A Splendid Little War (10 page)

“Like brothers,” Lacey said. Brazier gave a snort of derision. He was a large, square man with a hard, muscular face, and his snort was strong. “Please,” Lacey said. “You'll frighten the horses in the next field.”

“A year ago, I was adjutant to a bunch of ruffians called Hornet Squadron,” Brazier said. “Lacey was my Orderly Room sergeant. He was spoiling the pilots with luxuries, it was all totally illegal, and his peculiar rackets got both of us sacked and sent to the Front Line.”

“Luxuries,” Oliphant said. “What sort of luxuries?”

“I can't remember them all. English pork sausages were one. Also high-proof gin and rum. And coal, we were getting double our ration of coal. Honey. Cotton bedsheets. Lacey wanted silk, but I put my foot down. Canadian bacon. All wangled. Pinched. Fruits of fraud.”

“None of it was for profit,” Lacey said. “I did it for fun. War can be awfully boring. And those pilots weren't with us very long, were they? While they survived, the least they deserved was soft toilet paper. The official issue was just like onionskin.”

“We ran out of coal on my squadron,” Oliphant said. “Last winter of the war. Bloody cold, we were. We froze on patrol and we froze when we landed. One chap got frostbite. Who was that? Parker? Barker? Doesn't matter. He wasn't around for long.”

Brazier grunted. He didn't care about casualties. They were the small change of battle. “Anyway, here we are again, Lacey and me, back where we began,” he said. “And if you mention the fortunes of war, Lacey, I'll box your ears.”

“We're not exactly as we were, are we?” Lacey said. “
Carpe diem
. Opportunities came my way and I climbed the greasy pole of rank while you were hammering the Hun. I heard you got killed.”

“Lightly shot in several places.”

“Possibly by your own men.”

“Possibly. They wanted to retreat. I didn't. I shot a couple, the rest saw reason and I got a Military Cross out of it. Medals are cheap. But peacetime soldiering isn't for the likes of me. So I volunteered for this show instead.”

“Very wise. And we have wonderfully soft toilet paper.”

“Damnation. Almost forgot.” They halted. “Mission commander asked me to tell you that you're commissioned. God help us. Acting Pilot Officer Lacey. How did you wangle that?”

“I have done some service to the State,” Lacey said. “Did you hear of the unsavoury affair of the general's wife, the blond gigolo, and the gallon of gelatine?”

“No thanks.”

“Nor shall you. I wiped that particular slate very clean.” They walked on.

Griffin came out to meet them. “When will your bombers be ready to operate?” he asked.

“Well, not before tea,” Oliphant said. It was a joke, but the C.O. stiffened and he stared as if Oliphant had belched at a royal wedding. “As you can see, sir, our machines haven't been unloaded yet,” Oliphant said. “If the mechanics work overnight, some might be flyable early tomorrow. Maybe breakfast-time. It depends.”

Griffin prodded him in the chest with his swagger-stick. “Get this straight. We have a city to capture. You can forget tea and breakfast. We're fighting a war. First light tomorrow I want you bombed-up and ready for take-off. No excuses.”

Oliphant took half a pace back to escape the prods. “Yes, of course, sir. This is Captain Brazier, by the way.”

Griffin ignored Brazier. “Bomb the Reds. Bomb the bloody Reds. Bomb the blighters around the clock. No quarter, no mercy. Blow the Bolsheviks off the face of the earth.”

They watched him stride away. “Quite keen, isn't he?” Oliphant said. “Almost brisk, at times.”

“It's the smell of cordite,” Lacey explained. “Highly intoxicating.”

“You wouldn't know cordite from custard,” Brazier said.

“Chef makes very explosive custard,” Lacey said. “Put too much on your Spotted Dick and it'll blow your socks off.”

“More tosh. I wish I'd taken you with me to the Trenches. A month with the infantry would have knocked the tosh out of you.”

They walked on. What a funny war, Oliphant thought.

Oliphant's Flight had six bombers, but he had brought ten pilots and ten gunners. Extra men had turned up at Ekat, and from what he had seen of action in France, he knew there would be wastage ahead. No point in having a machine without a crew.

The newcomers crowded into the Pullman bar-dining-room for tea, and were impressed to be offered hot buttered crumpets, even if these were square. “Chef hasn't quite got the knack of it yet,” Lacey said. “Have some strawberry jam.”

“We've been living on Russian bread and potato soup,” Oliphant said. “Allegedly potato. Tasted like turnip to me.”

“Chef does a very acceptable Gratin Dauphinois. And his Gratin Pommes de Terre Provencale is improving rapidly.”

“He can't cook a cheese omelette,” Captain Brazier said. “No cheese in it.”

Lacey shook his head. “Russians. Hopeless. Square crumpets, and then a cheese failure. Chef shall be shot.”

Brazier sipped his tea and studied Lacey. “You were never much of a soldier, were you? More of a grocer's assistant in uniform.” He was six inches taller than Lacey, and his voice had the hard edge of command. “Now you're suddenly a pilot officer who can't fly an aeroplane. Promoted from grocer's assistant to grocer. Nothing to boast about, is it?”

Lacey had no answer and he was smart enough to keep quiet. Oliphant looked from one to another and told himself that this was not his quarrel. Then Count Borodin came in and said that he had brought a squad of
plennys
for the new Flight. They all went out to see. “Golly,” Oliphant said. “Shaven heads. And not the glimmer of a smile. Are you sure they're on our side?”

“Treat them as batmen,” Hackett told him. “Give one of them a tin of bully beef and he's happy as a pig in shit. Just don't salute. It makes them jump like nuts in May.”

“That's meaningless,” Wragge said. “You don't find nuts in May. Nuts mature in autumn. Everyone knows that.”

“Not in Australia, chum. My best friends were nuts, and they were nutty as hell in May. You see an Aussie nut in May, stand aside.”

Brazier pointed at the biggest
plenny
. “I'll have him. What's his name?”

“Rapotashnikov,” Borodin said. “But you may call him Nigel.”

One by one, the DH9s took off and circled the airfield. The Camel pilots came to watch.

The bombers were single-engined biplanes, with a crew of two:
nothing special about the design except that the machine was almost twice as big as a Camel. Its wingspan was forty-two feet; the Camel's was twenty-eight. In a Camel, the pilot could sit in the cockpit and talk to his mechanic, face to face. Not in a DH9, which stood more than eleven feet high to the upper wing. Fully loaded, it weighed over a ton and a quarter, including a pair of 230-pound bombs carried inside its bomb bay and smaller munitions hung under the wings. That was why the wings were so long: they provided the lift for this load. What the Camel pilots were most interested in was the engine that dragged this beast into the air.

The Camel had a Le Rhône rotary, a short-assed job where the cylinders spun in a ring and carried the propeller with them. It was as light as an engine could be, and very compact, so that the pilot sat close to the nose. There was barely enough room for the twin Vickers machine guns between him and the propeller. This arrangement made the Camel highly manoeuvrable. It could jink like a swallow and turn on a sixpence, all from 110 horsepower. But that pull would scarcely make a DH9 taxi, let alone get it off the ground. It needed the Siddeley Puma, which had six big cylinders arranged in line, like a truck engine. The Puma was so hefty that there wasn't enough room for all of it inside the body of the aircraft: its uppermost length poked out, exposed to the air.

This was good for cooling, but no help to a pilot who was trying to look ahead. Still, the engine made 230 horsepower, twice the little rotary's output, power that was needed to haul the bomb load through the sky. It made heat as well as heft, and the designers had added a novelty: a radiator placed just in front of the wheels, which the pilot could lower to catch the slipstream if the Puma began to overheat. So, alongside a Camel, a DH9 was a lot of aeroplane. It needed twice the take-off run before it came unstuck.

Griffin watched one as it slowly and grudgingly made height. “Pumas,” he said. “You couldn't get Rolls-Royce Eagles?”

“We took what they gave us, sir,” Oliphant said. “These Nines got flown in from Salonika, just as you see them.”

“Nines. Is that what you call them?”

Oliphant shrugged. “Everyone does.”

“Sounds like you're selling shoes. Ladies' shoes.” They watched a bomber drift down and land. Its engine was misfiring and burning too much oil. “That's Tommy Hopton,” Oliphant said. “Good effort. He couldn't have seen much grass through that muck.”

“Pumas stink.” Griffin turned his back on them, “Air Ministry's gone and dumped its duff junk on us. Surplus to requirements, send it to Russia. Quick way to lose a headache without spending money. Thoughtless bastards.”

“I'm sure the troops can make the Pumas work, sir.”

“Are you? I'm not. There's one way to find out. Tsaritsyn hasn't fallen yet. That's your target. Get bombs on target
now
. You can crash on the way home if you want.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And drop the sir. I'm not here to be buffed up like a brigadier's buttons. I'm here to win.”

Tommy Hopton taxied back to his ground crew, and Oliphant went to meet him. “Sounded like a cracked cylinder head, Tommy,” he said.

“Felt like a burst valve spring. Smelt like grim death.”

“Bust exhaust pipe,” his gunner said, and coughed hard. “Maybe both pipes,” he wheezed.

“Otherwise it's a good, strong bus. Does what it's told,” Hopton said. “Pity about the Puma.”

“We'll knock it into shape.” That was all balls. He knew it; they knew it. Move on, move on. “See that smoke on the horizon? Tsaritsyn. We're going to bomb it if we have to crawl there on our hands and knees. Otherwise the C.O. will burst into flames.”

They turned and looked at Griffin, who was kicking at weeds. Hopton said, “He's not a happy man, is he?”

Wragge had joined them. “The skipper may not look happy on the outside,” he said, “but I can assure you that deep down inside he's as miserable as sin.”

“What's the Red defence like?” the gunner asked. “Are their fighters any good?”

“None. Frankly, it's not much of a war for us. Either the Bolos haven't got an air force or someone's lost the key to the hangar door. It's very dull up there. My advice to you,” he told the gunner, “is to take a good book. That's what I do.”

He left. “Camel drivers,” the gunner croaked. “All piss and wind.” His throat still hurt from that godawful exhaust smoke.

It was midday before the Nines were ready to fly, and by then Tsaritsyn had fallen.

Count Borodin brought the news. He said that the remnants of the Red Army were in full retreat, flooding out through the northern gates of the city and fleeing panic-stricken by rail, boat and foot. “Actually, Tsaritsyn has no gates,” he said, “and the remnants are too tired to flee at any great pace. All the trains and the boats left yesterday, full of officers. Which leaves the poor bloody infantry on its poor bloody feet, as usual. But, for the purposes of Wrangel's bulletins, the remnants are fleeing panic-stricken through the gates etcetera.”

“Good. We'll bomb them,” Griffin said.

“Yes, he'd like that. D'you know, it makes a change for me to be on the winning side. The last time was three years ago, and the fleeing remnants were only Bulgarians, so they don't count. Is it possible for me to come along and watch?”

“Can you fire a Lewis gun?”

“I was a pilot in the Tsar's Imperial Air Service. I can hit a squirrel in the eye at one hundred yards.”

“Just shoot the fleeing Bolo remnants in their fleeing Bolo backs.” Griffin didn't smile. Carnage was a serious business.

The land north of Tsaritsyn was not steppe. It was broken by hills and ravines that appeared and ended for no apparent reason. The railway followed the easiest route along valley floors, and so did the retreating Red infantry. It was not an organized retreat. Clumps of men who had fought together now walked away from the defeat, too tired to run. Why run when the next town, Kamyshin, was a hundred miles away and the first real stronghold, Saratov, two hundred beyond that? Then the bombs began to fall.

All but one of the Nines had taken off. They circled the airfield, climbing to three thousand feet and making hard work of it, before they
headed for Tsaritsyn, where a few of Wrangel's triumphant troops fired at them out of high spirits, and missed.