Hornet’s Sting

by Derek Robinson

  “That bastard Woolley’s behind this, isn’t he?”

  “Bliss didn’t say, sir. He just said your squadron has flown the Biff like a single-seat scout and got good results.”

  “Bastard. Right! I’ll soon get back and sort him out.”

  “One other thing.” O’Neill waited until the C.O. was looking at him. “You are commanded to represent the squadron at a memorial service in Westminster Abbey for Lieutenant Simon Savage, M.P.”

  “When?”

  “One week from now.”

  Cleve-Cutler thought hard and remembered what Savage had looked like. Bliss was right, of course. The Corps had its enemies in Government; it must put on a show, make friends, win votes. Savage would be a hero at Westminster Abbey; his C.O. must be there. “What about the battle?” he asked.

  O’Neill shrugged. “We’re not losing. We’re not winning, either.”

  Cleve-Cutler rapped the table until his knuckles hurt, and he stopped. “On and on and bloody on. It’s got so I wouldn’t know a victory if I saw one.”

  * * *

  Arras was a brutal slog, in the air and on the ground. Most R.F.C. squadrons were losing at least one pilot a day. At that rate, an entire squadron would be dead and replaced by the end of April. It didn’t work out so tidily, because new boys got killed much faster than old sweats. Still, everyone was looking forward to the offensive promised by the French. General Nivelle had a masterplan that would, he promised, deliver le dernier coup, smash the Boche Line and end the war. If it also distracted the German Air Force, the R.F.C. would be very grateful.

  “Meanwhile,” the adjutant told Woolley, “this Arras show is doing a splendid job of bucking-up the French Army, which I’m sure you recall took a bit of a pasting at Verdun.”

  “That’s bollocks,” Woolley said. It had been a day of too much flying and too little success, in grimy weather. Now they were in his office, drinking bottled Guinness.

  “Absolute bollocks, sir,” Brazier agreed. “But the war has reached a stage when nothing less than absolute bollocks will do.”

  There was a tap on the door and McWatters came in. “You want to see me, sir?”

  “Yes. Uncle says this Push will last until Michaelmas. Nobody can fly every day. Cut the cards.” Woolley put a pack on his desk. McWatters cut, and showed the six of diamonds. “You win,” Woolley said. “Take a day off.”

  McWatters poked his little finger in his left ear, which was still ringing and whistling two hours after descending from the height of a small Alp. “Orders from Wing are pinned up in the mess,” he said.

  “I did that. Damn clever, eh?”

  “Every fit pilot flies, it says.”

  Woolley went to a corner of the room. He took an upright chair and walked towards McWatters. “Stand to attention,” he said, and swung the chair and hit McWatters behind the knees quite hard. McWatters collapsed, making an oddly high-pitched moan. “You’re not fit to fly,” Woolley said. “Look at you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “At Bog Street School you wouldn’t get in the girls’ beanbag team.”

  “No, sir. Thank you, sir.” McWatters limped out. His legs hurt but his left ear was cured.

  “And when will you take a day off?” Brazier asked.

  “Bog Street. . .” Woolley straddled the chair. “So named because of the bog. Clever, eh?”

  Next morning the rasp of aero-engines woke McWatters early. He lay in bed, only half-awake, and as the engine notes changed in texture, he pictured the warm-up, the taxiing, the take-off. Later, his servant came in with a mug of tea. He meant to get up. Rain pattered on the windows. The next thing he knew a dog was barking, the light was bright, the tea was cold, his watch said eleven. He felt stunned with sleep.

  The mess cooked him an early, solitary lunch.

  Chlöe Legge-Barrington’s letter to Charles Dash gave an address for Nancy Hicks-Potter somewhere near Bruay, a town about twenty miles northwest of Gazeran. McWatters set off in his car and tried to drive northwest. He met a mass of traffic. From the west, columns of troops marched towards the fighting. McWatters got out the map. This route to Bruay ran parallel to the battlefront. The whole damn road would be clogged. He cursed and went back, painfully slowly, until he met the main road from Arras due west to St-Pol. From St-Pol he could pick up a good road northeast to Bruay. It meant a long, stupid detour, but at least the car would go.

  St-Pol was a madhouse. It took him half an hour to get in and longer to get out. Now the map showed two miles to the Bruay turn-off. He followed a convoy of trucks. The Bruay turn-off appeared and it was blocked. Two limbers, parked sideways, sealed the entrance. A sapper sergeant leaned against a wheel and drank tea from an old bully-beef tin.

  “What’s the trouble, sergeant?”

  “Wagon up ahead’s caught fire.”

  “No reason to close the road, is it? Sergeant?” This time McWatters leaned on the rank just enough to make the man put the tea away.

  “It’s an ammunition wagon, sir.”

  McWatters checked his watch: 2.35 p.m. The world was full of idiots and they were all wasting time, wasting his day. He raged silently. “It’s essential I get to Bruay,” he said. “What’s the next best route?”

  “Well ... I wouldn’t start from here, sir.”

  McWatters drove on. The sergeant picked up his tea. “Fuckin’ officers,” he said comfortably.

  It was twenty kilometres to the next town, which was Lillers. McWatters didn’t want to go there. Lillers was north of Bruay. At every crossroads he tried to turn right, but military policemen stolidly waved him away. He drove to Lillers (another confusion of men and horses and vehicles) and turned east towards Béthune. His backside ached. His stomach grumbled. The car needed petrol. Nancy Hicks-Potter was a bitch. No woman deserved this kind of attention. Then: a stroke of luck. A policeman with brains showed him a shortcut to Bruay. Eleven kilometres. In only forty bumping, halting, grinding minutes he was there, and she was not.

  The address he’d got from the letter was an old sugar beet factory, now used to store medical supplies. “All the F.A.N.Y. girls have moved forward,” a sombre Medical Corps captain said. “Gone to a new casualty clearing station at Bouvigny. You can come with me, if you want. You’ll certainly never find it on your own.”

  McWatters sat beside him in a truck that shuddered and jolted over corrugated roads. The daylight faded and died. “Is this an official visit?” the captain asked.

  “Sort of. I’m sort of... offering my services.”

  “Bully for you, lad.” There was no encouragement in his voice.

  Bouvigny was nothing: just a name for a village in ruins. The truck joined a line of ambulances whose dimmed headlights showed a cluster of Nissen huts.

  “Busy,” McWatters said.

  “Busier inside.”

  The truck stopped and McWatters got out. “Thanks for your help.”

  “It was nothing. I shan’t stay. As soon as we’ve unloaded, I’m off.”

  McWatters watched stretcher-bearers take wounded through a curtained doorway. The procession never stopped. Some of the men were crying out in pain. The stretcher-bearers walked with the long, patient stride of ploughmen. After a while McWatters joined them, not because he wanted to but because he could see no alternative.

  The hut was big and bright and almost entirely taken up with heavy wooden tables. He went at once to a corner, so as to be out of the way.

  The flow of casualties was fast and efficient. As one stretcher was lifted from a table, another was slid onto it. A doctor, perhaps two, made a rapid examination. Twenty seconds was typical; a minute was a long time. Then the bearers lifted the stretcher and moved away and another replaced it. The tables were never empty. The slick routine fascinated McWatters.

  “Your first visit to a C.C.S?” said the captain. “This is triage.” He had the dull-eyed expression of a millowner watching his machinery in action. “You’ve heard of triage?”

  “U
m . . . no.”

  “French word. Dividing into three. Anyone strong enough for the journey is sent on to hospital immediately. That’s one decision. Anyone not strong enough but worth the chance of surgery here goes straight into surgery. That’s the second decision. No time for debate. Triage needs speed.”

  “Division into three, you said.”

  “Yes. Must I define the third category?”

  “You mean they are ...”

  The captain pointed to an exit at the far right. “That leads to what we privately call the Moribund Ward. No visitor should leave without seeing it.”

  McWatters made his way between the tables, trying to look calm and official, trying not to look at the butchery being exposed on either side. His courage ran out when he reached the entrance to the Moribund Ward. He stopped and wiped his nose, checked his watch, wiped his nose again. And then, thank God, a F.A.N.Y. nurse came out of the ward, carrying two buckets of bloody water.

  “I say! Let me take those for you,” he said. Without a word she put them down. He picked them up and followed her through a different hut, into the night. She pointed, and he dumped the water into a pit. She pointed again, and he filled the buckets from a standpipe. While they were filling, he cleared his throat and said, “I don’t suppose you happen to know Nancy Hicks-Potter, by any chance?”

  She nodded. He carried the buckets back. The metal handles were thin and cut into his fingers. He spilt water onto his shoes and breeches. By the time they reached the ward he was gasping. “Wait here,” she said, and took the buckets. Her face was punished by fatigue.

  After ten minutes, another nurse came out, hunched as if against a cold wind. “I’m Nancy. Who are you?”

  “Jack McWatters. Charlie Dash was my best friend. He made me promise to look you up if. . .”

  She was shaking her head. “Don’t know any Charlie Dash.”

  “Well ... you met him at that nunnery near Beauquesne.” She yawned. “You got along jolly well,” he said.

  “Not me. Can you carry buckets?”

  “Of course. Dash had lots of freckles. He —”

  “No. Don’t remember. Come on, there’s work to do.”

  For an hour, McWatters carried water to and from the Moribund Ward. It was softly lit and quiet; almost soothing. New patients were carried in, the nurses washed them and comforted them and eased their pain with generous doses of morphine. If a man felt hungry or thirsty, a nurse was swiftly at his side with food or drink. If he was distressed, she held his hand and talked or listened. But most of the dying had already slipped into sleep. Blankets hid their wounds. Occasionally a man cried out, and mumbled, and was silent. McWatters was reminded of his school dormitory, where sometimes dreams disturbed the sleep of homesick boys. Then he saw a stretcher being quietly taken out by the far door. The Moribund Ward appalled him. He was glad to wrap a torn handkerchief around his palms and escape with his slopping, bloody buckets. At the end of an hour he did not come back.

  He was bone-tired and ravenous. He hung about until the sombre captain turned up with another truckload of medical supplies. “Seen enough?” he asked. McWatters nodded. “Not everybody’s cup of tea, is it?” the captain said.

  They went back to Bruay. McWatters ate half a sandwich. He could still taste the smell of the ward. He found petrol for his car. He got lost three times and drove into Gazeran at one in the morning.

  The day had been a painful failure. He could cross off Nancy Hicks-Potter. That left Edith Reynolds. No thanks. He didn’t care if he never met her, or any other nurse.

  He went to bed, and woke up in a prison of blackness, feeling desperately sweaty and afraid. He went out into the cool night air, and promptly vomited the half-sandwich. That made his day complete. There was nothing left to lose.

  * * *

  Spud Ogilvy got his voice back. His wits, however, were another matter.

  Cleve-Cutler took the train to Harrogate. Ogilvy was in a huge white hotel, taken over by the War Office for the treatment of officers suffering shell-shock.

  “Which is what, exactly?” Cleve-Cutler asked a Dr Wallace.

  Wallace took out a rubber band and stretched it. The band was strong, and it stretched a long way, but eventually it snapped. “I could tie the ends together, but it will never be the same,” he said.

  Cleve-Cutler looked at the remains of the experiment. “And that’s the best you can do.”

  “We’re talking about the best that Ogilvy could do. Were you there?”

  “No, but I’ve read the report. He went on patrol. Had a bit of a scrap, nothing special, everyone got back. Lost his voice and went to bed. Sounds to me like laryngitis. Or a dose of ’flu.”

  “He has no infectious or contagious disease. Physically he’s quite sound. Even his voice is almost back to normal.”

  “So how d’you know there’s anything wrong?”

  “Sudden noises frighten him.”

  “Noises? What rot! He’s a fire-eater! Likes nothing better than sending a Hun to Kingdom Come with a loud bang!”

  “Nevertheless, sudden noises frighten him.”

  “You’ve had your leg pulled, old son.”

  “You’d better see him,” Dr Wallace said.

  Ogilvy had a comfortable bedroom on the fourth floor. There was a fine view of a wide lawn. He was sitting on the bed, barefoot, cross-legged like a tailor. He was wearing grey flannel trousers and a heavy white sweater. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of aviator’s dark glasses.

  “You’re looking well, Spud,” Cleve-Cutler said. Dr Wallace sat in a chair in a corner.

  Ogilvy took a long time to answer. “Not looking well,” he said. “Been looking hard. Can’t see the adjutant anywhere.”

  “That’s not surprising.”

  “Of course it’s not. Uncle’s got very poor eyesight.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t, would you? He’s lost his glasses. You can’t expect to see him from here when he’s lost his glasses.” Ogilvy’s voice was quiet but firm. “It’s a ridiculous idea.”

  Cleve-Cutler tried a different tack. “This place is awfully posh. Sure you can afford it?”

  Ogilvy thought about that. “It’s awfully kind of you,” he said at last, “but I couldn’t possibly accept a loan. Not in the circumstances.”

  “And what are they?”

  “That depends. How much do you need?”

  Cleve-Cutler lost patience. “All right, Spud. That’s enough flimflam. What I need is a good flight commander.”

  Again, Ogilvy gave the matter some thought. “That’s because you keep losing them. You lost the last one, didn’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be here, looking for another.”

  “Has it occurred to you that you’re letting down the rest of the squadron?”

  “No,” the doctor said. “Stop that.”

  “You lost them, too,” Ogilvy said. “Time you got some new glasses. Get some for Uncle while you’re at it.”

  Cleve-Cutler looked around, and nodded. “Very comfortable. Very comfortable.” He went to the door. “After you, doctor.” Wallace went out. As Cleve-Cutler followed him, he slammed the door as hard as he could. “Sorry,” he said. “It slipped.”

  “Imbecile,” Wallace said.

  They went back in. Ogilvy was sprawling on the floor, propped up by his left arm. Blood was welling out of his lower lip and dribbling eagerly down his chin. The aviator glasses had gone; his eyes were almost shut. The left arm wobbled and gave way, and he collapsed. Wallace ran to the door and shouted; then ran back. “Get out of here,” he said.

  “He bit his tongue, that’s all,” Cleve-Cutler said. “Looks worse than it is.”

  A nurse and a doctor arrived in a hurry. “Throw this idiot out!” Wallace said.

  “Worse things happen in France every minute,” Cleve-Cutler said, as he backed away. “No need for all this melodrama.” He was briefly tempted to slam the door; instead he kicked it as he left.r />
  He went downstairs. All the men he saw looked perfectly fit. The nurses were pretty. This was a jolly place to sit out the war. He strolled past a Guards captain who wore an eyepatch. “Beats Arras,” Cleve-Cutler said cheerfully.

  “Harris? How d’you do. Brocklehurst.” They shook hands. “You got out too, did you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Bloody liar. Nobody else got out. Just me. The rest are hanging on the old barbed wire.”

  Cleve-Cutler walked away.

  “Bloody liar,” Brocklehurst said softly. “All bloody liars.”

  Cleve-Cutler sat in what had been the hotel lobby. There was obviously nothing to be gained by staying, but he wasn’t going to give that quack the satisfaction of thinking he had run away. After about half an hour, Wallace came down. “I put six stitches in his lower lip,” he said. “You deserve the same for your stupidity.”

  “Every man would run away if he could. I want Ogilvy back. He’s physically fit: you said so. He’s malingering. The battle starts and he gets a sore throat: how convenient! I’ll tell you something, doctor. You’re treating the wrong end of the patient. A kick up the arse is what he needs.” He stopped because Wallace had done an extraordinary thing. He had reached for Cleve-Cutler’s wrist and was feeling his pulse.

  After about fifteen seconds, Wallace let go. “You’re standing still, major, but your heart is racing. Why is that?” Cleve-Cutler picked up his greatcoat. “I’m confident Captain Ogilvy will recover,” Wallace said. “If you were my patient, I should be far less certain.” But Cleve-Cutler was striding away.

  * * *

  Maddegan kept the replacements flying, and in much less than a week each man had done twenty hours solo in Pups.

  “Plenty,” Bliss said. “Ye gods! It’s generous.” He was on the telephone to Woolley. “We gave your squadron special treatment after you made a nonsense of those Biffs. That’s history. Now that you’re up to strength, I want every machine on patrol.”

  “Those replacements aren’t ready, sir. They can fly but —”

  “Listen to me, captain. The battle is in command now. Not me, not Trenchard, not General Allenby whose Push this is. And the battle wants all your pilots now, ready or not. Clear?”