Hornet’s Sting

by Derek Robinson

  * * *

  Plans were changed. The squadron would still fly, but now it would carry out a Deep Offensive Patrol.

  There was a sense of muffled regret among the pilots as they ambled over to the flights. So much time had passed since the last man was lost in action – two weeks? three? – that nobody was sure who it had been. Crabtree had replaced Tim Lynch, yes, but when did Cooper and Radley catch a packet? The discussion was half-hearted. Anyway, Nikolai and Andrei were a special case. They had chosen to fly into oblivion. Eccentric in life and dotty in death. Ogilvy summed it up when he said, “They’ve gone looking for trouble in a sky lousy with Huns. They can’t shoot straight, they can’t fly crooked, and they’re actually trying to find a bright, shiny Albatros. Or two. Or ten.”

  A-Flight taxied to the far end of the field and ruddered around to face into the wind. Cleve-Cutler was leading; Gerrish would fly beside him. The C.O. raised his arm and glanced left and right. The other five Pups were waiting, trembling in the prop-wash, smoke pumping from their exhaust stubs. B- and C-Flights were bumping and swaying around the perimeter. He felt enormous pride in his command. Women were pretty, sex was fireworks, but to be leading a squadron of scouts into battle – that was bliss. Two black shapes wandered into his vision. He looked up. A pair of Nieuports drifted ahead of him, losing height, reaching for the grass, bouncing and then running safely. “Fuck,” said Cleve-Cutler.

  The Pups could not wait: the engines would soon overheat. This was turning into a rotten day. He unclipped the Very pistol and fired a red flare, straight up. It was the wash-out signal. Within a minute, all eighteen Pups were taxiing back to where they had come from.

  Duke Nikolai had his helmet off and he was brushing his hair. “Waste of time,” he said. “No Huns.”

  “You disobeyed orders.” Anger made Cleve-Cutler hot. “You took off without permission.” Nikolai shrugged. “No Huns,” he said. “Waste of time.” Oil fumes had coated his face, leaving white circles where the goggles had been. “Could that be,” Cleve-Cutler said, “because you failed to cross the Lines?”

  Nikolai looked at him as if he had tried to borrow money. He picked up his helmet and said: “What is lunch?”

  “Bugger lunch.”

  Count Andrei was approaching. “He knows,” Nikolai said, and headed for the mess.

  “The guns have stopped,” Andrei said. The last Pup engine had been switched off and the silence was total.

  “Bugger the guns. You took off without permission. Where did you go?”

  “We flew east. Crossed the Lines, a little Archie, not much. No Hun balloons. No Hun aeroplanes. We flew on, ten miles, fifteen. Still no Huns. Some English types, FEs I think, they waved, we waved. But still no Huns. So we went down low and looked around. Nothing. Empty. No Huns in the sky, no Huns on the ground.”

  “Impossible. They’re hiding.”

  “The trenches are empty, major.”

  “But that’s ridiculous.” Cleve-Cutler saw his squadron all around him, fuelled and armed and ready to fight. Five minutes earlier he had been about to lead it in combat; he still had a trace of the metallic taste of adventure in his mouth; and now these Russian jokers strolled home and said there was no enemy to fight ... “I don’t believe it,” he said. “Empty trenches? No Huns anywhere?” The bottom had dropped out of his world.

  The flight commanders were standing nearby, waiting for fresh orders.

  “Didn’t you see anything at all?” Ogilvy asked Andrei. “Cars, horses, trains, tents, fires?”

  “Burning buildings we saw. But nothing that lived.”

  “For fifteen miles?” Cleve-Cutler said. “That’s absurd.”

  “Jerry’s done a bunk,” Crabtree said. “He’s a treacherous customer. A slithy tove.”

  “Shut up!” Cleve-Cutler said. “If you can’t talk sense, don’t talk tosh.” That left everyone silent. “Oh, sod it,” he said. “I’d better go and speak to Wing. If anyone tries to take off,” he told Gerrish, “shoot him. Shoot him somewhere painful.” He strode away.

  Bliss and all the senior officers had been summoned to a meeting at Brigade. Eventually a middle-aged lieutenant came to the phone. “To be honest sir, there’s a bit of a panic here,” he said. Cleve-Cutler banged the receiver on its rest. As usual, loud noises made the rats squeak. “At least you vermin are loyal,” he said.

  * * *

  One Pup refused to start. Another threw a cylinder while it was taxiing. The C.O. took a sixteen-strong squadron across the Front at six thousand feet: well within range of light Archie and heavy machine guns. He skirted a cloudbank, ready to duck into its cover. Nothing fired. A few shells burst in the fields behind the German lines: probably British batteries still searching for enemy guns. Far below, two RE8s were trying to help. He pushed up his goggles and used his binoculars to search the ground. The image jumped and blurred with every bounce and twitch of the Pup, but he got one good look at a long stretch of German trench and it was empty.

  They flew east for five or six miles, climbing steadily and always looking up, past the towering hills of cloud, at the high spaces where packs of Albatros and Pfalz and Fokker liked to lurk. A flight of SE5s went by, returning home; that was all.

  Cleve-Cutler took the squadron up to fifteen thousand feet, half a mile above the clouds. It was a glorious afternoon and they owned it. For the next fifteen minutes, his sixteen Pups sat high in the sky, their chocolate-brown skins gleaming in the sunlight. And still nobody came up to argue.

  When they were at least fifteen miles beyond the enemy Lines, he put the flights into line astern and led them in a shallow dive, picking out the canyons and tunnels through the clouds. He flattened out at two thousand feet and waved B- and C-Flights away to left and right. In this wide formation they cruised home. Nobody fired a shot at them. Nothing down there moved, nothing lived. Crabtree was right: Jerry had done a bunk. “Bastards,” Cleve-Cutler said.

  Earthquake Strength 4:

  Windows and dishes rattle. Glasses clink. Crockery clashes.

  Next morning at ten, Sergeant Lacey filled Captain Lynch’s fountain pen from a bottle of Oxford-blue ink that had been in Lynch’s room. A Janáček piano sonata was playing on the gramophone. As he wiped the nib with an Old Harrovian tie which he kept for that purpose, he looked out of the window and saw Colonel Bliss approaching. He opened Lynch’s chequebook, made a couple of gentle flourishes with the pen and then wrote, quickly and confidently: Scottish Fund for Distressed Gentlefolk. Twenty guineas. He signed Timothy Lynch and dated it five weeks ago. He stood and lifted the needle from the record as Bliss came in. “Good morning, sir. The adjutant is at the churchyard, in charge of the burial party for Lieutenant Shanahan.”

  “Really?” Bliss was booted and spurred and he shone with the care of a devoted batman. “I didn’t know you’d lost another chap.”

  “Mr Shanahan’s motorcycle was in collision with a cow. He died in hospital, sir.”

  “Why couldn’t Shanahan be in collision with a Hun? Anyway, I’m not here to talk about him. Look here: Great Wall of China. Built by the Chinks to keep out the Mormons. Right?”

  “Probably not, sir. The Mormons are a religious sect in Utah. Perhaps you meant the Mongols.”

  “Did I say Mormons? I meant Mongols.”

  “Although the Mormons are by far the greater menace. They reject all forms of alcohol, for instance.”

  “That’s their funeral. The Great Wall of China didn’t work, did it?”

  “So we are led to believe, sir. However, China is still full of Chinese. For Mongols, you have to go to Mongolia.”

  “Don’t quibble, sergeant. Isn’t that an Old Harrovian tie?”

  “It belonged to Shanahan, sir. I’m having it cleaned before I send it to his next-of-kin.”

  “Oh. Jolly good.”

  Bliss was no fool. He was a little too fastidious about his appearance, he despised foreign food without tasting it, he could be a great bore on the subject of fox-hun
ting. But he had seen the military value of aeroplanes long before 1914, and he had paid to learn how to fly. Soon he was promoted out of the cockpit and into a staff job, but he remembered what it was like to be a pilot: the glorious, god-like feeling of soaring away from the pettiness of Earth, and the brutal terror when you suddenly thought this frail machine might be falling apart around you; he knew the value of belonging to the most exclusive club in the world, with its buoyant, rowdy comradeship, and he knew the silent acceptance of frequent deaths from crashing on take-off or breaking up in midair or catching fire anywhere at all.

  So Bliss had developed a shrewd nose for squadron morale. He reckoned that the abrupt German retreat had left Hornet Squadron puzzled and a bit discouraged.

  The pilots were assembled in the anteroom.

  “First, the facts,” he said. “The Hun has surrendered a massive amount of territory along fifty miles of the Front, from Arras in the north to Soissons in the south. The average retreat is twenty miles but near St Quentin it’s more like thirty. Yesterday’s bombardment was merely cover while the Hun rearguard fell back behind their new Line, which is called the Hindenburg Line, although I doubt if Field Marshal von Hindenburg did much of the digging.” A couple of pilots chuckled.

  Bliss then explained just what the retreat meant.

  Pepriac was now forty or fifty minutes’ flying time from the Hindenburg Line. That was no good. The squadron could expect to move soon, but not to any of the aerodromes just abandoned by the Hun. They were unusable: the fields cratered, the buildings booby-trapped, the roads mined. Indeed, all the territory that the British Army was taking over was a wasteland. Every bridge was down, every house was burned, every well was poisoned. The enemy had been busy.

  Finally, Bliss came to the big question.

  What had the Hun got out of this massive retreat? He had got the Hindenburg Line. By all reports, it was a wall. Well, history had seen plenty of walls. Hadrian had built a wall, hadn’t he, to keep the Scots out, and a fat lot of good it did him. The Chinese built their Great Wall of China to keep the Mongol hordes out, but they forgot to inform the Mongol hordes of this, and the Great Wall was a Great Flop. Now Hindenburg had his Line. Maybe he expected to win by sitting on his Prussian bum on cold concrete. Fine! “Just remember this,” Bliss ended. “Nobody ever won a war by going backwards.”

  He stayed to have coffee with the C.O. “Glad you came, sir,” Cleve-Cutler said. “Some of them need bucking up. Not the new boys so much as the old sweats who remember the Somme.”

  “They’re precious few.”

  “Yes. Odd, isn’t it? Months of slog and rivers of blood got us six miles nearer Berlin, at most. Now Fritz gives us thirty miles for nothing. I thought he wasn’t supposed to have a sense of humour.”

  “Hullo!” the colonel said. The distant hiccuping blips of Pups warming up had grown to a solid roar. “They’re off.”

  They took their coffee outside and watched A-Flight transform itself from a bunch of wheeled vehicles, wobbling at every bump, into six flying machines, lifted strongly by the air rushing past their wings. The two Nieuports followed. Nobody stalled, nobody collided, nobody crashed. Everyone on the airfield relaxed. The doc went back into his office. “They won’t score today,” Bliss said. “The Hun’s still settling in.”

  “I hope so. We need some practice. Look at Maddegan, waffling about at the tail. God knows how he got his wings.”

  Bliss pretended surprise. “My dear Hugh! Boom wants more squadrons. If a man doesn’t kill himself in England, he’s sent to France, lickety-split.”

  “And kills himself here.”

  A-Flight droned around the sky, climbing. The Nieuports had placed themselves several lengths away from the formation.

  “Some chaps survive and prosper,” Bliss said. “Look at Ball. Dreadful pilot at first.”

  Suddenly Cleve-Cutler had had enough of Bliss’s official optimism. “I bet you twenty to one that Maddegan won’t last a fortnight.”

  “Bad taste, old chap,” Bliss said. “Also poor odds.” He waved at his driver to bring the car over.

  * * *

  The weather was rubbish.

  Gerrish took his patrol up through dirty, patchy cloud that gave way to a lucky slice of clear air at four thousand feet; lucky because it gave him room to circle so that the flight could close up and the Russians could find them again. Maddegan never succeeded in closing up. He was still five or six lengths behind when Gerrish climbed into the next layer of cloud. It blew out of the southwest, as white as surf.

  Maddegan winced and braced himself as his Pup smashed into it. Nobody had taught him how to fly through this stuff. It blinded him, so he shut his eyes. As long as the seat of his pants told him he was leaning back, he let the Pup fly herself. After a long time a sudden dazzle made him look, and the horizon was at a violent angle. Gerrish circled again, while Maddegan straightened himself out. They were in another slice of clear air. Above them, a wilderness of cloud hustled along as if it was late for a storm. Seen from below it was all hills and holes which changed shape as they crowded each other. Gerrish steered for the holes and hoped they weren’t dead ends. Sometimes he saw the two Nieuports, far off to his left. They looked like flies in a canyon.

  At sixteen thousand feet there was still no sight of the top of the wilderness. Gerrish knew he couldn’t outclimb it. The wind was strengthening and scattering the Pups. He took them back down to the sanity of clear air.

  By now Maddegan had no idea of their position. Gerrish was fairly sure they were over the Hindenburg Line. A lot depended on the strength and direction of the wind. He found a pin-point on the eastern horizon and flew directly at it, keeping one eye on the compass. The wind shoved him hard off-course. He nudged the Pup around until he was head-on to the wind. It blew from the southeast. That was a huge swing: more than ninety degrees in less than an hour. If it stayed like that, it would help them fly back to Pepriac. Good.

  They patrolled for another half an hour and saw nothing. Gerrish was stiff and cold and bored. He turned for home and within five minutes a German aeroplane dropped out of the wilderness above them, four hundred yards ahead and flying in the same direction.

  “Lost!” Gerrish said. He signalled by hand for the flight to spread out wide and rewarded himself with a chunk of chocolate. Now there was nothing to do but watch the Russians make a botch of it.

  The two Nieuports crept up on the machine. It was an LVG, unmistakable with its great six-cylinder engine sticking up, bang in front of the pilot’s face. The observer had a gun, but he wasn’t facing backwards. He was leaning forward and shouting at the pilot.

  “Very lost,” said Gerrish. “Got the wind wrong, didn’t you?”

  This was the first time Duke Nikolai had fired the Lewis gun in action. It was rigged on the Nieuport’s upper wing so the bullet stream would clear the propeller arc. Still the idiot Huns had not seen him. He eased the stick back and the Nieuport floated up to the LVG. As he squeezed the gun-button his machine bounced in the LVG’s wash and all his shots went high. One in three was tracer. The enemy observer pointed to the burning bullets streaking away; he actually pointed. Nikolai was so furious with himself, and with this crass Hun, that he overcorrected and missed again. Now the drum was empty. He hauled the Lewis down its slide.

  The German pilot flung the LVG into a vertical bank, and dived, and saw a line of Pups waiting, and changed his mind and decided to climb for the clouds. Count Andrei was waiting above and cut him off. Nikolai had a second chance, attacking from the beam. It should have been a full-deflection shot. Ogilvy had taught him to aim well ahead. Instead he aimed at the pilot and saw all his bullets pass behind the tail. As he zoomed over the LVG he remembered that Ogilvy had also told him always to dive under a two-seater. The German gunner got in a long burst and wrecked one of the Nieuport’s wingtips.

  None of the Pups attacked the LVG. They put themselves between it and escape, while Nikolai again dragged the Lewis down its mou
nting, ripped off another empty drum, slammed on a fresh one, shunted the Lewis up into firing position and searched the whirling sky for the enemy.

  With his third drum he came from below and killed the observer. He also riddled the tail unit and left the rudder flapping uselessly and the elevators smashed. Now the pilot could neither dive nor climb. Gerrish got the binoculars on him. “End of the line, laddy,” he said. “All get out.” The pilot took off his goggles and threw them away. He twisted his head, searching for the Nieuport, and finally found it behind and above him, turning to dive. “For fuck’s sake, get it right this time,” Gerrish muttered. Hot needles of tracer reached for the LVG. The Nieuport pulled out and climbed and everyone watched. Nothing happened for seven seconds. “Oh, sod it,” Gerrish said. The fuel tank exploded. The LVG blew apart. Blast gently nudged Gerrish’s Pup sideways. The fireball made the sky look dingy, and then it shrivelled. A spray of bits, some burning, fell quite quickly and got swallowed by the cloudbank. The Pups were left circling a smear of smoke.

  * * *

  “Not exactly Queensberry Rules,” Gerrish said to the C.O. “More like amateur night in the abattoir.”

  “It’s a start.”

  “I don’t like my lads being used as nursemaids, sir. Even if he is the next Tsar but twenty-eight.”

  “I’ll spread the chore around, Plug.”

  When Cleve-Cutler next saw Duke Nikolai he congratulated him.

  “Was luck. LVG was stupid. Albatros is better, I think.”

  “You’ll have another chance this afternoon. With B-Flight.”

  Nikolai delicately wrinkled his nose. “Is better with A-Flight.”

  “Well, that’s my decision.”

  “Is better with A-Flight.”

  Cleve-Cutler’s fingertips prickled. “One day you’ll play that card once too often and ...” But he got control of himself before he could complete the threat, and he walked away. His hands were trembling with rage. That had never happened before.