Hornet’s Sting

by Derek Robinson

  “When can I start, sir?”

  Cleve-Cutler looked at his watch. “If it doesn’t rain, you can start in two hours. You’re in A-Flight. Captain Gerrish is your commander. The adjutant will introduce you. Good luck.”

  Morkel saluted and the adjutant took him away.

  “What are you hanging around for?” the C.O. asked.

  “When did you begin talking to the rats?” Dando said.

  “We’re all rats,” Cleve-Cutler said. “We all scuttle and squeak and breed in the dark. Try to understand that, doctor, and don’t ask such bloody silly questions. Sometimes I think you’re starting to lose your nerve. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  Cleve-Cutler nodded wisely. “Ga-ga,” he said.

  * * *

  Either from winding the starting handle, or from sitting in Sarah Beverley’s lorry, Charles Dash had got stains on his best uniform. He had also lost his hat: probably left in the cab. His servant, Private Bugler, was more concerned with removing the stains.

  “Never saw nothin’ like this before,” he complained. He sniffed cautiously. “Smells like ‘orse but looks like blood. Was you in contact with a bleedin’ ‘orse, sir?”

  “Just do the best you can.”

  “That’s easy for you to say, sir, but different stains need treatin’ different.”

  Dash gave him five francs.

  “You can’t go around without an ‘at,” Bugler said. “Go an’ see Sergeant Lacey in the orderly room.”

  Lacey was reading a letter. “My aunt in County Cork is in despair,” he told Dash. “She thinks the entire British war cabinet should be shot for treason. Without trial.”

  “Good Lord.” Dash was taken aback; sergeants didn’t usually talk like this. “Why?”

  “She feels they blundered by exposing the Zimmermann telegram.” Lacey saw Dash frown. “German Secretary of State,” Lacey said. “Sent a telegram. Germany offered to help Mexico invade the U.S.A. and recapture New Mexico.”

  “Yes? Pretty dotty idea.”

  “My aunt believes the British government should have secretly encouraged the plan. We should have offered to ship the entire German Army to Mexico, where it would sink in a bog of dago intrigue, corruption and folly. Her words.”

  Dash felt that he was being patronised. “Sergeant,” he said, leaning a little on the word, “I need a hat. Private Bugler seems to think …”

  Lacey pulled open a filing cabinet. It was full of officers’ caps, representing Guards and county regiments, gunners and engineers, Australian and Canadian units. There was even a bright Glengarry. “Nothing here from the Herefordshire Yeomanry,” he said. “But try this one: North Somerset Yeomanry. Somerset’s quite adjacent, isn’t it?”

  Dash tried it on. “Too tight,” he said.

  “That’s odd,” Lacey said. “Jessop complained that it was too loose.” He took back the cap and removed a strip of folded blotting paper from inside the lining. Dash tried again. Perfect fit. “Who was Jessop?” he asked.

  Lacey shut the filing cabinet.

  “I don’t suppose it matters,” Dash said. He took off the cap and looked at the name written inside. It was J.B.K. Rickman-Ellis. “Jolly handy, these spares,” he said. “In case a chap loses his hat.”

  Lacey nodded.

  “Any charge,” Dash said, “put it on my mess bill.”

  “Compliments of the management,” Lacey said. “However . . . may I ask: does anyone in your family manufacture or distribute cigars, whisky or gramophone records?”

  “No.”

  “Quel domage.” Lacey turned away.

  “There’s a cousin in Worcester,” Dash said. “His factory makes pork sausages.”

  “Does it, indeed? Here in France your genuine pork sausage is a currency worth more than diamonds. Kindly ask him to send you ten pounds in weight, urgently.”

  “All right. Look: where’s the adjutant?” Dash didn’t want the adjutant; he just wanted to change the conversation from hats and sausages to something more military.

  “Captain Brazier is drilling the burial squad,” Lacey said. “He feels their slow march is not up to snuff. Nor is their quick march.”

  “Who is being buried?”

  “Nobody,” Lacey said, “but the adjutant never lets a little thing like that stand in his way.”

  Earthquake Strength 2:

  Tremors felt by persons at rest.

  The rain held off, and Plug Gerrish took Morkel on patrol, together with Lieutenant Heeley.

  Heeley was a veteran of two months. He had fired at the enemy perhaps a dozen times, and claimed a share in one Fokker which A-Flight might have destroyed, or which might have disintegrated under the strain of violent combat manoeuvres. Or a bit of both. At any rate, Heeley had seen his bullets raise a string of rosettes in the fabric of the Fokker, and then one of its wings had crumpled, so that was good enough. He was nineteen and he thought it unlikely that he would reach twenty, but he kept such thoughts to himself. His sole ambition was to score one kill that was undeniably his alone. Sometimes he wondered why this killing should matter so much to him, a chorister at Salisbury cathedral until he joined the army shortly before the army would have claimed him anyway. But he had other discoveries to wonder at, whisky and women being the most exciting, and so he took his life a day at a time. That, after all, was how death operated, and death was doing very well.

  There was a delay while a search was made for flying gear that was big enough for Morkel.

  “I have three rules,” Gerrish told him. “The first is: stay in formation. So are the other two. If you lag behind I won’t come back for you, and the odds are you won’t come back at all. The Huns love stragglers. How many hours have you done solo?”

  “Fifteen, sir.”

  “On Pups?”

  “Eight.”

  “Air-firing?”

  “None, sir. It was foggy, so —”

  “I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.” Gerrish went off to select an old and unloved Pup for Morkel to fly.

  “Don’t mind Plug,” Heeley said. “He was born with a rat up his arse. You’re from South Africa?”

  “Yes. The Transvaal, if that means anything.”

  “I must say it’s jolly decent of you to come all this way to rally round the old country.”

  “I have shot every kind of animal that exists in Africa. It is time to shoot some Germans.”

  Heeley found that amusing. Morkel smiled gently.

  “Is that what you told them,” Heeley said, “when you applied to join the R.F.C.?”

  “No. I said I had played a lot of rugby football. They seemed impressed.”

  “The Kaiser was an absolute duffer at rugger,” Heeley said. “Poor devil hasn’t got a hope, has he?”

  Three sweaters, a sheepskin flying coat, fur-lined gauntlets and thigh-length flying boots made Morkel look as big as a gorilla. The Pup creaked and groaned when he got into the cockpit. Gerrish told him to take off, and stood well clear to watch. Morkel used up almost all the runway just getting off the ground. When he had done two circuits without crashing, Gerrish and Heeley followed him into the air. The three Pups droned eastward.

  Cleve-Cutler had watched, too. He felt grateful to Morkel for not crashing on or near the airfield. A pilot who made a nonsense of his take-off was like a Guardsman who fainted on parade. The C.O. went back to his office and found Duke Nikolai waiting at the door.

  The Russian saluted. He said nothing until they were inside. His face was as stiff as a statue. He read from a piece of paper. “It gives me pain to report,” he said, “that Captain Ogilvy has insulted His Imperial Majesty, the Tsar of Holy Russia, to whom I have sworn allegiance.”

  “Something Spud said? A slip of the tongue, no doubt. A misinterpretation.”

  “He struck me. I am Tsar’s representative. Therefore struck Tsar.”

  “Bit far-fetched, that.”

  “Struck me. I am Tsar’s —”

  �
��Yes, yes.” Cleve-Cutler knew the Russian’s powers of repetition. “Point taken.”

  Nikolai relaxed slightly. “We agree. Tsar demands satisfaction.”

  “In Russia, perhaps. Here, in the British Army, duelling is illegal.”

  “Honour has no boundaries, major. I know my duty. I shall do it.” He glanced modestly at his shining boots. “Not for first time.”

  “Duelling is illegal in the British Army. And Captain Ogilvy has sworn an oath of loyalty to his monarch. If he duels with you, he breaks his oath.”

  “I kill him quickly. Then he avoids disgrace.”

  Suddenly Cleve-Cutler was tired of the whole stupid argument. “You can’t have a duel without seconds, can you?” Nikolai nodded. “Well, I’ll find a second for Spud. I’ll also decide the time and place. And the weapons. It may take rather a long time. I’m frightfully busy. The war, you know.”

  Nikolai saluted.

  “Where did he hit you? I don’t see any sign of damage.”

  “Honour was damaged,” Nikolai said.

  “Honour, eh?” Cleve-Cutler opened the door for him. “Fragile stuff. They don’t make it like they used to, do they?” he said.

  * * *

  Morkel had grown up on the veldt, where space was vast and every day a friendly sun rose in an optimistic sky, and nothing was impossible. He had come to Europe because the war wouldn’t last for ever. Now was the time to seize its challenges.

  When the English taught him to fly, he went no higher than two thousand feet, where it was still possible to make out teams of horses drawing ploughs across fields, and smoke from chimneys, and sheep scattered like snowflakes. Now Plug Gerrish took the patrol up to twelve thousand feet, into a wilderness of cloud. Sky and earth were lost. The air was frigid. In Africa and in England, Morkel’s big strong body had performed everything he asked of it, but now he discovered that it was not made for a Pup cockpit at twelve thousand. The windscreen was tiny; his head stuck out in the arctic battering of the airstream until it ached with cold and he beat his fist against his flying helmet. After an hour blundering through the gloom of canyons in the cloud, searching tattered gaps that changed shape as he looked, Morkel was lost. He had no idea where they were, or what they were looking for, or what they would do if they found it. Staying in formation was a waking nightmare.

  He was constantly fiddling with the throttle-adjustment, which meant looking down, and when he looked up the aircraft was wandering, either sliding towards a collision or drifting into a hill of cloud. For the first time in his life, his size and strength were not enough; the effort of flying sapped his brain and the battering cold had no pity. Despair began to win, and the enemy did the rest.

  Gerrish, his head rotating like an owl, saw them high above and behind the Pups: a cluster of biplanes, falling fast. He fired a couple of rounds to alert his wingman and wheeled the formation to face the attack. Morkel, head down, heard nothing, saw nothing. He looked up and was alone. For a long moment he was too weary to be surprised. White-hot eruptions of pain in his right leg changed all that. Bullets had ripped his calf, smashed his shin and his ankle. He collapsed onto the joystick and the Pup dived, which saved it from the guns of the next Huns. By the time they turned, Morkel was circling inside a large cloud, not because he wanted to but because his right foot was jammed on the rudder pedal. By gripping the leg with both hands he dragged the foot free. When the Pup flew into clear air he got the machine level and he pointed it at a glimpse of sunshine, which he knew must be west. Morkel was a better pilot than he knew. He was also more badly wounded than he knew. A bullet had nicked an artery. Blood pulsed into his flying boot until it leaked out of the bullet holes. Morkel flew the Pup until he fainted. After that it flew itself into the ground, which happened to be a flooded shell-hole. Nothing special about that. There were a million shell-holes, and all flooded.

  * * *

  The adjutant waited three hours before he told Wing, and Wing ordered the standard telegram to the next of kin, regretting to inform and so on. Morkel had not had time to unpack, and his batman was an old sweat who always left the bags on the bed until he saw the new pilot back from patrol.

  Heeley was lying on the other bed, chewing on an unlit pipe, when Brazier arrived with a soldier to collect the bags. “You didn’t lend him anything?” the adjutant said. “Toothbrush, pyjamas, money?”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t give a letter to post? You know what I mean.”

  Heeley made a sour face. “Rotten job you’ve got, Uncle.”

  “You don’t give a tinker’s cuss about my job.” The adjutant had opened Morkel’s valise and was looking for a diary or pornographic pictures or a military secret: anything the family should not see. He tossed a pair of goggles to Heeley. “Those won’t be any use to anyone in South Africa.” He shut the valise and gave it to the soldier and they went out.

  Heeley put the goggles on and looked at the other bed. Morkel had been its third occupant in eight weeks. Flying was good fun; Heeley liked every minute of it. Coming back to earth wasn’t so enjoyable.

  Still, these were jolly good goggles. Heeley cheered up. Time for drinks, dinner, some poker, a bit of a singsong, and clean sheets in a warm, dry bed, which was more than the Poor Bloody Infantry got in their squalid trenches.

  * * *

  The weather stayed dry but very cold. All three flights went on Deep Offensive Patrols. Nobody died. If a flight was not on patrol, it went up and practised close-formation flying and manoeuvring by hand signal and how to attack in arrowhead or echelon or line-astern. One Pup lost a piston. Another overheated because of an oil leak. Both got down safely.

  “A quiet day,” the adjutant said aloud as he wrote up the squadron diary. “It seems the Hun fliers have no stomach for the fight.”

  “Possibly,” Lacey said. “But on the whole I feel they are more likely to be on leave in Frankfurt.”

  “All of them? In Frankfurt? What on earth for?”

  “For the opera. Paul Hindemith is conducting a new production of Der Rosenkavalier. The reviews have been ecstatic.”

  The adjutant leaned back and linked his muscular hands behind his heavy head. “Ecstatic ... I don’t believe I’ve ever met an ecstatic Hun. Not much to laugh about when you’ve got half a yard of bayonet through your giblets.”

  “That reminds me. Mr Dash’s cousin sent him a large box of best Worcester pork sausages. We are lucky that the sergeant at the fuel depot has a passion for English sausages. He gave me five hundred gallons of diesel. The generator will carry on making electricity for another month.”

  “If I got you a Hun, sergeant, a nice fat Hun, would you bayonet him?”

  “Only if he had tickets to Rosenkavalier, sir.”

  Brazier made a sour face. “You’re not much of a fighting man, are you? Sausages and diesel, instead of blood and guts.”

  “True. But then, you’re not shaving by candlelight, sir.”

  They sat and stared at each other across the adjutant’s desk.

  “This war has ruined the army,” Brazier growled. “I should be at the Front, not listening to cocky little pricks like you.”

  “Well, every prick serves its purpose,” Lacey said mildly. “Otherwise none of us would be in this world. Not even you, sir.”

  “What?” Brazier flung the squadron diary at him, and missed. Lacey was out of the office before Brazier could untangle his legs. Lacey kept going. His assistant, a corporal clerk, grabbed his cap and followed. “You mustn’t say things like that, sarge,” he said. “Honest.”

  “It was irresistible. Besides, I know where to get soft toilet paper for the officers’ mess, and Cleve-Cutler has piles, and Brazier knows it.”

  “Strewth,” the corporal said.

  “He has the bayonet,” Lacey said, “but I have the bog-roll. The way to the C.O.’s heart is through his sphincter.”

  * * *

  Next day the sun came up as dull as a counterfeit sovereign. It was only groun
d mist that dulled it, and half of A-Flight took off to make the first patrol. The other half followed after breakfast. Now the sky was blue as a lagoon. The barometer was high and steady. It was a good day for a spot of high-flying slaughter. By noon, B- and C-Flights had done their stint and nobody had fired a shot except to keep the guns from freezing. It was odd. Even the German Archie lost interest after a few inaccurate rounds. The squadron sat down to lunch with nothing to boast or bitch about.

  “What do we eat today?” the count asked a servant.

  “Brown soup, sir. Mutton. Steamed treacle pudding.”

  “Oh.” His shoulders slumped. “Brown and brown and brown. All English cooking is brown.”

  “Steady on,” Munday said. “Burnt toast isn’t brown. And what about porridge?”

  “Porridge is the revenge of the Scots upon the English,” McWatters said.

  “Come to Russia,” the duke said. “We give you soused herring, smoked eel, quails’ eggs with paprika, red cabbage, white cabbage, green cabbage, baby venison stuffed with . . . stuffed with ...” He looked at the count.

  “Russian stuffing. Impossible to describe.”

  Soup was served. “Also vodka,” the duke said. “Russia has three hundred different kinds of vodka.”

  “Which is best?” Simms asked.

  “All are best.”

  McWatters sniffed. “I bet the average serf doesn’t eat too many five-course meals washed down with buckets of vodka.”

  “No serfs in Russia,” the count said. “Serfs abolished. All free.”

  McWatters was taken aback. “Free,” he said. “You mean free as in a democracy?”