The Challenging Heights

by Max Hennessy

  They found the Bolsheviks among the forests near the solitary eastbound railway line but, with bombs in short supply, they had had to load up with hand grenades and a lot of empty beer bottles which made a whistling noise as they fell. Flying low through a scattering of fire that put holes in the wings, they tossed out the hand grenades but, as the Russians dispersed, the DH’s engine began to falter. It picked up again almost at once but for safety Hatto swung west. As he did so they realised one of the thick fogs which infested the area had come down and the ground beneath them was completely obscured.

  ‘Best keep going west,’ Dicken yelled.

  ‘The bloody compass is dud,’ Hatto shouted back. ‘I don’t know which is west.’

  ‘That way!’ Dicken pointed.

  ‘I think it’s that way.’

  ‘You’re wrong!’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  Staring downwards, Dicken was convinced he was right. In the observer’s cockpit was a spare joystick which he unfastened and brandished in front of Hatto’s face. ‘It’s that way,’ he yelled in a fury. ‘And if you don’t turn I’ll knock your brains in.’

  With the faltering engine, they struggled on, only to find, as the fog lifted abruptly, that they were both wrong and west was at right angles to the course they were flying. They were still laughing at themselves when the engine cut completely.

  As Hatto glanced round, Dicken saw the alarmed look in his face. ‘Bet you a quid you can’t land without crashing,’ he yelled.

  Heading for an open space in the forest, they just failed to clear the trees and Dicken was shot out of the rear cockpit as the machine came to a full stop, wedged firmly in a vertical position between two giant pines. Dazed and stupefied, he sat up to see Hatto climbing from the pilot’s cockpit. The ground around them was littered with empty bottles.

  ‘They’ll decide we were drunk,’ Hatto grinned. He stared about him, rubbing his shoulder and looking for the Bolsheviks they’d just been bombing. ‘Strikes me,’ he went on, ‘that we’d be wise not to hang about here.’

  Following the single railway line, they headed west along the edge of the forest. The sun was out now so that they had to stumble along in the heat in their heavy flying clothes, plagued by midges that seemed to come in millions from among the trees and lakes. After a mile or two, they came to a clearing where sleepers were stacked and among them they found a small rusting hand-driven trolley. Using pine branches, they levered it on to the track but as they clambered aboard, they heard shouts and saw men on horses appearing among the trees.

  ‘Christ,’ Hatto said. ‘The Bolos! Look slippy, old fruit!’

  They began to pump the handles but the trolley was old and tired and it was hard work, though, once they got the handles moving, they began to move faster and faster. A few shots whistled over them but nothing came very near and, surrounded by the squeaks of the handles and the oil-less wheels, they managed to make their escape.

  A few last shots whistled overhead as the horsemen dropped behind and disappeared, and they stopped the trolley to get their breath back, sitting on the platform, smoking and enjoying the sunshine.

  ‘Not bad here,’ Hatto remarked.

  ‘I’ve seen worse,’ Dicken admitted. ‘But not much worse.’

  Hatto smiled. ‘Old Parasol Percy Diplock would enjoy this place. All those midges. People who shoot at you. Lots of non-comfort.’

  ‘Pity we can’t get him to join us.’

  ‘Fat chance of that. I expect he’s got all his anchors out to make sure nobody moves him far from London.’

  It was Dicken’s turn to smile. ‘It would be a triumph if we could get him here.’

  ‘Perhaps we should bend our minds to that end. Nothing vicious, mean or vengeful. Just something to take that smug look off his face.’

  They were still enjoying the sunshine when it dawned on them that the trolley they were sitting on had started vibrating and that the vibration was coming from the rails beneath, and finally that the Bolshevik horsemen had disappeared not because they had grown tired of the chase but because there was a train approaching and they were in the way and likely to derail it.

  ‘Good God,’ Hatto yelled. ‘The bloody thing’ll flatten us!’

  As they struggled in a panic to lever the trolley from the rails, they heard the shriek of an engine whistle and the engine hurtled at full speed round the bend towards them. Alongside the driver, his moustache bristling with ferocity and clutching a revolver as big as a cannon, was Orr coming to their rescue. The truck behind was filled with men with rifles.

  They had good reason to celebrate that night because news had come in that the White Russian armies were closing in and the Bolsheviks were on the run everywhere.

  ‘At the moment,’ Orr said, gesturing at the map, ‘General Denikin’s heading up from South Russia, General Kolchak’s heading west from Siberia, another force is pushing down from Archangel, and there’s a force here under a chap called Yudenitch who’s aiming for Petrograd. The idea’s to meet in Moscow and restore the status to quo so that Europe will be freed from the Red menace for ever and ever, amen.’ He paused, sucked at his pipe for a while and studied the map, measuring the distances in hands’ breadths. ‘I hope they pull it off,’ he added. ‘Because if the Siberian lot really do manage to join the Archangel lot it’ll only be at the expense of a lot of hard slogging, and that crowd at Archangel are in no state to restore ’em. All this victory talk needs taking with a pinch of salt because nothing’s what it seems out here, and to make matters worse, they all speak some bloody awful Slav language no one’s ever heard of, let alone studied at school.’

  Hatto glanced at Dicken and smiled. ‘What we really need here, sir,’ he observed cheerfully, ‘is an officer who’s a good linguist.’

  ‘I can imagine them sending us one,’ Orr growled.

  ‘Oh, they would, sir,’ Hatto said. ‘Especially if this chap, Ulmanis, who’s running the show here, requested it. He needs a good liaison officer. After all he’s head of the Provisional Government.’

  ‘And at the moment hiding from von der Goltz who’s behaving as if he’s commanding an army of occupation.’

  ‘All the same, sir, if we get his signature on the request they’d have to take notice of it in London.’

  Orr wasn’t convinced. ‘We’d probably get some wet type from the Foreign Office with a face like a hen’s arse.’

  ‘Then we should request someone by name, sir, and get Ulmanis to ask especially for him. Make it seem important. Have him claim he’s heard of him and wants him very particularly. If it becomes a political thing they can’t refuse.’

  Orr scowled. ‘Who would he want?’

  ‘There’s a Squadron Leader Diplock, sir. He was studying for a degree, specialising in European languages when the war broke out. Surely what they speak here’s European. He’s very good, sir. He also speaks French, German and Italian. There’s nothing he enjoys more than a job like this. What’s more, sir–’ Hatto smiled ‘–he’s the chap who was responsible for sending me here – probably you, too, if the truth were known.’

  Orr’s head jerked round. ‘He is, is he?’ he said. ‘Very well then, Willie, let the bugger have a taste of his own medicine. How do we get Ulmanis’ name on the damn thing?’

  Hatto beamed. ‘Leave it to me, sir. He’s here in the city keeping his head well down because von der Goltz and the Baltic Barons are trying to capture him.’

  ‘Think you can find him?’

  ‘Shouldn’t wonder, sir. I hear his Minister of Commerce and a couple of other ministers are aboard the destroyer, Seafire. They’ll know where he is and I happen to have made my number with Seafire’s captain. Chap called Andrew Cunningham. Rather hot stuff for a sailor.’

  Seafire lay alongside the breakwater in the inner harbour, just ahead of her a merchant s
hip laden with arms.

  ‘Her engines have broken down,’ the officer on the gangplank told them. ‘And the Old Man’s scared stiff someone will decide to board her, seize the weapons and start a revolution.’

  Beyond the merchant ship was a large barracks containing German soldiers and behind it a tract of pine forest. As they went aboard, Cunningham, a tall round-faced man bursting with self-confidence and salty language, was conducting a ferocious argument with a wild-looking man with a bushy black beard, partly in Latvian, partly in halting German and partly in English.

  ‘The bloody man’s claiming the Germans have captured the Latvian GHQ,’ he pointed out. ‘I’m going along to see what’s happened. Fancy joining me?’

  As they headed into the forest, they met German soldiers staggering back with beds, pots, pans, chickens, ducks, blankets and various other forms of loot. A house in a clearing was burning fiercely, alongside it a battalion of German soldiers forming up ready to march off. Seeing the British uniforms, Latvian officers, their faces bruised, their uniforms torn, rushed up, waving their arms, to explain that the Germans had arrested all their senior officers, seized their records and started the fire. As they finished, a German band at the head of the column blared out and the column began to march off. Cunningham frowned.

  ‘It’s obviously no time for a ship full of arms to be alongside the jetty,’ he said. ‘We’d better shift her.’

  Returning to the ship, the tow was made fast and they began to head down the narrow canal that led to the commercial harbour.

  ‘The swing bridge’s supposed to open to my siren,’ Cunningham growled, staring ahead. ‘If it doesn’t, we’ll have to ram it and put a landing party ashore to shoot anybody who objects.’

  As they reached the outer harbour and made fast again, German troops were visible on both sides of the canal and in a lot of neighbouring buildings, and they could see the black snouts of machine guns near the lock gates.

  ‘This is bloody ticklish,’ Cunningham admitted. ‘One destroyer against the whole of von der Goltz’s army. We’ll go in stern-first, Number One, in case we have to come out in a hurry.’

  Backing and filling in the narrow waterway, the ship turned round. The Germans began shouting insults but, as the destroyer’s guns were lowered and trained round, ready to fire at point-blank range, the shouting died. In a deathly silence, they waited for what would happen, but as Cunningham rapped out a series of crisp orders, all of them quite audible to the Germans on shore, the machine gun parties at the ends of the wharves quietly picked up their weapons and disappeared. Almost immediately a couple of Latvians, who claimed to be ministers of the deposed government, climbed aboard and claimed asylum. They said Ulmanis and other ministers had taken refuge with the British Mission.

  When they found him, Ulmanis looked tired and ill but he was more than ready to append his signature to anything that might bring help, and two hours later the request for a linguist and for Cecil Arthur Diplock in particular was in the safe of the captain of a naval trawler heading towards England.

  Three

  Stuck away at the north-eastern end of the Baltic, there was a depressing feeling of being out of the world – especially when they heard stories of men in America preparing to fly the Atlantic. Only a few short years before when aeroplanes had been little more than powered box kites such a thing had appeared impossible, but from the newspapers they received it now seemed that Harry Hawker, the famous test pilot, and a companion, with a huge specially-built Sopwith powered with a Rolls Royce Eagle engine, two other men with a converted Vickers Vimy bomber with two Rolls Royce Eagles, and a squadron of American naval men in flying boats were all virtually on their way.

  The uncertainty of the situation in the Baltic remained, however, and the White Russian forces were totally unreliable. The conscripted Russian peasants had had enough of autocracy to last them for ever and had no intention of supporting any move to restore the Romanovs. The Poles were working for an independent Poland and their interest was only in getting rid of their traditional enemies, the Russians, White or Red. The Letts wanted a free Latvia and were only too willing to fight with the British whose idea was to set up buffer states in Latvia, Esthonia and Lithuania to keep back the tide of Bolshevism. The German leaders were interested only in preserving their own estates by keeping East Prussia German and, if possible, adding to it while no one was looking.

  It was always difficult to get the separate forces to operate together, and the White Russian officers remained terrified of their men. When one of their battalions mutinied and shot their officers in the back on parade, the Russian generals responded by rounding up a whole host of wrongdoers for punishment, and everybody had to face the business of the execution of the ringleaders. The Russian officers clearly intended to make an example and the court martial was a hurried affair with only lip service paid to justice. There was no appeal and the sentence was to be carried out almost immediately.

  After a visit to a tent, where they were blessed by priests, the guilty men were sprinkled with holy water and kissed, then marched under escort to where Russian, German, Polish and British troops formed a hollow square. Some of them were weeping but one of them, a fine-looking sergeant, stood proudly erect as the stripes were torn from his sleeves. A small dog appeared and began to sniff the legs of the condemned men and for a while the affair seemed likely to descend into tragi-comedy because it refused to get out of the way. The officer in charge, a pale-faced young man wearing pince-nez and the enormous epaulettes of the Imperial Russian Army, timidly shooed it aside only for it to return again and again. In the end, a Russian colonel with an iron-grey board, stamped across and snarled at him to get on with it, lashing out with his boot at the dog which bolted, yelping, so that even the men waiting for execution managed a faint smile.

  As the machine guns chattered, the men tied to the posts stiffened and slumped but, as the smoke cleared, the sergeant was seen to be still alive. He had somehow shed his blindfold and, though his face and clothes were smeared with blood, he was shouting ‘Long Live Bolshevism’. As the officer in the pince-nez moved up to him to administer the coup de grâce with his pistol, the sergeant spat at him. As the officer hesitated, the sergeant went on shouting. In the end the colonel did the job and the young officer promptly turned aside and vomited up his breakfast.

  It was a depressing business and seemed to symbolise the uselessness and waste of the operations along the Baltic. However, the generals had finally decided that doing nothing was dangerous and a menace to morale and the following day news came that the army was to move forward. Several of the units passed the aerodrome, the Germans well-fed and well-equipped but the rest wearing only old torn uniforms without greatcoats, cast-offs from the war in France. Most of the fighting seemed to be left to them where possible while the Germans remained in the barracks near the river, arrogant, self-important and behaving more like a victorious army than a defeated one allowed to retain its weapons only because of the local political situation.

  The flying went on, for the most part pointlessly because they were short of ammunition and had few bombs, and for a lot of the time only half the aircraft were serviceable through lack of spare parts. Eventually they heard that the allied intervention in Russia was falling apart, and that the British and the troops in the north around Archangel were to be withdrawn during the summer when the sea was free of ice, though they were hoping first to make a swift drive south to link up with Kolchak’s drive west from Siberia. Within a week, however, they heard that Denikin’s White forces in the south had been driven out of the Ukraine and the great plan to capture Moscow was dying on its feet.

  Soon afterwards, the Russian pilots received instructions – God alone knew where from because they seemed to have no senior officers – to fly north. The Finns, as worried about Bolshevism as everybody else in Europe, were also standing with teeth bared in case the Bolshevik
s came, and since the fighting round Murmansk appeared to have died down, they had agreed to give the Russians refuge. The airmen gathered their battered collection of machines together for departure and gave the most tremendous dinner, for which they hired a gypsy orchestra, and put on a display of Russian dancing and drinking that left everybody breathless. In turn they were hilariously excited and full of gloom, and the Russian major, Samonov, went round saying goodbye with an intensity that was heartbreaking, growing slowly more drunk as the evening went on. The party continued until dawn and was just breaking up when the roar of an aeroplane starting up came over the by now blurred strains of the orchestra. Rushing outside, they saw one of the Fokker DVIIs just lifting off the ground.

  ‘Who is it for God’s sake?’ Orr asked.

  ‘It’s Major Samonov,’ one of the Russians said. ‘It’s his way of saying goodbye.’

  Banking steeply over the end of the field, the Fokker came hurtling towards them with a roar that set the windows shaking. At the top of its climb it turned and dived again and they all flung themselves flat as it howled past, its slipstream blowing stinging particles of grit in their faces. As they lifted their heads, it banked over the trees at the other end of the field and came howling back once more. Watching it narrow-eyed, they were convinced Samonov was trying to kill himself. As the Fokker came thundering towards them yet again one of the lorries was just coming in from the town and, as the Fokker flashed towards it at a height of nought feet, they saw the driver jump out and run. The Fokker leapt over the lorry and turned again at the end of the field for another run, but this time as it banked, standing on its wingtip, they heard the engine splutter and cough.

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ Handiside gasped.

  A wing touched the ground in a puff of dust and, as they all started to run, the aeroplane banged down and began to slide sideways across the turf, shedding undercarriage, wings and tail in flying fragments until it finally hit a parked farm cart. As it disintegrated the pilot flew out of the cockpit to hit the ground several yards in front with a thud that sickened them.