Hornet’s Sting

by Derek Robinson

  * * *

  Dash got up in time for dinner. With the C.O. away, and the aerodrome so boggy that there was no prospect of flying, the atmosphere in the mess was relaxed and cheery.

  “O’Neill sent me a postcard,” the doctor said. “Packs of wolves are roaming in Westminster. They ate the Home Secretary.”

  “O’Neill couldn’t tell a wolf from a white elephant,” Gerrish said. “He’s blind as a bat.”

  “I’ve often wondered about bats,” McWatters said. “Clever little creatures. Fly like the devil and never hit anything. Your churches are full of them, padre. How’s it done? What’s the trick?”

  The padre took some more roast potatoes. “God moves in a mysterious way,” he said.

  “Chap called Mannock in 40 Squadron,” Lynch said. “Only got one good eye. The other’s not worth a damn.”

  “That’s nothing,” Simms said. “The whole of 56 Squadron’s only got one ball.” It was an old joke, and it produced a few tired groans. A new man, called Griffiths, looked puzzled. “Albert Ball,” Simms told him.

  “Oh, yes! Captain Ball,” Griffiths said. He was glad to be part of the conversation at last. “People were talking about him at the depot. What’s his score?” It seemed a perfectly natural question, but as soon as he’d asked it, Griffiths knew it was wrong. Bad form to discuss scores during dinner. “Doesn’t matter, really,” he mumbled. His face was hot.

  Lynch took pity on him. “A couple of dozen,” he said. “The answer to your question is a couple of dozen, which puts Captain Ball far out in front.”

  “And all done in a Nieuport,” Ogilvy said. “Ball prefers the Nieuport.”

  “I want Nieuport,” the duke said abruptly.

  “Get me Nieuport too,” the count said.

  Everyone looked. They were serious. They sat straight-backed, heads high, and looked down their beautiful noses at them. “This is not the time or the place,” Ogilvy said. They spoke to each other in Russian. “Two Nieuports,” the duke said. “Quick. Tickety-boo.”

  “You mean lickety-split,” Munday said. “Tickety-boo means all-serene.”

  “Tickety-boo and lickety-split,” the duke said.

  “We’ll discuss it later,” Ogilvy said.

  “Please, sir, can I have a new bicycle?” McWatters said.

  “Tell me, Uncle,” the doctor said, speaking slowly and clearly so as to distract attention from the Russians, “tell me, why is the British Army so fascinated by Ypres? It’s a smelly bog. I should have thought the Allies had all the bog they needed. Yet every time I pick up the paper, there’s another thumping great Battle of Ypres going on.”

  “Only two battles,” the adjutant said. “Strategic necessity.”

  “Oh. I see. Well, that’s all right then.”

  “Russia got biggest bog,” the count said with a gloomy pride.

  “Pinsk Marshes. Big as Switzerland.”

  The duke said: “German Army invades Pinsk Marshes. Russian Army attacks German Army.” He knocked his knuckles together. “All lost in marshes. All.” That silenced the rest of the squadron. “Great victory for Tsar,” he added.

  “Plenty more armies in Russia,” the count said.

  “My goodness!” the padre exclaimed. “Rice pudding. With currants in it. What a treat.”

  The wind howled suddenly in the chimney, and the stove roared. The doctor glanced at the adjutant. “How are our coal stocks?”

  “Excellent. All thanks to Lieutenant Dash and his cousin, the pork sausage maker.”

  “Ah. Well done, lad.” A dozen fists briefly pounded the table in applause, and Dash nodded. For the first time, he felt accepted by the squadron.

  * * *

  As he walked to his hut, Captain Brazier heard music coming from the orderly room. He found Sergeant Lacey playing the gramophone as he worked at his desk.

  “Sounds like a fight in a fireworks factory,” the adjutant said.

  “Stravinsky. His music for the new Diaghilev ballet, Les Arbeilles. It’s on in Paris. You’d love it. Pure joy.”

  “Stravinsky,” said the adjutant. “Isn’t he that anarchist-musician johnny? Caused a riot?”

  “And a very splendid riot it was,” Lacey said. “At the première of The Rites of Spring.”

  “I suppressed a riot once. At the market place in Peshawar. And a very splendid suppression it was.” Lacey rolled his eyes. “I assure you, sergeant. I had the ringleaders tied to the mouths of our cannons and I blew their little Indian lights out. Blew them clean out!”

  “Rather like a birthday cake,” Lacey said. He was flicking through a batch of signals. He held up a pink form. “Plum jam. Brigade are still unhappy. The quartermaster insists that we have two hundred pounds more than our entitlement.” Lacey polished his glasses with the flimsy paper.

  “We explained all that. Didn’t we?”

  “We said that he sent us strawberry jam in error and that we returned it.”

  “Well, tell him again.”

  “No, no. The man is a halfwit. He needs guidance.” Lacey rolled a form into his typewriter and rattled out a reply:

  Plum jam, squadron entitlement for, mislabelled as supplied, local transfer of. Your PNT/14Q dated 06.03.17. Can confirm manufacturer’s error resulted 200 lbs jam labelled plum in fact contents half strawberry half raspberry therefore transferred to 40 Squadron on authority Duty Officer that Squadron.

  The adjutant read this. “Blame it on the manufacturer. Quite right. I suppose you had a reason for picking 40 Squadron.”

  “They moved to England last week.”

  “Ah.” He signed the paper. “Duty officer, eh? Could be anybody. Poor chap’s probably gone west by now.”

  Lacey leaned against the doorframe, his thumbs hooked in his pockets. “Probably,” he said. Brazier sat squarely, and cleaned the nib of his pen with a bit of blotting paper. Eventually Lacey looked at him and said: “Strawberry jam.” Brazier raised a bushy eyebrow just a fraction. “Isn’t there something horribly symbolic here?” Lacey asked. “The army can afford to lose millions of men, year after year. But not a few cases of strawberry jam. Jam matters.”

  “Civilian talk,” Brazier said briskly.

  “Jam matters more than men?”

  “Regulations matter more than anything.”

  “War isn’t regulated. War is confusion and disorder and luck and waste, especially waste. Every week – even now, when nothing is happening – hundreds of men, wasted. Thousands of tons of shells, wasted. So why this obsession about jam? I apologise for interrupting you.”

  “Not a bit of it. I’m pleased to see you developing the Fighting Spirit, Lacey.”

  “Mere bile, sir.”

  “You should apply for a commission.”

  “I should take one of Beecham’s Pills.”

  “We need keen young subalterns at the Front.”

  “Only because you keep losing them. Which reminds me. Your ammunition has arrived.”

  He fetched a wooden box stencilled Signal Flares (Very Pistol) Handle With Care, and placed it on the adjutant’s desk. “A posthumous token of respect from the late Lieutenant Morkel.”

  Brazier prised open the lid and eased a few records from their straw packing. “Band of the Grenadier Guards ... ‘Blaze Away’ ... ‘Colonel Bogey’ ... ‘Sussex by the Sea’ ... Good. Real music, this.” He dug deeper. “Hullo ... Orlando Benedict and his Savoy Orchestra?” He peered at the labels. “‘I’m Lonesome for You’ ... ‘Here Comes Tootsie’ ... ‘If You Could Care for Me’ ... ‘Poor Butterfly’ ...” One nostril flared. “Tosh. Utter tosh.”

  “I think Captain Lynch hoped it might soften your stony soul, sir.” Lacey pointed at a label. “Novelty foxtrot. Splendid exercise for the deskbound office worker.”

  Brazier grunted, and put ‘Blaze Away’ on the gramophone. “Keep your jazz,” he said. “This is real music.”

  * * *

  The day after he left France, Cleve-Cutler was eating breakfast at Taggart’s hot
el, near Piccadilly. Taggart was a gloomy Irishman with an eyepatch and a bad limp. He had been invalided out of the R.F.C. early in 1915 when a friendly shell had rushed through the gap between his wings and removed several vital struts, forcing him to make a messy landing in a wood. Now he sat at Cleve-Cutler’s table and helped himself to toast. “My advice,” he said. “Wear mufti. Otherwise wherever you go, the bloody civilians will buy drinks for you, and then they’ll ask you how many Fritzes you’ve shot down.”

  “Fritzes? They really say Fritzes?”

  “They know nothing. All they know they read in the bloody silly newspapers, and that’s lies dreamed up by the bloody silly War Office. Cavalry of the clouds, that’s you. Take their drinks, tell them any old lies, fuck their women if you want to, they’ll consider it a privilege, with those wings on you and all, like being fucked by an angel. Just don’t take anything they say seriously. They know nothing.” He limped away, dropping crumbs.

  Cleve-Cutler wondered what to do with his week. If he moved fast, he could catch an express and be in Cornwall by tea-time. Grey seas, grey granite, soggy moorland. His parents would ask a lot of questions. Then their friends would visit and ask the same bloody silly questions: what’s it really like? When are we going to win? And, no doubt: how many Fritzes have you shot down? Resentment gripped like indigestion. If he told them what France was really like, they’d never believe him. Bugger Cornwall.

  So he stayed at Taggart’s and went to a different show every night; often two shows, with supper in-between or after or both. The West End of London was bustling with young officers. He quickly fell in with a bunch hellbent on squeezing the most out of their leave. They called him the Mad Major – to the infantry, any R.F.C. major was mad – and when they ended up at Taggart’s, he made jugs of Hornet’s Sting for them. They thought he was a hell of a fellow. He relaxed in the luxury of not being a commanding officer. For the first time in a year, he did what he damn well pleased. It was a strange experience, like taking his clothes off in a crowded room, and he soon grew sick of it, but for a few galvanic days he thought he was happy.

  He went to a dance. It was a tea-dance, held at Malplacket House. The young Lord Malplacket had gone to France with his regiment in 1914 and soon was Mentioned in Despatches for conspicuous gallantry, too conspicuous for his own good: a German sharp-shooter picked him out and picked him off. Nobody in the British Army wore a steel helmet in those dashing, innocent days. Eventually the remains got shipped home and placed in the family vaults while a cannon left over from the Civil War boomed out the dead man’s years. His widow wondered what to do with herself. Belgian refugees needed help. She found them dull. The Red Cross wanted people to roll bandages: not a thrilling prospect. She decided that her war-work was to give tea-dances at Malplacket house for officers on leave. Every afternoon, the ballroom was brisk with the foxtrotting of subalterns and widows. Cleve-Cutler went, and found it the most enormous fun.

  The second time he went, he saw a girl sitting in the gallery that overlooked the ballroom. Emerald dress, dark red hair. Quite alone. He danced a waltz and got some lemonade for his partner and looked up. Still there. Still alone. He excused himself and found the stairs to the gallery.

  “Hullo,” she said, as if they had known each other for years. “You’re wasting your time with me.”

  “Well, I’ve got plenty of time, and I can’t think of a better way to waste it... May I sit and talk?” He really wanted to sit and look.

  She was unfashionably slim and her face had a delicacy that made him feel powerful and protective, until she looked him in the eyes. Fear did strange, apparently useless things to a man, as he knew; it dried the mouth, it tightened the lungs, it made the heart hammer and the palate detect strange metallic tastes. Now he discovered what sudden love could do. It knocked the stuffing out of a chap. Fear multiplied; love subtracted. This was all new to him. Cleve-Cutler had confronted fear and overcome it. He wasn’t going to submit tamely to love. “You know, you remind me of someone,” he lied.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “You can do better than that.”

  “Um,” he said. He looked away, but looking away was pain. “What I meant was ...” He looked back, and was ruined again. “Look here, you’re being jolly unfair.”

  “Am I? Well, do something about it.” She was infuriatingly calm. He was in a fever; what right had she to be so calm? “For a start,” she said, “you can tell me who you are.”

  You crass ass, he told himself. “Hugh Cleve-Cutler,” he said.

  “Ah.” She was looking down at the dancers, which he resented. “I used to know a Stanley Cleve-Cutler.”

  “Very remote cousin. Went into the Foreign Office. Never seen again.”

  “There you are. I knew you could do better if you tried.” Hope surged in him. “I’m Dorothy Jaspers, which makes me a remote cousin of our hostess.”

  “Splendid. May I ask for the honour of a dance?”

  “You may ask, but the answer’s no.”

  He felt as if he’d swallowed a stone. A sane man would get up and leave. He wasn’t quite sane at that moment. “Look,” he said, “I’m somewhat confused about exactly what’s going on here.”

  She turned to him and took hold of his face with both hands and looked into his eyes. “Tell me true,” she said. “Do you know where we can get a drink at this hour of day?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  She let go. “Get your hat and find a cab. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  He helped her into the cab. She was smaller than he had thought. The emerald silk dress brushed the ground. Tricky dancing the foxtrot in that, he thought. They went to Taggart’s Hotel. On the way, she said nothing. Cleve-Cutler watched her, secretly, and marvelled that no man had captured her. Were they all blind? Was he massively lucky?

  Taggart opened the bar for them.

  They all drank brandy-sodas and talked about the new shows and the best songs in them, until Taggart went off to organise dinner and left them in charge.

  “Decent chap, old Taggart.”

  “Yes,” she said, crisply.

  “That show he mentioned. We might —”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps some supper? There’s a place —”

  “Yes.”

  “Splendid.” But this was all moving too fast for Cleve-Cutler. “Fancy you knowing Stanley,” he said. “Not that I knew him well.”

  “Forget Stanley. This face of yours: it’s not your real face, is it?”

  “Good God, no.” He’d explained his jaunty looks to so many people—family, army doctors, medical boards – that he was ready with the answer. “Dodged an idiot in a Gunbus, flew into a barn. The quacks stitched me together again. Improvement on the original, some say.”

  She freshened his drink with brandy. “Well, damn it all to bloody blazes,” she said, and freshened her own drink. “There are three things I wish I could do. I wish I could dance, and run, and go swimming at the seaside, but I never shall because I have a wooden leg, and it’s definitely not an improvement on the original. If you want to see it I charge nothing for public displays but from the funny look on your funny face I suggest you take a big drink first.”

  Cleve-Cutler was too shocked to move or speak.

  “Take a drink and have a look,” she advised. “Otherwise you’ll never believe me.”

  “But you’re wearing shoes.” His voice was husky; he drank to strengthen it. He watched, fascinated, as she raised the hem of her long green silk ballgown, and he saw a wooden leg fitted into the right shoe. The hem kept rising. The wooden leg ended just below the knee. Leather straps secured it.

  She let the dress fall. He finished his drink in one gulp. “Told you so,” she said.

  * * *

  It had happened when she was six. Her father was a banker. Liked horses, liked hunting, had an estate in Berkshire. He gave young Dorothy a pony-and-trap, a miniature of the real thing. She wasn’t allowed to drive it alone, but one day al
l the grooms were busy, so she took it. And for fun, she rode the little pony bareback, and they were trotting along a farm track, all going as fine as ninepence, when the pony shied. She was thrown. The trap ran over her leg. Very bad fracture. Lots of operations, but in the end it had to come off.

  “That’s so dreadfully unfair,” Cleve-Cutler said.

  She took his face in her hands, as she had done in the gallery, and looked into his eyes. “Tell me true,” she said. “If your washer-woman’s husband had a wooden leg, would you think it dreadfully unfair?”

  “Um ... no. Possibly not.”

  She released him. “Well, then. It’s just people of our class who are supposed to be unblemished.”

  “I suppose that’s so.”

  “I know shops that sell artificial hands and fingers. Even artificial noses. Factory work is dangerous. So is farm work.”

  “Excuse me.”

  He went to the lavatory and washed his face in cold water. He had seen many violent deaths and mutilations in France. He had seen a pilot walk into a spinning propeller. He had seen men blinded, and men gutted, and men incinerated in the gush of petrol from bullet-holed tanks. But that was war, and they were only men, and they were fighting for decency and purity and all that was best in the world, as symbolised by this wonderful creature he had found in the gallery. Who turned out to be a fraud, a swindle. So maybe the war was a fraud and a swindle too. He leaned on the wash basin and looked at his reflection “We make a fine pair,” he said. He dried his face and went back.

  “I know the best place for oysters,” she said.

  “I never doubted it for a moment,” he told her. He still loved her. From the knees up, anyway.

  * * *

  Taggart gave them a large room with a large bed.

  Dorothy had been staying at Lady Malplacket’s place. She telephoned from the hotel and had someone pack a bag and bring it over.

  Cleve-Cutler said: “Won’t your cousin think it strange? Moving out like this?”