War Story

by Derek Robinson

  “It was dark,” Cleve-Cutler said.

  “Of course it was. I expect Sergeant Harris thought he was getting a Rolls-Bentley. If it hadn’t been so damn dark none of this would have happened. I blame everything on the blackout. In fact, considering this joker was writing his diary in the pitch black and falling-down drunk too, it’s amazing he could put two words together. I’d like to congratulate him. Wheel him on.”

  “Can’t,” Cleve-Cutler said. “He copped it, yesterday.”

  “What bad luck. Never mind, wheel on the other idiot.” Bliss checked the page. “Kellaway.”

  “No good either. He banged his head, lost his memory.”

  “Really? All of it? What a dangerous place this is. First you lose your CO, then your adjutant, then Henley, and now Kellaway can’t find his memory. Honestly, it’s getting so a chap daren’t put anything down for a minute. What’s behind it, d’you think? Magpies? Squirrels? Cat-burglars?”

  “You don’t believe this stuff in Henley’s diary.”

  “Do you?”

  “If it’ll get us out of a hole, yes.”

  Colonel Bliss went off to telephone his boss, the general. When he came back he said: “The old buffer is satisfied. He knew Milne couldn’t possibly have done anything so bloody silly, and now events have proved him right.”

  “So can we fly again?”

  “Yes. In fact he’s so pleased that he’s put Hornet Squadron on double patrols for a week.” Bliss returned the diary. “I liked the bit about the argument over horse-power,” he said. “Somebody used his imagination there.”

  Kellaway and Paxton were among the pallbearers at Henley’s funeral. There was no coffin; the body was in a neat canvas bag resting on a board. It lay on the floor of the tender that carried the funeral party to the graveyard at Pepriac church. Paxton was shocked by the absence of a coffin but he quickly forgot about it as he watched the body get jolted inside its bag by the bumpy ride. What fascinated him was the utter helplessness of this corpse, the way you could actually see the wobble of its feet or its head. All through the burial ceremony he kept thinking how easy it was to kill a man. You aim, you squeeze, and before he hears the bang of your gun he’s dead. But even that wasn’t the most exciting part. The real thrill was turning an aeroplane into a flaming wreck. That Albatros had looked so beautiful. And he had knocked it out of the sky. He, Oliver Paxton, not yet nineteen, never very brilliant at Sherborne although he’d got his rugger colours, couldn’t master trigonometry to save his life but he could blast a Hun before lunch. He could count up to one! The padre finished speaking. Paxton hadn’t heard a word. He glanced across the open grave at Kellaway. He’s smiling, Kellaway thought. What on earth is there to smile about? An NCO shouted orders. Rifle fire crashed and echoed. Paxton smelled fumes, and tasted the scent of intoxication.

  Paxton had no difficulty getting permission to leave Pepriac. Lacey fixed it with the adjutant. Now that Paxton had got his uncle to send a box of the best Havana-Havanas every other day it seemed that Lacey could fix anything.

  At first he explored the land to the south, as far as the river Somme, the limits of the British Army. It was easy walking: gentle slopes, vast fields, well drained by the chalk that gleamed wherever a trench had been dug. Ten or twelve miles was nothing. And everywhere he went he met soldiers in camp, soldiers out training, soldiers on the march. The countryside was studded with regiments, and more kept arriving: not from the Trenches but from base camps, sometimes from England.

  This military richness amazed and impressed him. Buglecalls delighted him. Sometimes, when the air was still, three or four buglers in different camps would overlap and he stopped to admire the sheer cleverness of the organisation. He liked watching men on parade. He liked watching the wagontrains, sometimes six horses to a wagon, rumbling by knee-deep in white dust. But most of all he liked watching troops on the march behind a band of fifes and drums. The crunch of boots, the shrill of fifes, the thump and thunder of drumskins: all combined to make his chest swell and his legs twitch with suppressed energy. As the column marched away he felt a huge, patriotic pride mixed with a regret that he could do nothing to demonstrate that pride. He was an Englishman. That was Saint George’s music. He wanted to slay a dragon or two.

  One day he took the squadron dog, now named Brutus, with him for company. This worked so well that next day he asked Kellaway to come.

  Dando had grounded Kellaway until he was sure he had recovered from his concussion. Kellaway was not keen on walking. “That’s why I left the Somerset Light Infantry and joined the Corps,” he said. “All that marching. You walk everywhere in the infantry. Awfully tiring. I’ve got small feet, too.”

  “Just a short stroll,” Paxton said.

  “Nice lunch somewhere?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not absolutely sure it was the Somerset Light Infantry. Sometimes I think it was, sometimes I wonder. D’you ever get that feeling?”

  “No. Come on, get your boots on.”

  It was another fine day. The fields were awash with poppies, and there was always a skylark high above, singing as if God were holding auditions. Paxton and Kellaway walked north. They visited battalions of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, the Highland Light Infantry, the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, the Scottish Rifles. They were offered lunch in the mess by some Northumberland Fusiliers, newly arrived. Only eggs and potatoes, for which the Fusiliers apologised, but lots of wine and cheese. Kellaway quickly drank two glasses of wine and became very jaunty.

  “Your face seems to have acquired a few battle honours lately,” one of the hosts said to him.

  “Ah, yes.” He felt his bruises. “But you ought to see the other chap.”

  “No, no.” Paxton made a little melodrama out of it. “Not a good idea. Might put them off their food.”

  They asked him what had happened, as he knew they would. This was his party-piece. He was good at this. “Routine patrol,” he said. “Four or five thousand feet. Above the clouds, anyway. You wouldn’t have seen a thing from down here.” That always impressed people. “Along came this Hun, two-seater, Fokker, nasty piece of work. Machine-guns fore and aft. One of their latest grids. Bigger than us, and faster. He knew it, too. You could tell from the way he charged at us. I reckon he must have been doing a hundred miles an hour.” There was utter silence now. He took a sip of wine.

  “Then we had a scrap and I shot him down,” Kellaway said. “Pass the potatoes, old bean.”

  Paxton tried to grin and be a part of the laughter, but he felt sick with rage and hatred. Kellaway had not only pinched his story, he had pinched his Hun! And he was still chattering away. Paxton gave up. He chewed the tasteless food in order to make his face do something that hid his expression.

  Kellaway was saying: “… but that one doesn’t count because he ran away home, and it was downhill all the way so he went very fast. Anyhow, we made up for it next day. We caught a whale. Huge German aeroplane. When we searched the wreckage we found a billiard table and a genuine lavatory with a chain you could pull. I put three drums of ammunition through the Lewis before that Hun went down. The barrel was so hot it glowed red like a poker.”

  “So how many Huns have you shot down, in all?”

  “Seven. Eight, if you count double for the whale.”

  Paxton made an effort to be cheerful but he felt both angry and ashamed. They left as soon as he could contrive it, which was not until Kellaway had drunk a lot of brandy. Neither of them spoke until they were out of sight of the camp. “I must say that was the most disgusting performance I have ever witnessed,” Paxton said; but he was talking to himself: Kellaway had turned aside and was pissing on an old tree stump. Paxton walked slowly on, his face twisted in distaste, waiting for Kellaway to catch up and be condemned in style. But Kellaway didn’t catch up. Paxton went back and found him asleep with his hat over his eyes. “Sod you, then,” he said, and felt soiled by his own words. He walked away and spat to cleanse his mou
th.

  For half an hour he wandered about, watching troops erect tents. Then he decided to go home. Kellaway was where he had left him, still asleep. By now Paxton was too weary to be angry. “Come on,” he said.

  Kellaway awoke like a child, smiling, yawning and stretching. “Goodness, I’m thirsty,” he said. “D’you know, I just had the most extraordinary dream. I dreamt I was back at school, and it was last summer, because I was captain of tennis which I was, you see – only I was in uniform, and …”

  Paxton let him ramble on as they walked back, until he lost patience and interrupted. “Why did you tell all those frightful lies?”

  “Steady on. It’s only a dream.”

  “I’m not talking about your dopey dream. I mean all the lies you told the Northumberland Fusiliers at lunch.”

  “Lunch?” Kellaway kicked at a dandelion. “Did we have lunch?”

  “You told them you’d shot down seven or eight Huns.”

  “No! Really? What a spoof!” Kellaway was delighted.

  “There is such a thing as honour, you know,” Paxton said.

  “Did they believe me?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I don’t see how anybody’s honour has suffered, then. Do you?”

  Paxton felt trapped. “It’s just not good enough,” he said.

  Chapter 11

  Flying two patrols a day was not unusual in 1916. Plenty of Quirks went up twice a day, coming home for lunch as if they were keeping office hours. But at least the crews of Quirks had specific jobs to do, and once they had done them they could quit, put the nose down and buzz off. FE2bs led a different life.

  They were built to fight. The initial stood for ‘Farman Experimental’ but a lot of people assumed they meant ‘Fighting Experimental’, and some of the more gung-ho pilots actually called their machines ‘fighters’ instead of ‘scouts’. Cleve-Cutler was one of these. When his flight commanders complained that they hardly ever saw enemy planes, and so two patrols a day were twice as pointless as one, he said: “Not at all. Now we own the sky. If Jerry wants it back he’ll have to come up and fight us for it.”

  “I think Jerry’s trying to bore us to death,” Gerrish said.

  “Then stir him up. You’re supposed to be flying offensive patrols, so be more offensive. Be downright bloody disgusting.”

  “I couldn’t do that,” Foster said. “Nanny made me promise. However,” he added as he saw Cleve-Cutler’s expression, “I suppose I could always shoot Nanny first.”

  “And don’t be so damned cocky,” Cleve-Cutler said. “Remember what happened to that chap Dobson or Hobson or whatever his name was, at Lagnicourt last month.” The meeting broke up in silence. Hobson had crashed in flames, caught by a low-flying enemy machine which shot him down when he was only fifty feet off the ground, thinking his patrol was over, probably thinking the other plane (if he saw it) must be British. Nobody knew what Hobson had thought. Nobody caught the other plane, either.

  Flying offensive patrols was a wearying grind. There were the physical demands of going from ground level to the same height as the top of a small Alp and sitting there for an hour or more in a Force 10 gale. Do it twice a day for a week and your body starts to complain: the head throbs, or the sinuses burn, or the ears develop a persistent buzz. But that was trivial. The great strain was the search, and it grew worse when there was nothing to find. The sky became achingly empty. Impossibly empty. Some pilots and observers lost faith in their own eyes. The less they found the more they worried. After all, they were up there to kill someone. Where was the bastard? Stealing into their blind spot? About to kill with the shot the victim never hears? So they searched, and worried. A man would have to be crazy not to worry. On the other hand, worry was exhausting. Worry too much and you might end up too tired to search. It was something to worry about, was worry.

  Little of this showed on the ground. They had the elasticity of youth, and in any case it wasn’t the done thing to reveal one’s emotions except on the subject of sport, or perhaps dogs. The squadron had a good spirit, better than it had had under Milne. The mess was much improved now that Appleyard had gone: better food in more variety, no more damn mutton, some decent wine and even occasionally a few crates of real English ale. A new cricket bat appeared, thought to be a gift from Paxton which was only right since he’d made Tim Piggott break the old one. The mess got a piano. It had three bullet-holes in the front and a dead pigeon deep inside, but it was a piano, even if the G below middle C made a twang like a departing arrow. Corporal Lacey had bought it with some of Paxton’s cigars. Paxton also got part of the credit for two sofas and a set of cane chairs, none new but none badly broken. “I see the new boy has been making himself useful,” Foster said to Piggott as they went in to dinner.

  “Up to a point. Lacey wangled the stuff with his cigars. Lacey can get anything. Paxton couldn’t get wet in a rainstorm.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a French virgin. Can Lacey get me a guaranteed French virgin?”

  “I believe there’s one left. Six years old, very ugly. Ten cigars.”

  “I’ll think about it. Ten is a bit steep.”

  After dinner most officers took their coffee in the anteroom. Boy Binns could pick out a tune on the battered piano, after a fashion, and a group of singers and saboteurs clustered around him. Paxton sat by a window and watched the sunset. Others sprawled in chairs and read yesterday’s newspapers. The adjutant sat in a corner and smoked a stubby briar pipe while he fed bits of cheese to the dog Brutus.

  Eventually, inevitably, there was a fight between the singers and the saboteurs, and the piano swayed violently. Boy Binns quit. The fighters chased each other around the room until they made themselves so unpopular that they took their fight outside and the anteroom became almost silent.

  Thus everyone heard Spud Ogilvy’s grunt of surprise. He was reading his mail. “This’ll interest you, adj,” he said. Captain Brazier tossed a fragment of cheese. It was like a token opening bid with a poor poker hand. Ogilvy said:”Old friend of mine, chap I was in the trenches with, says he served under you. He says ‘I hear you’ve got our old CO, the amazing Basher Brazier, fastest gun on the Western Front’. Did they really call you Basher?”

  “It was a corruption of ‘pasha’. That’s what the Egyptians used to call me.”

  “Then he says: ‘Too bad about the blue blood, but how can you tell what colour it is unless you make a few holes in the bag?’ What on earth does that mean?”

  “Can’t imagine.”

  “And he ends with a bit of verse. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if Jerry don’t get you then Basher must’.”

  “It rhymes,” Brazier said, getting up. “Not much else to be said for it.” He clicked his fingers and Brutus obediently followed him out.

  “My word,” Ogilvy said. “I must write and ask him what he meant.”

  “Another thrilling episode of this gripping yarn next week,” Foster said. “Be sure to place an order with your newsagent.”

  Paxton paid a mechanic to make the hinges on his trunk tamper-proof. Next day he found the lock and the hinges intact, but the trunk was nailed to the floor. He had to borrow a crowbar, all the time wondering how O’Neill could possibly have got inside it again. He saw the answer when he prised it free. O’Neill had got under the floorboards and driven the nails upwards. Paxton, grim with determination, paid again to have the trunk encased in sheet steel. He had not known he was capable of such rage and loathing. He dreamed of doing things to O’Neill’s helpless, squirming body of such a mounting ferocity that he startled himself. But when he saw the armoured trunk he felt a rush of glee. “That’s the stuff!” he said. “That’s the answer!”

  “Yes, sir,” said the mechanic. “Oh, thank you, sir. Thanks very much, sir. Very kind of you, sir.”

  The daft affair of Sergeant Harris and the mules had not been Major Cleve-Cutler’s fault but he felt the squadron had come out of it badly and he wanted to do something to make up for it
. He asked Captain Brazier if he had any bright ideas.

  “Well now, look here, I’m no airman,” Brazier, said.

  “No, but you’re twice my size and twice my age and you’ve got ten times my experience of the British Army, so what would you do, if you wanted to score a few points at Wing and show them we’re not a bunch of drunks and delinquents?” Cleve-Cutler’s scars grinned at him.

  “Not quite twice your age. Forty-nine this year.”

  “My father’s only forty-seven.”

  “Lucky chap. When I was forty-seven …” The adjutant rubbed the spot where his eyebrows met, and decided not to follow that thought.

  “They think I’m old, you know, some of them. I’ve overheard them talking. ‘Not bad for his age.’ That sort of thing. Very patronising. God knows what they say about you.”

  “Prehistoric,” the adjutant said. “Fossilized. What’s that doddering old fool doing around here? That’s the view of the intrepid aviator. Seen from ten thousand feet, I suppose I am prehistoric. And all those muddy fools at the Front must look like cavemen seen by eagles. Except that cavemen almost certainly had much more comfortable caves, and they didn’t have to keep their heads down all the time. I’m wittering on like this in the hope that you won’t notice I haven’t answered your question.”

  “Forget it, adj. Not important.”

  “I’ll give you a piece of advice, though. Attack the enemy’s strength, not his weakness. My very first CO taught me that.”

  “Um.” Cleve-Cutler reviewed all his possible targets. “The toughest nut to crack is the German observation balloon, I suppose.”

  “The tougher the nut, the sweeter the meat,” Brazier said.

  Cleve-Cutler talked it over with his flight commanders. “The Hun wouldn’t defend his balloons so heavily unless they really mattered, would he?”

  “Given a good telescope, a man in a balloon can see forty or fifty miles,” said Gerrish. “So they say.”