A Splendid Little War

by Derek Robinson

  “Does he? I’m pleased he’s pleased.”

  A touch of tartness in the words surprised him. “Well, it got us out of a serious hole.”

  She stopped and picked a small yellow flower and tucked it into a buttonhole in his tunic. “Kenny looked quite satisfied with the results.”

  “Thank you,” he said, for the flower; and then: “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “There’s nothing noble about a dead man’s face. Quite the reverse. I gave his features a human look. Not a smile. Just the kind of expression that a colonel with a V.C. should have. Oh dear. Now I’ve shocked you.”

  “Not a bit.” They walked on. Not entirely true: what had shocked him was the sight of the wedding ring on her finger as she fixed the flower. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? He felt cheated, and hated the feeling, it was a sign of weakness, unworthy of a C.O. “After France, nothing shocks me,” he said. “All that blood and guts.”

  “It may be blood and guts to you, but it’s bread and butter to me,” she said. “Old medical joke. Very old.”

  He laughed, and enjoyed a great relief of tension, so he took another risk and said: “How does your husband feel about all this?” He waved at the steppe. “An Englishwoman in the wilds of Russia.”

  “Nothing. He …” She stopped, and faced him. “Look: if you must walk such a long way away, we shall have to communicate by postcard.” He took a cautious pace towards her. She shook her head. “Dear Sir,” she said. “Ref yours of the tenth inst …” He took a larger step. “Better,” she said. “Short story. We met at Cambridge. His name was Tristram. Not his fault, blame his dotty parents. Fell in love. Not our fault, blame the biology. Tristram was very dashing. As soon as he could, he dashed off fast to join the war before it stopped. Queen Victoria’s Rifles, second lieutenant. Dashed over to France, dashed over the top at Festubert in 1915. Pointless battle that nobody remembers. End of story. Not his fault, blame … I don’t know who. But I hope you’re not all dash.”

  “I ran away from home when I was fifteen,” he said. “Does that count?”

  They turned to walk back to the trains, and she took his arm. “Hullo!” he said. He glanced ahead and saw distant figures watching them. “What will the neighbours think?”

  “They’ll think what we both thought as soon as we saw each other on Kenny’s train,” she said. “Yum-yum, we thought. That’s for me.”

  “Oh,” Hackett said. “Yes. I suppose that’s true.”

  She squeezed his arm. “Men can be so slow,” she said. “It’s a wonder the race has survived.”

  Prod Pedlow had borrowed a Bible. He sat in the shade of the train with Drunken Duncan, and tried to look up the part that Borodin had mentioned during tea on the way back from the village of the Skoptsi. “Whose gospel was it?” he asked. “I’ve forgotten.”

  “Matthew. I remember because I’ve got a cousin called Matthew. Brilliant opening bat. He hit the ball so hard it made holes in the boundary fence. Bound to play for England one day, everyone said so. But …” Duncan shrugged.

  “But what?”

  “Fell in love. French ambassador found him in bed with his wife, said the embassy was French territory and under French law he could kill him, it was justifiable homicide. Very nasty. Last I heard, Matthew was an assistant bank manager in Cape Town. Tragic.”

  “Serve him right.” Pedlow was searching the pages for St Matthew. “Anyway, it’s only cricket.”

  “You’re an Ulster Prod,” Duncan said. “You wouldn’t know a cover drive from a dustbin lid.”

  “Ah, here he is. Matthew.”

  “You need chapter and verse. I can’t remember what Borodin said.”

  “I can. He said 1912 – chapter 19, verse 12. Big year, 1912. I was a chorister, the choir was processing around the church, and I was singing like a bird when my voice broke. Cracked. It fell two octaves in one breath. 1912. Turning-point for the nation. Here we are …” He read the verse. “Bloody hell,” he said bleakly, and handed the Bible to Duncan. “Verse 12.”

  Duncan read it in silence. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

  “That’s only someone’s opinion,” Duncan said. “Who was it, anyway?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Pedlow said. “Preaching to the disciples. I suppose those chaps in the village thought that, if it got them into the kingdom of heaven, it was worth a swift chop.”

  “We could show this to the squadron,” Duncan said. “No. They still wouldn’t believe us.”

  “I wonder what a swift chop does to a chap’s vocal cords? It might boost him up a couple of octaves.” Pedlow sprawled in the grass, propping himself on his elbows, and looked at the vastness of the sky and the spotless purity of its blue. “Enough to get you into the heavenly choir. Not that it exists. That kind of mumbo-jumbo is all codswallop. But if you were an ignorant villager standing stark naked with a sharp knife in your hand, it might be enough to get you to de-bollock yourself. If you’d started having second thoughts, I mean.”

  “Oh … Christ on crutches.” Duncan had not been listening; he had been scanning the page opposite Matthew 19, 12. “It gets worse,” he said. “Listen. And if thy hand or foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire.” He looked up. “More friendly advice from the Son of God.”

  “They wouldn’t dare cut off my feet,” Pedlow said. “I wouldn’t stand for it.” Duncan yawned. “Anyway, I outranked them,” Pedlow said. “I was a Top Angel. Air Commodore, at least. Maybe Air Vice-Marshal.”

  “Didn’t stop your feet stinking. Another night in that lousy hut and I’d have cut them off.”

  “You can be very selfish sometimes, Dudders.”

  “It’s for your own good, Gerry. To keep you out of the everlasting fire. And I haven’t finished.” Duncan’s forefinger pressed the page. “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee … You can guess the rest. Keep a duff eye and you go straight to hell.”

  Pedlow stood up and brushed bits of grass from his sleeves. “They really believed it. I mean, we saw the knives and the blood and …” He squeezed his eyes shut as the memories returned. “And the mutilations. Thank God Borodin and Lacey turned up. Those fanatics were capable of anything.” Duncan grunted. For a moment they were both silent, trying to forget the unforgettable. “Bloody Russians,” Pedlow said. “D’you fancy a beer?”

  “Nothing against it in St Matthew,” Duncan said. They headed for The Dregs.

  Hackett was restless. He wanted to send a signal to Mission H.Q. in Ekat, reporting his situation. Lacey’s radio batteries were flat. Being recharged. Ready tomorrow. Well, send a cable. Telegraph lines ran alongside the track, so tap into them. No good, they’d been cut. Maybe by Nestor Makhno’s men, in Warsaw.

  There was nothing to be done. No train passed, in either direction. Hackett sat on the bottom step of his Pullman car and began to dislike this corner of Russia. Didn’t hate it, there was nothing to hate, how could you hate grass? But he resented being dumped in the middle of this emptiness. From time to time a fly came wandering by, curious to taste his unusual sweat, and he let it take a look before he made a grab. It always got away. It was just a stupid fly, all buzz and no brains, and it won every time. He looked around and saw his squadron lying in the sun, shirts off, waiting for him to tell them what to do. He sent for the flight leaders, the adjutant and Lacey.

  They met in his Pullman.

  “It’s forty miles round trip to Warsaw,” he said. “Borodin won’t be back tonight. I’m not waiting here to be shot at from dusk to dawn. We’re leaving. We’ll head back east, find somewhere to lie up, return here tomorrow.”

  The adjutant
didn’t like the risk. Borodin might return earlier than expected, might have urgent intelligence, might need protection. He volunteered to remain. Not alone, obviously. Wragge suggested leaving Uncle and ten picked men. Oliphant said twenty would be better, with four Lewis guns. Then there was food. A squad that size had to eat. Alright, add a cook. And the medical sergeant, just in case. Perhaps a couple of plennys. Hackett cut short the discussion. “You can keep the Marines and Kenny’s train, Uncle,” he said. “I’ll take everybody else.”

  “Excellent decision,” Brazier said.

  “You’re in your element, aren’t you?” Wragge said. “You’ll command a little local war. Enormous fun.”

  “Look at it this way. We’ll be shooting them before they can start shooting you.”

  “Russians can’t shoot straight,” Lacey said.

  They looked at him with surprise. “I thought you were here to take the minutes,” Oliphant said.

  “Count Borodin told me. He said that Russians have never had much faith in rifles. They believe in fighting with the sword, the lance and the dagger.”

  “How quaint,” Wragge said. “But it won’t win this war.”

  “Somebody must win,” Oliphant said.

  “Not necessarily. Maybe they’ll both lose. All die from exhaustion.”

  “That’s all.” Hackett stood up. “We’ll move in an hour.”

  As they left the Pullman, they heard the plennys singing. They were standing around the mound of the mass grave, and their hymn had a depth and strength not found in Western choirs. The boom and rumble of the singing contained a sadness that went far beyond these victims of war. Here was the voice of Russians who grieved for their whole country. While they sang, nobody in the squadron moved. Then the hymn ended.

  “That’s one thing these jokers are good at,” Oliphant said. “They can sing in tune. After that, they couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the sole.”

  The trains moved out, and Brazier spent the night with the Marines, waiting for trouble that never came. He was not unhappy. He had been soldiering long enough to know that there was always more trouble on the way. The supply was inexhaustible. In times of uncertainty, while other men worried about the future, Brazier was certain that it would always bring problems that could be tackled only by high explosive and cold steel. Someone, somewhere, would always need his skills. That was a comforting thought.

  5

  Count Borodin took a pony without a saddle. He told himself that no peasant could afford a saddle, and he was a peasant. Big mistake.

  After five miles, the base of his spine ached from bouncing on the pony’s backbone. He tried sitting on his hat, but it was no better. He pressed his thighs against the pony and raised himself and took the pressure off his spine. The relief was good, but the constant effort soon made his thighs ache. He tried sitting sidesaddle, and liked it, but the pony didn’t. It swung its head and tried to nip his legs. He cursed it, not as a peasant would but in the elegant language of the Imperial Court, which meant nothing to the animal, so it stopped and listened. “You’re useless,” Borodin said in English. “You’re cutting me in half and you’re as slow as cold treacle.” He got off and massaged his thighs, and began walking. The pony munched grass and watched him go.

  Soon it would be dusk. He had no need to think about his route; he followed the railway track. He thought about what he was doing. What he was trying to do.

  Seeking out intelligence was new to him. He had served with his regiment until it was virtually destroyed by death or desertion. He had a spell in the Imperial Air Service until it ran out of aeroplanes, and then he got a position on the staff at supreme army headquarters. He witnessed a different scale of carnage there.

  The death-blow was struck when Tsar Nicholas II, appointed by God to be Supreme Ruler of the Holy Russian Empire and therefore Head of the Armed Forces, sacked the C-in-C of the Army and took over operational command. The saying goes: A fish rots from its head. Borodin saw the Russian Army rot from the Tsar down, until the soldiers gave up and walked home and abandoned their war.

  When he was a boy, Borodin had often lived on the fringe of the Imperial family: such was the accident of his birth and the fact that Nicholas was in love with Russian music – Rimsky-Korsakov; Balakirev; the boy’s father, Aleksandr Borodin; Tchaikovsky: a golden age. The Tsar’s idea of heaven was watching Sleeping Beauty from his box at the Imperial Conservatory.

  Borodin knew him as a mild young man who liked playing with dogs and gathering mushrooms. When he was twenty-five he still enjoyed a game of hide-and-seek. He had no curiosity about the outside world and absolutely no ambition to be Tsar. “What am I going to do?” he asked when his father died, and he never found a happy answer. He adored his wife more than his people, let her dominate him, scold him and urge him to be a second Peter the Great. Perhaps he put himself in charge of winning the war in order to please her. In so doing, he condemned them both, and their children, to death; but not before he had killed another million or more Russian troops.

  So: no room for Intelligence in Borodin’s time on the Staff. Now he wondered just what he would do in this little town renamed Warsaw, how he would discover whether or not it was in Nestor Makhno’s hands and how he could escape without getting shot. Even in these rags, he didn’t look like a peasant. Too tall, too erect. He rubbed dirt on his face and neck, and walked like a ploughman, feet well apart, knees bent, a bit of a stoop, elbows out. Night fell. Walking like that, in the dark, grew more difficult. He often stumbled, partly because he was tired. And every step he took was a step he would have to take again when he came back. Perhaps this adventure was not such a good idea.

  The moon came up, which helped, and at last he saw a light, which was very welcome. It was a farmhouse, and the light was a fire. A woman, not young, was bagging potatoes by the light of a fire, and she was not glad to see him. He stopped a good distance away, told her he was alone, and asked how far it was to town.

  “Walking?” She had a knife, and made sure he saw it. “An hour. Maybe less.”

  An hour was three miles. Maybe only two. At once he felt better. “You grow potatoes? Sell me a sack of potatoes.” A peasant bringing potatoes into town: nobody would look twice at him. Then he remembered: it was two miles. Maybe three. “Make it half a sack,” he said.

  They argued over the price and he paid more than they were worth. “You’ll get double that in town,” she said. “If you’re lucky.” And laughed. Or cackled.

  About an hour later, maybe more, maybe less, Borodin slouched along the railway tracks into Warsaw. His shoulders ached. Half a sack of potatoes weighed more than he had believed possible.

  Ahead, the lights of the station glowed. No sounds. No trains, no people. An efficient spy would infiltrate and find out why the town was dead. How? Wake up someone and ask him? That was absurd. His legs were stiff. He saw a shadow that was blacker than the night. A brick wall. He sat and rested against it, holding the sack between his knees, and told himself to think harder while he rested his eyes.

  What woke him was the moving of the sack. He grabbed it before it could escape and it was made of skin. He had a man by the throat. The thief squirmed and spluttered and tried to claw at his fingers, but Borodin tightened his grip. The struggle stopped. He stood up and took the man up with him. Took him easily. In the faint light of the moon he saw that the man was a boy. He let go of the throat and held him by the arm. The boy coughed until he was wheezing for breath, and got his breath back and coughed some more.

  “Feel better?” Borodin asked. “I apologize for my behaviour, but you did rather ask for it.”

  The boy took a huge breath and slowly released it. He wiped his eyes with his spare hand. “Feel like shit,” he croaked. The voice was young. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. “Christ … look at you. Never saw nobody as tall as you before. Let me sit down. Ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  They both sat. “You wanted my potatoes,” Borodin sa
id. The words sounded dishonest. A genuine peasant wouldn’t say that. The boy grunted. “You only had to ask,” Borodin said, and fished a big potato from the bag. “Here.” The boy took it, smelled it, and began eating it. “It’s raw,” Borodin said. “Got another?” the boy asked. Borodin gave him another potato. He ate with his mouth open. For a while the only sound in the night was the work of teeth and saliva on potato.

  Eventually he belched, a long gut-rumbling statement. “God help your digestive system,” Borodin said. “What’s wrong with this town? Don’t they feed you?”

  “Got another?” He accepted another potato and put it inside his shirt. “I saw you sneakin’ along the tracks. You don’t belong here. You talk like nobody from here. If I told Makhno’s men they’d shoot you.”

  “Yes. But you wouldn’t get any more potatoes.” The boy thought about that. “You help me,” Borodin said, “and I’ll take you to a place where you’ll get three hot meals a day.” More silence. “Fried eggs for breakfast,” Borodin said. “Beef stew at midday. Lamb chops for supper. Hot bread with everything.”

  The boy was in tears, crying for food. He told Borodin what he wanted to know. Nestor Makhno’s men had taken the town, killed half the people, looted everywhere. Vodka, vodka, vodka. They were waiting for a train to rob, and getting angry because no trains arrived, so they went on killing and looting and drinking. They were all drunk now. That’s why the town was quiet. They’d drunk themselves stupid. Tomorrow they’d wake up and feel even worse and kill some more.

  Borodin asked why they hadn’t killed the boy. He said it was because his father was stationmaster and they needed him to stop the train they wanted to rob. He pointed to the station lights. His father was there, guarded by a Makhno man who was drunk out of his skull, like all the rest.