitude to the Sub-Committee on Russia. Former Sub-Committee. It had ceased to be, through force of circumstances. But Fitzroy had a tidy mind, and a word of thanks cost nothing.

  “Never knew such a summer,” Sir Franklyn said; “I felt sorry for the county cricketers. Season’s been a washout.”

  “The Times says there are floods in America,” Fitzroy said. “Of course, there are always floods somewhere in America.”

  “One place you don’t want to be is Russia,” General Stattaford said. “Freezing snow from now until spring.” Silence. Nobody wanted to talk about Russian weather. “All our troops got out before winter,” he said. “British Army knows how to extricate its men. Point of pride.”

  “Not all,” Charles Delahaye said.

  “Brace yourselves,” Weatherby said. “The Treasury is going to bombard us with statistics.”

  “And money,” Delahaye said. “Widows’ pensions, for example. Maintenance of military cemeteries. The Army left 526 men buried in North Russia alone. I can give you the figures for the other campaigns, the Caspian area for instance, and the men we sent to aid Denikin, and the Siberian wars …”

  “Some other time, perhaps,” Fitzroy said.

  “Then there’s the Royal Navy,” Delahaye said. “The Treasury takes a keen interest in sailors. Warships are costly to replace.”

  “Undoubtedly,” Fitzroy said. “But we reviewed that very carefully, didn’t we? The Kronstadt affair, Lieutenant Agar V.C., splendid stuff. We lost a few motor boats, am I right?”

  “Not entirely. By July of 1919 the Royal Navy had an average of eighty-eight warships and auxiliaries in the Baltic, at no little cost. They lost seventeen ships, including a cruiser, two destroyers and a submarine. Thirty-five officers and 128 men were killed.”

  “What’s your point?” Stattaford said, sharply.

  “Simply that our Intervention in the internal affairs of another nation came at a price.”

  “We were never publicly at war,” Sir Franklyn said. “Now we are very publicly at peace with the Soviets. Lloyd George deserves a little credit for his secrecy.”

  “Denikin might have won,” Stattaford said stubbornly.

  “So what?” Weatherby said. “The Kaiser might have won. That’s not what the history books will say, is it?”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Fitzroy said. “Please. Let us not bicker. The matter is over and done with. General, let me give you more sherry.”

  There was silence while he topped up their glasses.

  “Now we have nothing to talk about,” Weatherby said. “Except the bloody awful weather, and we’ve done that.”

  “Perhaps the matter is not yet quite finished,” Sir Franklyn said. “Who will write the Official History of the Intervention?” He looked hard at Fitzroy. “Surely the question has arisen.”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “And is that because you don’t know, or because you’ve been told to stonewall?”

  Fitzroy spread his hands. “I’m not at liberty to say that either.” They laughed, except for Sir Franklyn, who gave a wintry smile.

  “There won’t be an Official History, will there?” he said. “You needn’t answer that. You already have.”

  Weatherby looked at his watch. “I have a train to catch.”

  Delahaye shared a taxi with him. General Stattaford chose to walk.

  Fitzroy was helping Sir Franklyn into his greatcoat, and finding his umbrella, when Sir Franklyn said: “Just imagine that Russia, France, America, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and a few more – Canadians, Serbs, Chinese – imagine that they all sent armed forces into Britain at different points, in order to decide our form of government. Can you imagine that?”

  “Scarcely.”

  “And if they did what I’ve said, and if we defeated them, how long would it take the British people to forget this?”

  “Oh … generations. Perhaps never.”

  “Just a thought. Goodnight, Mr Fitzroy.” He put on his hat, stepped outside and opened his umbrella, and walked into the night.

  AFTERWARDS

  Every record of Merlin Squadron’s operations in Russia was burnt when the British Military Mission left Taganrog. All of Lacey’s signals, including his exchanges with Captain Butcher about elephant guns and with Captain Stokes about jazz-band instruments, were lost. He kept copies of his fabricated verse eulogies, thinking that they might, one day, be useful for his memoirs.

  The squadron disembarked the cruiser at Portsmouth. Most of the ground crew, with their valuable skills, stayed in the R.A.F. Brazier returned to his old regiment, soon grew dissatisfied with peacetime soldiering, and applied for a posting to Palestine, which was now a British Protectorate. He became expert at leading small groups of soldiers in night-time raids on Arab terrorists. In 1935 he was shot dead in one such raid, and was awarded a posthumous Bar to his Military Cross.

  Tusker Oliphant left the R.A.F. and worked as a flying instructor at a civil aerodrome. His patience and his calm authority made him popular with students. For many years he organized an annual reunion of members of Merlin Squadron.

  Tiger Wragge was offered a job as an R.A.F. test pilot, and took it, on the understanding that he would be free to fly in international air races. His successes in these events won him some public fame. In 1931 he was testing the prototype of a new fighter aircraft when it disintegrated at low level and he was killed.

  Junk Jessop left the service and sold Ford cars in London. Later he grew a moustache in the style made fashionable by Douglas Fairbanks Jr (he slightly resembled the actor) and moved up to selling Bentleys. His ghosted memoirs of the Russian war were a minor success, but when the Special Branch questioned him about a breach of the Official Secrets Act he moved to Australia.

  The R.A.F. had no use for Borodin, and Susan Perry made it clear that they could never be more than friends. She went back to nursing at Guy’s Hospital and let him stay in her flat until he found a job. Within weeks he married an American film actress who was in London recovering from a divorce. He went with her to Hollywood. When she divorced him he made a career in movies, playing supporting roles as a suave but dangerous Englishman. Susan Perry qualified as a doctor, married a farmer and never regretted it.

  Air Ministry terminated Lacey’s commission as an acting pilot officer, so he left the Services. He enjoyed the period of freedom, then became bored and invested his savings in a series of high-risk ventures – night clubs, films, new plays. All failed. In 1923 he re-joined the Army and served in the Pay Corps. In 1925 he vanished, together with a large amount of the Army’s money. He was never arrested. In 1933, ex-Sergeant Stevens met him on a train in France. “He asked me if I thought there would be another war,” Stevens recalled. “I told him it looked likely. He sounded rather nostalgic.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A Splendid Little War is fiction based on fact. The reader is entitled to know which is which.

  In brief: the characters are invented but the broad sweep of events is
true.

  In 1919, Britain did indeed send military forces from all three Services to support the White armies of General Denikin and Admiral Kolchak against the Bolshevik armies led by Lenin and Trotsky. General Wrangel commanded the White Army in the battle for Tsaritsyn (soon to be renamed Stalingrad, and to be fought over in another war) but in this narrative his remarks are invented.

  In 1919, Lloyd George was the British Prime Minister and Winston Churchill was his Minister of War. Churchill was obsessed with destroying Bolshevism; Lloyd George was willing to back Denikin and Kolchak while claiming, piously, not to interfere in Russia’s right to decide its own government, a piece of double-think that fooled nobody.

  Jonathan Fitzroy’s Advisory Committee on the Intervention in Russia is invented, as are its members: Charles Delahaye, General Stattaford, James Weatherby and Sir Franklyn Fletcher. However, the events that they discuss are true. For example, when Weatherby speaks of mutinies by British Army units in Luton, London and Calais, he is referring to actual events. Similarly, discussion of the Irish problem, or the Royal Navy’s successes at Kronstadt, or the campaign to hang the Kaiser, and many more, are all based on fact.

  The Royal Air Force raised new squadrons as part of the Intervention. These flew Camels, DH9s and other aircraft, left over from World War One and showing their age. My accounts of their performance in combat are as accurate as I could make them. An R.A.F. squadron fought in the battle for Tsaritsyn, and it made the long journey – first westward, to Taganrog, and then north for some eight hundred kilometres, to Orel – in support of Denikin’s fast-moving assault, before retreating an even greater distance, to Novorossisk and evacuation by the Royal Navy. However, Merlin Squadron is my invention and none of its officers and men is based on actual R.A.F. personnel. The same applies to Count Borodin and to other Russian officers.

  Some incidents in the narrative may seem bizarre or improbable. Was there a Russian religious cult, known as the Skoptsi, whose members self-mutilated in accordance with the teaching in Matthew, chapter 19? There was indeed. And it is true that the British Military Mission H.Q. in Russia issued each aircrew officer with a phial of morphine, both for medical treatment and as a last resort if captured; similarly; ‘Goolie Chits’ were attached to aircraft in India. Both Red and White armies routinely shot any enemy officers they captured, just as units that mutinied or deserted usually shot their own officers. Details of the elaborate banquet to mark the fall of Tsaritsyn are typical of Russian celebrations in those days.

  The part played by the London Scottish Regiment in the Somme offensive is based on fact but Colonel Kenny V.C. is fiction. On the other hand, Lieutenant Agar V.C. did indeed lead the M.T.B.s that destroyed the Soviet fleet in Kronstadt; similarly, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson did command a battalion of the Hampshire Regiment in Siberia, where he came to regard the situation as “pretty hopeless”, and led a dozen soldiers in the extraordinary journey to Archangel, which I have described.

  My accounts of Nicholas II – first as a happy youth, then a reluctant Tsar, lastly as a disastrous Commander-in-Chief – follow the facts, as does Rasputin’s success with ladies of the nobility. Nestor Makhno’s Anarchist Brigade was a brutal reality in 1919, and the sad inadequacies of Russian hospital trains were all too true: disease, especially typhus, was rife. The vast wine cellars, used by Denikin to fund his treasury, existed, although not exactly where I located them. Another detail: the idea of decorating a ceiling with black footprints was not invented by aircrew in World War Two; it began a generation earlier.

  The Royal Navy kept a large fleet in the Baltic, enjoyed victories and suffered casualties, mainly from mines; and Lloyd George did indeed – briefly and secretly – declare war on Soviet Russia. At the other extreme, Susan Perry’s pragmatic embalming technique reflects the methods of the time. The scale of official corruption at all levels, and especially the theft of British aid to Denikin, was as great as I indicate, and possibly greater; it was a large reason for his ultimate failure.

  I have tried to do justice to the qualities of the Russian armies, both White and Red. The truth was enormously complicated. This book is primarily about the experiences of an R.A.F. squadron, living in trains and often isolated from the population, and so the picture of the wider campaigns must be sketchy, and – for purposes of narrative convenience – somewhat telescoped.

  What they discovered about the Russian military – that it could be both brave and incompetent, resolute and corrupt, loyal and treacherous, long-suffering and thoughtless – left the R.A.F. officers baffled and bewildered. Atrocities were committed by both sides. Nichevo and vranyo played a real part in Russian life, and for all I know they still do. In the end, my reported comment of the bomber pilot who wished that both sides would lose reflected the views of many who served in the Intervention.

  Life on an R.A.F. squadron in the Intervention was a strange mixture of bloody combat and a summer holiday in the countryside. They travelled by train, in some comfort, with plennys acting as batmen. Often the surroundings were pleasant, and an officer might take his horse and go shooting or fishing. They were nominally part of a White army, but in fact they were largely independent and a long way from British Mission H.Q. In those circumstances, it is not altogether surprising that a squadron might realize that Moscow was within range and plan to bomb it. This plan did, in fact, take shape. It seemed an obvious and desirable step to take in a war. Moscow had been the goal all along. It was the enemy’s H.Q. If it could be hit, why not hit it? When Mission H.Q., and then London, firmly refused permission, this must have seemed to the squadron a foolish decision. In London’s eyes, it was a wise precaution. The Russian Civil War was not yet won and lost. There was no merit in impetuous gestures.

  There can be no doubt that the Intervention left Russia feeling threatened on all sides. After World War Two – when 1919 was only a generation ago – the Iron Curtain had one great merit from the Soviet point of view: it defended Russia’s borders against attack. In 1957 Nikita Khrushchev, on a visit to the United States, declared: “All the capitalist countries of Europe and America marched on our country to strangle the new revolution … Never have any of our soldiers been on American soil, but your soldiers were on Russian soil. Those are the facts.” The Intervention of 1919 cast a long shadow.

  None of this can be confirmed or refuted by reading an Official History of the Intervention, because that work was never written (or, if written, was never published). No doubt Lloyd George’s government saw nothing but embarrassment in detailing the decision-making behind a venture that was costly in blood and money at a time when Britain could afford neither, and which ended in total failure. Compared with other campaigns, few first-hand accounts of the Intervention survive. The Day We Almost Bombed Moscow, by Christopher Dobson and John Miller (Hodder & Stoughton, 1986) tells the story of that incident and of many other facets of the Intervention. Two sets of memoirs by serving officers are very revealing. Farewell to the Don (Collins, 1970) is the journal of Brigadier H.N.H. Williamson, an artilleryman whose task was to advise and instruct Denikin’s armies. He travelled widely and saw both the best and the worst of the Russian soldier. Last Train Over Rostov Bridge (Cassell, 1962) is by Captain Marion Aten D.F.C., whose squadron flew Camels in many combats against the Red air force. They arrived in Russia full of enthusiasm and left it, months later, a lot wiser and not sorry to get out. The immediacy of their experience makes their accounts invaluable reading. Of other books on the subject, The Victors’ Dilemma: Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War, by John Silverlight (Barrie & Jenkins, 1970) is scholarly and invaluable.

  Any factual errors, of course, are down to me.

  D.R.

  DEREK ROBINSON writes about wartime flying and flyers better than anyone else. Yet there is more to his novels than the air combat of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force. There is a rich cast of characters for whom humour comes as naturally as breathing. It is this combination – men who take nothi
ng seriously except flying – that makes Robinson one of the outstanding storytellers of his day.

  He says that he owes much to luck. The Education Act of 1944 let him jump the class barrier and escape a Bristol housing estate for Cambridge. He read Modern History (which inexplicably ended in 1914) and escaped again to advertising agencies in London and New York. He escaped a third time to write two long and unpublishable novels, and finally, at the age of thirty-nine, got it right. Goshawk Squadron was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1971. It made enough money to finance the next novel. The rest is ink, sweat and tears …