War Story

by Derek Robinson

  The adjutant’s dreams made sleep intolerable and yet he resented having to wake up. It was the usual pattern, and familiarity made it no less unpleasant.

  He sat on the side of his bed and tried not to swallow. He knew that if he swallowed he would regret it. The last fading impression of his dream drifted about him like mist: the more he focused on it the less he saw. It was about India, of course. Whenever he had a bad dream it was always set in India and everything was always grey and dingy and hot. He was always trying to get somewhere in a hurry and failing because there were too many people in the way, and his failure always grew worse and worse until it woke him up.

  He took out his medicine bottle. He took one long swig and whacked in the cork. That killed off his dream. What a bloody day. He pulled out the cork and took another swig. Be warned, he told the new day. You be bloody to me and I’ll be bloody to you.

  Kellaway didn’t want to wake up. When Paxton shook him, he moaned; and as Paxton shook him more and more vigorously his moaning wavered and broke, until at last his eyes opened. “Get up!” Paxton said. “We’re flying in ten minutes.”

  Kellaway’s body had been drained of strength and filled instead with a dull, wearying ache. When he tried to speak his throat hurt and he couldn’t swallow. The furnace glare of sunlight became unendurable. He rolled over to escape it, and fell out of bed.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Paxton said. He was disgusted, not so much at Kellaway’s behaviour as at the fact that he was fully dressed. His uniform was stained with dirt and vomit. There was grass in his hair and dung on his shoes. His nose was cut, half his upper lip was swollen, and all that side of his face was scratched and bruised.

  “Fidler!” Paxton shouted. “Fidler!” He kept on shouting until the batman arrived, on the run. “Get black coffee and run a bath for Mr. Kellaway,” Paxton ordered

  “Looks like he needs a doctor, sir.”

  “Have we got a doctor?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then don’t be a prize tit.”

  “Yes, sir.” Fidler hurried out. By the time Paxton had got Kellaway’s clothes off, Fidler was back with a jug of coffee. They sat Kellaway on the bed. Fidler held a tin mug to his lips, but Kellaway seemed to have no control over his mouth, and the coffee ran down his neck and chest and dripped onto his thighs. With his shoulders slumped and his arms dangling he looked very young. A feeble belch made his head twitch. “What’s that disgusting smell?” Paxton asked.

  “Well, it could be vin ordinaire, sir,” Fidler said,”or it could be mule’s piss. Hard to tell the difference, sir.”

  “Oh, shut up. Help me get him in the bath.”

  They draped a dressing gown around Kellaway and walked him to the bathhouse. On the way they passed O’Neill. He said, “Constipation, it’s a terrible curse.”

  “Kellaway’s not constipated, for heaven’s sake,” Paxton said.

  “I didn’t mean him. Have you tried prunes?”

  “Lout.”

  The bath was nearly half-full. Fidler turned off the taps. Paxton said, “Go on, get in.” Kellaway blinked at him. His eyes went out of focus, and slowly the lids came down. “God in heaven!” Paxton said. He removed the dressing gown. Kellaway was trembling. A cut in his upper lip had reopened and blood was trickling down his chin. His eyes remained closed.

  They picked him up and put him in the bath. “I didn’t tell you to run a cold bath, you fool,” Paxton said. “This is scarcely tepid.”

  “Best I could do, sir. Boiler’s probably run out of coal.”

  Kellaway’s eyes had opened. He was still trembling, making a confusion of ripples, but otherwise he did nothing. “Get on with it, man,” Paxton said. “We haven’t got all blasted day.” But Kellaway just lay there, his small white body looking flat and continually crumpled by the ripples. Paxton lost patience. He cupped his hands and threw water into Kellaway’s face and onto his head. “If that blasted Quirk is ready before you are,” he said, still splashing hard,”I’ll kill you.” Kellaway’s bottom lost its grip and his head slid below the surface. It was a big bath and his toes were nowhere near the other end. Bubbles and bits of grass and a smear of blood came floating up. “What the deuce?” Paxton said.

  “He can’t hear you, sir,” Fidler said.

  Together they hauled Kellaway, spluttering, into a sitting position, Paxton getting soaked to the elbows in the process. “Look here,” he said,”I’ll hold the silly ass and you wash him.”

  Fidler sucked his teeth and screwed up his face so that one eye was shut. “Don’t know about that, sir,” he said. “He’s not my officer, properly speaking. Mind you, supposing …”

  Paxton waited. “Supposing what?”

  “I was just thinking, sir, any problem can be solved with a bit of what you might call… give-and-take.”

  “Take the soap,” Paxton said,”and give him a scrub.”

  Fidler sniffed. “You realise what I’m doing is above and beyond the call of duty, sir.”

  Even when Kellaway had been washed and vigorously towelled, he was still more asleep than awake. “He’s no blasted good like this,” Paxton said bitterly as they walked him back to the billet. “He’ll fall out of the cockpit. What else can we do? There must be something else we can do. How about brandy?”

  “Just as likely to put him to sleep altogether, sir.”

  O’Neill was about to leave as they brought Kellaway in. “No luck?” he said. He strolled over, adjusting the silk scarf inside his shirt collar, and studied Kellaway’s limp body. “Well, no wonder he won’t start,” O’Neill said. “You forgot to pull the choke out.” He gave Kellaway’s shrunken penis a sharp yank, and walked away.

  Kellaway gasped. His eyes bulged and his limbs jerked as if they were on strings. “I say!” he breathed. “Play the game!”

  Paxton was first astonished, then encouraged. “Did you see that?” he said to Fidler.

  “Yes sir, and don’t ask me, because you gentlemen can get away with it but any private soldier touches an officer’s private parts gets himself court-martialled.”

  Kellaway, meanwhile, had shuffled off to his bed and was sitting down, hands guarding himself against further attack. “Not bloody fair,” he whispered.

  Paxton looked at his watch, and looked at the huddled figure. Kellaway licked blood from his lip. Fidler said, as if to himself: “It might work, if …”

  “What might work?”

  Fidler was looking the other way. “Needs a bit of what you might call give-and-take, sir.” He shook his head. “That’s what it needs. Yes.”

  Paxton gave him ten francs. Fidler went out. Within two minutes he was back with a medical assistant who was carrying a bottle of sal volatile and a small cylinder of oxygen connected to a facemask.

  The sal volatile put Kellaway back on his feet, coughing and cursing. Several lungfuls of oxygen restored his strength, if not his health. His eyes were red, but so were his cheeks. The medic took his pulse. “Hammering away like a machinegun, sir,” he said.

  It took Kellaway ten minutes to get dressed, with occasional pauses for a whiff of oxygen. Paxton paced up and down and looked at his watch. ‘C’ Flight took off; he went to the window and watched them climb eastward. Kellaway brushed his hair. “Never mind that,” Paxton said. “Come on, we’re late. Get a move on.”

  But the night had changed Kellaway. It remained in his memory largely as a blur of noise and colour and misery, but he knew he had experienced astonishing heights and depths: people had been cheering him and giving him endless drinks, and other people had been cursing him and picking him out of stinking puddles in total blackness. He was nineteen, and he had survived a CO’s party, which was more than Paxton could say. Kellaway wasn’t afraid of Paxton any more. “I’m hungry,” he said.

  Paxton shouted. Kellaway put his hat on and went to the mess, where he ate a bacon-and-egg sandwich that tasted metallic, so he poured lots of Daddies Sauce on it. Paxton stood with his arms crossed, and watche
d. His fingers clenched and unclenched. He counted every mouthful. At length he said: “I can’t tell you how unspeakably filthy you looked this morning.”

  “Then don’t,” Kellaway said. He drank a second cup of tea.

  “I wouldn’t drink too much of that if I were you,” Paxton said. “Then don’t.”

  Paxton’s eyes widened. His heartbeat made a sudden rush. “Don’t let the war hurry you,” he said harshly, and wished he hadn’t.

  “I won’t,” Kellaway said, and he didn’t.

  They said nothing as they went to the pilots’ hut and put on their flying kit: fleecelined, thigh-length boots, sweater, scarves and double-breasted, high-collared sheepskin coat. Gently sweating, they lumbered across the field to the aeroplane. Paxton went straight over to the fitter and rigger, who were standing by the engine, and so he failed to see Piggott, sitting on the grass beyond the tailplane. “Who’s driving today?” Piggott called out.

  “I am, sir,” Kellaway said. Paxton turned and gaped.

  “Then listen to me.” Piggott got up. “No stunts. No low flying. Don’t bully the engine, it won’t thank you for it, and don’t go faster than seventy. If you can’t see Pepriac, you’ve gone too far. Learn the landmarks. Stay out of trouble. Don’t even think about doing anything heroic. See you at lunch. Goodbye.” He walked away.

  “You little swine,” Paxton said. He tried to duck under the wing, and banged his head on the leading edge. “This is my show. The CO gave this flight to me.” But Kellaway was already climbing into the rear cockpit. “Hard cheese,” he said. “I’ve just taken it back. Get in, I’m ready to take off.”

  “It’s a rotten swindle.” Tears of pain and frustration blurred Paxton’s eyesight. “You watch, I’ll get you for this.”

  “Can’t hear you,” Kellaway announced, as he fastened the strap of his helmet.

  Chapter 6

  Milne dropped a pile of papers into a sack held by one of the Orderly Room clerks. “I should have done this months ago,” he said. “It’s all nonsense, you know.” He dumped the contents of a desk drawer. “All bally nonsense, every bit of it”

  “Beg pardon, sir,” the clerk said. “Wasn’t that your cheque book just went in?” He fished it out.

  “My stars, so it was. What big eyes you’ve got, grandma.” He stuffed the cheque book into a tunic pocket. “Time for a little rest.” A young lime tree grew outside his office. As the breeze shook its leaves, a constant flicker of shadow and sunlight chased itself across Milne’s desk. “What does that remind you of?” he asked, pointing.

  The clerk cocked his head. “A sideboard?” he said. Milne wasn’t listening. “It reminds me of the way you get a run of fast water in a river, and then it gradually smooths out,” he said. “This is June, isn’t it? Best month for trout on some rivers.”

  “Don’t know, sir.” The clerk gave the sack a shake.

  “I always got sick in a boat, never got sick in a river,” Milne said. “The ripples used to look just like that. Alive. And I’ll tell you something else …” His telephone rang. “Can you get this bloody instrument in your bag?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “I was afraid not. Oh well. Go and burn that lot.”

  He picked up the phone. “Mary, Queen of Scots,” he said. “You have an appointment?”

  “She’s dead,” said a voice he knew. “Try again.”

  “Dead, is she? Where did she cop it?”

  “Shut up, Rufus. This is serious.”

  “So is war. War is hell. Ask Colonel Bliss. He knows.”

  “This is Colonel Bliss. Listen—”

  “What a coincidence, I was talking to him just a moment ago and—”

  “Shut up, Rufus. I mean it, this is really serious.”

  Milne sighed. “Hang on, Bob.” He found his hot bottle and wedged it in the top of his trousers. “You were more fun when you had a squadron. Go on, fire away.”

  “That was your mob that ran amok in Montvilliers last night, wasn’t it?”

  “Dunno. I was miles away, playing whist with the vicar’s wife.”

  “What matters is the Corps Commander’s told me to kick your arse till your balls ring like a bell-buoy in a gale. His words, not mine.”

  “I’m innocent,” Milne said. “Nice turn of phrase, though.”

  “You were seen, Rufus, by dozens of people. Those bloody mules caused absolute havoc. The Assistant Provost-Marshal’s raising hell. The sergeant you got the mules from went and crashed your tender right through a shop window. Killed himself.”

  Milne was briefly silent. Then he said: “And he swore to me he’d been a crack racing driver. The man’s a fraud. Don’t believe a word he says.”

  “I’m coming over. Now.” Bliss hung up.

  Milne took the telephone and stretched out on the floor. He suddenly felt utterly weary, washed-out, drained. He telephoned the cookhouse. “I’m going to have rather a large party for lunch,” he said sleepily. The sergeant cook asked how many. “Hundred. Hundred and fifty.” What should they prepare? “Everything. Cook everything.” Milne said. Then he called the hangars and told them to warm up his aeroplane. Then he fell asleep.

  The sight of a buzzard, circling a hundred feet to their left and fifty feet above them, startled Paxton out of his boredom. He shouted and pointed. The rush of air pressed his arm back as the buzzard was quickly left behind. He sat down. Excitement over.

  They had been flying for fifty minutes. Kellaway had climbed to fifteen hundred feet and cruised around Pepriac at a safe sixty miles an hour. The morning had been golden and clear at the start but now clouds of all sizes were beginning to tumble out of the west, and the BE2c occasionally shook or even bounced. Each time, of course, it steadied itself without any help from him. It was very comforting.

  For Paxton it was very tedious. He had forgotten to bring a map, so the landmarks meant little. Besides, the countryside was dull and he’d seen it all before. Lots of troops in lots of camps, tens of thousands of them, and all about as interesting as ants. Even the river Somme wasn’t worth a second glance: not big, and in no hurry to get anywhere.

  Paxton played with his Lewis gun instead.

  It was longer and heavier than he’d expected. It had a cocking handle on the end shaped like a shooting-stick, a drum of .303 cartridges on top and a pistol grip below. The barrel was a good two feet long and encased in a cylinder. In the middle of the gun, at its balancing point, was a socket that fitted onto a metal prong attached to the rim of the observer’s cockpit. There were several of these mountings, and Paxton practised shifting the Lewis gun from one to another, firing at an imaginary foe, then shifting again. It was cramped and awkward. He stopped for a rest and noticed that his final aim had been dangerously close to the propeller disc. He swung the gun further out. Now his aim crossed a bracing wire that ran from nose to wing. He avoided the bracing wire and found himself looking at the exhaust pipe, which rose vertically until it cleared the upper wing.

  After more experimenting he came to the conclusion that it was virtually impossible to fire forwards without hitting something. Firing sideways or downwards or upwards, you had to avoid the wings or the wing struts. You could fire backwards quite safely provided you took care not to shoot off your own tail, but that involved kneeling on your seat and aiming above your pilot’s head. And what if the enemy pilot failed to place himself where you could hit him? What then?

  Paxton looked around, and wondered who had put the gunner inside this birdcage of struts and wires and why he had thought it was such a bright idea. That was when he noticed the buzzard. He shouted and pointed, but Kellaway didn’t seem to notice. What dull company Kellaway was. On impulse, Paxton fired a short burst over the top of the tail. That made him jump!

  Kellaway gestured. “We nearly got bounced by a buzzard,” Paxton bawled. “Or maybe an Albatros.” He grinned. Kellaway didn’t hear or understand, but then, Kellaway was an idiot.

  The telephone awoke Milne. He felt a
s if he had slept for hours but it was only ten minutes. Sergeant Widgery told him his aeroplane was warmed-up.

  The mule Alice followed him as he walked to the hangars. “I wish I’d learned to swim.” he told the beast. “I wish I’d done lots of things. Wish I’d taken a chorus-girl to a champagne supper. Taken lots of girls to lots of suppers Wish I’d seen the Pyramids.” He returned a salute. “You ever seen the Pyramids, Jennings?” he asked, not pausing.

  “No, sir.”

  “Shame, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll learn to swim today, though.”

  His FE was ticking over, the wash from the propeller making the tailplane flutter. A mechanic stood by each wingtip. to help steer when he taxied out. The legs of the undercarriage stretched slightly as Widgery jumped down from the cockpit. The mule, disliking the noise, hung back. “No kit. sir?” Widgery said. “It’ll be chilly up there.”

  “I’m only going for a stroll. Want to come? Just for balance You won’t have to shoot anyone down. You can take a pot at a pheasant, if you see one.”

  They took off. Milne levelled out at three hundred feet. Two miles away he found a cavalry regiment in camp and he landed in the next field. The officers’ mess welcomed him. “Come to lunch, all of you.” he said. “We’re celebrating.” Jolly decent of you, they said. What’s up? “Don’t know yet.” he said. “I haven’t decided. Who else is around here? I want cheerful chaps, like you.” Well, they said, the Artists’ Rifles were just up the road. A laugh a minute, they were. Widgery swung the propeller and scrambled aboard, and they took off.

  *

  Kellaway had never flown through cloud, and on this morning he didn’t feel brave enough to start. The stuff seemed far too crisp and dense. When he looked to the west it was like being in a small boat on a stormy sea: whitecaps everywhere. He decided to get well above it and worry about getting down later.

  It worked. There was clear air above twenty-five hundred feet, a colossal amount of it in fact, reaching upwards and outwards for miles and miles to a sky that was so big and so blue it made his head swim if he tried to see it all. The sun was more than he could take: even with goggles on, his eyes watered when he looked eastward.