War Story

by Derek Robinson

  There was some shuffling of feet. Broken glass tinkled.

  “The squadron has lost two good friends,” the padre said. “Two thoroughly decent sportsmen. I know you will agree when I say they each played a straight bat, often on a bumpy wicket, and indeed they had assembled a very creditable score when, out of the blue, the Great Umpire in the Sky decided that both their innings were closed, as one day He will for each and all of us.

  “If his decisions sometimes seem hard to understand we always have the Bible to turn to for help. It has never failed me, and it did not fail me now. Last night, I admit, I was sorely puzzled by the actions of our French allies. I prayed for guidance, and when I awoke this morning the answer came to me immediately: Exodus eight.” He opened his Bible. “Verse 8. Pharaoh says to Moses: ‘Entreat the Lord, that he may take away the frogs from me, and from my people’. And verse 13: ‘And the Lord did according to the word of Moses; and the frogs died out of the houses, out of the villages, and out of the fields.’” He closed his Bible. “They had a plague of frogs, you see. Well, in a sense, can we not say that we too, yesterday, suffered from a plague of frogs? And that our remedy was very similar? The Lord smote the frogs of Egypt, and we smote the frogs of France. In both cases, the godly people were not plagued by frogs any more. The message of God’s holy word,” he said, waving it above his head,”is here for all to see, if only we look hard enough. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  They mumbled their amens.

  “Thank you, padre,” Cleve-Cutler said. His fixed half-grin glittered with an amusement that perhaps he really felt. “As far as I’m concerned a plague of frogs consists of one, and in future if one frog pilot so much as looks at you sideways, blow his head off. Okay, that’s all.”

  As they dispersed, Goss said to the padre: “I never knew all that stuff about frogs. How on earth did they get into the houses?”

  “It’s rather a complicated story, Douglas. You see, God wanted Pharaoh to let the Israelites go out of Egypt, and when he refused, God sent this plague of frogs to show Pharaoh that he meant business.”

  “And did it work?”

  “Well, no, it didn’t, so God sent a plague of lice to Egypt, and when that didn’t work He sent swarms of flies, but Pharaoh still refused to let them go.”

  “What a bally nerve.”

  “Yes. So God sent a murrain upon all the beasts of Egypt. That’s a disease like boils, very unpleasant. Then he sent plagues of hail and locusts, and a plague of darkness.”

  “My stars. Not very nice for Pharaoh’s mob.”

  “No.”

  “And I expect God got His way in the end.”

  “Yes.”

  “He usually does, doesn’t He?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “In fact Pharaoh was a bit of a chump to think he could win.”

  “A bit of a chump. Yes.”

  Cleve-Cutler was sitting on his bed, reading a letter from a friend in his old squadron and grinning because it was a very funny letter, when Foster knocked on the door.

  “Want a whisky?” Cleve-Cutler said. “You look absolutely frozen.” It was not a cold day.

  “No thanks.” Foster sat in a chair, didn’t like it, got up and sat on the floor in a corner of the room. “The other day you offered me a job in another outfit. Acting CO.”

  “It’s gone.” Cleve-Cutler found a couple of glasses and wiped them with a towel. “D’you want to move, Frank?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  “Can’t be done, old boy. I need you here.”

  “Oh well.” Foster found a long, thin splinter of wood in the wall of the hut and began pulling it free. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t deserve to be given a squadron, I’m too stupid. I’ve been incredibly stupid.”

  Cleve-Cutler poured whisky and gave him a glass. “Yes?” he said.

  “I can’t believe how dense I’ve been. I really, honestly did think it would all be over soon. Then we’d all go home and …” He stirred his whisky with the splinter. “It’s going to go on for ever, isn’t it?”

  “Look on the bright side, Frank. Lots of lovely promotion waiting for chaps like you.”

  Foster aimed the splinter like a dart and tossed it across the room. “Stupid and blind,” he said. “I thought I’d never cop it. Other people go west. Not me. Now I know better. Or worse.”

  “Oh, tosh!” Cleve-Cutler said. “Your chances improve with experience, everyone knows—”

  “Flamer,” Foster said. “I’ll be a flamer. Quite soon.”

  “Bet you won’t. Week’s pay. How’s that, Frank?”

  “It’s bound to happen.” Foster made a sour face. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me. I need you.”

  Foster stood up and drank the whisky. “Incredibly stupid,” he said, and went out.

  Nothing was heard from the French about Foster’s revenge. It was assumed that the incident was closed. Brazier told Cleve-Cutler of an occasion late in 1914 when English artillery had accidentally dropped a few shells on a French position. Before the French protest could be translated the same number of French shells had fallen among English troops. “Nothing left to be said, after that,” Brazier remarked. “Or written. I gave our gunners a damn good rollicking but you won’t find a whisper of it in the regimental history. Now then: what d’you want me to enter in the squadron diary regarding the loss of Yeo and his observer?”

  “Killed while attacking an enemy balloon,” Cleve-Cutler said. “You might chuck in a ‘gallantly’. That never did any harm.”

  “And Foster’s business?”

  “Exactly. It’s Foster’s business. Nothing to do with us.”

  Nevertheless, Cleve-Cutler knew that Foster’s state of mind was something he could not ignore. The man still did his job well but off-duty he could be touchy and unpredictable. Sometimes he was as debonair as ever; at other times he laughed when there was no joke to laugh at; and once or twice he withdrew into a kind of frozen silence while conversation went on around him.

  “You know him better than I do,” Cleve-Cutler said to Piggott. “Have a quiet word with him.”

  Piggott had a chance for a quiet word when he found Foster sitting alone at the end of the bar, holding a fly-swat. He seemed to be in a cheerful mood. “See that fly, Tim?” he said. At least a dozen flies were circling nearby. “That one on the left… No, it’s in the middle now … There he goes … I’m going to kill that fly, Tim. Sooner or later he’ll wander over here and then …” Foster demonstrated a brisk swat, and smiled. “One dead fly.”

  “I see.” Piggott got himself a bar stool. “Does it have to be that particular fly?”

  He had asked the wrong question. All Foster’s cheerfulness faded away. He looked saddened and weary. “Probably not,” he said. “I suppose one dead fly is worth just as much as another. What’s the price of a dead fly nowadays? About a thousand pounds, isn’t it?”

  Piggott was baffled, but he decided to go along with what might turn out to be an elaborate joke. “It depends who’s buying,” he said.

  Foster got off his stool, thrashed about with the swat, and drove all the flies away. “They’ll be back in two minutes,” he said,”so I don’t see the point of it all. Do you?”

  “Maybe there isn’t a point.” Piggott’s threshold of tolerance for foolishness was low and he had almost reached it. “Listen, Frank,” he said, “we’re all as cheesed-off as you are about what that murdering frog did.”

  Foster frowned hard. “I don’t follow you, Tim.”

  “That awful business with Yeo.”

  “Oh, that.” Foster tossed his fly-swat in the air and deftly caught it. “Doesn’t matter.”

  Cleve-Cutler listened to Tim’s report. “Oh well,” he said,”he’ll get over it, I expect. Whatever it is.”

  Chapter 13

  All the FEs were up on patrol. Kellaway had gone to hospital to have his head examined. The aerodrome was dull. For ten minu
tes Paxton threw an old tennis ball for Brutus to chase. Then he went to the adjutant and asked permission to go to Amiens for a haircut. “Get me some decent ink while you’re there,” Brazier said. “This Army stuff’s like gnat’s piss.”

  A wagon was leaving the transport section. Paxton waved it down. Corporal Lacey was driving. “I have a few calls to make en route,” Lacey said as Paxton got in. The cab was stacked with boxes of Havana-Havanas. “I want to collect some new old furniture to replace the old old furniture in your mess, for instance.”

  “Sorry about that. Childish way to behave. Mindless destruction.”

  “Do you think so? I’m surprised. The apparent vandalism of squadron parties and mess nights is squarely in the Western tradition of emotional relief through the exercise of seemingly primitive orgies of self-indulgence which are actually very tightly contained.”

  “Tightly contained?” Paxton scoffed. “Don’t talk rot. We smashed everything in sight.”

  “Exactly. Everything in sight in the mess. It was like Carnival, or Mardi Gras, or New Year’s Eve in Glasgow. A beano as an essential corrective to the restraints and restrictions of the rest of the year. With all due respect to the Duke of Wellington, the battle of Waterloo was not won on the playing-fields of Eton. It was won in the shambles and wreckage of the Fourth of June celebrations, when the Old Etonians proved they were as happily violent as any, and far more so than most.”

  “Tosh,” Paxton said. It wasn’t an adequate answer, but Lacey engaged the clutch and revved the engine and after that it was too noisy to talk.

  They drove over washboard pavé and rutted side roads and potholed farm tracks, calling on depots where stores were heaped in small pyramids of boxes that could be seen a mile away. Sometimes Lacey stopped at the main entrance; more often he went to the back and talked to a shirt-sleeved NCO who lived in a small guard hut with a large guard dog. Cigars changed hands; goods were loaded into the wagon: timber, carpet, drums of olive oil, bits of plumbing, rolls of canvas, a cinema projector, much furniture, a piano, a hip-bath, and more that was hidden inside wooden crates. He also collected items at military storehouses in requisitioned barns and farms. There were so many stops that Paxton lost interest until he saw Lacey and a sergeant discussing a cow. Lacey didn’t take the cow but he did come away with a box of live hens. “What’s wrong with the cow?” Paxton asked, sarcastically. “Too heavy?” “Too pregnant,” Lacey said.

  At last they drove into Amiens. Occasional gaps in the streets showed where bombs, or perhaps long-range shells, had fallen, but the town was full of life, most of it in khaki and all of it with francs to spend. Lacey trundled through the centre, pointing out the good places and the bad. “That’s the only shop to go to for handkerchiefs … This little restaurant on the corner is very sound on fish … I can’t recommend that café unless you’re desperate for company … Stay away from them, they’re so overpriced it’s quite criminal… Excellent pâté here …” Eventually he ran out of shops and increased speed.

  “Where are you going?” Paxton complained. “I came here to get a haircut, you fool.”

  Lacey stopped the wagon. “Surely you don’t want to have your hair cut back there, do you?” he asked. “They’re all barbarians. I wouldn’t let them cut the grass. I assumed you would want to go to the place that I go to.” For a moment they stared at each other. “It’s tucked away behind l’église St.-Jacques,” he said. “It’s called Leroux Frères.”

  “You’re M.N.T. Lacey,” Paxton said in a voice that was not much more than a whisper. “You played Hamlet in the school play.”

  “Yes. I thought you knew.”

  “You were years and years ahead of me. I was just a kid. In fact you must have been in your last year when I was in my first.”

  “Probably.”

  “And the moustache … It completely changes your face.”

  “I recognised you immediately. But then, yours is a much smaller moustache.”

  Paxton looked away. “You were a prefect,” he said. “You beat me, once.”

  “Did I? Why?”

  “For fighting.”

  “Ah. And did the beating hurt?”

  “Not much.”

  “No. My heart wasn’t in it, even in those days.”

  They drove to Leroux Frères. From the outside it could have been mistaken for a town house. A very old man opened the door and silently took their hats and Paxton’s cane. The place smelled faintly of sandalwood soap. He led them to a room that was all marble and mahogany except for a pair of barber’s chairs placed back to back. Two men, black-suited, grey-haired and silent, helped them out of their tunics and into the chairs. These, Paxton thought, must be the famous frères. His mind was still fluttering around the discovery that Lacey was an old boy of Sherborne. “Um …” he said. “Je voudrais que vous … um …”

  “Don’t bother,” said Lacey from the other chair. “They know what’s best for you.”

  Paxton gave up. It was all too much. A hot towel was wrapped around his face below the eyes and the chair smoothly reclined. He found himself looking at the ceiling. It was covered in frescoes, skilfully drawn and delicately coloured and so erotic that his stomach muscles jumped like hot chestnuts. A small gathering of men and women, none with clothes on and all splendidly athletic, were doing amazing things to one another as if it were all great fun. There seemed to be some kind of sequence to the pictures. One led to another. Heavens above! Paxton’s eyeballs rolled around in their sockets while the scissors snipped.

  When he was back on his feet and in his tunic, nicely brushed down and buttoned up, he suddenly remembered the need to pay. “Don’t bother,” Lacey said before Paxton could reach his francs. “I have an arrangement.” Lacey shook hands with the man who had cut his hair. Paxton did likewise. The very old man showed them out. Fancy shaking hands with your barber, Paxton thought. No wonder the frogs are in such a pickle.

  “Quite a decent haircut,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  Paxton jutted his chin. He felt in danger of being patronised. “Mind you, I’m not sure I believed it all,” he said.

  Lacey looked amused. “These things can always be tested. It’s early in the day, but there are a couple of places you might like to try. For instance …”

  “No.” Paxton felt his face going red. “No thanks. Lunch is what I need.”

  Lacey drove him to a serious-looking hotel called Voyageurs. “Their terrine de canard is not to be despised,” he said.

  “Aren’t you coming in?”

  “It’s officers only. I wear mufti when I come here. Feel free to mention my name. I shall go off to a rude, crude cave and eat half as well as you for a tenth of the price.”

  Paxton climbed down and watched the wagon clatter away. He felt suddenly quite lost without Lacey. But that was absurd. Lacey was one of the Other Ranks, while he was Our Trusty and well beloved Oliver Arthur David Paxton, in whom King George reposed especial Trust and Confidence … He looked at Voyageurs, and it seemed even more serious and costly and overwhelming. He breathed deeply and ran up the steps as if he owned the place. When in doubt, get on or get out.

  The restaurant took up almost the whole of the ground floor. It was busy; very busy. The head waiter was fussing with a party of staff officers who had just arrived, and when at last he came hurrying over to Paxton his flurry of apologies and welcomes went straight past him to yet another highranking group, all spurs and red tabs, who got steered to an empty table. Paxton felt exposed and ignored. The head waiter eventually found time for him, took the news that he was alone with tightened lips, and did a lot of muttering and standing on tiptoe before he found him a small table in a dim corner and disappeared.

  The menu was as long as a short story, and Paxton understood about six words of it. He couldn’t see terrine de canard anywhere. He began to loathe Lacey.

  Waiters hurried by, blinkered in their devotion to duty to others, until he lost patience and tried to stop one
. Total failure. The man shrugged, said something in the usual gabbling gibberish and laughed, actually laughed as he went away. Paxton sat and steamed. He was helpless. He hated being helpless. He hated these arrogant frog waiters and these fat and greedy colonels and brigadiers. He was hungry. Ravenous. And still nobody came.

  When he had lost all hope, and given up, a waiter did actually arrive. He placed a tulip-shaped glass of champagne in front of Paxton. Beside the glass he placed a card. Then he stood back and waited.

  Paxton tasted the champagne and drank the lot in one go. The card was embossed in gold with the name Judith Kent Haffner. Extraordinary. He looked at the waiter, who shrugged, but then what else could you expect? He turned the card over. Join me before you starve to death. Green ink. Firm, confident handwriting.

  There were eight or nine young officers seated at her table in the middle of the room. The oldest was a major in the Royal Sussex with a badly scarred face; he looked about 25. The rest were captains and lieutenants of Paxton’s age or a year or two older. Most wore medal ribbons. It was a noisy, jolly party; everyone was talking and pointing and telling the others to shut up and listen, and failing, and laughing. Judith Kent Haffner was listening and talking and joining in the jokes too, but mainly what she was doing was smiling at Paxton as he followed the waiter. And Paxton, who was not much good at smiling and who fundamentally disapproved of strange women sending him drinks, found himself smiling back. She was not the matron he had expected. She was young and she was startlingly pretty in a way that reminded him of the pictures of girl elves in the fairy stories read to him by his nanny: big eyes, big mouth, shiny black hair cut short and swept forward in twin curls that touched her cheekbones. She reached out a long, slender and almost naked arm and took Paxton’s hand. Her fingers were firm. “Buzz off, Henry,” she said. The cavalry lieutenant sitting at her left immediately got up and cheerfully moved away. A waiter scooped up Henry’s plate and held the chair for Paxton to sit. “You’re one of those golden eagles, aren’t you?” she said. “I can tell from your wings.”

  “I potter about the sky occasionally.”