A Splendid Little War (44 page)

Merlin Squadron's gypsy existence continued. Borodin heard from Denikin's staff of an abandoned Red air force field about five miles this side of Orel. Wragge got the flights in the air and in tidy formation, and they circled the woods where Hopton and Blythe probably lay: a farewell gesture. They followed the railway north and, surprisingly, Denikin's staff had forgotten their
vranyo
because the field was just where they said. Well, even staff officers tripped up occasionally.

The Nines landed. Wragge took the Camels onward to have a squint at Orel. They flew over great numbers of troops, guns, cavalry. Nobody was on the move. The railway was clogged with trains. None had steam up. Orel was safe for today.

The Camels took a good look at it from a thousand feet. Compared with Kharkov and Kursk, this was a small town with pretty little onion domes. The biggest building was the railway station. Orel was a quiet, civilized place where the citizens were too polite to fire guns at visiting aeroplanes.

The C.O. waved the other Camels away and dived hard, pulled out at little more than rooftop height and zigzagged across town, showed off with a vertical banking turn around the onion domes and made his exit on the other side. Some women shook their fists at him. He'd probably woken their sleeping infants. He climbed and picked up the Flight and they cruised home. No trade today. Maybe the Bolos had given up. What a swindle.

The train was on the move.

The adjutant, the doctor, Stevens and Lacey were playing whist in
The Dregs. The track was in bad shape, and as the train swayed, it jolted the needle back to the start of the gramophone record. “What is that curious music?” Brazier said.

“American ragtime,” Lacey said. “Henry sent it. It's by a man called Scott Joplin. The tune is “The Entertainer”. Joplin has been called the J.S. Bach of our time, but you don't think much of Bach, so you won't like Joplin.”

“On the contrary. His ragtime would make a good regimental march. Stick to ordering groceries, lad. That's your level.” He played his card and took the trick.

“Chef says we're nearly out of cheese,” Susan Perry said. “Can't you order some more?”

“I can order whatever you like,” Lacey said. “But will it arrive? We're five hundred miles from Taganrog. Any train not guarded by British troops is bound to be looted, probably by our allies.” He took the trick, and played a low club. “I can see your cards, Stevens.”

“They're dreadful, aren't they? I was hoping you'd feel sorry for me.”

“Play your six of clubs,” Brazier suggested.

“That card? It's got jack of hearts written on it.”

“So who has the real six of clubs?” Susan Perry asked. Nobody had. “What d'you want it to be?”

“Ideally, the ace of diamonds,” Stevens said.

She plucked out the card and played it for him. “Ace of diamonds, by majority vote.” The train jolted, and the needle jumped back to the start of “The Entertainer”.

“Maybe we can buy some Russian cheese,” Lacey said.

“It's foul.” Brazier trumped Stevens' ace with the two of spades and won the trick. “Inedible.”

“That's the second time you've played the two of spades,” she said. “This is my idea of purgatory – playing whist with a crooked pack and a batty gramophone record.”

“And to complete your suffering,” Brazier said as he tore up his two of spades, “Lacey reciting his poetry.”

“The C.O. thanked me for it,” Lacey said. “He told me the last four lines really hit the bullseye.”

“Remind us,” she said.

Lacey quoted:
“Nor law, nor duty bade them fight, Nor public men, nor
cheering crowds. A lonely impulse of delight, Drove to this tumult in the clouds.”

“W.B. Yeats,” Stevens said.

“One of my contributors. It sums up the squadron, according to the C.O.”

“Good for him,” she said. “I hope we never hear it again. But I fear we shall.”

Stevens played the four of diamonds, Lacey played the five. “Bloody officers,” Stevens said. “There's no justice.”

Count Borodin awoke to the sound of rifle fire. The noise came in irregular bursts, like the faraway crackle of burning stubble. Experience told him that the firing was more than a mile away, probably two miles, and the blackness said it was the middle of the night. He closed his eyes and guessed how many men were fighting. Perhaps two battalions. A small battle. The firing grew more intense and then faded and died. He went back to sleep.

At breakfast, the talk was all guesswork. “What d'you think happened, Count?” Jessop said.

“I think you have egg on your chin.”

“I know. I keep it there in case I get peckish later.”

Borodin ordered a pony to be saddled. He visited the staff train, came back and joined a meeting of the C.O. and the flight leaders. “There was a small Red attack during the night,” he said. “Several, simultaneously. All beaten off.”

“Where did they spring from?” Wragge said. “There were no Reds in Orel when we looked. Nobody fired a shot at us.”

“Wise restraint. If they fire at us, we bomb them. So they don't fire, and we go away.”

“The Huns learned that trick,” Oliphant said. “We bombed their cities at night and at first they were easy to find because when they heard us coming they turned on their searchlights, but then they realized they were advertising themselves so they stopped. Hid in the darkness. Not easy to find a blacked-out town in the middle of Germany. If we found it, of course, their searchlights came on and they chucked all kinds of filth at us.”

“Cunning buggers, Huns,” Dextry said.

“What are you saying?” the C.O. asked. “Orel's full of Bolos, hiding in back alleys, waiting to do their worst?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Moscow by Christmas,” Borodin said. “That's all everyone thinks of. Some of Denikin's people have even picked out the white horses for their triumphant entry.”

“Why not?” Oliphant said. “Denikin's made mincemeat of the Bolos.”

“Mincemeat, you say. Russians prepare many a hearty meal from mincemeat.”

“So what was last night's nonsense all about?” Dextry said. “The Bolos made a nuisance of themselves and then went home. Not very heroic.”

“Delaying tactics,” Borodin said. “Spoiled our troops' sleep.”

“Or maybe it was a last gasp.”

“We're guessing,” the C.O. said. “What does Denikin want us to do?”

“Ground-strafing,” Borodin said. “Targets of opportunity.”

“So he's guessing too. Well, let's get in the air. With any luck, someone will try to kill us.”

Wragge took the whole squadron, four Camels and four Nines.

From two thousand feet, Orel still looked peaceful. Still no burning buildings, no heavy machine guns chucking filth at the sky. No point in strafing something that might be a barracks but was more likely to be a hospital. Proves nothing, Wragge thought, even a hospital might be a hiding place full of Bolos. Or it might be an orphanage, and we'd end up strafing a hundred blond-haired blue-eyed boys and girls. Hard cheese. Teach them not to grow up to be ruthless Bolsheviks. And anyway they're orphans, nobody would miss them, so
nichevo
. And we'd
vranyo
Mission H.Q. and Denikin and say the Camels were returning enemy fire.

But Orel remained a picture of a market town drowsing in the midday sun, and the squadron cruised on, and soon Wragge's humane and civilized conduct was rewarded by the sight of two armoured trains, north of the town, not moving. Almost at once, the old familiar ink-blots decorated the sky ahead. One burst was close, and he felt rather than heard the rattle of shrapnel pocking his wings as he bucked through the broken air. He looked back and pointed at Oliphant, the Flights separated, and he led the Camels away in a long, shallow sideslip.

We have been here before, Oliphant thought. The Nines had moved wide apart as soon as the shelling began. From this height the armoured trains were very thin, no wider than strips of ribbon. The C.O. would want him to go in low, very low, to improve his bombing chances. That was how the Bolos got Michael Lowe. Oliphant searched the sky, half-hoping for three Spads to appear and give his Nines an excuse to dive hard towards home. No Spads. Black shell bursts marched towards him and forced a decision. A compromise.

He took his Flight down to a thousand feet and put them in line astern. A strong wind kept nudging him to the right. He crabbed to the left and hoped the correction would let his bombs drift onto the target. The old familiar tracer, red and yellow, was pulsing up, searching, racing past. Oh yes, we have been here before.

He bombed the first train, then banked hard to give his gunner a clear shot, and watched his explosions chase each other through the grass. He circled and watched the rest of his Flight have the same bad luck. Well, we tried. Oliphant looked up and saw three Spads arriving from the north. You're late. What kept you? Pink, with yellow flashes. Did the Reds repaint them every night? Or was there an endless supply? The Nines formed up and made haste for home. Slow haste. The bomber flown by Prod Pedlow and Joe Duncan had been hit. Their machine had lost a wheel, the last three feet of its lower port wing was gone, the rudder was trailing yards of fabric and the engine was streaming black smoke. Pedlow and Duncan waved to show that they were unhurt, but they were losing height and their speed was not much above stalling. The other Nines stayed with them, watched the Spads with one eye, and hoped the C.O. would keep the enemy busy.

Wragge did his best. His plan – to strafe the trains when the last bomb exploded – got scrapped. The Camels climbed hard. The Spads, very cavalier in their bright décor, had seen the Nines and were in a long dive to cut them off. By great good luck, Wragge's course would meet the Spads halfway. It would be a perfect interception: hammer the enemy broadside while he couldn't bring his guns to bear. The Spads saw it coming.

When the Camels were just out of gun-range, the enemy suddenly turned away and climbed, turned even more and came at them as nicely as a display at an airshow.

The Camels scattered. The usual madhouse began.

Dextry never flew straight. He saw flashing glimpses of a gaudy fuselage, got few chances to fire and by then he was looking at blue sky until a Spad wandered so close to him that he could smell the stink of its exhausts, and he fired one long burst at the cockpit, one single glorious battering burst and the Spad reared so that he saw the pilot's arms thrown up as if in surrender. Dextry used the Camel's escape, a hard right bank, and it was too slow. He flew into the Spad and buried his engine into its cockpit. Now the two aeroplanes were welded into one. The control column impaled itself in his stomach and the gun butts flattened his nose. Dextry knew nothing of this. In the instant when he went from a hundred miles an hour to nothing, the fuel tank behind him tore loose, smashed through his seat and crushed his spine.

The wreckage fell, slowly and awkwardly spinning. It did not burn until it struck the ground. The impact burst the tanks and the flames roared.

The scrap had ended. The other two Spads had gone back where they came from and the three Camel pilots had no appetite for pursuit. They went down and circled the crash until the big guns of the armoured trains chased them away.

They caught up with the Nines, by now down to a few hundred feet. They kept clear and tried to guess whether the broken bomber had enough speed to reach the airfield, and if it had, what sort of landing Pedlow would make on one wheel. They watched it tip sideways, at first gently, as if testing the manoeuvre, and then more boldly, until the wings were vertical and the aeroplane sideslipped hard.

From height, say from fifteen hundred or better yet two thousand feet, with ample space to pull out, the move would have looked smooth, even slick. From a few hundred feet, the best that could be said is that it was a quick death. The force of the crash crumpled the Nine as if it had been made of paper. It burned like paper.

Nobody hung about. Once you've seen one crash site, you've seen them all. And no amount of looking would improve this one.

Orel fell, without being pushed.

The town sent spokesmen, under large white flags, to say that the Red Army had all gone, were probably halfway to Tula by now, and Orel
was glad to offer every assistance to the splendid White armies, including a gala banquet in the town hall that very night.

An invitation to Merlin Squadron was politely declined. “Nobody feels like getting hilariously drunk,” the C.O. told the adjutant, “and we're not going to sing funny songs for the benefit of a lot of fat, over-decorated …” He couldn't find the right insult. “Fiascos,” he said.

They were in the Orderly Room. Lacey was filing his radio reports. “Strictly speaking, a fiasco is a total failure,” he said. “Originally a term used by Venetian glassblowers. If one of them blundered, he turned it into a flask, a
fiasco
. Perhaps the word you seek is
farrago
, which means—”