Spencer made two friends, one through coincidence and the other of necessity. The former was Flying Officer Frank Steyner, who was remarkable for his ability to cut himself off from his surroundings, either by sleeping or reading. Since boredom and apprehension made many of the men cranky and belligerent, and since the overcrowding aboard Diligent was chronic, the food poor, and the seas intermittently rough, this struck Spencer as an enviable talent. Unaffected by tedium, impervious to fighting and vomiting, Steyner inhabited his own little world in which order prevailed. He was a slim, pale, slightly prim-looking young man whose hair was already thinning at the front and sides, a physical type who at junior school might have wound up getting teased or bullied, but here there was something formidable in such innate composure. Spencer suspected he was way smarter than most of them. He was left respectfully alone.
But one bad day they wound up next to each other in the canteen. There weren’t many in the queue because Diligent was pitching and wallowing like a stuck pig and that had robbed most of them of their appetite. But there was Steyner, neat as a new pin, feet braced apart, hanging out one hand for the swill of mince, gravy and mashed potato and holding in the other a novel by the famous writer.
‘Mind if I join you?’ Spencer asked boldly.
Steyner glanced around.‘Put two Americans in a large half-empty room and they wind up rubbing shoulders.’
Spencer wasn’t sure whether this constituted a ‘yes’, so he added, indicating the book: ‘I’ve met him.’
‘You have?’
The note of interest persuaded Spencer to accompany Steyner to a table. ‘When I was a kid. He used to stay at the dude ranch outside my home town, in the early spring, to work.’
‘Would that be Buck’s?’
‘That’s right. How did you know?’
‘I’ve read a lot about him.’ Steyner put his bookmark in place and slotted the book between the middle two buttons of his shirt – you got in the habit in this weather of not just laying things down. He picked up his fork and began to eat, saying without rancour: ‘This is the filthiest goddamn food it’s ever been my misfortune to confront. So do you know about Lottie?’
‘She’s got a memorial stone halfway up the canyon. That’s where I met him.’
‘Mooning around?’
Spencer couldn’t be sure whether Steyner approved of the writer or not. ‘No, he’d come off his horse.’
This provoked an explosion of unexpectedly robust laughter. ‘You don’t say! The great outdoor hero himself thrown off by some old easy chair from a dude ranch!’
Spencer smiled modestly, pleased with the success of his story. ‘Not even thrown as a matter of fact – I think she scraped him off on a branch.’
‘Better and better!’ Still laughing, Steyner held out his hand. ‘Put it there. Frank Steyner, New York City.’
‘Spencer McColl, Moose Draw, Wyoming.’
‘A pleasure. Have you read any of his works?’
‘At high school. We read one of them in class.’
‘That’s right, you would – so appropriate for growing boys, so muscular, so straight down the line . . .’ Spencer was just beginning to appreciate Frank’s conversational weight and to enjoy his style, but he didn’t see why he should get away with too much.
‘I liked his writing.’
‘You and millions of others. He’s certainly doing something right.’
Spencer pointed at his midriff. ‘You’re reading him.’
‘I am. And he’s the perfect travelling companion, that I will say. A breath of good old fresh country air while cooped up on the ocean wave with our brave boys.’
Throughout this exchange Steyner had been eating, small, quick mouthfuls swallowed in a businesslike way without relish. Spencer had only managed a third of his, and was beaten. Steyner nodded at his plate.
‘You want that?’ He shook his head. ‘May I?’
‘Be my guest.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You bet ...’
Spencer watched, respectfully, as the food disappeared. When he’d finished, Steyner rose.
‘See you around. Spencer. We can talk life, love and literature.’
The second friendship, the one born of necessity, was with Brad Hanna from Moses, Utah, who was in the bunk above him and whose dangling arm, tattooed with a fanged serpent, and hand, holding a cigarette, became as familiar to him as his own. Brad was two years younger and a mechanic whose consuming passion was motorbikes. He was perhaps the only man left on board Diligent who still wholeheartedly believed the war to be nothing more nor less than a terrific adventure and (he was sure about this) an unrivalled opportunity for fraternising with grateful European girls. Brad’s unrelenting ebullience was something of a mixed blessing. He read his stock of comics and film magazines in strict rotation, and seemed to regard it as his social duty to share the pleasures of both with Spencer.
His opening sally was to hang head-down over the edge of his bunk and waggle the journal of the moment in Spencer’s face.
‘Hey, cowboy, take a look at this.’
‘What is it?’
Another waggle. ‘You ever see a pair like that? I mean, ever? You got any of that up in frontier country ’cos we sure don’t in Moses.’
‘I believe you.’
‘You know what I reckon?’ At this point Brad would do a neat sideways vault down from the top bunk – a hard trick since the next pair of bunks was only eighteen inches away – and perch on the edge of Spencer’s, flicking at the photograph with his middle finger. ‘I reckon it’s the clothes. You put a doll in duds like that, push some of it up and pull some of it in and get her to stand like she’s begging for it – everything looks good, know what I mean?’
Spencer thought, I’m twenty-one years old but this guy makes me feel old and tired. At the same time there was something soothing in this superabundance of cheerful good nature which needed neither pretext, attention nor approval in order to flourish.
All he had to say was: ‘You’re right. She’s no prettier than most of the girls back home,’ which would in turn be the cue for Brad to throw the magazine on the floor and yelp ‘Speak for yourself, buddy!’ or something like it.
‘In Moses a girl who looked like that’d be locked up, I’m tellin’ yer. You got a girl at home, cowboy?’
‘No.’
‘Damn’ right!’ Brad treated any remark of this kind as though it were an article of faith rather than a simple, factual response. ‘We got the whole of English womanhood waiting for us!’
If English womanhood was waiting, it was doing so discreetly and behind closed doors on the nright the fighter group arrived in Church Norton, Cambridgeshire. Gazing exhaustedly from the lorry, one of a roaring, rattling convoy transporting them from the station in the local market town, Spencer could scarcely begin to imagine their effect on this dour little place. The RAF had been here until recently, but they were the home team, and in much smaller numbers. This was a full-scale invasion, albeit a friendly one. It had been raining hard and though it had stopped now it was still overcast, and the windows of the houses were blacked-out: what with the darkness and the age and appearance of the cottages down the high street it was as though they’d travelled not just across the ocean, but back in time.
The women may have been lying low, but not the kids. They saw mostly young boys who should have been in bed – it was past ten o’clock – hanging out of windows and standing by the side of the road, cheering and waving and shouting ‘Hallo, mister!’ Outside the door of the pub, whose sign Spencer couldn’t read, there was a group of men who just watched them go by, though one of them did raise his glass slightly.
He could see the lorries in front heading to the left, and climbing slightly, and next thing they too had swung round a steep bend. There was a large building to their left, and Spencer could make out the silhouette of a stubby castellated tower with a rooster weathervane swivelling back and forth. He took this to be the church, and
assumed that the proximity of this to the pub meant they were in the middle of the town. But at once they seemed to be out in open country again and after another half a mile they pulled over and clambered down from the lorries, their boots smacking down into what would come to be the familiar thin film of liquid mud, slurry and engine oil that coated the roads around the airfield.
The other thing Spencer always remembered was the wind. It was an overcast night in high summer but the base seemed to have its own micro-climate in which it was always blustery. There was a faint farm smell, as though the land from which the airfield had been carved refused to be dismissed. The McColls had not been great churchgoers, but Spencer remembered something about swords being made into ploughshares – he was itching to start flying and bomb the bejasus out of the enemy, but that underlying smell served as a reminder that the idea was for a guy to work himself out of a job.
They were taken to the airmen’s quarters at Site 5, and Frank Steyner fell in next to him – Spencer hadn’t seen Brad since disembarkation.
‘Natives were reserving judgement,’ commented Frank in his dry-stick way.
‘Yeah . . . not exactly a tickertape welcome.’
‘Who can blame them? Who wants to be under an obligation?’
‘I guess.’
They entered a Nissen hut with two rows of narrow beds, lockers, a squat stove at the far end.
‘Honey,’ chirruped Frank satirically, ‘we’re home!’
* * * * *
The next morning it was fine, and a pearly light was already breaking at four a.m. when Spencer woke. His bed was near the door. He pulled on his boots and a sweater over his pyjamas, and went outside.
He drew a couple of deep breaths, stretching his arms above his head, and turning slowly through three hundred and sixty degrees. The airfield was like a stage set, primed and ready, half-lit, unpopulated, the far edges of it mysterious. To the north was the place through which they’d come last night; he could see the church tower like that of a miniature castle prodding through the surrounding trees. To east and west was open space, fanned by runways, some of them just pierced steel plating laid down over the farmland. Here and there clusters of Quonsett huts and low-rise buildings, the accommodation and amenities of the base – PX, stores, armoury, dormitories, latrines – enough for the several hundred airmen, officers, ground crew, cooks and clerks.
South was another small town, the church had a conical spire like a witch’s hat; another pub, presumably more urchins, more watchful local men, more retiring women . . . The brash sprawl of the base, with its long fingers reaching into the surrounding neighbourhood, must be twice the size of the sum of these two small, old places.
Something made him look over his shoulder. About fifty yards away, on the edge of the road they’d driven along last night, stood a small boy, straddling a pushbike. The MP in the guardhouse didn’t seem bothered. The boy raised a hand, and Spencer tipped his forehead back. The kids at least were friendly.
He walked down the side of the dormitory hut and emerged on the far side of Site 5. From here he could see the hardstandings.
And there she was: 8’ 8”; 7,125 lb; 37’ by 32’. Built to slice the air like a whip at twenty-five thousand feet. So new she hurt the eyes, so lean and smart she grabbed you by the balls . . . So beautiful that she squeezed Spencer’s heart.
‘Good aeroplane, eh, mister?’
Spencer glanced round: it was the kid, without his bike. ‘Yeah, looks that way.’
‘She’s a Mustang. You a flier?’ Spencer nodded. ‘You’re lucky, she’s yours.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘Is my team ploughing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?’
—A.E. Housman, ‘A Shropshire Lad’
Harry 1854
The last time Harry had seen Colin Bartlemas it was springtime at Bells, and his old friend’s face had been round and pink as an English apple, a picture of rude health and optimism on the day he enlisted. Now, in the furious summer heat of the Black Sea coast, that same face was shrunken and aged beyond recognition by the agony which had killed him half an hour since.
Colin’s body smelled, not just of the sickness, but of rotten flesh, so that Harry was obliged to put a handkerchief to his own face to prevent himself from gagging. Imperfectly cleaned through lack of time, a crusted delta of dried vomit spread from the corner of the dead man’s mouth, attracting a gluttonous squadron of flies: death breeding life, nature at her most brutally logical. Harry slapped briefly at the flies with his handkerchief but they were far too numerous and persistent to drive off. The burial party were watching him with dull patience. He signalled them to get on with it, and walked away.
The French, who had been the bearers of the cholera from Marseilles, had suffered worst, but with allied encampments crushed together in the port’s arid hinterland, the disease had swiftly and disinterestedly extended its empire and already the two armies had suffered tens of thousands of fatalities. Haughty, handsome young officers who, like Harry, had never smelt a whiff of gunshot outside ceremonial occasions; and indomitably cheerful fighting men, drunks, reprobates, petty criminals, the lionhearted salt of the earth – once cholera had taken hold all were reduced within hours to mere carrion, food for the humming hordes. Some poor fellows had arrived one day and died the next, barely aware of their surroundings. The practice of decent, dignified funeral parties, headed by trumpeters and accompanied by the playing of solemn music, had long since been abandoned, rendered impractical in the face of so much death. And besides, to hear the ‘Dead March’ continually throughout the day and night had a depressing effect on the spirits. In such pitiless conditions, swift and effective disposal of the bodies was of the essence.
And yet Harry found shocking the way each corpse – which only hours before had been a man of good heart and high hopes was wrapped, removed and buried. The ground was baked to the consistency of rock; it took as many as a dozen men working flat out for two hours to dig a communal grave. It was not uncommon to see at least one of them collapse while at their task, a victim either of sheer exhaustion or the early stages of the disease they were struggling to contain. Many areas, like this, were now covered with rough mounds of earth like macabre giant molehills and Harry averted his eyes from the occasional protruding hand or leg of some wretched, inadequately covered cadaver.
Here he did what he could never have imagined doing and thanked God for the manner of Hugo’s death and the peace, intimacy and dignity which had accompanied his funeral. And that led him to pray again as he so often did for Rachel, with tortured, passionate fervour.
Clemmie waited for him with head hanging. She did not acknowledge or welcome his arrival by so much as a twitch. When he put his foot in the stirrup to mount, and the saddle yielded and settled with his weight, she still did not stir. He looked back to where the burial party were already shovelling the desiccated sod back on top of the bodies. Even on the makeshift shrouds it made a rattling sound. His eyes smarted and he wiped away the sweat with his cuff. Tonight he would have to write to Colin’s parents and tell them that their eldest child and only son, the apple of their eye, had died bravely in his country’s cause without ever glimpsing the enemy. But not how. He would spare them the swift, convulsive horror of this death, the way it leeched the life from a man in his prime in no more than a few hours, leaving a husk that even a mother would scarcely recognise.
He turned Clemmie’s head and rode back towards the camp. Nothing was as they had expected. In these terrible circumstances he could no longer say with certainty whether or not it was a mercy that they would never see a charge.
Looking back on all they’d been through, it troubled Harry that perhaps the euphoria of departure had been occasioned by no more than a spilling-over of strong feeling from a bored nation thirsty for excitement. And they had been susceptible to it themselves, only too ready to lap up the babel of ad
ulation. They’d reached Varna without a shot fired except those mercifully expended on dying animals. It was almost forty years, a whole lifetime beyond the memory of the younger men, since a British Army had ridden out to war in Europe, sure as always of their greatness.
In the dead quiet – hideously apt expression – of this oppressive, flyblown, disease-ridden encampment, Harry was haunted by doubts. Stopped in their tracks, stranded and frustrated, doubt and depression settled on the army. Allied to the old enemy, France, and the courageous but untrustworthy Turks, and ranged against still-distant Russian forces of whose strength and precise location they were ignorant, for reasons that were unclear – although the pretext was the sinking of the Turkish fleet at Sinope – they sat here on the edge of the Black Sea, sickening and dying. Supplies were poor and sporadic, medical attention inadequate, and their future movements uncertain to say the least. He could not escape the impression that they had been sent here on a magnificent whim like roundshot from a gleaming cannon that had fallen dully, far short of its target.
Harry had so far escaped the cholera, but not the equally widespread and debilitating effects of worsening morale. Whatever they had been prepared for when they set sail from England almost three months ago, it had not been this. Pride, excitement, anticipation and (he admitted it) sheer ignorance had buoyed them up. There were some, both officers and men, who had seen battle in other theatres of war, but not many in the Light Cavalry. He had always considered himself able to stand aside from the more fatuous excesses of mess and parade-ground life, but now he realised, chastened, that he was no less spoilt and unthinking than his brother officers. He saw all too clearly that the Hussars had been for him a pleasant occupation in which the possibility of actually fighting a war had figured no more prominently than a distant flag, fluttering bravely in the sunlight. And when he had imagined battle it was the sound of the trumpet, the thunder of hooves, the much-vaunted élan of the Light Cavalry charge which he had envisaged. Instead there was this. This terrible inertia, sickness, hopelessness, uncertainty – and the heat. Both men and horses were entirely unprepared for it.
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