The Mercenaries

by John Harris

  ‘Half-time,’ Fagan said as everyone sat back, belching loudly to show their appreciation. ‘Time for a sausage and a glass of wine before we start again.’

  While they were recovering their breath, a great cast-iron urn in the garden filled with prayer paper was lit and fireworks tied in bunches to trees like blossom were set off. Surrounded by blue smoke, staccato crackling and sprays of golden sparks, General Tsu and several of the officers knelt and touched their foreheads to the floor, and the gay gossipy Kee explained that prayers were being offered up for the success of the summer campaigns.

  ‘I thought he was a Christian,’ Fagan said in bewilderment, and Kee gave a chirrup of delighted laughter.

  ‘Oh, he is,’ he said. ‘But he also jolly well believes in being on the safe side as well, you know.’

  As the fizzing and crackling died away, they were introduced to the General’s wife, a French-born Chinese who had met her husband when she was a student in Shanghai. She was small, intelligent and attractive in a brocade dress, and Ira managed to converse with her in French, then the General’s son, Philippe, was brought in by an amah, a boy about eleven in a grey silk gown and carrying a violin.

  The Warlord’s son will now entertain us,’ Lao announced.

  They had been expecting the usual diabolic noises which small boys make on violins but Philippe Tsu was already an expert despite his youth. He played several short pieces by Brahms and a longer one by Debussy.

  ‘Sure, the child’s a prodigy,’ Fagan said, already a little drunk and owlish and laying on his accent like a stage Irishman.

  ‘I was a violinist, too,’ Madame Tsu explained in English. ‘My father was a concert pianist. The boy is a genius and should not really be here in Hwai-Yang. I have taught him all I know now and he ought to go to Paris or Rome to be taught properly.’ She smiled her sad resigned smile. ‘Perhaps, soon, my husband will retire and we shall go to Shanghai or Hong Kong, and from there I shall be able to take him to Europe.’

  It was almost midnight and a damp breeze was blowing when General Tsu announced that they would go out to the airfield to see his air force.

  Ira would far rather have gone to bed and he could see Ellie was pale and drawn with tiredness, but it was no good arguing, because the string of ageing cars with their patched tyres had already appeared outside the gate, their brass oil-lamps flickering as the engines throbbed and clattered, every one of them bearing General Tsu’s personal red flag with an orange circle in the centre. It was like being part of some musical comedy cavalcade and Ira kept catching Sammy’s eye and having to resist the urge to laugh.

  ‘General Tsu likes to move with the modern times, you know,’ Kee explained earnestly. ‘He has seen the magnificent legation flags on the cars in Shanghai.’

  The road out to the airfield was a rutted track and the cars rattled and roared and banged in a tinny procession out of the city, honking madly to clear the road. Bounced in the rear of an ancient Peugeot, clutched by a shaken and disgusted Ellie, Ira wondered how much longer the performance was going to continue.

  ‘Sure as hell wish they’d let me go to bed,’ Ellie shouted above the din.

  ‘Sure as hell wish they would,’ Ira yelled back with a grin. ‘Perhaps I could then.’

  One of Tsu’s regiments was drawn up on the airfield waiting for them, every second man holding a torch, and at Lao’s signal the officer in charge, a small man in a baggy uniform, waved his sword and began to put them through a short drill. It was about as edifying as the salute outside Tsu’s house. Several of the soldiers didn’t appear to know what to do and the officer descended on them in a fury, shrieking abuse and sending them staggering with cuffs at the side of the head. It was funny enough to be embarrassing, but General Tsu was beaming with pleasure.

  Lao’s stiff aristocratic face showed no indication of what he was thinking as he gestured. ‘We will now see our air force,’ he announced.

  Outside a lopsided barracks hut that creaked and clanked as the wind sighed through it. General Tsu’s would-be pilots were lined up, and Ira was startled to see how pathetically young and timid they seemed. They all appeared to be still in their teens and their clothes were a mixture of the ill-fitting unmatching uniforms and long silk gowns. One of them wore cotton trousers and spats and another leggings, and only one of them, a tall thin man slightly older than the rest, appeared to have any confidence in himself.

  ‘This is Captain Yang,’ Lao introduced. ‘He is our commanding officer He has had much experience. He was trained by the illustrious Americans.’

  Yang, a brash young man who had only recently returned to China, said he’d learned to fly in a Pennsylvania air circus, but there was something about him that roused Ira’s suspicions at once, something that indicated that his ardent professionalism was false. He appeared to suspect that Ira was dubious about him and seemed a little uneasy as he introduced the pupils in a whining nasal voice with a strong Mid-Western accent like Ellie’s.

  ‘Lieutenant Cheng Peter. Lieutenant Lan Hu-Siang. Lieutenant Yen Shuan. Lieutenant Tsai Kwan . .’

  The pupils shook hands and bobbed their heads, the flat bus conductors’ hats they wore, ill-fitting and moth-eaten, shaking on their skulls as they nodded.

  ‘They are honoured to meet their illustrious teachers,’ Kee said with a gaiety that seemed a little mad under the circumstances. They hope they will jolly soon also be able to fly.’

  Ira nodded back at the would-be pilots. ‘Do they speak English?’ he asked.

  Kee shook his head. ‘Only one, Lieutenant Cheng. Unfortunately, they have not all had the benefit of a Western education as I have.’

  Ira grinned. ‘Well, I don’t speak Chinese,’ he pointed out.

  ‘The much-travelled Captain Yang does.’

  ‘Fine. How do we get him or you into a two-seater machine with the pilot and the pupil.’

  This was something that had clearly not occurred to anyone. For a second, Yang and Kee and Lao stared at each other, then Lao smiled his acid smile, as though he were laughing at them all.

  ‘Doubtless we can work out something,’ he said.

  ‘Think so?’ Ira asked. ‘How would you translate: Please apply more rudder. The torque from the engine is pulling the machine to the left?’

  In the distance, beyond the Bessoneau hangars, they could see the flare of more torches where another group of soldiers stood. As they had noticed earlier, the hangars were as bad as the field. There were great rents in the perished canvas and several of the guy ropes were drooping or missing. An ancient Crossley tender sagged in front of one of them, its tyres missing, the bonnet red with rust, and nearby stood an old Albion lorry and several large petrol drums. Fagan tapped one as they passed and it gave a hollow sound.

  ‘Empty,’ he said. He was still drunk and there was a wild look in his eye. He was obviously looking for trouble, and Ira made time to pass a warning to Sammy to be on his guard.

  Tsu was obviously trying to impress them with his armed might: Beyond the tender, several elderly guns, many of them without breeches, were drawn up--among them a six-incher that Ira had never seen outside a museum, a battered .75, a Vickers-Maxim pom-pom, a tiny Hotchkiss, and a group of ancient Russian weapons that had found their way down from the north--probably after the Russo-Japanese War.

  Someone had been busy while they had been in the city and, against the moonlight, they could see five ancient aircraft lined up beyond their own machines. For the most part, they were mere elementary contraptions of linen and spruce and Ira could already hear Fagan laughing in a thin derisive way that sounded crazier than ever.

  ‘Sure, the one on the end’s a pre-war Bleriot,’ he was saying. ‘Twenty-five-horse Anzani engine. And by the Holy Whirligig, a Parasol!‘

  Others Ira recognised as a Maurice Farman and an Aviatik, and his voice was awed as he spoke. ‘I wonder what crook sold them this lot,’ he said.

  Only one of the machines, a black Fokker D7 at the end of the l
ine, appeared to be airworthy, but as they drew closer they realised that, in fact, it was only half a machine. Though it appeared to have guns, it had no wings.

  ‘What happened to that?’ Ira asked.

  ‘It has not yet been assembled,’ Yang said quickly, and Lao frowned.

  ‘It was incomplete,’ he informed them coldly, not attempting to hide anything. ‘It was bought in Russia but it came without the wings and they have never turned up.’

  At close quarters the machines were even more horrifying than at a distance. Tsu’s legendary aircraft were nothing more than a collection of museum-pieces, sagging, tattered and rusted. But, preceded by two men bearing torches, they moved solemnly along the line, first past the lopsided Avro, then the Albatros and their own D7, and in comparison with the rest of them, the three patched old machines they’d flown in were shining with newness. On the others--mostly cumbersome old French, British and German machines which had been discarded as obsolete in the first years of the war, the woodwork was unvarnished and warped, and the fabric, rotten and yellow with age, hung limply on the wings and fuselages where it was quite clear there were broken struts and strengtheners. Bracing wires were looped and twisted and the turnbuckles were stiff with lack of use, and the guns they carried and the ammunition that still lay in the breeches were patched with rust. The tyres had long since been replaced by pieces of thick rope secured to the rims of the wheels by wire and every machine was marked by mould where damp had attacked the undoped areas.

  ‘Holy Mother of God,’ Fagan said. ‘Surely the old fart doesn’t expect us to fly in these.’

  With a shock Ira realised he did. General Tsu was standing in front of the gimcrack collection of wrecks now with a beaming smile on his face and even the stiff-faced Lao was gesturing them forward.

  On closer inspection, the machines looked even worse. Control wires were broken and ailerons rusted solid. On the Parasol, the rudder hung askew and on the Bleriot the padding round the cockpits and parts of the fabric looked as though they had been chewed by rats. Only the wingless Fokker and the Aviatik, which turned out to be Yang’s personal machine, were in a reasonable condition but every single aeroplane had been painted with Tsu’s insignia on rudder, wings and fuselage.

  Their faces expressionless, they climbed into the machines, trying to hold back their laughter and avoid showing what they were thinking, while General Tsu stood with an uncertain Yang and watched them, his face beaming with pride.

  ‘Well, the Aviatik ought to fly,’ Sammy grinned, climbing down after a while. ‘I suppose Yang’s seen to that.’

  ‘And the Maurice Farman might,’ Ira pointed out. ‘It just might.’

  Lao had stepped forward, his smile stiff. ‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ he said, ‘you will give us an exhibition of flying.’

  Ira fought for solemn words to hide his mirth. The situation was so farcical it was hard to know what to say without being insulting.

  ‘The General is expecting it,’ Lao pointed out firmly. ‘And Captain Yang assures us his aeroplanes are ready for immediate use.’

  Fagan gave his half-witted yelp of laughter. ‘He does, does he?’ he said.

  He jerked a hand at the Bleriot, whose cylinders were red with rust and whose wooden propeller was splintered and bound with copper wire as though it had hit the ground in some far-distant forced landing and been crudely repaired. His eyes were wild and his face flushed with drink. His soul seemed to be stirred to cataclysmic proportions.

  ‘As a specialist in the more subtle varieties of sin, me ould ardent boyo,’ he shouted, his accent thick enough to cut with a knife, ‘I see no reason to save Captain Yang’s rat-faced bloody visage for posterity. You can tell Himself--the Pride of the Missionaries, the Warlord of the South-West, the Great High Pajandrum--that even if they could get off the ground --which they never will--Holy God, I’d no more think of flyin’ one of them things than I would of tryin’ to teach them bloody oxen out there on the field to dance the foxtrot.’

  2

  It seemed for days that the Warload of the South-West was sulking. There was no sign either of him or of Lao and for a whole fortnight the group at Kailin were left entirely to their own devices.

  The parade at the airfield had broken up in confusion after Fagan’s comments and there had been a loud argument between Fagan and Lao which had then become one between Lao and General Tsu, with various aides of different rank joining in from time to time and Captain Yang yelling defensively between the various groups and Ira’s party.

  It had started to rain heavily in the middle of it all, the torches hissing and spitting in the downpour, and GeneralTsu had retreated to the Pierce-Arrow, his face like thunder. No one had thought to dismiss his troops, however, and they had continued throughout all the shouting and the high wang-yang of Chinese voices to stand in lines, hunched against the rain but interested in the indignity of their superiors quarrelling.

  Eventually Tsu had driven away in high dudgeon with Lao, leaving the argument to be finished by Kee and Captain Yang, who, by this time, had been alternatively yelling about his honour and spitting with rage and likely, it seemed, to swing his sword out of its long curved scabbard at any moment to take a swipe at Fagan’s head.

  With a good Irishman’s contempt for danger, Fagan had stood his ground. ‘I expect it was a bloody flight mechanic you were in this goddam air circus of yours,’ he snorted. ‘Sure, and not a very good one at that. A grease monkey, maybe, employed to wipe the engines down and clean the vomit out of the cockpits.’

  They had got him away at last in a borrowed car, with an affronted and furious Ellie alongside the driver and Ira and Sammy sitting on the indignant Fagan in the back. They heard the argument in the bungalow across the garden going on long after they had closed the door behind them.

  Still laughing, they had crossed the lawn to find Mei-Mei waiting for them with her birdcage and her smiles. They had forgotten all about her in the excitement and were startled to see her still around. She seemed to be dressed in her best, in dark grey silk-fringed trousers and a red silk jacket, and she was wearing make-up with carmine lips and a single flower behind her ear. As they appeared, she bent her head in a kow-tow before them.

  They stared uneasily at each other, wondering what to do about her,

  ‘Seems to be a sort of housekeeper,’ Sammy said.

  Ira eyed the girl dubiously. She was physically fragile, with sloping shoulders and narrow hips, and her hair, polished like fine lacquer, was wound carefully round the top of her head.

  ‘A nice decorative one, anyway,’ he commented.

  She spoke softly for a while, smiles like ripples moving over her lips, but neither of them could understand her.

  ‘Think she’s got something warming in the oven?’ Sammy asked.

  She looked startled and disappointed as they went to their rooms, but made no attempt to follow them. Instead, she sat down with her birdcage by the goldfish pond in the garden as though she were going to wait out the night there.

  ‘Hope she’s good on bacon and eggs,’ Sammy said as he closed the door.

  She was still there next morning when the houseboy wakened them by the simple expedient of sticking a cigarette between their lips and lighting it. She had hung coils of red prayer paper near the door and was waiting by it, quiet and grave-faced, wearing a soft jacket ducktailed at the hips, her hair braided and held by a silver clasp. She was obviously not dressed for work and was on her knees in front of three smouldering joss-sticks which sent up spirals of aromatic smoke.

  Sammy poked his head out uneasily. She seemed to be putting out prayers for their immortal souls but she didn’t have the look of a priest or joss-man and they couldn’t imagine that she’d been sent just to make the place smell sweet.

  ‘She’s still there,’ he said uneasily.

  ‘What doing?’

  ‘Burning joss. For us, I reckon.’

  It was a warm morning, the scent of blossom in the air, and Ira was on t
he verandah, staring at the morning scurry of small birds and the lifting flap of herons from the river. Sammy joined him after a while and in the distance they could see the decorated roofs of a pagoda through the trees and hear the high-pitched chatter of Chinese voices in the street as peasant women went past hauling heavy handcarts loaded with sacks of rice or seed or canisters of human manure to fertilise the paddies outside the town, straining forward against the shafts and trailing smells of ordure and dust.

  ‘Lor’, don’t it bugle?’ Sammy commented, wrinkling his nose. ‘I’d rather have Mei-Mei’s joss, I reckon.’

  They peeped back in the house, but Mei-Mei was still doing obeisances on the floor and, feeling vaguely as though they were intruding on some private ceremony, they retreated once more to the verandah, eager for food but uncertain whether to join in her devotions or ignore her.

  Just inside a room on the next verandah they could see Ellie washing herself, half-naked as usual, a macaw-coloured pareu she’d bought the day before knotted round her waist.

  ‘Why’s she always do it where we can see her?’ Sammy asked wonderingly.

  Fagan’s voice came across to them. He was singing in a dubious baritone, which he kept interrupting to shout to Ellie. They seemed to have recovered their good temper, a strange bewildered lost couple who never seemed to know whether they were happy in each other’s company or not.

  After a while Fagan joined Ellie on the verandah and they saw him sponging her back, an operation which finally dissolved into a wrestling match that ended abruptly as he snatched away the pareu. For a while, they struggled, Ellie red-faced and shrieking and Fagan shouting with laughter, then he grabbed her in his arms and carried her screaming out of sight. For a while the shrieks continued across Fagan’s half-witted laughter, then they died away to a heavy silence.