“Oh ... desperation, I suppose. He was sitting on a luggage trolley in Waterloo station, and everyone was rushing about except him, and he looked as if his pet rabbit had died.”
“Pet rabbit,” Cleve-Cutler said. “This is a commissioned officer in the Durham Light Infantry, in wartime, and he looked —”
“Don’t be so stuffy. The first time I saw you, you were grinning like a baboon.”
“Surely not.”
“Like two baboons. Anyway, Tommy had no money and nowhere to go, so ...”
“I see.” He stretched. “Well, enough about him. More than enough. What about us? What’s on the menu?”
“Rackety.” She could see that he had forgotten, so she said. “Rackety-rackety-rackety. It’s in code.”
“That rackety. Of course. I remember it well . . . What does it mean?”
“It’s the signal for the Big Push,” she said, which made him laugh. After that, the morning improved rapidly.
* * *
On the third day of the battle, nth April 1917, it snowed.
The Allied advance, already reduced to nibbling a few yards here and there, came to a halt. It left many troops in exposed positions. These had been expensively bought: the price lay scattered about the woods and fields. Having spent so much to win so little, the generals refused to think that the effort was wasted and so they kept on spending. It was a miserable existence for the infantry, chilled by the blizzard, chivvied by machine-gun fire, hounded by artillery.
All day, Woolley sent up units of two or three aircraft to patrol the battlefield and chase off any strafing machines. It meant flying low: dangerous work. The prop blasted snow at the pilot’s head, and the horizon was a white blur.
A lieutenant called Drinkwater, flying a Pup, got shot at so often that he felt sweat trickling down his body. Flashes of small-arms fire caught his eye, but by the time he turned, whirling snow had spoiled his view. More flashes came from a different side, and a sharp scream as a round scarred the engine cowling. “Bastards!” he shouted. A hillock loomed, and then trees on the hillock. The Pup reared to miss them. Enough of this madness. Drinkwater went up a thousand feet.
He was alone. Two Pups had taken off with him; one turned back with a sputtering engine and he’d lost the other in this grisly weather. He flew wide figures of eight and waited for something to happen. Eventually the snow thinned and almost stopped. He could see for a mile. Two miles.
At once, enemy Archie began to seek him out and he climbed and turned, dived and turned and climbed some more. Drinkwater had been with the squadron for seven weeks; he was a veteran; he knew how to outwit Archie. The bursts made blots, like cheap ink soaking into cheap paper. A flight of six Sopwith 1½-strutters crossed above him, probably off to bomb a railhead or an aerodrome, and the Archie switched to this juicier target. Drinkwater saw activity on the ground and went to look. What he found was British cavalry, sheltering in a dip behind a wood.
This was so extraordinary that he forgot about strafing. Cavalry were not an unusual sight; their camps were all over northeast France, far behind the trenches. This was the first time he had seen cavalry at the actual Front, within striking distance of the fighting.
They were lancers. From two hundred feet he could clearly see their lances, looking like the sort of javelin he had thrown in the school sports. The men holding them were dismounted, standing in groups. They wore swords. Some of them waved to him. They looked as relaxed as if they were at a point-to-point before the start.
He circled. Nothing much happened. Maybe they were returning from action. If so, there was no point in hanging around. He climbed to five hundred feet and flew east, looking for trouble. In less than half a mile he found it. The ruins of a farmhouse were busy with men in field-grey. He sideslipped to get a better look and a machine gun opened up. “Bloody nerve!” he said. The Pup’s Vickers was fully loaded. He hadn’t shot anyone or anything since before breakfast. He put the nose down. A second machine gun began firing, and a third. He sheered away and felt bullets smacking into the Pup. He gave the engine maximum revs and curled his body into the smallest space and hared back to the wood.
The lancers were cantering past it. They were not going back to camp. They were heading for the open fields around the ruined farmhouse.
Drinkwater flew alongside them and waggled his wings and waved and shouted. They waved and shouted back. He could see their open mouths.
As the field widened, so the cavalry spread out and quickened their pace, kicking up a fine spray of snow. Drinkwater counted at least sixty men. He climbed and got a splendid view. Now they were into a gallop and the lances were being lowered for the charge. He kept climbing. They were aiming to sweep behind the farmhouse. The first row of horses went down as if tripped and their riders died with them. The next row raced into the bullets and now the machine gunners were hosing the rest of the galloping column, finding fresh targets as the leading horses crashed and made room for the bullets to hit the followers. In a minute it was over.
Before that, Drinkwater had dived at the farmhouse and kept his thumb on the gun-button until the Vickers stopped firing. He was fired at, but he was too angry to care. He climbed, and turned, and took one long look at the snowscape dotted with struggling animals and men, and many more not struggling, not moving, just lying in ragged rows, and a few who had turned in time and were racing away, trying to out-run the bullets. Then he stopped looking and flew to the west.
Something cracked loudly and the control column ceased to do much controlling. The Pup sank gently, in a powered glide, and finally found a bog on the outskirts of Arras. It skimmed the mud until its wheels stuck and it performed a very squalid cartwheel.
Drinkwater was filthy, and cut about the head and legs. A squad of Pioneers got a rope on the wreck and dragged it and him out of the bog. After that he remembered a middle-aged doctor, a glass of rum, and a deep cellar. An open-truck railway train came along and took him on a dark journey. It was like travelling on the London Underground, except it was different. He climbed a lot of stairs and was put in an ambulance. Then he was at Gazeran, being looked at by Dando. When Dando had finished, the adjutant questioned him about his patrol. “It seems you got Archied,” Brazier said. “Was anything else noteworthy?”
Drinkwater shook his head.
Routine patrol, Brazier wrote. “Don’t you remember the tunnel under Arras?” he asked.
“Why did they do it?” Drinkwater whispered. The doctor’s stitches showed up stark black against his chalky face.
“That’s obvious,” Brazier said. “They did it to get the troops to the Front without being shelled by the Hun. The Hun blew Arras to blazes, but he couldn’t touch our lads safe down below. And now we get the wounded out in the same way! Lucky you, eh?” He strode away. The door banged.
“I should have crashed the Pup,” Drinkwater whispered. “Crashed it on the guns.”
Dando slid a needle into his arm. “Count to ten,” he said.
“More than ten.” Now Drinkwater was anxious. “At least sixty. I counted sixty ...” His eyes closed. The needle came out.
* * *
The experts had gone off to consult other experts. Cleve-Cutler had a free morning. “Good,” Dorothy said, at breakfast. “You can come with me to Hammersmith.”
“Hammersmith? That’s an awful hole.”
“My chums at the War Office don’t think so. They’ve given me a frightfully secret job in Hammersmith. Go and fetch Tommy. He must come too. Otherwise he’ll just skulk in his room.”
Cleve-Cutler climbed the stairs. He was sexually content, and full of bacon and eggs, and rested by a good night’s sleep; so his mind was relaxed and free to let the pieces of the puzzle drop into place almost without his knowing it. He tapped on the door and Tommy Blanchflower opened it. “You’ve deserted, haven’t you?” Cleve-Cutler said.
Tommy was barefoot, and his toes were plucking at the linoleum. “Not really,” he said. “I’m just a bit late.
Lost my train ticket.”
Cleve-Cutler went inside. “How late?”
“Um ... two weeks.”
“Then the military police are out looking for you, old chap. Anyone who overstays his leave by two weeks is a deserter in their books.”
“Didn’t overstay my leave.”
Cleve-Cutler sat on the bed and waited.
“Didn’t take any leave.” There was a hint of defiance in the voice. “Did a bunk. Walked out. Got a train.”
“Then you’re definitely a deserter. And you can’t spend the rest of the war hiding in here.”
“I’m not going back there.” Tommy sat on the floor. He used the minimum effort: just let his back slide down the wall.
“It’s your best chance. Go and apologize to your C.O. Tell him ...” He stopped because Tommy had slumped further, until his elbows rested on the floor. “Not going back,” he said.
“I see. In that case, stop being so bloody Russian and tell me exactly what went wrong.”
“Cub-hunting. I was in the mess one night and the chaps got a bit bored and decided to go cub-hunting. You know what that is?” Cleve-Cutler nodded: it was a kind of hide-and-seek played by young officers, an excuse for noise and bullying and broken furniture. “They made me the cub. I’d seen what they did to the cub if they found him too easily. Put boot-blacking on his balls, that sort of thing. So I found a very good hiding place. Too good, because they never found me. Bad mistake. I heard them getting more and more annoyed, and drunk, and I didn’t dare come out. In the end I had to use the lavatory. Everyone had gone. I sneaked back to my room and they’d made an apple-pie bed. So I walked out.”
“For an apple-pie bed? For a joke?”
“It wasn’t a joke.” Tommy hooked his big toes together and watched them wrestle. “They despised me. Ever since I told one of them I didn’t want to go to France, and he told the rest, they were all against me.”
Cleve-Cutler took a moment to consider that. One possible question was: why apply for a commission if you don’t want to serve your country? But he knew the answer. Conscription at eighteen meant Blanchflower would be in uniform whether he liked it or not. Everyone went. “France isn’t so bad,” he said. Not so good, either, he thought.
“That’s not what my brother said in his letters. He hated it. Got killed a year ago. A cousin got killed too. Knew it would happen. Said so.”
“They died for England,” Cleve-Cutler said. “What better sacrifice can a man make?” His hand covered his artificial grin.
For the first time, Tommy looked him in the eyes. “They didn’t sacrifice their silly lives,” he said. Something like contempt was in his voice. “Other people organised their deaths. Will you go back to France and sacrifice your life?”
“Not if I can bloody well help it.”
“So we’re agreed.” That was that. Nothing more to be said.
They went by cab to Hammersmith, through steady rain that was flecked with sleet. Dorothy chatted easily, mainly about racing. The men did their conversational duty, but Cleve-Cutler was considering the fact that, by not having a deserter arrested, he was himself committing a crime. It didn’t worry him so that was something else to wonder about.
The cab stopped at a large brick building, once a commercial laundry, now requisitioned by the War Office. “This is where the generals have asked me to do my bit,” she said. “It’s where the losers come to collect their winnings.”
An elderly sergeant took their names and led them into the main hall. It still smelt of soap and flatirons. Sitting on benches, waiting with the skill of soldiers who have learned to wait, were about a hundred amputees.
“Now I begin to understand,” Cleve-Cutler said.
“I have no medical qualification,” she said, “but I can give hope.”
An elderly doctor introduced himself. The hall was divided by canvas screens and there was a constant traffic of bustling nurses and men who would never bustle again. “I’ve got a rather interesting chap for you to meet,” the doctor told Dorothy. “No legs, but what a heart! Name’s Miller, so you can call him Dusty.” He took them to a canvas cubicle, waved them in, and said, “I’ll be back in half an hour.”
A young man sat in a wheelchair. He had the milk-white skin that goes with red hair. His face was young and his eyes were old. He was holding an artificial leg as if it were made of glass.
“Thank God! A good-looking man at last,” she declared. Without taking her eyes off Miller she said, “You two, toddle off, make yourselves useful. Vanish!”
The elderly doctor was waiting for them. He was bald and broad, with a cheerful mouth and untrusting eyes. “Let me give you the guided tour,” he said. “We’re rather proud of the Hammersmith Factory. Treating the limbless has made great strides lately.” Cleve-Cutler glanced sharply, and saw no sign of irony. “Here’s a lucky chap.” They looked into a cubicle and saw a man whose right arm had been amputated above the elbow. “Today’s the day he gets a new arm. Let me see the stump ...” It was rounded and red as an apple. The doctor stroked it. He was a craftsman searching for rough edges, bodged workmanship; and finding none. “Do you still miss it?” he asked.
“Yes sir. I can feel it wanting to pick things up.”
They moved from cubicle to cubicle: a man without a foot, a man without half a leg, without two-thirds of a leg, without both forearms. Lieutenant Blanchflower asked the doctor quiet, intelligent questions. Major Cleve-Cutler grunted occasionally and looked nobody in the eye. He wanted a drink. The doctor, pleased to have such an attentive audience, spoke about the problems of shattered joints and ravaged muscles. “Just last week,” he said. “I found this in a patient’s buttock.” He rummaged in a pocket and produced a jagged bit of shrapnel, the size of his thumb. “That’s what’s wrong with this war, if you ask me.”
Blanchflower did ask him. By now Cleve-Cutler wanted a large drink.
“Your biggest enemy in the field is not the Hun,” the doctor said. He had stationed himself where he could watch the shuffling come and go. “Your biggest enemy is a tiny organism, Clostridium welchii, which lives in the intestines of animals and is transferred to the fields in the usual way.”
“Dung,” Tommy said.
“Quite so. Most battlefields were farmland, so Clostridium welchii is abundant. A soldier struck by a shell-splinter falls to the ground, gets his wound dirty, and infection follows as night follows day. Unless the damaged tissue is soon excised, gas gangrene sets in.”
“Not in the Royal Flying Corps,” Cleve-Cutler said firmly. The constant parade of stumps was making him queasy.
“Peritonitis and septicaemia are the airman’s foes, in my experience. If shrapnel penetrates the abdominal cavity, or a bullet impels fragments of uniform into the body, especially if it impacts with bone —”
“Good Lord. Is that the time?”
“My grandfather was a surgeon at the battle of Waterloo,” the doctor said. “He told me that the lance, the sabre and the musket-ball made the cleanest wounds a man could wish to see.”
“Oh God,” Cleve-Cutler muttered, as another amputee lurched past on crutches. “This is a dreadful place.”
“There’s nothing more stupid than a shell,” the doctor said.
“It makes a chap think,” Tommy said.
“I’ll meet you outside,” Cleve-Cutler said, and left without shaking hands.
He had to wait forty minutes until Dorothy and Tommy came out. “Aren’t they doing splendid work?” she said.
“Don’t ask me. This place is a chamber of horrors. It’s worse than a zoo. People could pay sixpence to go in and throw buns at the limbless.” His anger surprised her, so he persisted. “Christ knows it’s hard enough to fight a war without coming home to this kind of freak show. It’s obscene.”
“Goodness.” She widened her eyes. He realised she wanted to hear more.
“Told you Hammersmith’s an awful dump,” he said. “Look at the rain! We’ll never get a cab.”
<
br /> “Poor Hugh. Never mind, here comes a nice big bus and it’s going our way, what luck.”
“Bus?” Cleve-Cutler hadn’t travelled by bus since he’d left school. They got on. It smelled of shag tobacco and sweat. “I missed breakfast,” Tommy said. “I hope you can pay for lunch.” Cleve-Cutler said: “What?” The bus moved off. “Well, I’m jolly hungry,” Tommy said.
“Where to, guv?” the bus conductress said. Cleve-Cutler turned, amazed that a second-lieutenant would cadge lunch off him. “What?” he said.
“Where to, guv?”
“Taggart’s Hotel.”
The conductress raised her eyes to heaven. Dorothy said, “Here, give me some money.”
He felt better when they reached Kensington and got off the bus. “I apologise,” he said. “Inexcusable remarks. Must have been a bit liverish.”
“Champagne’s good for the liver. We’ll go to Studley’s.”
“Claret’s awfully good, too,” Tommy said.
“Shut up, you. And call me ‘sir’.”
“Claret is awfully good,” she said. “We’ll have lots of claret.”
Lunch was, if not happy, at least convivial. He watched her and thought she must be the only person in London who was not troubled by the war, who actually looked forward to each day and enjoyed it. He found her buoyancy irresistible, infectious. When he took a cab to the War Office, he had to remind himself why he was in England. He was frowning as he walked into the meeting room. It was empty, except for an R.F.C. captain who was looking out of a window. “O’Neill!” he said. “Who let you in? This is no place for a thug like you. And where’s my meeting?”
“I work here, sir. And your meeting’s been cancelled.”
They took stock of each other. They had not met since the summer of 1916. Both were survivors, in their different ways. Looks ten years older, Cleve-Cutler thought. Lost weight, O’Neill thought. “Colonel Bliss telephoned,” he said. “The Committee of Inquiry is scrapped. New tactics for the Bristol Fighter. Close-formation flying and crossfire are out. The machine is now flown offensively. The pilot attacks —”
Hornet’s Sting Page 29
