Hornet’s Sting

by Derek Robinson

  “I’m told you’re here to get experience on Pups,” he said.

  “No. Here to kill German pilots,” the duke said. “I promise Tsar I kill twenty-five by Easter. I swear this on crucifix of Tsar.”

  “Duke Nikolai is distant cousin of Tsar,” the count said.

  “And Count Andrei is distant cousin of me. Tsar chose us. We pledge our blood, which is also blood of cousin, Holy Emperor the Tsar.”

  “My goodness.” Ogilvy felt a need to keep pace with all this loyalty. “How is the Tsar?” he asked.

  “Very tired,” the duke said. “He carries pain and suffering of Holy Russia on his back.”

  “Also in right shoulder some rheumatism, I think,” the count said.

  The discussion left them silent and brooding. Ogilvy said briskly: “Well, I’m sure you’ll soon settle in here. A servant will be allocated to you and then —”

  “Two servants,” the duke said.

  “One shared servant is customary.”

  “Not in Imperial Russian Air Force. Two servants each.”

  “The British Army has definite rules.”

  “Not in Imperial Russian Air Force.”

  “I’m afraid my hands are tied.”

  “Not in Imperial Russian Air Force.”

  Their bodies had stiffened, their faces were blank. “Need two servants,” the count said. “Otherwise filth and squalor. Insult to Tsar.”

  “Put your hats on,” Ogilvy said. “We’ll see the C.O. about it.” They put their caps on and saluted. “Not now,” he said. They looked at each other. “Never mind,” he said.

  It was a long walk to Cleve-Cutler’s office. Halfway there, the duke pointed out that their boots were already very muddy. “Need servants in war,” he said.

  “Tell me something,” Ogilvy said. “Why didn’t you speak English when you were at Wing H.Q., with Colonel Bliss?”

  “Wing said nothing worth answer.”

  “Ah. I should have thought of that.” They plodded on in silence.

  Cleve-Cutler was polite but firm: officers of junior rank were entitled to half a servant each. The Russians thought this absurd: how could an officer be shaved by half a servant? What would the other half do? What if both officers needed immediate attention? “One must wait,” the C.O. said.

  “Not in Imperial Russian Air Force,” the duke said.

  “This is the Royal Flying Corps.” The C.O. sent for the adjutant. Captain Brazier came with a well-thumbed copy of King’s Regulations. The duke pointed out that King George V was a first cousin of Tsar Nicholas II because their mothers were sisters. What was more, the Tsarina Alexandra was also a cousin of King George, both being grandchildren of Queen Victoria. He himself, as Duke of Dolgorankov etcetera, was a cousin of the Tsar and therefore a part of the British royal family.

  “Bully for you, lad,” Brazier said. “But it earns you no special privileges here.”

  “King’s Regulations,” said the count, picking up the book and slamming it shut, “cannot regulate king.”

  The discussion went on for half an hour. Cleve-Cutler didn’t want to impose his rank, but the Russians seemed ready to argue all day. The longer they talked, the more chopped and staccato their speech became. In the end, he offered a compromise: one servant each now, and a second each when it could be arranged.

  They talked in Russian, long enough for the adjutant to clean and assemble his pipe.

  “Is agreed,” the duke said. He and the count stood, put their caps on, saluted, and left.

  “God’s bollocks!” the C.O. roared. “And that’s positively my last word on the subject.”

  * * *

  Ogilvy took the Russians into a hangar and showed them a Pup engine on a workbench.

  “As you can see, it’s a rotary,” he said. “Now —”

  “Is too small,” the duke said.

  “Well, rotary engines don’t have to be big. A rotary doesn’t work like a car engine, what we call an ‘in-line’. An in-line engine is fixed to the frame and the cylinders go up and down and make the crankshaft go round and round, which turns the wheels. Well, forget all that. A rotary engine is totally different. The crankshaft is fixed to the front of the aeroplane. See?” He showed them a Pup with no engine. The crankshaft stuck out like the stub of a unicorn’s horn. “Won’t turn. Can’t turn. What turns is the engine. The entire engine whizzes round the crankshaft. All nine cylinders.”

  They moved on to a Pup from which the cowlings had been removed to expose the engine. “The propeller is bolted to the engine. When the engine turns, the propeller turns. Turn it fast enough and the machine flies. See for yourself.”

  The duke cautiously pulled the propeller through a half-circle. The engine breathed as the pistons slid in their chambers, and one after the other the pushrods opened and shut the outlet valves.

  “Exhaust comes out there,” Ogilvy said. “Now look: petrol and air and oil arrive here, at the back, and they go in there, into the heart of the beast. Petrol and air mix and vaporise and the mixture gets into the cylinders by some technical magic that needn’t bother you now. The oil does not mix, because it’s castor oil, and it’s needed to lubricate the bearings. The bearings are what make it possible for the engine to whizz round and round at a phenomenal rate. There’s a magneto here that feeds the plug that makes the spark that fires the mixture that kick-starts the cylinder that ... But you understand all that.”

  “No,” the duke said.

  “Which bit?”

  “All.”

  Ogilvy took them through it all again, twice. No flicker of understanding showed. He decided to move on.

  He went through the pre-flight routine. “Test the struts. The struts are all you’ve got to hold the top wing to the bottom wing. Test the wires.” He plucked one and made it sing. “Count the wheels. Check the control surfaces.” He reached into the cockpit and jiggled the joystick. “If your elevators go down when you want them up, then maybe some dozy rigger has got the cables crossed. Maybe he lost a screwdriver in your fuselage. Always check that things move correctly. It’s your life. Not his. Understand?”

  The duke nodded. “Now we fly?”

  “No. Now we start the engine. Flying the Pup is easy. She flies like a bird. Making the engine do what you want is the problem. Treat it nicely and it’ll be nice to you. Treat it badly and it’ll sulk. Might even cut out. Just think: there’s a Hun on your tail. You’ve been beastly to your engine. It stops. Silence. What do you hear next?”

  “Nothing,” the count said. “Dead.”

  For the first time, Ogilvy felt slightly encouraged. He led them through the start-up routine.

  Pressure in the petrol tank pumped up to 2½ pounds per square inch. Check the magneto switch is off, the fuel lever closed, the air lever closed. Mechanic turns propeller and squirts a little fuel into each cylinder as its exhaust valve opens. Main petrol tap on. Mechanic gets prop into a comfortable position for swinging. Now the tricky bit: setting the air and petrol levers. They control the mixture going into the cylinders. Set the air lever first. The exact point on the quadrant depends on the weather. A cold day – make it halfway. Warm day, a bit less. Leave the fuel lever alone. Check the petrol tank pressure again. Too high and she’ll never start, no matter what you do. Your mechanic says, ‘Switch on,’ and you switch on the magneto and say, ‘Contact,’ and he swings the prop. With luck she fires at once and goes straight up to maximum revs.

  “And that’s the point where you do absolutely nothing,” Ogilvy said.

  They nodded. “Is not difficult,” the duke said.

  “Is very difficult. It’s very tempting to open the fuel lever when she fires. Fatal. Do that and you flood the engine and it dies. You must wait. Wait while the prime – that’s the petrol that got squirted into the cylinders – the prime gets burned off. When you hear the engine start to cut, gently bring up the fuel lever, always behind the air lever. The fuel takes a second or two to reach the cylinders. Don’t worry. The e
ngine’s spinning like a flywheel. You’ve got time. She’ll pick up.”

  “Where is gun?” the duke asked.

  Ogilvy thought he misheard. “Where is what?”

  “Gun. For killing Hun.”

  Ogilvy shut one eye and looked up at the rafters. “Forget gun,” he said. “First we’ll attempt a start-up.”

  A Pup was waiting outside the hangar. Ogilvy told the duke to put on his helmet and goggles. A mechanic guided his boot into the footstep cut into the fuselage, and helped him into the seat. Ogilvy took the duke through the start-up sequence again. “Tighten your goggles,” he said. “Really tight.” The mechanic primed the cylinders. “Check fuel pressure,” Ogilvy said. “And don’t rush it.” He walked away

  “Switch on.”

  The duke switched on. “Is contact,” he said.

  The mechanic swung the prop and the engine exploded into life like a small bomb. Black smoke blasted out and was instantly hurled back. In seconds the propeller had reached more than a thousand revs a minute and the whole machine was rocking and shaking and threatening to rotate the opposite way. The noise was painful; brutal. Prop-wash hammered the grass flat. The Pup’s wheels shuddered against their chocks. The duke’s goggles got ripped off by the gale and vanished. And then the engine quit. A fragile silence returned, scared out of its wits.

  “You rushed it,” Ogilvy said.

  The duke climbed down. His eyes were watering and he dabbed them with a silk handkerchief.

  “I told you to wait for her to use up the prime,” Ogilvy said. “You didn’t wait.”

  The duke spoke in Russian to the count. They walked to the nose and examined what they could see of the engine. It stank of petrol. Petrol dribbled from an open exhaust valve.

  Ogilvy had gone to look inside the cockpit. The switch was still on; he turned it off. The fuel lever was fully forward. “You drowned the poor bitch.” He ducked underneath the wing. “Have you ever flown a rotary-engined scout?”

  A mechanic was handing the duke his goggles. “Never,” the count said.

  “Never. I see. Look: you are pilots, aren’t you?”

  “Not pilots,” the duke said. One lens of his goggles was broken; he poked his finger through it.

  “Captains of aeroplane,” the count explained. “In Imperial Russian Air Force, sergeant is pilot. Officer is observer. And captain.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Ogilvy said. He kicked a wheel.

  “Like navy,” the duke said. “Captain does not steer ship.”

  “So you’ve only flown in two-seaters?”

  “Russian two-seaters best in world.”

  “But our Pups are single-seaters.”

  The Russians looked at each other and shrugged. Ogilvy went in search of Cleve-Cutler.

  * * *

  Next day, the War Office sent an Avro 504 to Pepriac. The 504 was a stable, docile two-seater and the R.F.C.’s best trainer. With it came an instructor and two mechanics and a truckload of spares.

  For the next two weeks the Russians took turns to cruise round and round the airfield while the elements of flying were hammered into them. When it was too wet to fly, they sat in a Pup and taxied it the length of the field. Airmen in shining oilskins turned it, and then ran alongside and kept the wingtips from scraping the ground as it was taxied to the other end. When it was too wet and windy for that, the Russians walked to the butts and fired a Vickers machine gun until it was so hot that rain sizzled on its barrel.

  On the tenth day, the instructor telephoned Colonel Bliss. “I can’t make them any better, sir,” he said.

  “Then they might as well solo,” Bliss said. “Don’t call me again unless they kill themselves.”

  Cleve-Cutler had the two oldest, most patched-up Pups in the squadron fuelled and ready. This was standard routine for new pilots; pointless wasting good equipment on novices. Everyone turned out to watch. Nothing morbid about that. All pilots took a professional interest in the ability of someone who might soon be flying in tight formation with them. The Hun was not the only killer in the sky.

  The Russians survived their solo flights in Pups. The ambulance and the crash-wagon drove away. The pilots went back indoors.

  “Congratulations,” Ogilvy said.

  “Where is gun?” Duke Nikolai asked.

  “We take it off for solo flights, in case you hit your head on the butt.”

  “Hit Hun with gun. Not head.”

  “Come and have a drink.”

  By now they were popular in the mess. They brightened up the rainy days. The duke played Russian ragtime on the piano: some of his bars had more beats than others, some had fewer, but this only added to the novelty. He liked poker. He played fast, gambled with total unpredictability, and won and lost with equal relish. He favoured a Russian variation which he called blind poker: if a player never looked at his cards until the hand was finished, and he won, then the pot was doubled. “Rasputin taught me,” he said.

  “The Mad Monk?” said Simms. “Did you know him?”

  “Godfather. Very hairy, very smelly. Had three balls.” It wasn’t easy to silence the mess, but Nikolai achieved it. “Is one franc to play.” He shuffled the pack. “From Siberia. Empress Alexandra saw Rasputin, thought: ah! is special. Like Jesus Christ had no navel. Because of Virgin Birth.”

  Simms said, “I can’t imagine that sort of carry-on in England. If our local vicar started playing fast and loose, the bishop would have him on the carpet, pronto.”

  “Look here,” Munday said to Nikolai. “Are you sure you got that right, about Christ not having a navel?” Nikolai shrugged.

  “Bishop has vicar on carpet?” Andrei said.

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a belly button in paintings,” Munday said.

  “On carpet.” Andrei was still puzzled. “Is maybe penance?”

  “It’s a figure of speech,” Hamilton said. He was awkward, and he understood little of the conversation, so he forced himself to say something or he would have felt completely excluded. “I met the Archbishop of Canterbury once,” he added, daringly.

  “That’s nothing. I bumped into St Peter last month,” said a Canadian called Snow. “He told me to come back later when he wasn’t so busy.” A few pilots chuckled. Hamilton grinned but didn’t understand. Ten minutes later he worked it out, but that was too late to laugh, and besides he didn’t think it was so very funny.

  * * *

  The rain cleared, the wind dropped. Plug Gerrish led A-Flight on a Deep Offensive Patrol. They were at ten thousand feet and still climbing when they crossed the Lines. Black smudges of Archie sprang into being as suddenly as raindrops on a pavement, and as harmlessly; the German gunners were out of practice. From two miles high their gun-flashes were yellow pinpoints, as pretty as fireflies.

  Gerrish kept climbing. There was no cloud cover and the air was well below freezing. Each pilot was layered with sweaters inside his sheepskin jacket. Mufflers sealed his neck, whale-grease coated his face. His head was tucked down, out of the blast of the slipstream, but by the time Gerrish had topped fifteen thousand the iron grip of the cold was inside boots and gloves and flying helmet. Apart from the eternal searching of the sky, there was nothing to do but sit and suffer. The Pup was little and light, less than twenty-seven feet in wingspan, less than twenty feet long. A restless pilot, always shifting his weight, would make his Pup sidle and twitch and lose place in the formation. Hamilton was restless.

  He was bony because he was so young that he hadn’t had time to put flesh on his bones. Hamilton was still a month under eighteen; he had lied about his age to get into the R.F.C. After the wastage of 1916 the army was not too fussy, especially if a chap was keen and tall. But he felt the cold in his lanky, unpadded body, and this made him restless. Gerrish had put him at the tail of the formation, where his twitching was less of a threat to others.

  The flight was nudging twenty thousand feet and everyone was breathing hard, dragging in lungfuls of thin air. Gerrish like
d height; it gave an unbeatable view of any Huns climbing to attack, and height could always be translated to speed. Hamilton did not like height, certainly not this height. His lungs could not work on the air he gave them. His heart made a painful, erratic thud. His mind sometimes drifted, and his brain was slow to carry out his orders. His Pup wallowed, because it too was unhappy in such thin air, and he knew he ought to make adjustments to the throttle. The decision was enormously difficult, and not helped by specks of light wandering across his eyes. He tried to see where they went. When he looked up, the rest of the flight was two hundred yards ahead. That didn’t seem terribly important. The important thing was to get some sleep. That was essential. His hand slipped off the control column. Once he’d got some sleep he’d be better. His eyes closed. The Pup gently toppled sideways.

  Nobody saw him leave. It was not the best Pup in the squadron (he was a new boy with an old aeroplane) and its long and vertical power-dive set up a shuddering vibration in the wings. The Pup became unbalanced and began to spin. It spun so hard that one wing cracked and blew away. None of the rest of the flight saw that either. By then Hamilton was three miles down and out of sight.

  * * *

  Harry Simms was a handsome lad. He wasn’t a deep thinker; not even a shallow thinker; his life had been perfectly satisfactory, so he saw no need to question it.

  His father had inherited twenty-six farms in Hampshire. The rents allowed him to raise a large family in comfort and to wander his fields with a butterfly net. He had passed on his charm and good looks to his children, and that (he believed) was as much as any reasonable person could expect of a man.

  Harry came out best in the breeding stakes. His features were neat and clean-cut; his eyes were dark; his hair was a rich chestnut with enough of a curl to make women sick with envy; and he had the finest calves in the county. It was for his calves that he had joined the Dragoon Guards: their narrow trousers showed off the legs superbly. He kept the regimental uniform when, for a bet, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps.

  His instructors were surprised how quickly and how well he learned to fly. “He’s too stupid to realise how hard it is,” one of them said. This was only partly true. Harry Simms had spent much of his youth riding a horse or sailing a racing dinghy. Flying an aeroplane was simply sailing on the air with the help of some horsepower. The understanding between balance and speed and steering came naturally to him. Arithmetic did not. “Suppose you’ve got seventeen gallons of fuel,” his instructor said. “She does twenty-three miles to the gallon. How far can you fly?”