Hornet’s Sting

by Derek Robinson

  Everyone went outside. For three days the guns had laboured around the clock. Now there was silence in the east. Night had fallen. Could the troops be attacking in pitch darkness? Recipe for disaster. Maybe we had run out of shells. Maybe the gunners had run out of targets. Maybe the Kaiser had surrendered.

  “It’s easily seen that none of you has been under a bombardment,” the adjutant said. “What do you think the enemy is doing now?”

  “Moving his bowels?” McWatters suggested. “He must be rather constipated after three days stuck in a funk-hole.”

  “Constipation is not the problem. To the contrary.”

  “Survival mechanism,” Dando commented. “The lighter the burden, the faster the flight.”

  “Spill the beans, Uncle,” Snow said.

  “Extraordinary lingo ... What is it: Cherokee? Never mind. What would you do, if you were Hindenburg? Mend your trenches, obviously. Get your dead and wounded out of your Lines. Rush up your reserves to plug the gaps. You can make good a lot of damage in one night.”

  “Jolly generous of us,” Simms said.

  “Everything they do tonight will be destroyed tomorrow,” Brazier said. “A fresh lot of Huns arrive for our guns to kill. It grinds the enemy down, I assure you.”

  “No battle, then,” Munday said.

  “Not yet.”

  The novelty had worn off. They went inside, all but the C.O. and the adjutant. “We’ll keep ’em guessing,” Brazier said. “We’ll blast’em, and pause, and blast’em again. Each time we stop, they’ll think we’re about to attack.”

  Cleve-Cutler heard a rare note of confidence. “You’d really like to be up there, wouldn’t you, Uncle?”

  “Storming a strongpoint is the greatest feeling a man can ever know. You fellows seize the air, but you can’t keep it.” Brazier grabbed a handful of air and opened his fist to reveal nothing. “Only the infantry can win a war.”

  “Let’s eat,” Cleve-Cutler said. Enough was enough.

  After dinner, Spud Ogilvy took Crash Crabtree aside. “Uncle seems to think this show will be a walkover,” he said.

  “Oh Christ. Not another. I’ve been through three walkovers already. Each one nastier than the last.” When Ogilvy made a sour face, Crabtree said, “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me. Listen ... What d’you make of this joker Woolley?”

  “Oh, I like him. He’s even scruffier than me. He makes me look like the Prince of Wales. But can he fight? He may be repulsive, but is he offensive?”

  “What a bloody awful choice to make.” Ogilvy signalled to a mess servant. “Brandies,” he said.

  * * *

  Next day, when the Biffs and the Pups came back from training, Charles Dash walked over to the orderly room. To foil McWatters, he had asked Lacey to hold his letters until he could collect them.

  There was a letter for him, not from Chlöe Legge-Barrington but from Lucy Knight, the smallest of the F.A.N.Y. girls; the one with the curliest black hair; the one who had said, “Men are so slow.”

  Dearest Charles,

  Chlöe phoned me to get my new address, to give to you, so I thought why not drop you a line? While I have a minute to myself before the battle makes life impossible, as usual.

  I must say Chlöe was a trifle mysterious. She hinted that one of us might have left something precious in your bedroom at that awful old nunnery, and if we got in touch I might Hear Something To My Advantage, as the solicitors keep saying in their rather ominous little advertisements. But I was never in your bedroom. Perhaps Chlöe has been at the Madeira!

  Dash groaned. He rammed the letter into its envelope and shoved it into a pocket.

  “Disappointing news?” Lacey asked. They were alone.

  “Women. It’s either feast or famine. I don’t know which is worse.” Lacey nodded. “Any suggestions?” Dash asked.

  “I can recommend Corporal Llewellyn’s wife.” Lacey was censoring the Other Ranks’ letters. “One hundred and three ‘Acts of Joy’, as he puts it, during his last leave. He recalls their sixty-fourth coupling with particular affection. Beef gravy played an important part.”

  “Gravy? How?”

  “Better you don’t ask.” Lacey dipped a small brush into a pot of india ink and blacked-out half a page. “Mrs L is definitely the woman for you. A pity she is in Swansea.”

  “Come on, play the game, Lacey. You’ve been out here for years. What do chaps do?”

  “Personally, my mistress is music. However, I can offer you a French widow. Her husband was a pilot.” He found a letter in a file: square envelope, purple ink, slanting handwriting. “She keeps writing. She is extremely eager to give hospitality to a lonely young English aviator.”

  Dash took the letter. It came from Abbeville: quite near. He went to his hut and lay on his bed and thought about it, and after five minutes he knew that he didn’t want a second-hand French widow wrapping her second-hand French legs around his, while she remembered how good it had been with her late, brave husband. He wanted the best. He wanted to be milked dry at midnight by that wonderful English girl whose memory could still wake him up in the small hours, streaming sweat and gasping and searching the bed for a ghost that had been so real his heart was trying to break through his ribcage.

  Dash had been fucked by an angel. It wasn’t Lucy Knight, which left only two: Edith Reynolds and Nancy Hicks-Potter, each stunningly beautiful. It had to be one or the other.

  * * *

  The barrage roared again, and fell silent again, and roared again.

  Gerrish visited Woolley in his hut. He was playing his accordion. The rhythm was robust but the tune was shapeless. “Maybe I should go back to the saxophone,” he said.

  “Maybe you should go back to Blighty.”

  “Maybe you should piss in your hat.” Woolley let the accordion fall. It groaned as it collapsed. “If that’s too hard, you can piss in my hat. Or I’ll piss in your hat. Or we’ll both go and piss in Field-Marshal Haig’s hat, it’s very small, he takes a size four and a quarter, so that should give us a chance to compare our marksmanship, don’t you think, old sport?” He lay on his bed and looked at two flies doing stunts around the naked light bulb.

  “I have a simple question,” Gerrish said. “Why do you keep running down our training and our tactics?”

  “Beats me. Since it upsets so many people, I take it all back.”

  “You’ve had to take back a lot of things, in your chequered career, haven’t you? Bad tactics? Bad decisions? Things like that don’t come cheap, do they?” Woolley moved his head and watched two different flies doing the same old stunts. “I’ll say one thing, and then I’ll go,” Gerrish told him. “This war, this battle, may be a joke to you, but it could just save our country. If we can only break through, if we can capture the Flemish ports – Ostend, Zeebrugge – then we can force the U-boats to go all around the north of Scotland instead of straight down the Channel.”

  “That was in the Daily Mirror,” Woolley said. “They had a map of it and everything.”

  “Not everything. What the papers can’t say is that if we fail, the Kaiser stands a good chance of starving us out of the war, long before the Americans even get here. Forget Hindenburg. We’re getting torpedoed to death. Every fourth ship that leaves British ports gets sunk. American ships and neutral ships won’t sail to Britain. You may wonder how I know all this. My uncle captained a freighter. Last week his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic. Lost with all hands. The cargo was wheat. That’s all I have to say.”

  Woolley listened to his fading footsteps. “Take that smile off your face,” he told the flies. “It’s nothing to laugh at.” He was finishing his Guinness when somewhere nearby a Lewis gun made its dull, familiar sound, like a tidy giant ripping a carpet in half.

  * * *

  Andrei and Nikolai walked from the mess to their hut. As they reached it, two men came out of the darkness and greeted them in Russian. They introduced themselves as Shtemenko and
Gordov, first and second secretaries of the Paris embassy. Duke Nikolai asked them to come inside. “Have you dined?” he inquired. Yes, they had. Andrei suggested a little pepper vodka. That would be welcome, they agreed. They wore navy-blue raincoats over dark woollen suits, and they carried large tweed caps. Each man looked to be about forty. They were clean-shaven and seemed tired. Shtemenko, the first secretary, had a lawyer’s briefcase. Nikolai invited them to take their coats off, but they declined, saying they felt cold. “Unless I am mistaken,” Nikolai said, “you were not at the embassy a month ago.”

  “Recent appointments,” Shtemenko said.

  Andrei poured the vodka. They all looked to Nikolai. He said, “May Russia be happy.” They drank to that. “And God save the Tsar.” But Shtemenko and Gordov had knocked back their vodka and turned away, so Nikolai drank alone. He made a little flutter of the fingers which developed into a gesture that invited the visitors to sit. He remained standing.

  “The ambassador sent us here,” Shtemenko said. “He has been ordered by the government in St Petersburg to arrange for your return to St Petersburg immediately and with all speed.”

  “Impossible.”

  “The count also,” Gordov said.

  “We take orders only from the Imperial Russian Air Force.”

  “N’existe pas,” Gordov said.

  “I am sorry that your journey has been wasted,” Nikolai said. “Count Andrei will show you how to leave.” Nobody moved. “I don’t know who your masters are,” Nikolai said. He was trying to sound brisk and commanding, but his voice felt stretched thin. “Directors of the Petersburg Tramway Company, I shouldn’t be surprised. Everybody runs Russia now. Everybody and nobody. I, however, am an officer. My orders came from the Tsar.”

  “N’existe pas,” Gordov said. He swallowed a yawn and looked down. It had obviously been a long day.

  “Without royal orders to leave, it would be an act of desertion. Desertion from the Imperial Russian Air Force.”

  “N’existe pas,” Gordov mumbled.

  Shtemenko began: “When you reach Paris I am sure —”

  “Where are your orders?” Andrei demanded suddenly. “Where is your proof of identity?”

  Shtemenko opened the briefcase and took out a sheet of typewritten paper which had the Paris embassy heading. While they read it he cracked his knuckles. One knuckle made him wince.

  “Anyone could have written this,” Andrei said. “It’s not even signed.”

  “N’existe pas,” Gordov said.

  “There are guards on the gate,” Andrei said. “How did you get in?”

  “Nobody will care about that when you have gone,” Shtemenko said. “A car is waiting.”

  “Why?” Nikolai said. “Why does Petersburg want me? And why in such a hurry?”

  Shtemenko said, “The ambassador sent us. He has his orders.”

  “No,” Andrei said. “This is a British base. Go and show your bits of paper to the British government.”

  “As far as we are concerned,” Shtemenko said, “the British government ...” He gestured wearily to Gordov.

  “N’existe pas.”

  “It exists here,” Andrei said.

  “No, they are right. Petersburg must be obeyed.” Nikolai said. “I’ll come to Paris.”

  Andrei was astonished. In English, he said, “Don’t be such a fool!” Nikolai smiled. “It’s for the best,” he said in Russian. “I’ll see the ambassador. I suppose I’d better take my dress uniform?”

  Shtemenko looked at Gordov, who shrugged. “A uniform is a uniform,” he said, and yawned hugely behind his hand.

  Nikolai opened his wardrobe and pushed aside a hanging greatcoat. When he turned he was holding a Lewis gun. Shtemenko managed to raise a hand and shout, but all Gordov could do was gasp. Then Nikolai cocked and fired and raked the spray of bullets from side to side, knocking the two men off their chairs and killing them again and again. When the battering racket stopped he turned and looked for Andrei. He was hiding in a corner. “N’existe pas,” Nikolai said.

  Woolley was the first to reach the hut. Andrei was wrestling with Nikolai for the Lewis gun. It wasn’t a fight; Nikolai simply wouldn’t let go, until Andrei saw his chance and kneed him in the groin, a rising blow that lifted him onto his toes. Nikolai shrieked like a girl. Andrei knocked the drum off the Lewis and kicked it into a corner. Both men were splattered with blood: a bullet had nicked one of Shtemenko’s arteries and his flailing body had sprayed generously for the few seconds that his heart went on pumping. On the floor, pools of blood were spreading and joining. Woolley went in too fast, skidded and fell with a crash that knocked the wind out of him. He sucked in air that stank of cordite. Gerrish appeared in the doorway.

  “Get the doctor,” Andrei said. Gerrish turned and ran.

  Woolley sat in the red muck and looked at the bodies. “They don’t need a doctor,” he said. Bullets had made a ruin of Shtemenko’s face, and Gordov had been almost cut in half. Both men looked less like people and more like sacks of spare parts, casually dumped.

  “This one needs a doctor,” Andrei said. He was kneeling beside Nikolai, who was squatting on his haunches and shuddering so violently that they could hear the chatter of his teeth. “Can’t you cover those bastards up?”

  Woolley got blankets and tried to throw them over the bodies. His strength, and his sense of distance, were distorted by shock and he bodged the job. One blanket fell short, and left Shtemenko’s shattered face looking over the edge. Woolley reached out and tugged the blanket higher and got bits of wet skin on his fingers. He went outside and threw up.

  Dando arrived at the run. Cleve-Cutler and Brazier and the duty officer arrived, all holding revolvers. “Can’t you stay out of trouble for five bloody minutes?” the C.O. shouted at Woolley. Woolley was sitting against the hut. He spat out the remains of his supper and licked his lips and said, “It’s a bit slippery in there ...” But by then they were inside.

  Four men with rifles came out of the night, at the double, and guarded the hut. Curious pilots wandered up and asked what on earth was happening. “Aston Villa nil, Wolverhampton Wanderers three,” Woolley whispered. He was strangely short of saliva. Two medics arrived with a stretcher and carried Nikolai away. Finally the officers came out. Woolley stood up. Dando shone a flashlight on his face and asked him how he felt. “Better than those two,” Woolley said huskily, “but not much.”

  “Come,” Cleve-Cutler said. They trudged in silence to his office.

  * * *

  “One of them kept saying N’existe pas,” Andrei said. “As if it was some private joke.”

  “He knew they were coming for him,” Cleve-Cutler said to Andrei. “You think.”

  “Probably.”

  “But you didn’t know he had the Lewis.”

  “No. Hidden in his wardrobe. I never looked there.”

  “Of course not. Extraordinary weapon to use.”

  Andrei drank his coffee, laced with the C.O.’s whisky. He had told them all he knew. What he could not describe was the killing: the hammering racket and the chemical stink and the invisible bullets kicking the men and making them jump and squirm. One second they sat looking tired and patient, the next second they were frantic and acrobatic and dead. That, he could not even begin to describe, nor to forget.

  “Any idea where he got it?” the C.O. asked.

  “Anywhere. He had money.”

  “How did these thugs get in? They didn’t come through the main gate.”

  “Plenty of holes in the hedge, sir,” the adjutant said. “Plenty of hedge. Can’t guard it all.”

  “I want extra sentries everywhere,” the C.O. told the duty officer. “On all the flights, the petrol dump, the ammo store, the motor transport. Go.” He went. “Now, Mr Woolley. What were you doing there?”

  “Not much, major. I heard the merry rattle of machine-gun fire. Then I fell on my arse in the gore. Then I chucked a blanket over the dead. Two blankets. Then I puked.”r />
  Brazier sighed. “At the sight of blood?” he said pityingly.

  “At the sight of innards, Uncle. First time I’ve seen two men cut up and ready for the butcher’s slab. Lights, liver, kidneys, tripes, heart, lungs, all on display.”

  “That’ll do,” the C.O. said.

  “And steaming hot, too.”

  “All right!” The C.O. was prowling around his room. “This is a hell of a thing. Two civilians, probably got diplomatic status, shot to bits by a member of the squadron, I mean, what could be worse?”

  “And with an illicit weapon, too,” the adjutant reminded him.

  “I know what could be worse,” Dando said. “Two civilians shooting dead a member of the squadron. We found loaded pistols in their pockets,” he told Woolley.

  “Nikolai would never have reached Paris, let alone Petersburg,” Andrei said. “There’s no future for the thirteenth heir to the Romanovs. He’ll just cause trouble.”

  “Yesterday he offered me the Ministry of Railways,” Woolley said. “Five thousand dollars a year.”

  “You?” Cleve-Cutler exclaimed. “You couldn’t run a three-legged race.” He kicked the waste-basket. “Conniving little hound didn’t offer me anything . . . What are we going to do, Uncle? What do King’s Regs say about this sort of situation?”

  “Refer the matter to a Higher Authority, sir.”

  Cleve-Cutler picked up the phone and asked for Wing H.Q., and was connected, and asked for Bliss. The windows rattled, and the line went dead, and they all flinched at a roar like a cliff face collapsing. “Bomb,” Woolley said. “Air raid.”

  “Sweet sword of Satan!” Cleve-Cutler roared. “Will this day never end?”

  * * *

  The bombers droned around the sky. They were near the airfield, perhaps over it. They were too high to be seen and the confusion of engine noise made it impossible to track an individual machine. A bomb fell at least every five minutes; sometimes several bombs fell together.

  Most of the pilots had never been bombed before, and they took it badly. They sheltered in old trenches and swore softly at the Hun swine strolling about as if they owned the damn sky.

  A faint whistle led to a dull crump. The trench trembled and bits fell off its sides.