Hornet’s Sting

by Derek Robinson

  * * *

  After the rumours of mutinies in the French Army, there had been some talk in the mess of battle police. The adjutant had been happy to confirm that they existed, certainly in the British Army and probably in all armies. Their task, he explained, was to ensure that when the balloon went up and the infantry went over the top, nobody was left behind. “Some men need to have their bravery stimulated,” he said. “I’ve known some very effective shots to be fired in our own trenches.”

  Paxton recognised German battle police as soon as he saw them, even in the dim light of the railhead. They were well armed and vigilant. When the train unloaded, they made very sure the trucks were empty. When the troops fell in and were marched away, battle police escorted the column. There was no singing, no talking. In the small hours of the morning, with the crack and shudder of gunfire and shell-bursts all too near, men had plenty to think of. Paxton was bitterly regretting the impulse that had ot him on the train. He’d only done it because he was tired of making decisions and so he had trusted to luck, had gambled that the train would go eastward. He had no idea which way the tracks pointed, so it was a fifty-fifty chance. Now the bloody silly train had gone westward and he was marching into the battlefield. He could smell the drifting chemical stink of explosives. The bitch of a westerly wind was at work again.

  They marched on a cobbled road until the cobbles became so smashed that marching was impossible. At some point they must have turned onto a track. The mud had been made liquid by rain and feet. Paxton listened to the suck and slop of hundreds of boots and found it most discouraging.

  The track ended in a field. They sat in the lee of a slope and saw star-shells soar and droop and illuminate the night sky ahead. The glow was enough to show stretcher-bearers coming over the slope, stooping and hurrying, sometimes stumbling and spilling their loads. The odd bullet fizzed overhead and droned away.

  Paxton chewed on his lump of sausage and tried to ignore the way the ground shuddered. After a while he found that he himself was shuddering, long after the vibrations stopped. He was glad nobody could see him. The next man nudged him, and offered a small flat bottle. “Schnapps,” he whispered. Paxton gave him the remains of the sausage. The schnapps made him gasp, but it had a fiery charge that drove out the cold and some of the fear. He returned the bottle. They shook hands. Paxton wanted to embrace him. That drink was the first kind act in an age.

  Much later, a sergeant came along the line and each man got two stick grenades.

  The man with the schnapps took out his rosary beads and began a rhythmic murmuring.

  Another sergeant came along. Everyone got a swig of liquor. It followed the schnapps like a rioting mob.

  Then they were on their feet.

  Paxton followed the others. If he kept walking he was bound to reach Wipers, and then Gazeran, then England.

  They went around the side of the slope and waded through a stream. The enemy was firing shrapnel as well as high-explosive. He found them equally frightening: high-explosive blew you up, shrapnel cut you down. It was time to get into a trench, surely. They shuffled past a row of craters, all flooded. Paxton knew then that there would be no trenches. Anything deep enough to hide in would be deep enough to drown in. He was going to die. Hatred for his killers rose like bile.

  They stopped. An order rippled down the line, and a metallic clicking followed. Bayonets were being fixed. Paxton had no bayonet. Serious offence, that. Fourteen days confined to camp. Paxton chuckled. The next man looked up and said something. It sounded friendly. “Gesundheit!” Paxton told him. It was nonsense, but nothing mattered any more. The schnapps bottle appeared. They emptied it.

  After that, everything happened very quickly.

  First, there was a charge. Paxton’s boots were thickly caked with mud, so he lumbered rather than charged. There was a lot of firing and a hell of a lot of smoke. Paxton thrust his rifle, even though he had no bayonet, because everyone else thrust theirs, and he shouted because everyone was shouting. “Gesundheit!” he roared. Not much of a battlecry. He stretched it, made it last. Better!

  But this bloody mud was a bastard. His legs were tiring, and he lagged behind, which was how he came to see his pal with the schnapps killed by a grenade. It blew him off his feet. Paxton went forward and looked at the pile of rags. This was all wrong, this was bad, this was just plain rotten ... He was coughing and spitting from breathing these foul fumes, so he lumbered on.

  Something had to be done. That was clear to him. Your pal gives you a drink, you can’t just let him die. He was shouting, “Bastards! Bastards!” A wall of searing hot air hit him from the side and flung him far away. Then a roar deafened him. He lay on his face in the mud and knew that he would never breathe again. His lungs had quit.

  That was only the beginning. Next he spent a long lifetime wandering about the battlefield. Or maybe it was five minutes. His lungs wheezed painfully, treacherous bloody things. First they quit, then they un-quit. Bastards. Something familiar stuttered, away to his right. It must be a Vickers. Good old Vickers! Never lets you down. Well, not often.

  Paxton found a rifle with a bayonet and walked around behind the Vickers. Two-man crew, one feeding, one firing. He stabbed the feeder in the back and pulled the trigger. Enormous bang, and the recoil jerked the bayonet out. The gunner jumped up and Paxton bayoneted him too, several times. “Bastard!” he shouted. “Gesundheit! Bastard!” The man lost his tin hat. Paxton sat down and took off his coal-scuttle helmet, sticky with old soup, and put on the tin hat. Better. More dashing.

  War is easy, he thought. You just kill people. Someone was trying to kill him. Bullets were fizzing past his head. He sat behind the Vickers and blasted off a long, scything burst. Now this was fun. He was still enjoying himself when three men in khaki kilts dived into the gun-pit. “Where the devil have you been?” Paxton said. “It’s been frightfully lonely here.”

  “Thank God you held out,” a lieutenant said.

  “Gesundheit,” Paxton said. He fired off the last of the belt.

  Earthquake Strength 11:

  Railway lines greatly bent. Underground pipelines severed.

  “Smuggler’s Boy,” Paxton whispered. “Did Smuggler’s Boy make it?”

  He was in Dando’s two-bed sick bay, washed, shaved, hair brushed, dressed in fresh pyjamas, crisp white sheets drawn up to his chin, looking like a man who’d gone fifteen rounds with Gentleman Jim Corbett.

  “Don’t know,” O’Neill said. “Never heard of him.”

  Paxton’s eyelids came down very slowly. He seemed to lack the strength to lift them.

  “You look knackered,” O’Neill said. “I’ve got to write a report. There’s a chance of a medal. Frankly, I wouldn’t give you the skin off my rice pudding, but...”

  Paxton licked his lips, once.

  “Some Royal Scots Fusiliers found you. With a Vickers. Winning the war. At Wipers.”

  Paxton coughed suddenly, and dribbled a little. O’Neill wiped it away with a handkerchief. “Dando says you got somewhat knockedabout. When you crashed. I need to know all that.”

  Occasionally the eyelids trembled; nothing else moved. After a while O’Neill went away.

  * * *

  Third Wipers went on and the losses were heavier than ever. The rain also went on. August was like winter. The drainage system of those Flanders fields had been wrecked and the rain had nowhere to go but down. Soon it was trapped by flat layers of clay and rock. The top-soil became saturated and then liquid. Even height gave no escape. A geological curiosity of this area was the fact that water collected on the ridges too, and stayed there. The soldiers didn’t find it curious. Knee-deep in muck, sometimes thigh-deep, permanently soaked, at risk from slow death in a swamp as well as sudden death from high-explosive, the infantry had other words for Flanders.

  Far from cutting their losses, the General Staff ordered more attacks. The original Push had involved only a hundred thousand men. Plenty more were waiting in the Reserves. Damn i
t, they’d been expensively trained and drilled; they were ready. It would be a criminal waste not to use them. It would mean that all those gallant lads who’d fallen would have died for nothing! God forbid.

  The new attacks failed. The German Army had been ready for Third Wipers, and it had built a deep belt of concrete pillboxes. The concrete was very thick; sometimes even a direct hit only scarred it. The blast probably killed the machine-gun crew inside, but they were quickly replaced. Tanks were the obvious weapon against pillboxes. They struggled in the swamps, flooded and stalled. When British infantry tried to rush a pillbox they got cut down. If, at huge expense of blood and bodies, they captured a pillbox, its only entrance was on the enemy side. Hun guns pumped shells and bullets into the opening. Meanwhile, British artillery went on chewing up the battlefield. Each time Hornet Squadron flew over it, the ground looked more than ever like a flooded moonscape.

  * * *

  Dando’s notes on Paxton began with concussion. He felt pretty sure about that, because any pilot who survived a crash must have whacked his head on something hard, and this head was badly cut. So were the knees and elbows. Dando suspected that a couple of ribs were cracked. There was heavy bruising almost everywhere. What worried him most, however, was the total lack of appetite and interest. Most patients got thirsty, even if they weren’t hungry. Most patients talked, too. “Find out if he’s in pain, if you can,” Dando told McWatters. “I can’t get anything out of him.”

  Paxton moved only his eyes when McWatters came in. His eyes looked tired. His skin was slack and shiny.

  “Hullo, Pax.” McWatters squeezed a foot through the blankets. “I hear you walked all the way to Wipers. Never realised you were so jolly fit. How are you feeling? Chap called Morkel is looking after your flight. Bit swarthy. Decent enough otherwise.”

  Paxton did not move. McWatters got a chair.

  “You probably want to hear all the gossip, don’t you? Let’s see ... The mess had pheasant for dinner last night, flocks of the bloody birds! Sergeant Lacey got them. And the wine, crates of it, spanking good stuff. The man’s a magician. Of course we do D.O.P.s all day, usual grind. Remember Mackenzie?”

  Paxton frowned. McWatters was startled at how old it made him look.

  “Woolley got him kicked out of A-Flight. The little sod flies on his own now. Keeps getting flamers, or at least he claims he does, so the Yanks are happy ...”

  Paxton was struggling to get his arm out from under the blankets. McWatters helped him, and said, “D’you want... I mean, can I ...” With immense effort, Paxton scratched the tip of his nose. His arm flopped. McWatters tucked it out of sight.

  “Here’s something to make you laugh. You remember that nurse who told me she’d been rogered by our little choirboy? All codswallop. Fairy tales. God knows why, she’s an absolute stunner, I mean ...”

  Paxton’s eyelids were falling.

  “I’d better push off.” McWatters stood up. Paxton blinked, and half-opened his eyes. “Smuggler’s Boy,” he whispered. “Did Smuggler’s Boy do it?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest old chap. Better get some rest.”

  * * *

  McWatters had never seen an enemy formation bigger than six until a dozen Huns came up through a hole in the clouds.

  He laughed. It wasn’t funny, but he had sucked in lungfuls of air and he had to do something with them. Now he felt tired; his limbs were heavy. Fear did that. He was familiar with fear. It would vanish with action. He rocked his wings, test-fired the Vickers, made sure the whole flight was awake, and immediately dived into the attack. Why not? He was more or less up-sun and he had height advantage. No point in waiting.

  They were Halberstadts, two-seaters with two guns, big strong beasts but they lacked a Biff’s performance. They certainly couldn’t climb as steeply as the Biffs could dive. McWatters heard his wires start to scream, glanced at the airspeed dial and saw it nudging two hundred, and looked up. The Huns were starting to scatter. Good! A spot of panic would even the odds.

  Now he picked out a Halberstadt with commander’s streamers on the wing-struts, made it his target and fired. For a few seconds the air was laced with tracer. Everything shook: the Hun, the Biff, McWatters himself.

  It was not a good fight. Too many machines in too little space meant much wild flying and few clear shots. The flight went clear through the Halberstadts and used its speed to climb away, all except Drinkwater.

  His place at the rear meant that he suffered most from the confusion. The few shots he fired went wide. No shouts of joy came from his gunner. Another blank. He tightened his grip and heaved on the stick just as a Halberstadt skidded across his path. He gave it a burst. He saw it wing-over and fall, smoke gushing from its engine. “Bull’seye!” he roared. He thrust the stick forward. Bagged a Hun at last! he thought. He was going to make sure of victory if he had to chase the blighter right down to the ground, and that was what he had to do.

  The Halberstadt was heavier than the Biff. Its exhausts kept pumping huge amounts of oily smoke but apparently its engine still worked. It kept Drinkwater out of range.

  He was sure he could change all that when the Hun had to flatten out and the chase became a charge across the countryside. He was frustrated again. Obstacles got in the way: trees, hillocks, churches. The German pilot knew the land. When at last Drinkwater got the Biff lined up for a shot, swirling smoke hid the enemy. It was maddening. To make matters worse he saw tall trees racing past his wingtips. The Hun had found a gap in a forest. Smuts from his exhaust coated Drinkwater’s goggles. When he dragged them off, the Halberstadt had vanished. A few seconds later the forest ended and he was skimming over farmland.

  The Hun must have escaped down a turn-off in the trees. Left or right? Drinkwater guessed left. He banked hard and chased along the edge of the wood and met the Halberstadt coming head-on. He took a second to fire and that was a second too long. A burst from the Spandau hit his head. The Biff flew into the ground at about a hundred miles an hour.

  An oil leak had caused the Halberstadt to make so much smoke. Its Mercedes engine seized-up while the pilot was circling the wreckage. He glided to a bumpy landing. Neither he nor his observer bothered to look at the bodies. They’d seen that sort of thing before, and it wasn’t good for the appetite.

  * * *

  Tchaikovsky ended with a crash, and then threw in two more final thumps for good measure. The needle hissed. Lacey reached without looking and lifted the arm.

  “I see The Times says we’ve captured another farmhouse at Wipers, sir,” he said.

  The adjutant was invisible in his office, but his door was open. He did not speak.

  “It wasn’t like this at the Somme,” Lacey said. “All the talk then was of how soon we’d capture some real towns. Bapaume and Péronne, I seem to remember...”

  No comment.

  “We nearly got them. Nearly got Péronne, anyway. Then there was Arras, where we captured several important villages. Isn’t that right, sir?”

  More silence.

  “And now we’re two weeks into Third Wipers, and the news is we’ve taken another farmhouse. First it was towns, then villages, now it’s farms. What next, do you think? When the next Big Push takes place, will The Times be applauding the capture of a vegetable garden?”

  “Come here,” the adjutant said.

  “Or a large herbaceous border, perhaps.” Lacey went in. Brazier was sitting, hunched at his desk. His great fists were clenched and rested on each side of an open file.

  “You never wrote that poem you gave us. The commanding officer used it as a tribute. Now it turns out to be a fraud.”

  “More of a collage, sir. Perhaps a mélange.”

  “Colonel Bliss calls it a damn fraud. Line one is stolen from ... Rupert Brooke.” Brazier spoke heavily; he might have been naming a defaulter. “Whoever he is.”

  “Was, alas.”

  “Shut up, sergeant. ‘Now God be thanked’. Brooke wrote that. ‘From this day to the ending
of the world!’ Stolen from Henry V, would you believe! Shakespeare!”

  “No mean thief himself, sir. Who is to say —”

  “Shut your treacherous mouth!” Brazier roared like a drill sergeant. Lacey recoiled. He had miscalculated; the adjutant was in a rage. “Next you raided Tennyson. ‘Blow, bugle, blow!’ Stolen from a song. ‘Was there a man dismayed?’ Stolen from ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. ‘Who rush to glory, or the grave?’ Stolen from the poem ‘Hohenlinden’ by Thomas Campbell, and no thanks to you the theft was disguised when the major changed the ending. ‘Land of our birth, we pledge to thee’ you thieved from ‘The Children’s Song’ by Rudyard Kipling, no less. That leaves ‘Dulce et decorum’ etcetera, which is public property, I suppose.”

  “Horace, actually,” Lacey said before he could stop himself.

  “So five-sixths of your poem is stolen property. You’ve humiliated the C.O., you’ve blackened the reputation of the squadron, you have obliged me to apologise in person to the brigade commander. The editor of the Yorkshire Post has publicly accused the Corps of ...” He searched in the file. “... ‘of making literary sport out of its sacred duty to honour its dead’.” Brazier clenched his fists and rubbed the knuckles together. “Now speak.”

  “Oh, it was a joke,” Lacey said gloomily. “I couldn’t think of anything original, so I cobbled together some stuff I remembered from school. It was all so obvious, I was sure someone would see through it. It wasn’t even good verse, it certainly didn’t make sense, I mean I never expected anyone to like it. Quite the reverse.”

  “The editor of the Yorkshire Post claims he brought the whole shabby business to our attention weeks ago.”

  “I scrapped it, sir.”

  “You destroyed an official signal?” The adjutant’s knuckles changed colour.

  “Not a real signal. Just a note from the newspaper.”

  “Theft, insolence, failure to obey an order, and now wilful destruction of an official communication.”

  “Anyway, that first verse was superseded by then. You already had my second verse, sir. Nothing wrong with that. All my own work. Entirely original.”