War Story

by Derek Robinson

  Milne had panicked then. The taste of terror came back to him now, and he hated it so much that he tried to drive away from it: he pulled out and accelerated past the guns, making the horses twitch and jerk their heads as he roared by.

  That shellburst had cut two control cables. The BE2a wallowed on its back for a short eternity. Milne cursed it and kicked it, and the German gunners rejoiced to find an easy target. The little patch of sky was filthy with shellbursts. Milne never discovered how he righted the plane, but he knew it was sheer luck that he flew home.

  And it had been sheer luck, too, when that Aviatik had failed to kill him. Milne hadn’t thought of it for months but now he could see everything: those dun, translucent wings with dense black Maltese crosses, the propeller-disc shining as it met sunlight, the tail-unit that was all curves, like a big butterfly. The Aviatik had caught him at the weary end of a long patrol, had come out of nowhere and hammered him. It hit the engine. His machine was limping and labouring as Milne screwed his head around to watch the Aviatik perform a steep and elegant bank and return for the kill. The German never fired. His gun had jammed, and no amount of thumping released it. They waved to each other before they parted, but when he landed Milne was so weak that his mechanic had to help him get out of the cockpit.

  Milne was sweating now, just at the memory. He stopped the car beyond a little stone bridge and washed his face in the stream. How odd to get so upset at a lot of old memories. More than odd: silly, because the only thing that mattered was that he hadn’t been killed. In eighteen months’ flying and fighting there were bound to be a few close shaves. Like that time young Jenkins damn near collided with him over Vimy.

  Milne wished he hadn’t remembered that. Young Jenkins had sidled across his path and almost killed them both. A week later Jenkins had flown slap-bang into his flight commander, a man called Harry Drake. That was sheer and utter waste. Harry Drake had been a very nice man.

  Minnows played cheerfully in the stream. Milne threw a small pebble and scattered them. They soon came back. He envied them. When he came back, he decided, he was going to be a minnow.

  Paxton had drawn a revolver from the armoury. He had decided that an Orderly Officer should carry a revolver; it helped to demonstrate his authority. By late afternoon, as he walked about the aerodrome in full uniform, he was beginning to regret his decision.

  The officers were playing cricket again. He couldn’t help feeling that if this was war he didn’t think much of it. All anyone did was swim and play cricket. He was hot, and his blasted revolver kept banging against his hip in a most annoying way. Also he had been bitten inside his puttees by some blasted French insects. He itched and could not scratch. He glanced at the cricket match. Half the players had crowded together and were arguing about something; the other half were lying down. The trouble with Hornet Squadron, he decided, was that it was slack. It lacked the Will to Win.

  Private Fidler came up to him and saluted.

  “Mr. O’Neill’s compliments, sir, and could you come and look at something suspicious he’s found lying in the grass, you being Orderly Officer and all.”

  Paxton distrusted anything connected with O’Neill. “What is it?” he asked.

  “If we knew that, sir, it wouldn’t be suspicious, would it? Personally, I kept well clear of it, myself.”

  Paxton hesitated, but he saw no alternative. “All right, lead on,” he said, and unbuttoned his revolver holster.

  They walked through the camp. “I must say I’m surprised to find an Australian in the squadron,” Paxton said, allowing his distaste to show. “God knows there are still plenty of decent Englishmen left.”

  “Bless your heart, sir, Mr. O’Neill’s not what you’d call a real Australian,” Fidler said. “It’s more of an act, with him.” He chuckled at the thought.

  Paxton wanted to know more but he wasn’t willing to ask and it seemed that Fidler had nothing to add. They walked in silence for a few yards. “What about Toby Chivers, then?” Paxton asked. “Was he English?”

  Fidler began to speak but then stopped and cleared his throat. “Sometimes I can’t believe Mr. Chivers has really gone, sir,” he said. “It makes no sense. Not in his case.”

  They turned the corner of the cookhouse and saw O’Neill standing in a patch of knee-high grass. Paxton let his hand rest on the butt of his revolver and approached O’Neill cautiously. “All right, what is it?” he asked.

  “See for yourself.” O’Neill nudged something with his foot. “Come on, it won’t dare bite you. You’re the bloody Orderly Officer.” The Australian accent made his voice slack and contemptuous.

  Paxton took out the revolver and advanced. Fidler had vanished. Paxton looked at what O’Neill was looking at and saw nothing but grass. “I can’t see anything,” he said.

  “Jesus.” O’Neill sighed, and shook his head. “If you can’t see it I’d better pick it up and show you. Here, hold this for a minute.” He thrust something hard and heavy into Paxton’s left hand. Instinctively, the fingers closed. When Paxton looked up, O’Neill was ten yards away and running. “Keep the spring in!” O’Neill shouted. Paxton squeezed until his fingers hurt. He was holding a hand grenade. His stomach clenched at nothing, as it had nothing to clench, and gripped it hard.

  By the time he had worked out that the obvious solution was to fling the bloody thing as far away as possible, he knew it wasn’t going to explode. That meant he was holding the spring in. He knew very little about hand grenades but he felt sure that this one was safe as long as he kept a tight grip. His stomach slowly unclenched.

  He could still chuck it away, of course; there was plenty of open space. But that would be much less satisfying than finding O’Neill and giving the grenade back to him. And if O’Neill wouldn’t take it, Paxton would toss it to him and leave, fast. These japes were all very jolly but enough was enough.

  Paxton marched back through the camp, holding the grenade in one hand and his revolver in the other, and soon saw where O’Neill was. O’Neill was playing cricket. Splendid! There would be plenty of spectators for the showdown. He headed across the field.

  Tim Piggott was batting. He was enjoying himself, the ball looked big to him, he was whacking it vigorously over or between the fielders, and so far he had scored forty-seven runs, a squadron record. O’Neill was fielding very close to Piggott. “Not now, old boy,” Piggott called out as Paxton advanced. “Buzz off.”

  “But this is important.”

  “Dont talk tripe. I only need three for my fifty. Get out of the way, I can’t see the bowler.”

  The bowler was beginning his run-up. Reluctantly, Paxton moved back. The bowler flung down a fast delivery. Piggott smacked it crisply over Paxton’s head, and ran two. Paxton stared at O’Neill, who was squatting on his haunches, chewing a stem of grass. “Forty-nine,” Piggott said, gasping. “Now for the love of Mike, shut up and stand back. I’m going to sock this one into the middle of next week.”

  Paxton had heard the whizz of the ball; he knew how hard it was, how painful it could be. He circled around behind Piggott and approached O’Neill. “I believe this is yours,” he said.

  “For God’s sake!” Piggott complained. The bowler bowled and Piggott played a dreadful shot, a cross-batted lumberjack’s swipe, his head up, his feet all wrong. The ball squirted high off an inside edge. Piggott swore, several people shouted, somebody ran to catch the ball and collided violently with Paxton. Both men fell to the ground. “Now look what you made me do,” Piggott said crossly. “You made me break the squadron bat.”

  “Grenade!” Paxton shouted hoarsely. He had stopped an elbow with his nose and his eyes were watering from the pain. “I dropped a grenade!”

  “Practice grenade,” O’Neill said. “Not real. Don’t bust your truss about it.” He was tossing it from hand to hand.

  “What a swizz,” Piggott said, examining the bat. It was thoroughly broken: the handle had come loose and the blade was split from end to end.

  �
��You swine,” Paxton tried to say, but his nose had begun to bleed and his speech was clogged.

  “End of game,” said Goss, the man who had collided with Paxton. “End of cricket as we know it in our time. And incidentally I seem to have cracked my elbow.”

  “Really?” Foster, the bowler, had joined them. “You’ve scarcely recovered from yesterday’s dislocated shoulder, Douglas. And what was it last week? A double rupture?”

  “Torn muscles, actually.”

  “You do keep up a giddy pace. How you manage it on those poor clubbed feet of yours I just don’t know.”

  “It’s broken, I tell you,” Goss insisted, flexing his arm carefully. “I shall never play the violin again.”

  “Forty-nine,” Piggott said. “Forty bloody nine. It’s tragic.”

  “Anyway, you were out. I would have caught that ball easily if Dexter hadn’t run into me. Wouldn’t I, Frank?”

  Paxton glared. He blew his nose and made it bleed. “Paxton,” he mumbled.

  “Don’t mention it,” Foster said.

  “I think that chap’s decided to land after all,” said Goss. “He’s been hovering about up there for ages, waiting for Tim to get his half-century.”

  It was a BE2c. The plane came drifting down, the pilot giving the engine brief drumrolls of power to keep the nose up, and landed nearby. They walked over to meet him.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said. He was short, and when he shrugged off his flying coat he looked even shorter. He had the kind of face that only a mother could love: decent, cleancut, obedient, trusting and honest. “I wasn’t altogether sure where I was,” he said. “You were here,” Goss told him. “You’ve been here ever since you arrived.” The pilot’s face was spattered with oil except where he had worn goggles, and there the skin was milk-white and freckled. He took off his helmet. His hair was a deep rich red. “Hullo, Paxton,” he said.

  Paxton recognised the voice before the face. “Hullo, Kellaway,” he said. He had dismissed Kellaway from his mind six days ago. Kellaway had gone down in the Channel. “I thought we’d lost you.”

  “I thought I’d lost you.”

  “They thought they had lost each other,” Foster explained to Piggott and Goss. Kellaway slapped his gloves against his thigh and shook his head at the wonder of it all.

  “I expect you’d like a nice cup of tea,” said Piggott.

  “Gosh, yes!” Kellaway said.

  They all trailed off towards the mess. “It’s probably none of my business, old boy,” Foster said to Paxton,”but were you on your way to shoot someone?”

  Paxton remembered that he was holding his revolver. He stuffed it in its holster. “Now that the cricket’s over,” he said thickly,”maybe we can all start shooting someone.” His nose began to bleed again. He threw his head back but a scarlet trickle escaped and splashed his tunic.

  “Dexter here thinks we ought to start killing people,” Foster announced.

  “Paxton,” mumbled Paxton.

  “I second that,” Piggott said. “Let’s all kill Paxton, quick, before he bleeds to death.”

  Milne knew the Amiens–Bapaume road very well from the air. It was a Roman road: fifty kilometres with scarcely a bend. It ran north-east from Amiens, and it was useful to pilots because it crossed the Front. Bapaume was held by the enemy. If you were slightly lost and you could find the Amiens-Bapaume road you were okay, provided you knew north from south.

  But until now, Milne had never driven on the road. From Amiens to Albert the surface wasn’t bad. The town of Albert had been thoroughly knocked about, and beyond Albert shell-holes were commonplace. The traffic thinned out, and then disappeared altogether. Milne was on his own. Nothing was happening in the cratered wastelands on either side. It didn’t look like the rear of a battlefield. It looked abandoned and forgotten, like miles of exhausted open-cast mines.

  A military policeman came out of a dugout and waved him down. “This is the turning-point, sir,” he said.

  “Jolly good,” Milne said.

  The man pointed to a spot where the road had been widened. “This is the last good place where you can turn the car. If you drive on, you might have to reverse all the way back, sir.”

  Milne turned the car, parked it on the shoulder of the road, and got out. “Thank you,” he said, and began walking.

  “You don’t want to go up there, sir,” the policeman called. “Not at four o’clock. It’s coming up to the afternoon hate.”

  Milne acknowledged this with a wave and did not stop.

  The policeman went back into the dugout, where his mate was reading a newspaper. “Royal fucking Flying Corps,” the policeman said. “Too fucking daft to come in out of the fucking rain.”

  The day was pleasantly warm. Milne unbuttoned his collar and loosened his tie. Now that he had time to look about, he saw little touches of colour between the shell-holes: iris, wild lupin, poppy, cowslip. There were occasional wrecks beside the road, mostly lorries, although he also saw a motorcycle twisted liked a corkscrew. Far away the remains of an aeroplane made him pause; but it was smashed beyond recognition. He strolled on and realised that he was whistling. He never whistled; he hadn’t whistled since he came to France. How curious that he should start now, in all this silence. There was a bit of dull mumbling and grumbling going on somewhere over the horizon but it only pointed up the absolute silence all around.

  A yellow butterfly arose and he made a grab for it. It dodged easily and flew ahead, zigzagging, never more than a few feet away, as if it liked being followed. “All right, you’re faster than me,” he said,”but can you whistle Alexander’s Ragtime Band?” The butterfly did some clever stunts. “That’s not whistling,” he said,”and you know it.”

  A group of men came in sight, about twenty, all running from the Front. Their boots made a dull clatter, like distant farm machinery. Milne found a broken cart at the side of the road and sat on it to watch them pass.

  Each man carried a shovel. They kept up a good pace, although their faces were shining with sweat. If they saw him they ignored him: nobody saluted, nobody even glanced; only one thing mattered, and that was to keep on running. A tall, thin lieutenant came pounding along behind them, head down, fists clenched. He saw Milne at the last moment, kept running for five yards, then stopped. “Carry on, sergeant!” he shouted, but the order turned into a gasp for breath. He stood with his hands linked on top of his head and his chest heaving. The squad ran on, leaving a faint haze of dust.

  “Jolly warm work,” Milne said.

  The lieutenant turned. He was blinking hard because his eyes were stinging from sweat. “It’s a warm spot,” he said,”sir.” He wiped his eyes and looked at Milne again. “May I ask …” He pressed his ribs, and winced. “Are you looking for your regiment, sir?”

  “No, no.”

  “Green Howards, I believe.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Only … they’re not in this part of the Front, sir.”

  “Quite so. Actually I’m Flying Corps now. I thought I’d come and take a squint at the real war. Like some chocolate?”

  “I ought to tell you, sir…” The lieutenant’s breathing was getting better. “The Hun batteries have got this road pretty well bracketed. They give it a bloody good pasting every day. Especially the afternoon hate.” He accepted a square of chocolate.

  “And when does that start?”

  The lieutenant looked at his watch. “A minute ago.”

  Milne nodded, sucking his chocolate. “Maybe the Kaiser’s given them a half-day holiday.”

  “Maybe my watch is fast.”

  A faint, clean-edged whistle came out of the east. The lieutenant cocked his head. The whistle magnified fast, at first splitting the afternoon silence and then tearing it, ripping it apart and finally releasing a bang that Milne felt through his boots. Two hundred years nearer the Front, a brown fountain created itself beside the road, climbed and spread, hung poised for a long moment, and fell. “You knew it would d
rop short?” Milne asked.

  The lieutenant nodded. “One develops an ear for that sort of thing.” Another shell was on its way. “A chap can’t be forever diving into a hole, just because …” This time the explosion was fifty yards nearer.

  “What if two come over at once?” Milne asked.

  “You just have to listen twice as hard.”

  “I see. And I suppose different types of shells make different sounds?”

  The lieutenant took out a filthy handkerchief and wiped his neck. “I really ought to be pushing on,” he said. Flies circled his head. He seemed not to notice them.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Milne said. “I’ll find my way back, in due course.” Shells were falling over a large area now. Most fell out of sight, but the persistent, irregular crump-crump was like the stamping of giant cattle. He saw a pulse thumping away in the lieutenant’s neck, and realised he was afraid that Milne might think he was afraid to stay. “Your troops must be wondering what’s become of you,” Milne said. “You’ve been most helpful. I think I’ll stroll on a bit further. Many thanks.”

  They shook hands. Milne knew, from his glance, that the lieutenant thought he was wrong in the head; but then, everyone thought all RFC pilots and observers were a bit mad. It went with the job.

  He walked on a few paces for the sake of form, and watched the lieutenant hurry away. The bombardment grew heavier, and seemed to wander in a random fashion. Milne ate his chocolate and watched distant eruptions of mud enliven the landscape, following the fancy of some German battery commander. The howlings in the sky were suddenly louder and nearer; he blinked at the instant ferocity of the shellburst, and once or twice he lurched when the edge of a blast-wave shoved him in the chest. Then the attack grew bored and fickle and went off to blow up other bits of harmless field. The stench of high explosive drifted on a gentle breeze and made his nostrils twitch.

  Milne was not testing his bravery. Where was the bravery in standing on a bare road in deserted countryside during a barrage? It made no difference to anyone whether he stayed or went. His survival was entirely a matter of luck. It takes no bravery to trust to luck. He was there to see the show, and to discover how watching the show affected him. Absurd reasons, both.