A Splendid Little War (12 page)

He gave his orders. “I want these officers armed and horsed. You are their escort. Any threat, bring them out fast.” They left. But the memories lingered.

Armed meant holstered revolvers. The mounts were Cossack ponies. The sergeant carried a leather whip; its thong was so long that the tip bounced in the dust as they rode. “You rather remind me of the American cowboys, sergeant,” Gunning said. “Herding cattle and so on.”

The sergeant thought about that. “This bleedin' country, if you'll pardon my French, sir. It's not like anywhere else.” That ended the conversation.

The city stank. The air was foul with the smell of unburied dead, both human and animal. This was not guesswork; Gunning and Lowe
could see the carcases, mostly blackened and bloated. More bodies were hidden in the ruins, releasing a stench that was as sweet as sugar and as sour as vomit. The officers held handkerchiefs over mouth and nostrils. Useless. Even the ponies tossed their heads and blew noisily, hating the air.

There was nothing noble about the ruins. The walls that stood were black with smoke. Those that fell were hillocks of rubble. Some streets were still burning. The sergeant followed what might once have been a broad avenue. Soldiers watched them pass. Some were wounded, some were drunk, some were both. Their uniforms were far from being uniform: tattered, filthy, a mixture of colours. Most were barefoot. All looked underfed. “Keep moving,” the sergeant said, and as he spoke a handful of women and children saw the visitors and ran towards them, shouting, pleading. Their rags were worse than the soldiers'. The sergeant cracked his whip at them, left and right, but they came on and the lash knocked a few to the ground. “Go!” he bawled. “Go, go!” Gunning and Lowe turned the ponies and whacked their heels against the ribs.

They stopped when they were outside the city, and let the ponies recover.

“The whip,” Gunning said. “Was that absolutely necessary?”

“They're starving,” the sergeant said. “If you'd given them a crust of bread, sir, ten thousand more of them would come out from nowhere and knock us all down. That's what hunger does, sir. Real hunger.”

They rode back to the aerodrome, thanked the sergeant and went to say goodbye to Colonel Davenport. They found him outside his office with Count Borodin, both men looking at five corpses laid out in a row, face up. All five wore the grimy, shapeless, sheepskin clothing of Russian peasants, with one small addition: red stars cut clumsily from cloth were pinned to their chests. “The two on the end are far too old,” Borodin said. “Even the Bolsheviks wouldn't conscript such grandfathers.”

“You're right,” Davenport said. “And if those cut-throats killed these two, they probably murdered them all.” He turned and stared at a pair of Russian men standing beside a farm cart.

“They want ten roubles per head,” Borodin said. “Fifty roubles. Not bad for a night's work.”

Lowe could still taste the stink of Tsaritsyn and he cleared his throat. Davenport looked and saw two well-brought-up young Englishmen whose faces were utterly empty of understanding. “Some idiot offered
ten roubles for every Red Army soldier brought to us,” he told them. “See the result. Civilians, all civilians. Russians kill their neighbours and pin a red star on them. If we pay, there will be more. If we don't there will be trouble.”

“Every Russian village has a feud,” Borodin said sadly. “It's our national industry.”

Davenport squared his shoulders. “Did you two find what you wanted in Tsaritsyn?”

“Yes, sir,” Gunning said.

“Interesting city, sir,” Lowe said.

“We really ought to get back to our squadron, sir,” Gunning said. They saluted and marched away.

“Five roubles a head, no more,” Davenport decided. “And I won't pay until those thugs have buried the bodies, here and now.” Borodin beckoned to the waiting pair. “For two pins I'd bayonet them both,” Davenport said. “That's what this country needs: a bloody good purge.”

“The Cossacks used to perform that duty for the Tsar,” Borodin said, “but in the end their hearts weren't in it.”

The mist dissolved and a soft sun gave the remains of the day an easy warmth. The steppe was changing colour: traces of red and yellow and blue could be seen in the distance. Wildflowers wasted no time here. Winter turned to summer with only a slight pause for spring.

Alongside the trains, some of the airmen were playing a casual game of football – the moustaches versus the clean-shaven. When the game began, Dominic Dextry had been exercising one of the Cossack ponies, riding bareback, and the animal enjoyed chasing the ball, so he declared himself referee. He was Irish, from County Cork, and he applied Irish rules to the game. The moustaches scored a goal but he disallowed it and penalized them for foul play. “That's ludicrous,” a moustache said. “Totally asinine.”

“Well, the ball was in an offside position, so it was.”

“Don't be absurd, Dominic. The ball
cannot
be offside.”

“It can in Ireland.”

“That's because there's too much Guinness taken, faith and begorra.”

“Nobody says begorra in Ireland, and I'll fight any man who says otherwise, begorra so I will, I will.”

“Your horse is eating our football, Dominic.”

“And after three hundred years of potatoes and English tyranny, can you blame the poor creature?” But the ball was too big for the pony's mouth and it lost interest. There was grass to be eaten. Football was amusing but grass was better.

Dextry slid off and lay on his back, looking at the sky. It was entirely a faded cornflower blue that wouldn't be allowed in Ireland, where there were always bully-boy clouds bustling in from the Atlantic. He snapped a stem of grass and chewed it. The pony moved its head and licked Dextry's ear, found it curious but tasteless, went back to real food.

Dextry missed Ireland, or some of it. He missed the talk in the Cork bars, always fast and funny and never two people agreeing on anything, so that an evening was better than a Dublin play. He missed the games, the Gaelic football that was something between havoc and homicide. And the sweet smack of a shinty stick. Shinty made English hockey look like badminton on the vicarage lawn. But his family had money and they had sent him to school in England, to Rugby school, where he was taught a more gentlemanly kind of football, even if his legs still had the scars to prove it. Every year he went home on holiday, and then one year he arrived to find the big old house in County Cork was a smoking ruin.

The English said the Irish liked a fight, and there were sixty thousand Irishmen in uniform in France, every one a volunteer, but Dominic discovered there was also a corrosive and undeclared war in Ireland which he had never suspected, and much of it was between Irishmen. He was sixteen. His family moved to Dublin and stayed with relatives. Dublin was a bleak and brooding place, not knowing whether to back the sixty thousand or to give the English a good kicking. Dominic left. He went to Wales and stayed with a friend from school, and tried to empty his mind of Irish bloody politics until the fight had burned itself out.

Another year at Rugby and soon he was eighteen, just. The Royal Flying Corps was glad to have him and he was glad to be in France. Should have been killed but beginner's luck, or the luck of the Irish, or some damn thing, saved him; and when all that careering a mile or two above the Trenches was over, he was glad to volunteer for Russia because
it was a long way from the bad blood still being splashed about the Emerald Isle. Russia promised good fun, good pay, good grub.

He let his eyelids close and he watched tiny gold specks wander about a primrose sea.

Griffin sat beside him. “Don't get up,” he said. “I'm ready for a gallop, but I've never been one for bareback. That's for the Red Indians.”

“Awfully slippery. I fell off, going nowhere.”

“Saddles. Cossacks have saddles.”

“We could ask. Tell you what. My
plenny
, Gladys, speaks a little English. We could tell him what we want and send him over to their camp.”

Griffin scratched his jaw. “Give him six tins of bully beef. Should buy six saddles.” He stood up. “Gladys? You did say Gladys?”

“Oh … I called him Jeremy at first, but it upset him. Very rude word where he comes from. He likes Gladys better.”

Griffin walked away and then came back. “Don't get too friendly with your
plenny
, Dextry. They're all ex-Bolos. Not safe. They jumped once. Might jump again.”

Half an hour later, Gladys came back with a Cossack who was driving a farm cart loaded with six saddles and bridles. Griffin looked them over. “Been in the wars,” he said. “Only to be expected. Saddle up three ponies. You, me and Gladys.”

They rode north, into the steppe. The saddles were small but so were the ponies, and the riders soon taught their legs and backsides to adjust. New and very green shoots of grass were already showing through the silvery-grey dead growth left by winter, and small flowers made spatters of brightness. It was easy riding: the land was never entirely flat, but its gradients were gentle. “Good tank country,” Griffin said. Dextry agreed. After that there was nothing remarkable to comment on.

Once, they came upon a hare and sent it bounding off. Dextry gave chase; the hare ran in wide circles and made fools of them. Once, they scared some partridge, which took off so fast that they were a camouflaged blur against the grassland. Then there was quiet again. The steppe was peaceful. Nothing broke its solitude: not a hillock, not a river, not a tree. Just grassland to the horizon. Dextry wished he could see a tree. A dead tree would do. Just a stump. Then they saw smoke.

It was a cavalry camp. Small, only about a dozen men. “Must be on our side,” Griffin said. “The Reds wouldn't dare show their faces so far
south.” He was right. The
plenny
went ahead and talked to their leader, and he came back and gave Dextry a smile. “Yes, good,” he said brightly.

They were offered vodka, and took it. The
plenny
whispered to Dextry, who said: “Really? Oh, jolly good.” He proposed a toast. “
Na Moskvu!
” Griffin said the same. Roars of applause. Big smiles. Much hand-shaking. All friends.

After that, things fell a bit flat. No more vodka, and not a lot happening. Gladys the
plenny
seemed quite keen on leaving. He brought the officers' ponies to them, which was a pretty broad hint. “Slow down, Gladys,” Dextry said. “No need to rush.”

“They had casualties,” Griffin said. “Over by the fire.”

They moved closer. The man on the ground was alive, but he was in a very bloody condition. Most of his face was damaged. Parts of his body were hurt; blood had soaked through his clothing and spread into the grass. His eyes were the only parts of him that were obviously alive. He watched the officers approach.

“Fresh wounds,” Griffin said. “We didn't hear any fighting. My opinion, he's been knocked about.”

The
plenny
took Dextry's sleeve and whispered again.

“Commissar,” Dextry told the C.O. “Apparently he's a commissar. Bolshevik politico attached to Red troops. I suppose these chaps captured him.”

“Is not your business.” A young cavalryman had come over and now he stood between them and the victim. “Please go.”

“Good English,” Griffin said. “That's a lucky break.”

“I was at school in Petersburg. We all learnt English. Listen when I say, this man is our business which you cannot understand.”

“Can't we?” Dextry said. “He's a prisoner of war and you're beating him to death.”

“For intelligence. To make him tell us secret intelligence. To help us defeat the Reds.”

“That's not war, that's savagery,” Griffin said. “You're supposed to be fighting for decency and you're acting like animals.”

“If the Red Army captures you,” the young cavalryman said, “they will do things to you far worse than we do to him.” He spoke so calmly that they had no answer. “All my family are dead. Father, mother, sisters, brothers, murdered when the Bolsheviks took power. Butchered. Thank you for your help, your guns, your money, but do not insult us by telling
us how to fight our enemies. Russia is not a tennis court.”

Gladys the
plenny
was alongside with the ponies. They mounted and turned to go. “At least, shoot the poor bastard dead and finish him,” Griffin said, and dug in his heels. They cantered away. They heard no shots.

After ten minutes, Griffin said: “I don't believe what that man said. He was lying. All that stuff about school in Petersburg. Too smooth by half.”

“It did rather run off the tongue.”

“There's a lot of desperadoes about. Deserters, bandits, that sort. The fellow they caught was probably a horse thief.”

“Law of the jungle.”

“Not our funeral. Nothing happened back there.”

“Nothing at all,” Dextry said. “Less than nothing. And that's an exaggeration.”

Count Borodin arrived alongside the Pullman trains in a Chevrolet ambulance hauled by two stolid oxen. His motorcycle was in the back. He honked the car horn and Lacey came out.

“We found this in Tsaritsyn,” Borodin said. “The Reds must have captured it in another battle. Slightly soiled.”

“It's been full of blood,” Lacey said.

“Half-full. It had a lot of worse things in it yesterday, but we left it overnight and the dogs cleaned it out. Many wild dogs in the city. It's a gift from General Wrangel. If your mechanics can make it go, it might be useful for your business trips.”

“Very thoughtful.” Lacey kicked a tyre. “Solid rubber.”

“Yes. No more annoying punctures. Go anywhere. Scoff at broken bottles, sharp nails, enemy bullets.”