War Story

by Derek Robinson

  She had lost her pyjamas. “Not like that,” she said. “So who cares?”

  They got into bed and, as she had done when they lay on the boulder on the island, she sat astride his legs. At first he was worried about hurting his arm, but the act of sex turned out to be astonishingly easy. She did most of it; he just lay back and helped. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. The end felt like the way the sunset had looked. He was sorry when it was over.

  That feeling of sorrow gradually intensified. He closed his eyes. She was humming to herself, contentedly, as she moved about the room, and he resented her contentment because a sense of dejection and regret was beginning to grip him. “You really are an ace,” she said. “You know that?” He said nothing. He wasn’t an ace, and he took no pride in the stories he had told her. His kills were none of her damn business.

  “How did you get shot?” she asked.

  He levered himself up on the pillows. She was sitting at the bottom of the bed, still naked, brushing her hair. “Listen,” he said. “You don’t want to hear about all that stuff.”

  “Oh, but I do. Dahlias, geraniums, the lot.”

  “Most of it’s fairly …” For some reason he thought of O’Neill’s face the day O’Neill had said to him It only takes one bullet. Grief sank its tiny claws. “It’s a fairly bloody business.”

  “I’m tough, I can take it. Want a sandwich?” There was a tray of food and a bottle of wine on a bedside table.

  Paxton took a sandwich and bit into it. It tasted of nothing. He didn’t want to eat her fucking food. He put it back. “This is the closest you ever get to war, I suppose,” he said.

  She glanced at him sideways. “I’d get closer if I could.”

  Paxton watched her doing things to her hair. He looked down and fiddled with bits of loose bandage poking out of the sling.

  “Now what are you brooding about?” she said.

  That angered him. “D’you really want to know? All right, I’ll tell you.” Anger swelled, and he didn’t try to hide it. “I’m brooding about a man called Foster. He shot himself. Duncan got his head cut off. Milne flew slap-bang into an enemy machine. Ogilvy got badly burnt. He might be dead, he might not. Is that enough for you?”

  Silence, while she looked at herself in a hand mirror.

  “It’s no reason to sulk,” she said.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed, reached out, grabbed the hand mirror from her and threw it across the room. The glass broke. “Here comes your bad luck. Go and look in my lefthand tunic pocket. There’s a couple of photographs. Group photographs. You’ll recognise one of the group.”

  She got up and found the pictures and carried them to the light. “There’s no group here,” she said. “What’s the joke?”

  “It’s no joke. Look harder.”

  She looked again, searching the prints. Paxton heard her grunt with shock.

  “German crew,” he said. “Now you know what a flamer looks like after it’s stopped flaming.”

  She coughed, and swallowed repeatedly.

  “No point in being sick in here,” he said. “Not when you’ve got two dozen bathrooms.”

  “I’m not going to be sick.”

  “Perhaps you should.” He went and took the pictures from her. “What else would you like to know? There’s lots I can tell you. Mind you, I may be sick in the middle. I’m not as tough as you.”

  She put on a dressing gown. “I think you’d better leave,” she said. Her face was full of disappointment and disapproval.

  “Yes, I’ll leave,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to bleed on your patriotism.” He wasn’t sure what that meant. The words just came out.

  The car was waiting for him when he got downstairs. “Wonderful intelligence system you’ve got here,” he said to the maid. She didn’t understand and she didn’t want to understand. She simply handed him his hat and opened the door. “Perfect,” he said. “But then you’ve done it before, I expect.”

  A squadron party was roaring at the top of its voice in the mess when he got back.

  He went to his billet and lay on his bed and watched a couple of moths having a scrap with the naked lightbulb. It was a gallant battle, fought against overwhelming odds, a splendid example of heroism and devotion to duty, but in the end they made the supreme sacrifice. Sometimes the racket from the mess drowned the rumble and boom of the guns. Usually it didn’t.

  He got up and walked across the room and lay on the other bed, the bed that had been O’Neill’s.

  At midnight Kellaway came in with the new man, Lucas, both of them bedraggled and drunk. “Hullo!” Lucas said. “You’re on my bed, old chap.”

  “O’Neill’s bed. I’ll fight you for it.”

  Kellaway found that very funny. Lucas did not. He said: “Now look here, old man—”

  “O’Neill went west,” Paxton said, and scratched his crotch. “You’d have liked O’Neill. He wouldn’t have liked you, though.”

  Lucas stared. He stared so long that he swayed and stumbled. “This fellow’s a pig,” he told Kellaway. “An absolute pig.”

  “It’s a dirty job,” Paxton said,”but somebody’s got to do it.”

  Author’s Note

  War Story is fiction built on a framework of fact. The reader has a right to know which is which.

  All the technical aspects of the air war in the summer of 1916 – in particular the design and performance of the BE2c, FE2b and FE2d – are as accurate as I could make them. (For instance, the observer in the FE2d did in fact stand on his seat to fire a gun to the rear over the top wing and the tail.) Lieutenant Paxton’s age and standard of training when he went to France were quite usual; some new pilots were even younger and had logged even fewer flying hours. The fact that his journey took five days, and that three other pilots crashed on the way, may not have been common but it was certainly far from rare. (In 1917 Lieutenant A. S. G. Lee and five other pilots ferried six Quirks from St. Omer to Candas, a flight of about fifty miles. Lee arrived safely but three planes crashed on landing, one crashed en route, and one went missing. “I felt rather a cad not crashing too,” Lee wrote to his wife,“because everyone is glad to see death-traps like Quirks written off, especially new ones.”)

  Other details – such as the dropping of message-bags by enemy aeroplanes, the use of canvas ‘coffins’, the attack by a French pilot on a British machine – are authentic. And RFC pilots did return from patrols to play cricket or tennis, or to go swimming. Indeed, the contrast between life in a squadron and life in the trenches was startling. The latter was cramped and dirty, often wet, usually lousy. The airmen flew home to good meals and warm beds, to games, music and parties in the mess. Not that the average front-line soldier wanted to change places with an airman: he watched too many pilots and observers fall to their death.

  Which brings me to parachutes. Apart from balloon crews, nobody in the RFC wore a parachute. (The same was true of the German air force until the very end of the war.) The official reasons against the development of parachutes were many and varied. It was claimed that parachutes were too heavy; that in an emergency pilots would have no time to use them; that having a parachute would “impair a pilot’s nerve when in difficulties” (i.e. he would quit the fight); that there was no real call for parachutes; and so on. Those were the views of members of the Air Board, who were not in France and who did not fly. Pilots and observers in the RFC saw things differently. They knew how easily a machine could break up, even without enemy attack. Sudden death was one thing, but they dreaded being trapped in a falling plane. Nevertheless, in the first half of the war there was surprisingly little demand for parachutes. The existing models were bulky, and cockpits were small; they were heavy, and engines were not powerful. Pilots were reluctant to sacrifice performance for safety. Yet the horror of being unable to escape from a doomed plane – especially one that was on fire – disturbed many a pilot’s sleep. Nightmares were commonplace in
RFC squadrons.

  I have tried to get my facts right concerning the war on the ground. The preparations for the battle were lengthy and they included the kind of dress-rehearsal watched by generals (with white tapes to indicate the German trenches) described in chapter 11. Some troops were assured by their officers that the advance would be quite literally a walkover: they would stroll across No-Man’s-Land and occupy the German trenches without firing a shot. However, the army took the precaution of preparing mass graves, dug by civilian Chinese labour.

  There is ample evidence that Captain Brazier’s actions in compelling troops to fight by shooting one or two of them was not unique. The regiments and units that I have named did in fact take part in the battle of the Somme (although the cavalry found little to do). Pals’ Battalions were a feature of that army and they suffered very heavy casualties. The length, pattern and scale of the British bombardment took place as described.

  Then there is the account of the celebration of the Fourth of June by Old Etonians, in chapter 4.

  Maurice Baring, himself an Old Etonian, was private secretary to the commander of the RFC. In his book ‘Flying Corps Headquarters 1914-1918’ he quotes a friend’s letter, dated June 5th, 1917:

  ‘Last night there was an Old Etonian dinner at the Lord Roberts Memorial Hall. There were three hundred Old Etonians present. I knew about five by sight. All my contemporaries were Lieutenant-Generals. They sang, accompanied by the Coldstream Band, and after dinner everything in the room was broken; all the plates, all the glass, all the tables, the chandeliers, the windows, the doors, the people. A bomb raid was nothing to it. Lord Cavan presided, and made a very good speech in Latin.’

  I took the liberty of shifting that event from England to France, and from 1917 to 1916, but I tried to keep intact the spirit of the occasion, which seems to me to suggest an upperclass appetite for violence and an educated taste for devastation that is often forgotten nowadays. Perhaps it goes some way towards explaining why that war went on so long.

  The verses quoted in chapter 18 (‘A year ago, at Henley’) were written during the war; I do not know the author’s name.

  Finally, I should make it clear that the newspaper items which Paxton quotes in chapter 21 are not invented. All the reports appeared, word for word, in English newspapers in the days after the battle began. By a curious twist of events, the men at the Front often relied on those papers for news of the battle as a whole, but the papers could report only what the War Office told them. Thus the soldiers read of victories while they witnessed disasters.

  We know now that the first day on the Somme took place almost exactly in the middle of the war. It certainly formed a watershed: it was the worst day ever for the British Army, with nearly sixty thousand casualties, of whom twenty thousand were dead, most of them in the first hour of the attack. The men of the Royal Flying Corps, living just a few miles behind the trenches, were not to know about that. Only they could see the entire battlefield, but even they could not see the tragedy.