Hornet’s Sting

by Derek Robinson

  “You might get a flip in a Pup,” Ogilvy said. “We do local patrols. Discourages the Boche.”

  “Frankly, I don’t know why they sent you,” Gerrish said.

  “We’ll go back, if you like,” Woolley said. “The band at the Grosvenor Hotel wants me.”

  “He plays the saxophone,” Paxton explained.

  “No gentleman plays the saxophone,” Ogilvy said woodenly.

  “This piano-tuning,” Woolley said. “I shall need a claw hammer and a crate of Guinness.”

  “A word of warning,” Ogilvy said. “The major has no sense of humour.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Paxton said. “He made Woolley the station rat-catcher.”

  “Then my advice is to start catching rats.”

  The war had come as a pleasant surprise to the rats of the Western Front. The lice enjoyed it too. Millions of men arrived and brought food, warmth and shelter: all that the typical rat or louse asks. At the very front of the Front, conditions were more primitive but no less attractive. The first-line trenches were, of necessity, also latrines. Meals were a perpetual picnic. What the army called “ablutions” were scarce or non-existent. On the whole, the lice came off worse than the rats. Billions grew fat on soldiers at the Front, but the same billions were soon slaughtered in de-lousing stations at the rear. True, some rats got blown to bits by artillery, just as some men did, but the survivors had the benefit of a landscape littered with remains. Behind the Lines there were rich pickings, too. Maconochie tinned stew was more than many British troops could stomach; the rats made sure none was wasted. But Maconochie was dull stuff compared with the diet at R.F.C. camps. Fliers ate well. Occasionally some of them threw up their half-digested meal in the hour before take-off, but that was no criticism of the cooking. At Gazeran airfield the food was good and plentiful, so the rats were sleek and plentiful.

  * * *

  Low cloud had put an end to flying for the day. Dufee, the new boy, had trodden on the last ping-pong ball and was in disgrace. The mess had run out of gramophone needles. Nobody wanted to play poker. When Woolley came in and asked if anyone felt like joining a rat hunt, half the squadron followed him. “You’ll need your Service revolver and a club,” he said. “Wear your flying boots.”

  They assembled at the cookhouse. Woolley had borrowed six dogs from nearby farms. He spread men and dogs until they ringed the area. He loaded a Very pistol, reached under the building, tucked the nozzle into the biggest rat hole he could see and fired a red signal flare into the colony. After a while, dirty red smoke leaked back. Nothing else happened.

  “Cock-up,” Snow said. “They don’t know the Colours of the Day. Try yellow.”

  Woolley reloaded and fired a yellow. At once the dogs were yelping and chasing, pilots were lashing out with clubs, rats were racing and squealing, and a tattered volley of gunfire rattled the windows.

  Woolley went around with a sack. “Ten,” he said. “One’s fat enough to be a major-general. Onwards.”

  The shots awoke Cleve-Cutler. For a long moment he felt kidnapped and abandoned and lost. He was in his office, but the dream that had gripped him was far more real than the dark walls. He had been at school, and failing miserably to find the room where he must sit an examination and knowing all the time that he was in the wrong building, perhaps in the wrong school, and he hadn’t done nearly enough work, and then he was being plonked down in the wrong chair and discovering that this was the wrong examination, and desperately seeking help only to find he was alone at fifteen thousand feet, which was utterly the wrong height and there was no way down and the joystick came away in his hands, which meant death. Terror woke him. He was sitting at his desk and his head was resting on the blotter. When he straightened up a piece of paper was stuck to his forehead. It was the draft of his letter to Lieutenant Stamp’s next-of-kin. The badge of failure.

  He went in search of the padre and found him sorting out cricket equipment in a hut he used as a chapel.

  “Bloody next-of-kin,” Cleve-Cutler said. “Bigger pest than the Boche.”

  “Yes? An original viewpoint.”

  “I’ve got the answer, padre. Shoot the blighters! Shoot ’em all.”

  “Well, yes, I can see that shooting might be a solution of sorts. It rather depends on the problem.”

  “Here’s your problem.” Cleve-Cutler showed him the letter. It was sweat-stained and grubby. “Hate writing these things. Loathe and detest ’em. All lies, anyway.”

  “Funny things, lies.” The padre held a cricket ball up to the light. “There’s not a word against lying in the Ten Commandments. Lots of jolly stuff putting the kybosh on adultery and on coveting and on bowing down to graven images, but nothing against telling fibs.” He tossed the ball from hand to hand, making it spin. “Do we really want total honesty? I’ve never known one of these things to be perfectly round. And I’ve yet to meet the bowler who’d want it.”

  “Shoot the bastards,” Cleve-Cutler growled. He was wandering around the room, hands in pockets, kicking the wall. “Why should I apologise? Dear sir, I regret to inform... They knew the odds, didn’t they? Bloody next-of-kin. Make me sick.”

  “Paul says something interesting in Philippians four, eight,” the padre began, but Cleve-Cutler snatched the ball in mid-air and grabbed a bat and strode to the door and smashed the ball hard and high. It soared and vanished. “Look here, I say, old chap,” the padre complained. “I took five for thirty-three with that ball last season.”

  “Well, I’ve just hit it for six. Gone for good. See? That’s what I’m clever at. Sending chaps up there where they never come back. I’m bloody brilliant at losing chaps. Ask Bliss, he keeps score.”

  “Five for thirty-three.” The padre peered out, but the cloud was even lower, the light even poorer. “My best before that was four for forty ... Was that absolutely necessary, sir?” he said reproachfully.

  “Essential, padre. Waste is my forte. I’ve wasted two perfectly good squadrons already. I’m good at waste.” Another distant spattering of gunshots made him frown. “What’s going on out there?”

  “I heard nothing,” the padre said briskly. He was willing to do his pastoral duty, but he refused to be a punchbag for angry self-pity.

  “I heard shots,” Cleve-Cutler said.

  “Shots, eh? Always possible in wartime, I suppose.”

  Cleve-Cutler gripped the cricket bat so hard that his knuckles clicked. He was alone with the padre, nobody had seen him come in, he could say he found the fellow with his head smashed . . . Why not? Why should this man live when all the others were being killed? His fingers ached and he had to relax them.

  “Ever been up in a ’plane, padre?”

  “No, never.”

  “Soon put that right. Every man on my squadron should get a taste, otherwise how can he understand what we do? I’ll take you up in a two-seater. That’ll test your innards. Nearer my God to Thee, eh? Eh?”

  He left, feeling triumphant, but in less than a minute he remembered the failed letter to Stamp’s parents, and his triumph turned sour. Worse: his heart began to pound like a drunken drummer. He walked very slowly to the adjutant’s office.

  Brazier shut the door and got out the whisky. The C.O. shook his head. “Well, I need a mouthful,” Brazier said. “You look as if you’ve been kicked in the crotch by a bull elephant. Is this a gift? Thank you kindly.” He took the cricket bat and put it in a corner. Cleve-Cutler sat in a chair. His shoulders were hunched and his hands made fists. “I speak from experience,” Brazier said. “I saw a bull elephant kick a man exactly as described.” He took a sip of whisky. “In India, of course. Only a private soldier. That was before it happened. Afterwards, still a soldier but not so much of the private part.” All the time, the adjutant was keeping a covert watch on the C.O. Whatever this crisis was, he was confident he could handle it provided the man didn’t cry. Brazier couldn’t stand tears. It disgusted him that men should weep just when a difficult situation demanded their full
attention. You didn’t see a lion or a buffalo break down and cry when the odds were against it. Certainly not. “I was on the elephant’s side,” he said. “No, I tell a lie. I was on the elephant’s back.”

  “I just almost killed the padre,” Cleve-Cutler said. “With that thing.”

  “Yes?” At least this was better than tears. “Well, I would have used a trench-knife, personally.” He glanced at the bat. No bloodstains, no bits of skin. “Did he annoy you?”

  The lower half of the C.O.’s face still had its jaunty grin, but his eyelids had slumped so heavily that he seemed about to fall asleep. “Look, Uncle,” he said. “What if this bloody silly battle doesn’t work? I mean to say ...” But he had nothing more to say.

  “Well, we try again, of course.”

  “Yes, but we did that already ...” He was stopped by the dull banging of revolver fire. “What the deuce is going on out there?”

  “Lacey!” the adjutant roared. The sergeant opened the door. “Be so good,” Brazier said softly, “as to send someone to investigate that shooting. I’m infinitely obliged to you.” Lacey closed the door.

  “What if it doesn’t work, Uncle?” Cleve-Cutler was fumbling with his smudged and grubby letter. “I can’t write another twenty letters like this. I can’t even write this one. They’ll all go west, Uncle. I know, because I’ve taken two squadrons through two battles and where are they now? Gone west. It’s easy for them. They just sod off and die. But who gets left with all the bloody silly letters to write?”

  Brazier suddenly snapped his fingers. “Damnation! Why didn’t I remember? My sergeant’s been writing something ...” He hurried out. The C.O. sat and, occasionally, blinked. Brazier came back with Lacey. “It’s poetry,” he warned.

  Cleve-Cutler felt his heartbeat lurch, and then settle down to a steady thud. He drank a little of the adjutant’s whisky. “All right,” he said. “Do your worst.”

  “For the next-of-kin, sir.” Lacey handed him a sheet of paper. On it was typed:

  Now God be thanked

  From this day to the ending of the world!

  Blow, bugle, blow! Was there a man dismayed?

  Who rushed to glory, or the grave?

  Land of our birth, we pledge to thee:

  Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!

  The C.O. read it twice. “What d’you think, Uncle?”

  “It’s honest, sir. Doesn’t dodge the sad event. But it’s plucky, too. Not some damn dirge. Quite chipper, in fact.”

  “This last line,” Cleve-Cutler said to Lacey. “It’s in Latin.”

  “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. A widely held opinion, sir.”

  The C.O. grunted, and stared at the paper. “This bit in the middle . . . You can’t tell me dismayed rhymes with grave.” Another broken volley of gunshot made him clench his teeth. “Speak up.”

  “What about ‘parade’?” Brazier suggested. ‘Was there a man dismayed? Who rushed to glory, or the parade!’ Eh?”

  The C.O. wrinkled his nose. “Reminds me of Cheltenham. Clarence Parade, Cheltenham. Aunt of mine lived there. Terrible old trout. Last thing I’d want to do is rush to that parade.”

  “Suppose you made it ‘Who rushed to glory or the last parade’ ...” Lacey said.

  They tested it silently, their eyes half-shut. “That’s damn clever,” the C.O. said. “‘Last parade’ could mean ...”

  “Exactly,” the adjutant said. “Gone, but still here. Damn clever. Well done, sir.”

  Cleve-Cutler was suddenly alert and alive again. “Can I use it on what’s-his-name’s parents, d’you think?”

  “Certainly,” Brazier said. “Use it on everyone.”

  “Patent elastic design,” Lacey said. “One size fits all.”

  There was a knock on the door. A corporal came in. “That noise, sir,” he said. “It’s Captain Woolley, huntin’ rats with a Very pistol.”

  Cleve-Cutler felt his heart begin another sprint. “Maniac!” he said.

  The rat-warrens had been cleared under the cookhouse, and under the stores and under the billets. Now the hunt moved on, to the doctor’s quarters.

  The afternoon was fading fast. Woolley used a flashlight to find the biggest rat hole. “Stand by!” he called. He reached in, fired a signal flare into the hole and hurried around the hut. A ring of men and dogs waited. He was just in time to see a streak of burning yellow burst out of the ground. It ricocheted off someone’s leg and raced into the dusk, a line of fizzing light, head-high. Shouts of astonishment, dogs yapping, the thud of clubs, and something else: the intermittent drone of an aeroplane engine.

  Halfway across the camp, the C.O. heard it too, and stopped. “What’s that?” he said. The adjutant listened, and heard only the rattle of the wind. “Not a Pup,” the C.O. said. A truck clattered across the field and spoiled everything. “Lost, probably. Like the fool in a Camel who landed here the other day.” They walked on and got a fine view of the runaway flare making its long horizontal streak. There was a bang of shattered glass. They began to run.

  They found McWatters first.

  “Christ on crutches!” Cleve-Cutler barked. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “We’ve got three sackfuls, sir. Dingbat shot a dog, and Dufee’s not very well, but otherwise —”

  “Get Woolley.” But Woolley was already approaching. “You crass clod,” Cleve-Cutler told him. “You feeble fart. You’ve turned my squadron into a fairground!”

  “Sir, you ordered —”

  “I didn’t order this hooliganism.” Woolley cocked his head and looked at the sky. The pilots stood in a guilty circle, except for Dufee, who was held up by two men. “What’s wrong with him?” the C.O. demanded.

  “That last flare knocked him down, sir,” Woolley said.

  “You shot one of my pilots.” Cleve-Cutler’s voice was harsh with rage. “Is this your idea of war, captain? Big-game hunting?” He booted a sack and it spilled dead rats. “Small-game hunting?”

  “That machine may be trying to land, sir,” Woolley said. “As duty officer I should —”

  “As duty officer you’re not fit to clean latrines! Go, before you kill someone!”

  Gazeran airfield had an ambulance. The crew saw Woolley jogging towards them and they started the engine. He jumped onto the running-board and they drove along the edge of the airfield until he told them to stop. The motor died.

  No sound except faraway birdsong in the holes in the wind.

  The cloud was lower, or maybe it just seemed lower in the gloom of dusk. The wind made fools of everyone: it blustered and then fell silent and then rattled in their ears. Woolley walked over to the nearest gun-pit.

  “He’s been wandering around up there for ten minutes, sir,” the sergeant said. “Wetting his breeches, I ’spect.”

  They listened. A soft growl came and went with the wind. “Ration wagons,” the sergeant said. “Goin’ up to the Lines.”

  The growl hardened to a flat drone. “Not wagons,” Woolley said. The wind blustered. He turned and searched the sky downwind, the approach for a machine trying to land. Nothing in sight, only the specks of whirling crows. The sergeant shouted and pointed. Woolley saw the head-on outline of a biplane, its wings razor-thin. It was too low and too fast and it was coming in cross-wind. The ambulance engine started. The rescue truck arrived. Woolley blinked, lost sight of the machine and listened hard for a crash.

  Then he saw the thing vault the hedge and skitter as a gust caught it, straighten out and turn towards the flights. The silhouette said Albatros exactly as its guns made their mechanical rattle. Six Pups stood in a row. Incendiary bullets swept along them in a gracious gesture, and in quick order they began to burn. The gun-pits were hard at work, and the air was dense with their hammering and cordite. But their bullets went too high because the enemy was too low, down where the guns dared not fire. And then the Albatros slipped between two hangars and was gone. The second Pup from the right exploded. All the others were
burning briskly.

  Six Pups in ten seconds, Woolley thought. That’ll cost him a packet. Drinks all round in the mess tonight.

  He found the C.O. and the adjutant watching a bucket-chain try to put out the fires.

  “Didn’t you see that Hun approach?” Cleve-Cutler asked quietly.

  “Yes, sir. It was too dark to identify until —”

  “Too dark? He identified us without any trouble. No doubt your firework display helped him. No doubt he saw signal flares blazing and thought that’s a juicy target. Eh?”

  The charred Pups hissed and steamed.

  “I was wrong about you, Woolley. You’re not fit to be a ratcatcher. You’re fit for one thing: court martial. The adjutant will prepare the papers.” He walked away.

  “I was court-martialled once,” Brazier said to Woolley, quietly. “It’s nothing to get upset about.”

  “My uncle Sid got hung for murder,” Woolley said. “Told me he never felt a thing.”

  Something went bang, and blazing splinters flew. They moved to a safer spot.

  “How on earth did you get a commission?” the adjutant asked, curiously.

  “It’s not mine. I’m looking after it for a friend.”

  “That’s a bloody stupid answer.”

  “Well, it was a bloody stupid question,” Woolley said. Brazier snorted. “And if you want to fight over it,” Woolley said, “it’s Very pistols at ten yards. I’m lethal. Ask Dufee.”

  * * *

  Lieutenant James McWatters could write his name and that was about all. He wasn’t ashamed of his failing; plenty of boys he had known at school either couldn’t or didn’t write. They came from the upper middle class of Edwardian England and they assumed that somebody would always be there to write for them, just as somebody would always be there to clean the boots and lug buckets of coal up the stairs. You didn’t have to be stupid to be semi-literate. All it took was perseverance.

  His father was a minor Anglican bishop and his mother was the heiress to a shipbuilding fortune. She had become very active in the women’s suffrage movement, which scuppered any chance of advancement for the bishop. A man who couldn’t control his wife didn’t deserve a bigger diocese. At the age of six, James got packed off to prep school. He knew his father spent all day writing. He was damn sure he wasn’t going to be like his father. “Bugger writing,” he told the master who gave him a slate. He had learned the word from stable lads, and enjoyed its impact. He threw the slate through a window.