War Story

by Derek Robinson

  “No, no,” James said. He looked to be the youngest of the four: fair-haired, fresh of face, with a mouth as wide as a choirboy’s. “You’re going too far now. You can’t fine him and shoot him. There is such a thing as British justice, you know.”

  “You ought to become a barrister, James,” Frank said. “You’d make a red-hot barrister. You could handle all my divorces.”

  “No fear.” James wrinkled his nose. “Rotten uniform. I prefer the Army.”

  More silence, while Paxton worked his way through his gruel.

  “What do these coves want, anyway?” Charlie said;”That’s what I don’t understand.”

  “They want peace, old boy,” Spud said. “They want the war stopped, no more shooting, everyone goes home.”

  “Bloody ridiculous,” Charlie grumbled. “Stop the war? We’ve only just got it properly organised. The man’s barmy.”

  There was a long pause, while Paxton soldiered on.

  “I once made a statement calculated to prejudice recruiting,” Frank said,”but I’m damned if I can remember what it was. All I know is when I said it the colonel turned white and told me he’d have me court-martialled for treason as soon as we’d captured whatever position it was we were supposed to be capturing. Ten minutes later he got blown to bits, so that was that.”

  “He should have written it all down,” Charlie said. “If he’d written it down and given the order to the adjutant, you’d have been shot at dawn, Frank, and you wouldn’t have liked that a little bit.”

  “Charlie’s right,” Spud said. “You’re not really at your best first thing in the morning.”

  “Well … it’s such a bloody awful time of day. It’s bad enough to shoot a chap. Why get him out of bed at dawn?”

  “It’s a gesture,” Spud said.

  “Damn rude gesture.” Frank discarded his newspaper and stood up. “Good God,” he said. Paxton found them all gazing at him. “You don’t have to eat it all, you know,” Frank said. “A couple of spoonfuls will do.”

  Paxton put down his loaded spoon. He had almost emptied the bowl, training himself to swallow each mouthful without tasting it. Now a sickly aftertaste rose in his throat like vengeance.

  “It’s a gesture,” Spud said.

  “Personally, I can’t stand the muck,” Frank said. “I usually give one of the servants a shilling to eat mine for me. Maybe you haven’t got a shilling.”

  Paxton nodded to indicate that he had a shilling. He didn’t trust himself to open his mouth.

  Spud said: “Actually sixpence would probably be enough. Private Collins here quite likes porridge, don’t you, Collins?”

  “No, sir.” Collins replaced Paxton’s bowl with a plate of bacon and eggs.

  “Too late now, Collins,” Frank said. “You should have spoken up earlier. Dexter’s gone and eaten it.”

  “Paxton,” muttered Paxton.

  “Look here, you chaps.” Frank moved behind James’s chair and put his hands on his shoulders. “If we’re to do some shopping and have a swim before lunch …” He squeezed until James squirmed.

  “Hey, that hurt,” James said, still reading his paper.

  “Shows what a puny weed you are.”

  “Are you coming, Spud?” Charlie asked.

  “No, dammit, I can’t, I’ve got to…” He stopped suddenly and stared at nothing in particular. “On the other hand, I don’t see why not,” he said, and turned and smiled at Paxton. “The CO asked me to tell you that you’re Orderly Officer today. There’s nothing to it, really; you just stroll around with this armband on and look intelligent…” He tossed Paxton the armband. “Sign here, if you don’t mind.” He held out a clipboard and gave Paxton a pen. “This gives you authority over the entire camp.” Paxton signed, and returned the pen. “What if—” he began.

  “Ask Corporal Lacey, in the Orderly Room,” Spud said. “Lacey knows all.”

  “Come on, you two,” called Frank from the door.

  ‘You’re very lucky,” Charlie told Paxton. “The old man must like you. I didn’t get to be orderly dog for months, but then I’m not very bright.”

  They left. Paxton looked at his armband and his clipboard and finally at his pair of fried eggs, until he realised that they were looking at him. He pushed the plate away.

  By eight the sun had burned off all the ground mist. The fields behind the British Front Line were a brilliant green. Tim Piggott, a mile high, located the spot where he knew the British battery was firing. A tiny cluster of miniature flames came and went. Piggott said: “Bang, one elephant, two elephants, three elephants, four elephants, five elephants, crash.” Exactly on crash, a cluster of little brown flowers bloomed behind the German lines, and slowly collapsed. “Missed again,” he said. “You’re hopeless.”

  Binns, who was Piggott’s observer, banged his fist on the right of the nacelle. Piggott immediately banked the FE to the right. Then he searched where Binns was pointing and found the Pfalz, blurred in the dazzle of the sun. It had reversed direction and was trying yet again to sneak around behind the FE. “Thank you, Boy,” he said. He knew Binns couldn’t hear him against the rush of wind and roar of engine, but Piggott liked to talk when he was on patrol.

  He straightened out when he had put the FE between the Pfalz and a BE2c two thousand feet beneath them. It was the BE2c that the Pfalz was after. Piggott’s job was to guard it and let it get on with its work of artillery observation.

  The morning was almost cloudless, with just a milkskim at enormous height, and the FE gave Piggott a magnificent view, like a box at the opera. But he had been trundling around this bit of sky for ninety minutes and he was ready to go home for breakfast. The Pfalz was a monoplane with a fuselage like a long, thin coffin and a cockpit slap in the middle of the wing so the pilot had to tip the machine on its side to look below him. This pilot had done a great deal of tipping and looking but only once in an hour had he dived at the BE2c, and he had pulled out of the dive after a couple of hundred feet when he saw that the FE would meet him first. He was a cautious, thoughtful Hun, and Piggott was bored with him. “You want this Quirk on a plate, don’t you?” he said. “Not today, I’m afraid. Come down and fight me for him.”

  BE2cs were slow and steady and they could be depended upon to stay in the air for two and a half hours or until they were shot up by enemy scouts or shot down by archie, whichever came sooner. When he joined the Corps, Piggott had flown a Quirk twice a day for a month. It was the Loos offensive, a bad, busy time when the generals demanded lots of artillery observation and photographic reconnaissance. Piggott soon came to hate the first and loathe the second.

  Spotting for the guns meant hanging about in the same piece of sky, making random changes in height and direction to baffle the archie, you hoped. But the changes mustn’t be too violent or your Morse transmissions suffered. Taking photographs, on the other hand, meant flying absolutely dead straight and level and hoping the Hun gunners couldn’t believe their luck and therefore aimed somewhere else. In his four weeks with the squadron they lost sixteen BE2cs and their crews. Piggott was saved by a sliver of anti-aircraft shell. It chopped off the little finger of his left hand. When he left hospital he was posted to Hornet Squadron.

  The Pfalz turned again, and again Piggott turned with it. “No imagination!” he said. “Try something different.” He searched the sky, slowly and thoroughly: nothing. He looked down just as a string of dense black blots created themselves a hundred yards to the right of the BE2c and immediately began to spread and fade. “Pathetic!” he said. “This could go on all day. I’m hungry.”

  He considered climbing up to the Pfalz and making it fight or run away. Not a good idea. It could outclimb him, and the FE didn’t get better as it went higher. Besides, his job was to guard the BE2c, which (he saw) had just made the archie look silly again. Say ten shells a minute: that was nine hundred shells the enemy had wasted, not to mention the peril to their own men from the clatter of descending shrapnel on their heads. “Ya
h, yah!” Piggott chanted. “Can’t catch me!” And at that precise instant, seemingly in retaliation for the taunt, black shellbursts straddled the BE2c and flung its nose up as if it had walked into a punch.

  Piggott stopped breathing until he saw the plane straighten out. He felt painfully ashamed. It wasn’t his fault; it was luck, or clever anticipation by the German battery commander; nevertheless his throat felt sick with a surge of self-disgust.

  There was no way he could help but he had to do something so he shoved the stick forward and went down. The BE2c was a mess, but at least it was right-side up and the British lines were near. Something was falling, catching the light as it spun. It couldn’t be a parachute. No parachutes in the RFC, except for balloonists. It looked like half a wing. Christ Piggott thought, if they’ve lost half a wing, have they got any controh left? The BE2c was tipping into a gentle sideslip. It had no power. The propeller had stopped. Something else fell off and fluttered behind it. All the time, archie was staining the sky with blots, like someone flicking a loaded pen. One blot touched the BE2c and the story was over.

  Piggott looked away. There was nothing worthwhile left, and what was not worthwhile he did not wish to see hit the ground. He levelled out and turned westward. Binns banged and pointed. The Pfalz had followed them down and was now circling lazily, five hundred feet above. The German pilot waved. Piggott waved back. Why not? It was just another day’s work, wasn’t it? Breakfast, that was what mattered now. Breakfast. Bacon, toast, maybe even some devilled kidneys. Breakfast. You had to keep your strength up for this kind of work. Breakfast. Breakfast. Great big breakfast.

  Paxton took seriously his responsibilities as Orderly Officer. He wore his Sam Browne and carried his cane and walked around the camp. All was in order. The men he met gave him orderly salutes. After half an hour Paxton had found no hint of disorder. He grew bored with the camp and went to inspect the airfield. That too was in good shape. There was a black patch where his Quirk had burned but the wreckage had been carted away; the rest of the field was blamelessly green.

  He walked along the tracks his Quirk had left in the grass and re-lived in reverse his disastrous landing: here was the strip where the plane slid on its belly, and beyond that the marks where the wheel-struts collapsed and gouged out turf, and further back still the spot where the plane first fell to earth and the wheels dented the grass. Now that the machine was destroyed he felt curiously proud of his arrival. A good landing, so one of his instructors had told him, was a landing you could walk away from. He sat on his heels and fingered the wheel-marks. It hadn’t been perfect but it was still a damn sight better than Wilkins had managed at Dover. Or Ross-Kennedy, doing cartwheels in a French field. Or Dexter, making a mess of that church. Damn fools. Nice chaps but rotten pilots. The hard-edged drone of an engine cut into his thoughts and he looked up. An FE2b sailed overhead, sinking softly, and touched down without a bounce. Paxton felt sick with envy. Two more planes landed during the next ten minutes. Each bounced a bit. The second bounced twice. Paxton felt better.

  He went for a walk around the field, and then strolled into the mess to chat with the crews about their patrol; but the mess was empty.

  “They’ve all gone swimming, sir,” a servant said. “Just ate breakfast and went.”

  “Ah. They’ll be back for lunch, though?”

  “No, sir. I think they go to an estaminet, sir.”

  “You mean I’m the only officer on the camp?”

  “Well, there’s the adjutant, sir. But he doesn’t usually take lunch.”

  Paxton went to see the adjutant. Corporal Lacey’s gramophone was playing the César Franck symphonic variations, but Lacey stopped the record and received Paxton courteously. “I’m afraid Mr. Appleyard is resting in bed this morning,” he said. “A recurrence of an old Nigerian malady, I believe. The CO, of course, is at Brigade HQ all day.”

  “Ah,” Paxton said. “Yes. Of course.” Nobody had told him the CO was at Brigade. You’d think the Orderly Officer ought to be told.

  In the next room, a couple of typewriters chattered, starting and stopping as unpredictably as birdsong.

  “If I may say so,” Lacey said,”it was uncommonly generous of you to take over Mr. Ogilvy’s duty as Orderly Officer.”

  Paxton looked down. He found something of interest in an in-tray. It was a memo about disinfectant for the men’s latrines. “Oh well,” he said. “I wasn’t going anywhere.”

  “Neither was Mr. Ogilvy. Now he’s splashing happily in the Somme.”

  Rafters creaked as the heat baked the roof. Lacey sharpened a pencil, taking a long time to get it to a fine point. Paxton watched the tiny flakes fall and wished he knew how to drive. Then he could take an army car and whizz around the French countryside. There had been a chap at Sherborne who’d had a car. Lucky blighter. Sherborne had been a jolly good school. You got beaten, of course. Everyone got beaten, by masters, by prefects. Eventually you became a prefect and then you beat others. Didn’t do anyone any harm. On the contrary, it helped to develop the proper spirit. That was the great difference between us and the Boche. We had the proper spirit.

  “Sinfully languid,” Lacey said. He was standing by a window, balancing the pencil on a fingertip by its point.

  “What?”

  “Don’t you find this weather almost sinfully languid?” The pencil wavered and he deftly caught it as it fell. “Idleness is a virtue on days like this. Unless one chooses to swim, and swimming is simply the most sensual of all indulgences. Don’t you think?” He had the pencil balanced again.

  “No,” Paxton said firmly.

  “Oh, surely,” Lacey murmured. “We all dream of toppling naked into a cool calm river and letting the running current do with us what it will.”

  “I don’t,” Paxton said. “I don’t like rivers.” This was not true, but he wanted to put Lacey in his place.

  “Actually, it’s a canal.” Lacey let the pencil fall, and this time did not catch it; instead he kicked it before it touched the floor, sending it flying into a corner. “The Somme canal. The river’s weedy, so the officers swim in the Somme canal.” Lacey was brisk now, dusting his hands. “It cleanses them of the corruption of combat, you see. It washes off the sweat of death.”

  “What rot.”

  “Yes.” Lacey turned and smiled a smile of pleased surprise. “Rot sums it up nicely. What rot is war. Its stench is everywhere. Nothing can resist it. What rot.”

  “How long have you been with the squadron, corporal?” Paxton asked.

  “Eighteen months.” Lacey waited until Paxton’s mouth began to open and added:”Sir.”

  “Eighteen months and still only a corporal, corporal. Very slow.”

  “Yes. Sinfully languid, in fact.” He took a small brush from his desk and began tidying up his moustache.

  Paxton had had enough. “Come and get me when the adjutant surfaces,” he said, and made for the door.

  “Don’t lend him any money,” Lacey called. Paxton turned and stared. “He’ll try to borrow money,” Lacey said. “Don’t lend him any. It’s bad for him.”

  “What a preposterous idea,” Paxton said. “Corporal.”

  “He picked it up in Egypt,” Lacey said. “Sir.”

  Driving back from Brigade headquarters, Rufus Milne had a lot to think about. To his surprise he found himself thinking about other matters. In particular, about his war and the number of times it had nearly killed him.

  This was something he never discussed, never mentioned in letters. He didn’t keep a diary. His response to danger was to forget it as soon as it had passed. This policy had worked very well: he suffered no nightmares, no spells of depression, none of the crippling anxiety which he knew some other pilots suffered when they were getting ready to fly. For nearly two years, Milne had done his job day by day, sometimes boring, sometimes exciting, and reckoned himself lucky to have it. Now, suddenly, as the car charged along a dead-straight road, wheels drumming, poplars flickering by, he saw hims
elf in a plane that was cartwheeling across a turnip field like a blown-away windmill, and he felt sick.

  The plane was a Maurice Farman so the crash must have happened in 1914, soon after the squadron came to France. No trenches then, just armies and battles and confusion. Nobody knew where the enemy was (or, if they claimed they knew, they turned out to be wrong) so the RFC flew from dawn to dusk, endless reconnaissance patrols. The roads were crowded but the skies were empty; anyway, in those days enemy planes couldn’t hurt you. Milne was at five thousand feet, busily marking troop columns on his map and wishing he had some chocolate, when the engine stopped. No coughing or spluttering, no hesitation: sudden silence. It was a very final decision.

  He glided westward for several miles. The field he picked out looked green and smooth, but over the last two hundred yards the wind turned boisterous and blew him sideways, across a turnip field. He knew, as he saw the rows of turnips rushing past, slantwise, that his wheels would never run; and when they touched he wrapped his arms around his head. He felt like a man in a barrel over a waterfall: the machine was flailing itself to bits, smashing its nose and tail and wings, the earth and sky whirling, until the fit of rage had exhausted itself and Milne found himself sprawled in a battered cockpit and not much else.

  That was his fifth forced landing but his first real crash. He had seen nothing of it at the time, but now, driving this car, he could follow it all in his mind, perfectly clearly. Ten seconds of cartwheeling chaos, and he’d walked away. Limped away. The memory made him shudder.

  He had to slow behind a long line of horse-drawn artillery. For a mile he ambled along in low gear, thinking that if he hadn’t been a pilot he might have been a gunner. It must be fun to bang away at the enemy, catch him by surprise, make him hop. Fun for the Hun gunners, too, presumably.

  The German archie had certainly had fun the day they caught Milne in a skimpy little BE2a somewhere near Festubert. He’d treated those fluffy balls of black smoke as a joke, until one of them stung him. It burst below, and flipped the plane onto its back.