Hornet’s Sting

by Derek Robinson

  The temperature fell as the day wore on. The sky was a dirty grey but it refused to rain. A smoky bonfire always burned at the eastern end of the aerodrome, to show the pilots the wind direction; today the smoke swirled and wandered and misbehaved. There were no birds to be seen anywhere.

  At eleven o’clock, the adjutant assembled all the officers in the anteroom. The replacements stood in a separate group; they looked as if they were waiting for a train. Nobody spoke to them. Nobody said much at all. It was exactly forty-eight hours since Plug Gerrish had led the six Bristol Fighters on patrol.

  “Gentlemen,” the adjutant said, and the lights went out. The power supply had failed. It should have been funny, but all it got was a tired groan. “It matters not,” he said. “I simply wish to say that, in the major’s absence, Captain Woolley is acting C.O.” He stepped back.

  “War is a balls-up,” Woolley said. In the gloom his voice seemed more cheerless than ever. “This is a big war, so it’s a big balls-up. People expect things to happen just because their plan says so. Not me. I know better. Now, Wing H.Q. wants us to do three patrols this afternoon. Don’t expect success. Expect a balls-up, and you probably won’t be disappointed, and you might even stand a chance of getting back here alive.”

  He put his cap on and went out. The adjutant went with him.

  “I’ve been in the army thirty-odd years,” Brazier said, “and I’ve never heard a commanding officer talk like that before.”

  “Well, they looked a bit brassed-off. They need bucking-up.”

  “Yes. Yes, they certainly need that.”

  “Now I’ve bucked them up. Now they know the facts of life.” Woolley headed for the C.O.’s office.

  Half an hour later, he was sitting in Cleve-Cutler’s chair and reading a file marked Woolley, S. (Capt), when Paxton came in without knocking. “What does ‘scabrous’ mean?” Woolley asked.

  “Don’t know.” Paxton kicked the door shut. It bounced open again. He kicked it so hard that it splintered. This time it shut. “I knew you were a twat. I didn’t realise you were such a prick.” He wiped saliva from his lips.

  “You’ve been reading my file.”

  “More jokes. That sums you up, Woolley, by God it does! Everything’s a joke. Nothing matters, does it?” Paxton’s forefinger kept poking holes in the air. “We are here so you can have fun.”

  “Look: stuff that thing up your bum, before I bite it off.”

  “Fine! Good idea! Go ahead. Do it.” Paxton thrust his arm out until the forefinger was quivering an inch from Woolley’s mouth. “Do it! Then I can report sick too.”

  Woolley used the file to knock Paxton’s arm away. “Who’s sick now?”

  “McWatters. And Andrei. And Cooper, in A-Flight, and Griffiths in what used to be B-Flight, and several more. They all reported sick just after you made your stirring address. Funny, isn’t it?”

  Woolley waited for an explanation and got none. “They’re scared,” he said. “Is that it?”

  “Of course they’re sodding scared.” Paxton dropped into a basket chair. “Scared of the Hun, after what he did to us. Scared of the machines, because they know the Pups are clapped-out and they think the Biff’s a flying coffin. Scared of you, because you’re an expert on how to make a balls-up of everything.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “That’s what they heard.” By now Paxton’s anger had worn out; he was empty, and almost indifferent. “Ever since we came here, you’ve behaved as if you don’t care a tiny toss about the squadron. Well, now you are the squadron, and nobody cares a tiny toss about you. Why should they?” Woolley was in his usual position, slumped in the C.O.’s chair, watching the flies racketing around the cold light bulb. Paxton got up and went away.

  * * *

  Lunch was over. Almost everyone was in the anteroom, for coffee. The buzz of an aero engine cut through the soft conversation. The adjutant took his coffee to the nearest window and looked up. “It’s one of our Biffs,” he said. “Since everyone else is here, that must be Captain Woolley.” They all went outside.

  The cloud was starting to break up. It was still grey streaked with black, but the base was higher and there were ragged gaps where the wind made chasms of clear air.

  Woolley was in a new Biff, with an airman strapped into the rear cockpit for balance. As soon as he saw the crowd, he put the Biff into a shallow dive and crossed the field, much less than a hundred feet up. He did a flick-roll as smoothly as if the thing were on rails. “Is that hard to do?” one of the replacements asked. The Biff climbed away steeply, its bellow echoing around them. “At that height, it’s insane,” McWatters said. “It’s insane at any height. Biffs aren’t built to be stunted.”

  Woolley found a canyon that reared to three or four thousand feet and was half a mile wide, and he used it as a circus tent. He looped, then looped again and half-rolled off the top of the loop and held that position while his speed decayed until the Biff toppled onto its wingtips in a great swooping side-slip. He flattened out, swung the opposite way, then swung back again, so that the Biff was fluttering straight downwards, the engine ticking over.

  “Falling-leaf manoeuvre,” Andrei said. “I did that once, by mistake.”

  “How did you get out of it?” Maddegan asked. Andrei shrugged. “Better you don’t ask,” he said.

  Woolley had somehow managed to abandon the falling-leaf. Now the Biff was in a power dive. A ton-and-a-quarter of aeroplane, encouraged by 190 horsepower, created a startling turn of speed. Woolley let it plunge a thousand feet and he got both hands on the joystick and hauled. The Biff bottomed-out hard enough to flatten his rump and drag the blood from his eyeballs. Then it was soaring almost as fast as it fell. He enjoyed its momentum as long as he dared, and he used the last dregs to carry the Biff over the top of yet another loop.

  “That’s too much,” Paxton said. “That’s just not possible.”

  “He’s in real trouble now,” McWatters said confidently.

  The Biff was spinning. Woolley had finished the loop in a casual, nose-high attitude and the fighter had stalled. At first the spin was a sluggish corkscrew. Then it got more violent, like a dog chasing its own tail. The Biff was no longer flying but falling, and trying to thrash itself to death as it fell. And doing its best to get rid of its pilot, too: every turn of the spin flung Woolley against his straps. His eyes were fogged: the altimeter was a permanent blur. His senses were struggling to keep up with the spin, and losing the battle. When he guessed the ground was less than seven hundred feet away, he switched off the engine. He centred the rudder. He shoved the joystick forward.

  The elevators kicked the tail up, and the nose, heavy with its Rolls-Royce Falcon engine, obediently fell. Gravity did the rest. Spinning was hard work for the Biff; it was easier to dive. Woolley gave it five seconds to build up a rush of air over the control surfaces and he switched on the engine, eased the stick back, saw the horizon fall away. The Biff was on its best behaviour again.

  Then he went back up and did it all again. He ended as he had begun: a flick-roll at less than a hundred feet above the airfield. He landed, and taxied over to the pilots. Switched off. Got out. The sweet smell of hot engine oil drifted in the breeze.

  “It’s a fighter,” he said. “We fly it like a fighter. Not like a chorus line.” He waited for some response; none came. “I haven’t got a joke about a chorus line,” he said. “Nor about the Biff. She’s a killer. Let’s turn her loose.”

  “With or without a gunner?” Paxton said.

  “With. Your gunner guards your tail.”

  McWatters said: “How can he do that if the pilot won’t fly straight and level?”

  “Listen,” Woolley said. “Flying Corps tactics said that crossfire saves your bacon. Maybe it does, as long as the formation lasts. No formation, no crossfire. No bacon.”

  He wiped his nose and let them think about that. “Anybody who wants to go on patrol using those tactics must be loony and I’ll have h
im chained to his bed in case he bites someone in the arse. Meanwhile I’m looking for people to fly the Biffs as they deserve to be flown, as fighters and not as chorus girls.”

  Half the hands went up. Very quickly, the other half, startled by this confidence, raised their hands too.

  “Mac and Pax and Andrei,” Woolley said. “The rest get their chance soon.”

  “One question,” McWatters said. “Exactly how did you get out of that spin?”

  “Listen hard. I’m not going to keep saying this.”

  * * *

  At three o’clock Woolley led a patrol of four Pups with the four Biffs, one of which was Ogilvy’s fighter, its punctured wings neatly patched. The cloud base had sunk and visibility was less than half a mile. After twenty minutes, rain began stabbing at the cockpits and visibility got worse. Woolley gave the wash-out signal.

  One Pup got blown onto its back when it landed. No damage to the pilot. Brazier was waiting with a fistful of orders. All further patrols had been cancelled. All ranks were confined to camp until 5.30 a.m. tomorrow. Then the P.B.I. would go over the top and the Battle of Arras would officially begin.

  Spud Ogilvy had gone. He was in an ambulance train bustling towards Boulogne and a hospital ship and eventually a nursing home in Harrogate.

  Dando drove him to the railhead. Ogilvy was so tired that he had to be lifted onto his bunk on the train, yet he could not sleep. He looked like a man who was being hunted to death. Dando discussed his case with the senior medical officer. “No visible wounds?” the man said.

  “He’s overdrawn at the bank,” Dando said. “A man has so much courage in his account, and when the last little bit is spent, there’s no point in asking him to pay more.”

  Dando shook hands with Ogilvy before he left. Ogilvy’s grip was weak at first, and then fierce. He didn’t want to let go.

  * * *

  There was no dawn. The night merely gave up and left, and grey daylight took its place with no enthusiasm. The cloud was higher than yesterday but it was blacker, and it leaked rain everywhere. The Lines were black, and the cloud was black. No barrage: the guns had been silent all night. The war had died in its sleep and gone to hell, where it was at least warm.

  Four Biffs patrolled at fifteen hundred feet. McWatters ducked his head and glanced at the chronometer clipped to his dashboard. Five twenty-nine and thirty-six seconds. He straightened up and began counting. Too slowly. He reached fifty-seven when the barrage erupted. Fifteen miles of British artillery made a noise that cracked the sky. Within a few seconds it cracked the earth too. The British front trenches bubbled with men. They surged into no-man’s-land with all the dogged obstinacy of an invasion of brown ants. They didn’t run: the loads they carried prevented that; but they didn’t walk either: they made as much haste as the heavy soil allowed. No man stopped unless he fell. What they were all so eager to reach was something that looked like boiling porridge.

  Weeks of shelling had torn the German Lines into tatters, and then ripped up the tatters and chopped what was left into little bits. Now the barrage was pounding this devastation with such ferocity that the striking shells overlapped each other. Yet men still lived down there. McWatters saw distress flares arcing out of the German defences, calling for help from their artillery.

  Within ten minutes the German Air Force arrived: six Pfalz scouts, escorting a pair of two-seaters which were undoubtedly there to spot for the guns.

  The Hun scouts flew straight at the patrol. The Biff was a strange new design, long in the nose and wide in the wings, and they probably thought it was a bomber or maybe a photo-reconnaissance job; either way it looked like a juicy target. But when the formations clashed and broke up into separate fights, with a Pfalz and a Biff circling to get a shot at each other, the new design showed itself to be very lively. The healthy pull of the engine gave great grip to the wings and tail. In a vertical bank, the gunner had a fine view of the enemy trying to tighten the circle. One Pfalz went down in flames, another broke off the fight and found itself pounded by the forward-firing Vickers of a Biff and dived away, full of smoke but minus a propeller. The rest rapidly followed. The pair of two-seaters witnessed this brisk defeat and promptly went down to ground level and flew home.

  There was more air fighting to come, against Huns who were less impetuous and more dangerous. Both sides were up in force. The weather blurred much of the action, but sometimes the glow of a falling flamer showed through the rain. And when a pilot had time to glance down he always saw another wave of brown ants surging across no-man’s-land. The stretch of boiling porridge had moved on. The guns had increased their range. The infantry had captured the first line.

  * * *

  Danger was an unpredictable drug. Sometimes it stimulated the senses, sometimes it flattened them. McWatters flew on four patrols during the first day of the battle. Twice he landed in a state of high excitement. Once he found himself almost an observer in a combat that might have killed him at any moment: his body flew the Biff, and sweated and cursed, while his mind looked on.

  The final patrol was cut short because driving rain brought an early dusk. When he landed, McWatters couldn’t remember anything; couldn’t even remember taking off. He was too tired to get out of his flying kit. He went to his hut and fell asleep as soon as he lay down. Forty minutes later he woke up so violently that he tumbled out of bed. Faceless devils were racing around the room, trying to kill him. He hadn’t been so terrified since he was six and a nightmare made him wet the bed.

  A hot bath did him a lot of good. He threw in plenty of bath salts and a dollop of some kind of lemony essence (sent by his mother) that created enough froth and bubbles to hide under. A glass of whisky was within reach. What more could a man want? Somebody walked past the bathhouse, whistling. That’s old Munday, he thought, and wished Munday would come in and chat. But Munday was dead.

  The whistling faded. McWatters lay like a log and absorbed the shock of loss. Until now he had fended off the truth, but the truth had strolled past, whistling. Munday was gone. And Plug, and Crash. Harry Simms, too. Charlie Dash. Heeley, whose first name nobody knew. Nikolai, whose second name nobody could pronounce. That made seven. Who else? Snow, the Canadian. All gone west.

  A couple of the replacements came into the bathhouse and McWatters couldn’t stand their chattering. He got out and got dressed and took an umbrella and walked to the orderly room.

  Sergeant Lacey was reading a Harrods catalogue and listening to a gramophone record of guitar music.

  “Something’s wrong with that banjo,” McWatters said. “Needs tuning.”

  “The government of Panama has just declared war on Germany,” Lacey said. “I’m playing this as a tribute to Panamese pluck.”

  The guitar went idly in search of its melody; found it; lost it; and lingered lazily over a few final chords. McWatters grew bored and took the catalogue from Lacey’s fingers.

  “I expect they’ll wear straw boaters when they go over the top,” Lacey said. “Boaters and blazers and creamy bags. Everyone flashing the most tremendous tropical smiles, and all encouraging each other with shouts of ‘Remember, men, you are Panamanian!’ as the Prussians flee in panic and —”

  “Shut up, Lacey. Why have you got this?”

  Lacey took back the catalogue and showed him an illustration of a croquet set. “A bequest from Duke Nikolai to the squadron. Perfect for those idle summer evenings.”

  “I’m damn good at croquet.” McWatters played a full-blooded imaginary shot. “I can sock the ball until it begs for mercy.” He turned away, and noticed eight valises stacked against a wall. “That reminds me ... Mr Dash borrowed some letters from me. I wonder if ...”

  Lacey gave him a small bundle of letters. “Mr Dash left a note. He wanted you to have them if...” He shrugged.

  “They’re from a mutual friend,” McWatters explained.

  “Miss Legge-Barrington, I believe.”

  “Charles Dash was a damn good sort, Lacey.”
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  He ran back to his hut. The letters were in chronological order. The latest was on the top. It gave Nancy Hicks-Potter’s address. McWatters shut his eyes and dreamed of illicit sexual ecstasy. The prospect was as intoxicating as the idea of victory over the Boche, and now it was a damn sight closer.

  * * *

  Northeast France is mostly flat and dull. The ground is heavy and good for sugar beet, which thrives on water, but in 1917 it did not make good trenches for the British Army, who preferred a nice chalk soil that drained quickly. Because of the low-lying nature of the terrain, nowhere here drained quickly. This was not ideal cavalry country. Even so, given a long spell of drying weather, the area around Arras might conceivably have offered the British dragoons and the lancers a decent charge at the enemy.

  In April 1917 the battle of Arras opened in driving rain and the weather got steadily worse. When the infantry went over the top they were slogging through mud. High above their heads was the perpetual scream of shells. It was Easter weekend, and the infantry prayed that the barrage had destroyed the German wire and smashed the German trenches and shattered the concrete strongpoints that were built into the Hindenburg Line which looked down on Arras and the whole fifteen-mile stretch of the Big Push.

  The key was Vimy Ridge, only a few hundred feet high, just a long crease running north to south; but it was steep-sided and the German Army had it. Or, more accurately, they had what was left after the Allied barrage had pounded it. Now the guns were pounding it again. The bursting shells might look like boiling porridge from the sky, but what the infantry saw was a wall of smoke and flame that grew uglier and more raucous as they plodded across no-man’s-land.

  This was not a walkover, and nobody had ever supposed it would be. Some German machine-gun posts had survived. They chattered and stuttered and cut holes in the troops toiling up the slopes. Nobody turned back. To retreat was more dangerous than to advance. The safest place to be was in the enemy trenches. In many places, British soldiers rushed the trenches and met an enemy that the bombardment had entirely killed, or terrified into surrender, or driven insane. Elsewhere there was plenty of desperate fighting, especially by the Canadians. They were given the highest and hardest stretch of Vimy Ridge to climb, and they had to buy every foot of it with their dead. Attack and defence were reduced to a primitive ferocity. Rifles became clubs. A Mills bomb, chucked around the corner of a trench, was the best weapon. By noon on the first day, the Canadians were on top. Vimy was captured.