A Splendid Little War

by Derek Robinson

  After the rough and bumpy fields where they had refuelled, Hackett was relieved to touch down smoothly on the turf at Beketofka, and he was pleased to see familiar faces in his ground crew. A sergeant fitter helped him down from the cockpit. “What have you got in the engine, Mr Hackett?” he asked. “Handful of marbles? Bag of rusty nails?”

  “It’s a dozen gold sovereigns, sergeant. If you can fish them out, you can keep them.”

  A rigger was twanging a wire. He made a face. “I know,” Hackett said. “Wait till you see the rudder cables. Treat in store.”

  Colonel Davenport was the camp commandant at Beketofka. His left sleeve was pinned up at the elbow, he wore the ribbon of a D.S.O. and his face was as lined as crumpled paper.

  “I leave the flying to you,” he told Griffin. “I look after good order and discipline. Got my hands full keeping out those thieving Russians in the next field. Steal the laces from your boots if you don’t kick ’em in the teeth first. Cossacks, you see.”

  “I think they shot at us when we came in to land, sir.”

  “Yes, they shoot at anyone they fancy. At Jews, especially. But that’s none of our business. Now: you’re here to buck up the White Army, right? So you report to General Wrangel. He’s the big chief in these parts.”

  “I thought we were under General Denikin, sir.”

  “Denikin’s C-in-C for the whole South Russian front. Wrangel commands his right wing, what they call the Caucasus Army. Mainly Cossacks. God help the Bolos if Wrangel’s army gets inside Tsaritsyn. God help Tsaritsyn, for that matter.”

  Griffin’s hearing had nearly cleared after more than six hours behind a roaring rotary. “Do I hear artillery, sir?”

  “After a fashion. Six out of ten shells don’t explode. Dud fuses. But Russian infantry like to hear their guns going bang-bang … Come on, I’ll walk you to your quarters.” These turned out to be the train. Half the coaches were Pullmans. “Believe me, it’s by far the best digs you’ll find in this benighted country.” Colonel Davenport pointed at a thin column of white smoke rising like a prayer from the locomotive, climbing through the chilled air, finally bending to the breeze. “Constant hot water. I wish I had that. I’m pigging it in a hovel.”

  “Always welcome, sir. Merlin Squadron will be honoured.”

  “Awfully kind. Here come two chaps you’ll find essential.” Much saluting took place. Davenport said: “May I present Count Borodin. He’s your liaison officer with General Wrangel. Speaks better English than I do.”

  Borodin was tall and slim, under thirty, clean-shaven, sleek, in a uniform of soft green and grey, free from decorations. He looked like the kind of officer who carries the maps for a general. He said, “An honour, wing commander. General Wrangel sends his compliments. He looks forward to seeing your machines in action.”

  “And I look forward to seeing his men biff the Bolos.” Borodin, Borodin, Griffin thought. Where have I heard that before?

  “And Sergeant Major Lacey runs your Orderly Room,” Davenport said. “With a certain flair not entirely found in King’s Regulations.”

  “Well, a Camel Squadron needs flair. Bags of flair.”

  Griffin didn’t like the looks of Lacey. Not tall enough for a sergeant major. Too young, and his uniform fitted him too well, he’d had it tailored, by God. There was something wrong with his eyes too. They looked calm and clever and a little bit amused. What in hell’s name was there to be amused at? Nobody got to be a sergeant major by calmness and cleverness and laughing at things. “I shall depend on you to uphold the traditions of the squadron, Mr Lacey,” he said. Whatever the hell that meant.

  “Yes, of course. I am also your Signals Officer, sir. I operate the radio. Messages have arrived from General Holman at the Military Mission H.Q. in Ekaterinodar, marked Urgent and Most Important.” Now there was a hint of a smile. He didn’t talk like a sergeant major, either. He sounded like a bishop announcing a winning hand at whist.

  “Lead on,” Griffin said.

  The C.O. took the largest compartment in the Pullman coaches. It even had a bath. A silent Russian with a Mongolian face and the build of a 15-year-old boy gave him a whisky-soda and ran the bath, helped him out of his sheepskin coat and flying boots and would have undressed him completely if Griffin had let him. He retired immediately to a corner and squatted on his heels.

  Griffin slid into the bath and let the warmth drive out the cold from his stiff limbs. His mind looked back at the tedious hours of flying since Ekat. He’d heard people talk of the famous Russian steppes. Now he’d seen one. Flat and empty. And endless. Presumably somebody scratched a living down there. Dreary, dreary. He’d never understood what his father saw in agriculture, and he’d been happy to leave it to the old man.

  His father, Henry Griffin, had inherited a corner of Leicestershire that was big enough to reach well into the counties of Rutland and Northamptonshire. His grandfather, Spencer Griffin had acquired this corner when he made an obscene amount of money out of guano, seagull droppings. He bought a small Atlantic island that was deep in the stuff, just when agriculture was booming and needed fertilizer. It was like shovelling up money. When the boom ended he bought land: farm after bankrupt farm. Farming didn’t much interest him; in fact, compared with his triumphs in guano, nothing much interested him; so he lived in London, and had the decency to die at the age of forty-eight when he walked home in fog as thick as mushroom soup and caught pneumonia.

  So his son got the farms. Now Henry was a good farmer, good enough to know eventually that his own son – John – had an incurably low threshold of boredom. Show him a field and it yawned like the prairie. So did young John.

  He was a strong, cheerful lad but school was a mystery to him and forget even the thought of college. He was good at foxhunting and he joined the Quorn and the Belvoir, and enjoyed it. When there was no hunt, he was a dashing point-to-point jockey. He was twenty-two when war broke out. That was serious, but not as damned serious as what happened when his horse abruptly refused and sent him flying arse-over-tit into a pile of rocks. He broke an arm and a leg and several ribs.

  They took a long time to heal. By then, the war was bogged down in the Trenches, so he joined a cavalry regiment. Good chaps, but no action. The only action seemed to be in the sky. Aeroplanes looked fun.

  In 1916 the Royal Flying Corps took him – good horsemen made good pilots, everyone knew that – and, amazingly, he found something useful that he was very good at. An appetite for the kill helped. A fat slice of luck did no harm. And for the lucky ones, promotion was rapid.

  Major-General Trenchard headed the R.F.C. and he believed in aggressive patrolling far behind the enemy’s lines. So did John Griffin. “They started it,” he told his squadron, “so let’s get over there and finish it.” If that was costly, well, they were all volunteers, nobody said war was cheap. And the dead made no complaints. Decorations and further promotions proved that Griffin must be right.

  Now he was a wing commander, with a whisky-soda, in a hot bath, and he had a bunch of young brigands to lead in a bright and breezy new war. What could be better?

  He reached for the signals and read General Holman’s orders. “Get Borodin,” he told the Russian boy-servant.

  As he soaked in the tub the count gave him an outline of Wrangel’s plan to capture the south side of Tsaritsyn: bombard the trenches, infiltrate the outer defences, assault the city. “We have tanks which—”

  Griffin raised a hand. “Enough. Something I learned in France was, get it on half a sheet of paper. More than that I’ll forget anyway.” He looked at his fingers. The tops were wrinkled. He stood up and let the water drain from him. They made an interesting contrast: the polish of Imperial Russia, or what was left of it, and the intrepid aviator, naked and dripping, here to show them how the Allies duffed up the Hun. “Who was that strange child I found in here?” Griffin asked.

  “Your servant. A plenny. Each of your officers has a plenny, we find them loyal and eager to please. You
rs is called Jack.”

  “An ex-Bolo? You captured him?”

  “The plennys were happy to change sides. The Red Army forced them to fight. Your chef, for example, was formerly with the Hotel St George in Moscow but the Bolsheviks put him in their infantry, a foolish move.”

  “Our train has a chef?”

  “You can have two, if you wish. They cost nothing.”

  “We shall need another. Ekat is sending me six bombers and their crews right now. A dozen men.”

  “Twelve more plennys, then. Of course. We have what you might call a plenitude.” He handed Griffin a towel.

  “Thanks.” What exactly did ‘plenitude’ mean? He let it pass. Borodin’s English was too damn good to be true.

  2

  The plennys woke the pilots at seven, with glasses of Russian tea. It wasn’t Earl Grey, but as they sipped it and enjoyed the comfort of clean sheets and sunshine, they began to think that the long, sometimes hard and dirty and often bitterly cold journey had been worthwhile if it helped to restore the good old days. You wouldn’t get tea in bed under the Reds.

  The plennys had brushed the uniforms, cleaned and polished the boots, made the buttons shine. The pilots met for breakfast in the bar, which doubled as a dining room. Griffin liked their smartness. “This isn’t France,” he said. “People wandered into the Mess wearing rugger shirts and jodhpurs. Not our style. We’re here to show the flag.”

  “Which flag is that, sir?” Wragge asked. “Hackett’s an Aussie, Bellamy’s Canadian and Dextry claims to be Irish.”

  “Give the butter a shove,” Griffin grunted.

  “Ireland’s British,” Maynard said.

  “Don’t tell them that in Dublin,” Dextry warned. “They’ll blow your patriotic head off.”

  “That’s just the Fenians. Not like the royal Irish regiments in France. They were jolly decent chaps.”

  Griffin pointed his fork at Dextry. “Tell your Dublin friends to keep their little war going. When we’ve mended Russia we’ll go back and sort out Ireland.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And let’s drop the sir in the Mess. Makes me feel like my grandfather, and he’s dead.”

  At 9.30 they all walked to the aerodrome. The sky was bigger than they had ever seen in France or England and it was drenched in the kind of blue that gives atheists second thoughts. Maybe Russia had more sky because it had more distant horizons. Already the sun was pleasantly warm and the breeze made only an occasional ripple in the grass. Perhaps spring had arrived overnight.

  Maynard looked at the vast expanse of grass and wondered if cricket was out of the question. He played an imaginary straight drive, knees bent, plenty of follow-through. Bellamy was looking at him. “Bit stiff,” Maynard said. “Loosening up.”

  “Save the next dance for me.”

  They stopped near the C.O.’s Camel. The other machines were dotted about, just as their pilots had left them.

  “Get lined up on me,” Griffin said. “We’ll make a mass take-off. I bet the natives have never seen one of those. Ten o’clock kick-off. That’s when the White artillery will start raising holy hell. Make sure your tanks are full, your guns are loaded, your bladders are empty. Off you toddle.”

  His mechanic was waiting for him.

  “Didn’t expect to see these Camels again, Mr Griffin. Not outside the knacker’s yard.”

  “Explain.”

  “47 Squadron flew them at Salonika. That’s where most of us mechanics were before this, and we watched them Camels sitting in the rain at Salonika, not getting any younger. Then they got flown to Ekat, those that still flew, that is, and it rains at Ekat too, rains like buggery, and here they are, sir, bloody soggy if you’ll pardon my Bulgarian. The Bulgarians, that was the enemy at Salonika, nobody knew why, ancient history now, a bit like your Camel, especially the wings, because it was the wings that copped all the rain, sir.”

  Griffin walked around the Camel, prodding the wings, twanging the wires. “No holes,” he said. “Ailerons work. See?” He made one move up and down.

  “Fabric should be tight as a drum, sir.” The fitter rapped the skin with his knuckles. It didn’t sound like a drum. “Soft as shammy leather.”

  “It flew me from Ekat.”

  “Level flight, sir. Cruising speed. Not combat. Not chucking her about.”

  Griffin said nothing about performing the loop over the small town. The aeroplane had certainly felt slow and heavy. Still, they survived. “Will she fly?”

  “You can take off, sir. After that …” He shrugged. “It’ll be like flying a wet dishcloth.”

  “Thank you, sergeant. Take-off is in fifteen minutes.”

  Griffin walked away, and watched the other machines being pushed into position. He liked the Camel. It was a small fighter, less than nineteen feet long. Full of fuel and ammo, it weighed little more than half a ton. If it was empty, two men could pick up its tail unit and easily tow it. He liked its chunky, compact shape, liked the way he could throw it into a tight right turn so fast that it tugged the blood from his brain and left the enemy flying straight and looking silly.

  It would be good to get back into a war. The sweet smell of spilled petrol drifted into his nostrils. That’s the stuff! Keep your Paris perfumes.

  Three of the Camels had been lined up with his own. The other two hadn’t moved. Somebody’s backside needed kicking.

  Hackett and Bellamy walked over to him. “My fitter can’t start the engine,” Bellamy said. “It nearly started and then something went bang and caught fire. He wants to look inside the engine.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Hard to say. He’s waiting for it to cool down. He says a lot of petrol was sloshing about, so maybe a fuel line broke. And the extinguisher made a bit of a mess.”

  “Broken fuel line wouldn’t go bang.”

  Bellamy could think of other possibilities but he saw the C.O.’s expression and he shut up. Griffin turned to Hackett. “What’s your excuse?”

  “I’ve got woodworm. Also mildew. The cockpit has a nasty smell and my rigger’s got piles. I don’t feel very well today, sir, and I can’t fly. But if you want one reason, here it is. The fitter reckons my Camel’s dangerous. To me. Not to the enemy, because he says the aeroplane will collapse in the air as soon as I chuck it about. Or sooner, if the wind gets rough.” Hackett’s tone was frank and conversational. He might have been discussing the selection for a football team.

  Griffin’s eyes were wide and unblinking. “You refuse to fly.”

  “Half the wing struts are cracked or split. Somebody bound them up with wire and now it’s rusted through. Painted, but rusted. The struts are there to keep the wings apart, but in fact the wings are holding the struts in place.”

  “Not any longer,” Bellamy said. “Look. Your chaps have just taken off the top wing.”

  “Sweet sodding suffering Christ on crutches!” Griffin shouted. “We came five thousand miles for this? I’m down to five machines!”

  “I don’t think a monoplane Camel would fly,” Hackett said. “Not fast, anyway. Might touch fifty going downhill.”

  Griffin turned away and took a large step and kicked a small flower, light blue, a charming but fragile messenger of the coming spring, and sent its petals flying. “We’ll do it without you two slackers. I’m not going to fail General Wrangel. We’ll fly all day if we have to.” He stopped because a man on a motorcycle was chugging and bouncing towards them. “Wrangel’s final orders,” Griffin decided. “Targets and so on.”

  It was Count Borodin. “Good morning, wing commander,” he said. “The assault is off. Postponed. No fighting today.”

  Hackett and Bellamy sat on the grass. Griffin pushed his cap forward so that the peak shadowed his eyes and he had to tip his head back to stare at the count. “Off,” he said. “What’s wrong? Weather not good enough?”

  “No, it’s the tanks, you see. The infantry were promised British tanks to lead the attack, and they’ve al
l broken down, so now the infantry won’t advance. Perhaps tomorrow.” He offered a blue porcelain jar with a sealed lid. “The general sends you this small gesture of welcome.”

  Griffin accepted. It felt heavy. “What is it?”

  “Caviare, the very best.”

  “Caviare from the general,” Bellamy said. “Shakespeare never thought of that.”

  “Shakespeare never thought of anything,” Hackett said. “Bacon wrote it for him. I read it in the Daily Mail.”

  “Shut up.” Griffin pointed at Hackett. “You’re in charge here. Get all these Camels repaired, serviced, made totally good, today. Come with me,” he told Borodin. “We’ll visit these bloody useless tanks. Is that straw?” He pointed to tufts sticking out from the edges of the motorcycle’s tyres.

  “Reeds. We find reeds are stronger. There are no spare tyres in Russia, so we pack the old tyres with reeds.” He kick-started the machine. It had no pannier. Griffin sat sideways on the petrol tank. They chugged away.

  “He’s not a complete idiot,” Bellamy said. “He knows that if two Camels are duff, they all need looking at.”

  “Caviare,” Hackett said. “Nobody ever gave us caviare in France. Omelettes, plenty of omelettes during the fighting. Here, they give us caviare for not fighting. Funny war.”

  “Come on, let’s spread the news.” They walked towards the waiting pilots.

  The tanks were in a field where sunflowers had been grown. The blackened stalks stood thickly, two feet high, except where tank-tracks had made narrow paths. Borodin followed one of these, turning left or right as the tanks had turned, until it delivered them to a small tented encampment. The tanks were huddled there, grey and muddy and motionless. Borodin killed his engine.

  “Elephants’ graveyard,” Griffin said.

  A British Army major came out of the largest tent. No hat, no tie, and his tunic was undone. “Major Riley,” he said. He had a fading black eye and one front tooth was missing. “Welcome to the Armoured Division, or as I call it, the Tank Trap.” A faint whiff of cordite came with him. Griffin knew at once to tread carefully. He introduced himself and the count. “I’m Royal Air Force. Merlin Squadron. I was supposed to support the attack,” he said.