A Splendid Little War

by Derek Robinson

  Borodin had an impossible idea. “Go and fetch your father,” he said. “Tell him I am an officer in General Denikin’s Volunteer Army. If he comes with me he will be safe and get three hot meals a day, like you.” The boy thought about it. “And the rest of these potatoes too,” Borodin said.

  “Where’s your army?”

  “Fifteen miles away.” More like twenty.

  “Lamb chops. What they taste like?”

  “Twice as good as chicken.” The boy’s gut rumbled some more. “Fetch your father. Go now. We can’t wait.”

  The boy went, as silent as a shadow. He didn’t weigh much. It was easy to move like that when you were just skin and bone.

  In less than five minutes he was back with his father. The man was thin and not much taller than his son, but Borodin was dismayed to see that he was lame, dragging his left leg. Even walking from the station was an effort. “We must hurry,” the man said. “It’s dangerous here.”

  “Fifteen miles. I can’t carry you.”

  “Pump trolley.” He pointed into the darkness. “Please. Hurry.”

  The trolley was a small, lightweight truck with a seesaw pump action to make it go. The boy jumped up and worked the pump, and the trolley screamed as if stabbed. “Get grease, get oil, butter, anything,” Borodin said. The boy jumped down and ran. “He knows what to get,” his father said. Twenty minutes later they pumped the trolley more or less silently out of town. Borodin felt exhilarated.

  “Lamb chops,” the stationmaster said. “I have never eaten them. Twice as good as chicken, the boy says.”

  “Your son is very smart,” Borodin said. “And the harder we pump, the sooner you can have breakfast.”

  6

  The first bomb fell in the town square of Warsaw and killed an ox.

  The ox was one of six that Makhno’s men had looted from different owners. If the owners protested or resisted, Makhno’s men shot them, knifed them, clubbed them. Sometimes they murdered them when they didn’t resist; such was the appeal of an anarchist movement: total freedom! The oxen were kept in the town square. Nobody fed them. Why bother? Makhno had plans to slaughter them for a grand feast. The bomb was only a 25-pounder, but the unlucky ox just happened to be standing a yard away from the point of impact. The other five oxen panicked and ran. It was a small stampede, but Warsaw was a small town, and five tons of hungry, angry beef make a formidable rampage. A second bomb went through the roof of a large stables where Makhno kept his horses, and started a second stampede. By now, bombs were going off like Chinese firecrackers all over town and everyone panicked. When the Camels came out of nowhere and strafed the mob, they ran. The battle for Warsaw had been fought and won in three minutes.

  Hackett went up to five hundred feet and took a long look at the aeroplanes criss-crossing the streaming mob, and he fired a red signal flare. It was the signal to quit. Already the town was emptying. No point in bombing empty buildings. And the panic in the streets was feeding on itself. A few late bombs flowered here and there, and then all the Nines saw his flare and stopped work.

  The other Camels came up to join him. He fished out the town plan that the stationmaster had sketched for him, showing the main buildings occupied by Makhno’s men. Some were on fire. Or maybe not. The plan was upside-down. He held the joystick between his knees and turned the paper, trying to match it with the streets, and the windstream snatched it from his fingers. Oh well, he thought. Nichevo.

  There was no ground fire, nobody stood and stared up, everyone was infected by the rush to escape. The bombs alone couldn’t explain such panic. It had to be the aeroplanes. They fell on the town like the hounds of hell, raced around at ungodly speed, spat fire and killed. Of course men panicked and ran. Sudden terror knew no other answer.

  Hackett fired a green flare and his squadron came together again, Camels leading Nines in the usual arrowheads. They made a leisurely approach, losing height until they roared through the drifting smoke of the town at fifty feet and terrified the anarchists all over again, just as their hangovers were beginning to plead for rest. It was like driving sheep. The squadron circled and did it again, driving them deep into the countryside. Then they flew away. Twenty miles ahead they found a relatively flat stretch of steppe to land on.

  “Golly, didn’t they run!” Maynard said to Jessop. “They must be awfully fit.”

  “I’ll tell you why.” Jessop put his arm around Maynard’s shoulders. “They play a lot of rugger. And cricket in the summer.” Maynard wriggled free. “That’s all tosh,” he said. Jessop looked offended. “I have it on Borodin’s word. He opened the batting for Petrograd Old Boys.” Maynard walked away. “Average of sixty-nine point four,” Jessop called. “His straight drive was notorious. He killed three umpires in one match.”

  The Pullman trains waited outside the station while the Marines went into the town. Brazier and the Marines were ready to fight but they found silence and smoke and dead men littering the streets. Nobody could tell if they were bandits or townsfolk. Some looked as if they had been trampled to death. The number of half-starved dogs poking their noses into the bodies was impressive.

  “Bloody shambles, sir,” the Marine sergeant said.

  “Family squabble, sergeant. The Russians can clean it up. They’ve had plenty of practice. Here …” Brazier gave him a Very pistol. “You may have the privilege.”

  A green flare soared into the sky. The trains pulled into the station and the plennys got to work on the coal dump and the water tower. The stationmaster and his son took one look at the town and asked to stay on the train. Lacey made them kitchen hands. They were happiest when close to food.

  The pilots lay about, sunbathing. Somebody saw rabbits and everyone went hunting. Revolvers banged; nobody hit anything. “Elusive is the word,” Tommy Hopton said. “That’s the second thing they taught me at Eton. Rabbits can be jolly elusive.”

  “What was the first thing?” Rex Dextry asked.

  “Never be rude to the servants.”

  They went back to sunbathing. Eventually the trains arrived and the ground crews got to work, dismantling the wings from the aeroplanes. Back to normal.

  7

  The journey took five days.

  Nothing could persuade the locomotive drivers to go faster than twenty miles an hour, and they were more comfortable at fifteen. “This is in case they have to stop suddenly,” Borodin explained. And they often stopped. Word had spread that the line was safe and expresses thundered past while Merlin Squadron stood in a siding.

  The pilots didn’t mind. If they could see a farm, they gave a couple of plennys a bunch of rouble notes and sent them to buy fresh food: eggs, milk, chickens, dried fruit, potatoes. Once they came back with two fat lambs, very much alive and immediately popular with the squadron. Rex Dextry wanted one to be kept as a mascot. He was arguing with Jessop about which lamb had more charm and friskiness. Jessop pointed to the one he liked and the plenny holding it picked up a stone and whacked it on the head, hard. Its legs folded. The other lamb bleated with fright. “I say, I say!” Jessop cried. The plenny misunderstood him and smashed the other lamb’s skull. He looked up, expecting approval.

  The whole appalling episode spoiled the day. “It’s barbaric,” Dextry said. “Medieval.”

  “My brother farms on the Cotswolds,” Jessop said, “and all I can say is, it wouldn’t happen there. That’s all I can say And another thing—”

  “The damn plenny smiled at us,” Dextry said. “Wham. Bam. Smiled.”

  “Perfectly normal,” Borodin said. “He did what he thought you wanted. To him, they were meat, not pets.”

  “Well, I don’t want any part of it,” Jessop said. “That’s all I can say.”

  Lacey made sure the spring lamb ended up in the chef’s kitchen. “I daren’t put it on the menu,” he told Borodin.

  “Leave it until tomorrow. Make a casserole and call it veal. They’ll scoff it down.” He was right. The pilots were young, with little room for gloom
. The slaughter of the innocents faded from memory faster than Bellamy’s burial. There were more important things to think about. Lacey had found a croquet set in the stores on “B” Flight’s train. It was in a crate stencilled “War Department – Lightning Conductors One Dozen”.

  He showed it to the adjutant. “Nobody ordered lightning conductors,” he said.

  Brazier grunted.

  Lacey fingered the lettering. “It’s not exactly a military item, is it?”

  “That’s because you don’t know the War Department. Wheels within wheels, my boy. Codenames hide new weapons. ‘Lightning conductors’ could mean, for instance, ‘Secret Tactical Smokescreen’.”

  Lacey took a croquet mallet from the crate. “We could burn this, and see if it smokes.”

  “More probably it’s a cock-up in Supplies,” Brazier said.

  “I’ll send a signal to Mission H.Q. Received one crate alleged lightning conductors in fact containing three elephant guns await further orders. That should baffle them.”

  Brazier shrugged. “Just don’t involve me. I don’t share your taste for confusion.”

  “Not confusion. Tactical smokescreen.”

  After dinner, he showed the croquet set to the Camel pilots. They were enthusiastic for the game. Practice on the carpet of The Dregs began at once. Mallets swung and balls ricocheted. Nobody’s legs were safe. Even Susan Perry – an honorary member of the Mess – took cover behind her chair.

  “Let’s you and me go and inspect your casualties,” Hackett said to her. “And leave these maniacs to batter each other.”

  They walked and she did not take his arm. He was relieved, he didn’t want the squadron watching them stroll like that. Then he began to wonder. Maybe she was being fickle. Women were fickle, well-known fact, everyone said so.

  She poked him in the ribs. “Relax your shoulders,” she said. “They’re up around your ears.”

  He let his shoulders slump. “Now what?”

  “Wave your arms. And whistle. Can you sing?”

  He whistled the opening bars of “Waltzing Matilda”, and waved an arm in time with it, and sang the next lines: “… under the shade of a coolibah tree, and he sang as he watched and waited while his billy boiled …” He stopped. “Feel free to applaud.”

  “You’ve got a voice like a bucket of frogs,” she said kindly.

  “Yes? That’s a compliment where I come from. We’d sooner listen to a bucket of frogs than wrestle a mad kangaroo.”

  She laughed, and took his arm. “Give me your hat.” He took off his cap. “Now you’re not the C.O. I’m not going to marry the C.O., but I might just marry you, whatever your name is. What is it?”

  “James. Are we going to get married?”

  “There’s nothing more certain.”

  “Good God. Well, I’m glad you told me.”

  They talked of other things: his boyhood in Australia, her life at Cambridge. Music, songs, hits from the shows. Lacey’s amazing ability to supply the Mess gramophone with records of the hits. “I asked him how he does it,” she said, “and he said, ‘I breathe through the loopholes’. What does that mean?”

  “It’s bullshit,” he said. “Australian word. It means …” She widened her eyes. It was a look he was learning to recognize. “Oh. You know what it means. Doesn’t matter. Tell me this. Are we really engaged? Or was that just …” He ran out of words.

  “Bullshit?”

  “No, no. I hope not.” He thought of several answers, some of them romantic, phrases he had never spoken. “Quite the opposite,” he said.

  “Do you want to be engaged?”

  “Well, it might settle the minds of the squadron. Stop the gossip.”

  “Then let’s do it. As long as we both know that it’s just for the benefit of the squadron.” That silenced him. “You may kiss your fiancée,” she said, so he did. That wasn’t for the squadron. That quite definitely was not for the squadron. Bloody hell, he thought. This is a girl in a million. They walked on.

  A hospital train trundled past, heading for Ekat, and stopped a quarter of a mile from them.

  “Casualties from Tsaritsyn, I expect,” Hackett said. “Do you want a closer look?”

  “Not at what’s inside,” she said. “They’re all the same. No dressings, no painkillers, no antiseptic, no drugs and one doctor too tired to amputate.”

  They watched from a distance. Men were carrying corpses from the train and piling them beside the track as if they were stacking cut timber. Hackett counted thirty bodies and gave up.

  “Gangrene,” she said. “Can you smell it? Like rotten fruit. Slightly sweet but also a yellowy stink. Plenty of dysentery, too. Smells like a broken sewer.” She sniffed the air. “Malaria, too, probably. That can be the real killer. Dead in a day sometimes.”

  The men climbed aboard the train and it pulled away.

  “What’s the point of a hospital train if they all die?” Hackett said.

  “It’s a Russian joke,” she said. “They call it irony.”

  Lacey and Borodin sheltered in the kitchen while the passion for indoor croquet burned itself out.

  “It will be over in fifteen minutes,” Lacey said. “Fighter pilots have a low threshold of boredom. Have you seen what they read? Cowboy stories. Penny dreadfuls. Ripping yarns. I speak of those who can read.”

  “I was a fighter pilot,” Borodin said. “I read all of Tolstoy. War and Peace twice.”

  “Heavens above. Don’t tell these hooligans. Your reputation will be in tatters.” Lacey found an apple and began peeling it. “How can we pass the time?”

  “I could teach you more Russian phrases. Von! is useful. It means ‘Get away!’ Poyedz is train. Nye refuganski poyedz might help one day. It means ‘Not a refugee train’. What else? You might hear Bozhe Tsarya Khrani at parties. That’s ‘God save the Tsar’.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I know. Everyone knows. But some people choose not to believe it. Prazdik is a good word. It’s a celebration. This C.O. should throw a prazdik. He’s become remote. He makes the squadron nervous.”

  “It’s the curse of promotion.”

  “Time for a prazdik, then. It cures all ills.”

  They ate the apple. The noise in The Dregs subsided and they went back. The pilots were searching for lost playing cards. “We’ve got fifty-two but five are jokers,” Jessop said. “Can you play poker with five jokers?”

  Wragge found the last croquet ball and gave it to Lacey. “We’ve formed a team to play the rest,” he said. “We are the Public School Wanderers and the rest are Serfs.”

  “Abolished in 1861,” Lacey said. “No serfs in Russia.”

  “Not that it did them any good,” Borodin said. He was talking to himself as much as to Lacey, but his words were out of character. There was a sudden silence.

  “Don’t stop there, old chap,” Dextry said.

  “It all depends how you define freedom,” Borodin said. “Yes, the serfs were emancipated, nobody owned them. Good. Now they were peasants, free to survive if they could. Not so good.”

  “I bet they got shat upon,” Jessop said.

  “They were given land. The Crown had bought it. The peasants, in turn, had to pay back the Crown. Six per cent a year, every year for forty-nine years. Six per cent is a very heavy rate. And the land’s value was always calculated above its market value, often twice as much, so the peasants could never earn enough to make their payments, and they fell deeper into debt.”

  “I told you they got shat upon,” Jessop said, pleased at his own cleverness.

  “Forty-nine years,” Dextry said. “How many peasants live to be forty-nine?”

  “Got it!” Maynard said. He held up the ace of spades. “Now we can play.”

  “Let’s leave them to it,” Lacey said. He and Borodin went out. “You surprise me,” Lacey said. “I didn’t realize the Russian nobility took such an interest in the soil.”

  “We don’t. I read about it at Cambridge. People ke
pt asking me what Russia was like, so I looked it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The 1911 edition.”

  “Ah yes,” Lacey said. “By far the best. It’s very sound on the Tudor Protestant sects. Especially in the north of England.”

  CATCH THE WAR WHILE IT’S HOT

  1

  Hackett awoke suddenly. It was too early, not much more than dawn. He felt tired, and angry because he was tired: what was wrong with his body? Couldn’t it give him a decent night’s sleep? He had a flickering memory of a dream and then it was lost. It left a taste of a struggle with a great problem. What problem? It had gone. But it had been urgent. How could it vanish so fast when it had mattered so much?

  He got out of bed, massaged his eyes and squinted at the steppe. It reminded him of his days in the Navy, being on watch when the dawn came up and painted the ocean. Now it was working the same trick on this prairie and turning it … not gold. Not yellow either. And blonde was all wrong too. “Who cares?” he said. He got dressed quickly and pulled on his flying boots and went for a walk in this indescribable landscape while the colours lasted.

  The air tasted splendidly fresh. He breathed deeply, felt stronger and stepped out, heading away from the train. The grass was wet and his boots were soon drenched. Songbirds were busy all around him. Well, they would have been busy anyway, but he felt better to know that he had company. When he paused to look back, the trains were just a thin brown strip on the skyline. It was good to be free from all those duties. He turned and walked on, and nearly walked into a goat.

  It saw him first and bolted, braying a warning. Other goats answered. He headed for them, out of curiosity, and came across the herd. They crowded together and stared. “Morning, chaps,” he said. That was when the boy stood up.

  Or perhaps he was a girl. He or she was wearing a long robe with a hood that hid the face. A small child, ten or eleven perhaps. The robe had been made for someone much bigger. It brushed the ground and the sleeves were doubled back. Good for sleeping in, probably. “Hullo,” he said. “I’m James.” Damnfool thing to say to a Russian kid.