A Splendid Little War

by Derek Robinson

  There was a gloomy silence.

  “Alright,” Charles Delahaye said, “That’s all conjecture. But even supposing it’s true, what can we do to stop it?”

  “I know what you can do,” General Stattaford said confidently. “Denikin’s troops are tired. Trotsky’s rabble is a shambles. Give me two divisions – no, damn it, two brigades – of front-line British regiments, and I’ll guarantee to take Moscow before the first snow falls.”

  That surprised everyone. “So … our recommendation to the P.M. is what?” Fitzroy asked. “Seize Moscow?”

  “They won’t go,” James Weatherby muttered.

  “We can’t invade Russia when we haven’t declared war,” Sir Franklyn said.

  “They’ll mutiny,” Weatherby said.

  “Shipping? Food? Equipment?” Charles Delahaye asked. “The cost is prohibitive.”

  “The troops simply won’t go!” Weatherby said. “You can’t force them.”

  “They’ll do as they’re bloody well ordered,” Stattaford declared. “This is the British Army and—”

  “And they won’t kill Russians. The troops’ war is over. Look: British troops don’t want to go to Ireland and shoot Irishmen who were fighting alongside them last year, so they certainly won’t obey orders to go to Russia and kill Russians who were our allies against Germany.” Weatherby flourished a copy of the Daily Mail. “Just to put together a small Relief Force for Murmansk and Archangel you have to appeal for volunteers. Ex-soldiers.”

  Stattaford took the paper from him.

  “Money wouldn’t necessarily be a problem,” Fitzroy said.

  “Yes it would,” Delahaye said. “Put up income tax again to pay for your Russian adventure and see what the public thinks.”

  “Listen to this,” Stattaford said. “The fighting spirit of the old army is aflame … Recruits are still pouring in with medal ribbons on their waistcoats … The officers too are excellent …” He looked up. “How d’you explain that keenness? What?”

  “Half of them can’t get a job in civvy street,” Weatherby said.

  “The other half are on the run from Scotland Yard,” Delahaye said.

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen … Please, please,” Fitzroy said. “We’re straying ever further from the point. How can we best help the Prime Minister retain the confidence of the nation?”

  “The British people want two things,” Weatherby said. “First, no more war. Ever. Second, make the Germans pay. My department gets reports from throughout the kingdom, and especially from the four million who did the fighting, and they all say: ‘Make the Huns pay every penny for the damage they did, even if it takes a thousand years.’ That’s what matters.”

  “Gratifying,” Charles Delahaye said. “But self-defeating. It’s the economics of the madhouse.”

  “They don’t know economics. They do know atrocities. We’ve been feeding them Hun atrocities for four years. Now their answer is: Squeeze the swine till the pips squeak.”

  “And Russia?” Fitzroy asked. He was beginning to sound defeated.

  “Oh, let them stew in their own juice,” Weatherby said. “That’s not my opinion. It’s their opinion.”

  A long, thoughtful pause.

  “I’ve been scribbling down a few words,” Sir Franklyn said. “What d’you think of A decent life for all Russians?”

  They thought of it, and nodded agreement. “And hang the Kaiser,” Weatherby said. “That would be the cherry on the bun.”

  9

  The Nines and the Camels landed at Beketofka. Immediately, Griffin ordered Jessop and Maynard to refuel and rearm and go and look for the missing bomber. “Take a bottle of whisky,” he said. “Pedlow and Duncan might be a bit shaken up. Look for them halfway between here and Urbàkb. Maybe a bit further. Scout around.”

  Count Borodin had been on the aerodrome, counting the machines as they landed. “Three missing in all,” he said. “Two Russian and one English.”

  “Your two crashed and burned,” Griffin said. He shouted at Hackett and Oliphant and beckoned to them. “Lucky it wasn’t more. Your White bomber boys were all over the sky. They never kept formation. I’ve seen more discipline in a herd of cows. Their defensive fire was worse than useless.” Oliphant and Hackett arrived. “Our Nines kept formation, they used crossfire, kept the Reds at a distance,” Griffin said. “Your lot …” He gave up.

  “All chiefs and no Indians,” Hackett said.

  Borodin gave a sad smile. “They fight when they want to and they fly as they like. Their commander is a good man but he cannot control them. They all flew for the Tsar, in the Imperial Air Service, and now they hate the Bolsheviks, but they don’t respect Wrangel. And some are lazy and drink too much.”

  “Sack them,” Griffin said.

  “No replacements.”

  “What have they got against General Wrangel?” Oliphant asked. “He’s a baron, isn’t he? Isn’t that imperial enough for them?”

  “Alas, no. We have many barons. Wrangel is from the Baltic, which is Russian but not old Russia. These pilots are from true Russian nobility. They look down on Baltic barons. A question of breeding, you see.”

  “Extraordinary,” Oliphant said.

  “Yes. I think you have something similar with Ireland. I shared rooms at Cambridge with the son of an Irish peer. Not a happy man. The British police kept reading his letters, he said. He grew quite bitter and went to America. Texas.”

  “Big mistake, that,” Hackett said. “In France the Yankee infantry attacked wearing cowboy hats. Texas is cowboy country. I expect they shot your Irish friend.”

  “Yes, they shot him.” The count’s brief, bleak words silenced them. “An argument in a bar.”

  “Bad luck,” Griffin said. “Back to business. Today’s raid. Pity the Red fighters were yellow but we strafed the machines on the ground and then we saw off that crowd that bothered the bombers. Good. Any observations?”

  “They know we’re here,” Oliphant said. “Maybe they’ll come and strafe us.”

  “We’ll go back there tomorrow,” Griffin said. “Last thing they’ll expect. Catch ’em with their pants down.”

  “They’re not stupid. They tricked us today,” Hackett said. “If we’d stayed with the bombers—”

  “We wouldn’t have strafed the aerodrome.”

  “Those Red fighters weren’t interested in us. They wanted the Nines and they caught them. Same fighters.”

  “No. Different crowd.”

  “I thought I recognized a few,” Oliphant said.

  “Not important,” Griffin insisted. “Anything else?”

  “They fooled us,” Hackett said. “Our job—”

  “Your job is to do what you’re told.” Griffin turned to Borodin. “And someone should kick your boys’ backsides until they learn to fight. Don’t look at me, I’m not going to volunteer. Not my job.”

  “They probably wouldn’t listen to us anyway,” Oliphant said. “We haven’t got the breeding. Some of us are scarcely bred at all. I mean, Bellamy’s Canadian.”

  “Bellamy’s dead,” Borodin said. “Your medical sergeant told me an hour ago. It wasn’t malaria, it was typhus. I advise a speedy burial.”

  “Sweet Jesus suffering Christ AllbloodyMighty,” Griffin said.

  “And General Wrangel invites you to a banquet to celebrate Tsaritsyn’s capture. Seven tonight. Carriages will call.”

  10

  The village was only a mile from the crash, but it was hidden in a long fold in the ground. It had about a hundred houses, all small and mud-coloured. Pedlow and Duncan were taken to a slightly larger house, built of brick, and invited to enter. They were given stools to sit on. The room was gloomy. The windows were tawny with dirt. In one corner, a small and flickering lamp cast a weak light on a pair of icons, drab with age.

  Cobwebs hung thickly from the roof. The warm air smelled of dried dung. Duncan suddenly sneezed, twice, and a long, thin cobweb detached itself from a rafter. “Now look what you’ve do
ne,” Pedlow said. They watched it drift down, slower than time, and reach its end. “Too thrilling,” Duncan said. “It’s more than a chap can take in.”

  Outside, a crowd was gathering. The man who had found them climbed onto his cart and made a speech, with much gesturing at the sky. His words aroused his listeners. One by one they entered the room. A brief prayer to the icons, and then the wings on Pedlow’s tunic got their full attention. The men touched them, the women kissed his boots, everyone stood around and put their hands together and prayed, loud and strong.

  “I seem to be doing rather well,” Pedlow murmured. “Don’t you wish you were a pilot?”

  “That woman on your right is fascinated by your groin,” Duncan said. “She can’t get enough of it.”

  Pedlow looked. “Perhaps her head is bowed in deference.”

  “No. They all took a good squint at your crotch. Is your fly unbuttoned? Wedding tackle on display?”

  Discreetly, Pedlow felt his fly. This small action startled the crowd. Some gasped, some moved to get a better view, faces brightened. “All correct,” he said softly, and folded his arms. The onlookers slowly relaxed. There was a sense of anticlimax.

  “Maybe they plan to eat us,” Duncan said. “I’m told the family jewels are considered a great delicacy.”

  “I wish they’d stop staring. They expect something. Maybe I should make a speech.”

  “I’ll do it.” Duncan stood. All eyes swivelled to him. “On the breast of a barmaid from Sale,” he announced, “was tattooed the price of brown ale. And on her behind, for the sake of the blind, was the same information in Braille.” Their eyes were wide. They said nothing. He sat down. They turned and shuffled out of the room. “They’ve gone to tell it to their friends,” he said.

  After a while, men brought milk, black bread and boiled eggs. Also armfuls of sheepskins. Pedlow and Duncan ate and drank and stretched out on the sheepskins. When in Rome, take a siesta. That’s what everyone else was doing.

  The search party landed and reported no success. “We flew up and down and round and round,” Jessop said. “Nothing but steppe, I’m afraid.”

  “Very empty,” Maynard said. “Jolly hard on the eyeballs, looking at nothing.”

  “Not good enough,” Griffin told them. “Get yourselves a sandwich and go back and look again. That Nine’s got to be somewhere.” He watched them trudge away. “The squadron never gives up!” he shouted. “It could be you lying out there. Or me.”

  “Then why don’t you bloody well come and help?” Jessop said, very quietly. As the day had grown hotter, the air had got bumpier. The Camel was not built for comfort. After two long flights his backside ached. Now they were going back again. This wasn’t why he came to Russia.

  11

  Captain Brazier was bored because he had nothing to do. In France, when he was adjutant of an R.F.C. squadron, he had had power: he was the man to whom new arrivals reported, he told them the drill, allocated their billets, chose their servants. He organized funerals, trained the pallbearers, made sure the firing party discharged in unison, and God help anyone who cracked a smile. He met visiting generals, inspected latrines, forwarded recommendations for decorations, blasted mechanics who needed a haircut. In France, he mattered.

  Now he was what the Army called a ‘useless mouth’, a commander with nothing to command, as bad as a pay clerk or a bandsman, fit only to be evacuated when the battle approached. He lived in a railway train among a waste of prairie, surrounded by natives who never washed, never shaved, and talked gobbledegook. It was a pity the Kaiser’s war had to end. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it was fought in the King’s English. In France, if you told a chap the Boche had put the kibosh on the frogs, the other chap understood you. God knows what it would sound like in Russian.

  He sat in his Orderly Room and rolled a bit of blotting paper into a pellet. Only half the Pullman car was his, the other half was Lacey’s office and radio room. He flicked the pellet at Lacey but it fell short. Lacey, listening on headphones, noticed nothing. Brazier made another pellet and fired again, but too hard: it flew over Lacey’s head. “Alright,” he growled. “One under, one over. Now watch out.” He fired again, just as Lacey reached down to open a desk drawer, and the pellet flew through the space where his head had been. “Hell’s teeth!” Brazier roared. “Play the white man, can’t you? I blew your head off, dammit.”

  “I’ll call you in fifteen minutes,” Lacey told someone.

  He unplugged the headphones and let them slip to his neck. Brazier aimed carefully and nearly hit a hat stand. “Back in the schoolroom, are we?” Lacey said.

  “Very dull war. No enemy. Bloody boring.”

  They made a curious contrast. Brazier wore a double row of medal ribbons, which looked like miniatures on his khaki tunic. Lacey’s sole decoration was his neatly groomed moustache, and in silk-lined RAF blue barathea he seemed almost dapper. Brazier sat hunched over his desk, his fingers still destroying the blotting paper, cheated of an enemy to duff up. Lacey stood and strolled to the window where he could enjoy the late afternoon sun. He spun the end of his headphone cord. He needed the exercise.

  “I don’t find it boring,” he said. “I’ve just sold five thousand steel helmets, for cash. The thrill of the marketplace, the pulse of profit.”

  “British Army issue? That’s government property. You can’t sell them.”

  “Well, nobody wanted them. Russian troops won’t wear them, they prefer to get their heads blown off in fur hats. Perhaps astrakhan, for the more stylish.”

  “Still not yours to sell.”

  “My dear captain, they were going nowhere on the docks at Novorossisk, while Russian housewives everywhere are crying out for good, sturdy cooking pots. An unusually honest Russian dealer bought the lot from our man in Ekat.”

  “Give me his name. I’ll have the blighter court-martialled.”

  “Henry. You can’t touch him, he’s an American civilian. You should be grateful to him. He sold forty thousand British Army horseshoes last week. Best Sheffield steel. Or do I mean iron?”

  “He stole them.”

  “No. If anyone did it was our man in Novo. Lieutenant Waxman, delightful chap, you’d like him.”

  “Waxman. Good. I’ll have him court-martialled.”

  “That might be difficult. Once the cargo is unloaded, it’s no longer British, it’s Russian. Denikin’s property. He won’t court-martial a British officer. He needs our guns and things. But not our horseshoes. Guess why?”

  Brazier tore the blotting paper into halves and then quarters. “Astonish me.” He threw the pieces over his shoulder.

  “Russian horses are smaller than British Army horses. They have far smaller feet. Evidently London didn’t know that.”

  “But.” Brazier raised a finger. “Russian women pull the plough. And they do have big feet.”

  Lacey looked around in surprise. “A jest. How droll. I feared that life amongst the crude, licentious infantry might have coarsened you. No, our buyer is in armaments. He melts down the steel to make rifles.”

  Brazier stood up and put on his cap. Lacey knew what that meant: now the adjutant was on parade, and King’s Regulations applied to everything. “Look here, Lacey. You’re not in France any more, swapping disinfectant for Canadian bacon. We’re guests of the Russian people. Stealing’s got to stop.”

  “The Russians steal from each other all the time. And it wasn’t disinfectant in France, it was linoleum. I seem to remember you enjoyed the bacon.”

  “There’s a difference. What you’re doing now is black-market trading. That’s fraud. Penal servitude.”

  “And without it, the squadron would have no petrol. I buy our petrol with the profits of my trading.”

  “Rubbish. Denikin’s people supply our petrol. Our military mission in Ekat said so.”

  Somewhere, a gramophone began playing dance music. Lacey put his hands in his pockets and began a slow fox-trot across the compartment. “Denikin’s ma
n cheats,” he said. “He sells half of our petrol to his friends. The railway people sell a lot of the rest en route. We’re lucky to get the dregs.” He reached the door and swivelled on his toes and started back.

  Brazier snorted. “Everyone’s a crook, are they? I don’t believe it.”

  “Henry isn’t a crook. He buys our petrol back from the men who stole it. Result – everyone’s happy. And Merlin Squadron flies again.”

  Brazier went out and slammed the door.

  “A poor critic,” Lacey said, “but a steady performer.”

  12

  Griffin told Wragge and Hackett to find a good spot to bury Bellamy. They asked the adjutant’s advice. In France or England there had always been a handy church with a graveyard, but here … Brazier told them to look for low ground, no rocks, easy digging, away from running water. “Typhus,” he said. “Nasty stuff. Go down six feet minimum.”

  They found a sharp stick and set off.

  “Tough luck on old Bellamy,” Wragge said.

  Hackett grunted.

  “Best Mess president we ever had,” Wragge said. “Those dinners at Butler’s Farm were stunning.”

  “Too much fish. The British are in love with haddock. Ever seen a whole haddock? Very ugly. No haddock in Australia. We passed a law, it’s banned. And anchovies. Bellamy was always giving us anchovies, for God’s sake. Why?”

  “I don’t think anchovies are actually fish.” Wragge tried to remember what an anchovy looked like. “Anyway, you never had any problems with the roast beef. You tucked in like billy-ho to the roast beef. Second helpings.”

  “Because the first was feeble.” Hackett stopped. “Where are we going?”