A Splendid Little War (5 page)

“Prospects are poor, I'm afraid. Lenin and Trotsky say they won't cough up a kopek.”

“Then why are we in Russia?”

Another pause for thought.

“I remember reading a letter to
The Times
,” Sir Franklyn said. “Something along these lines: If we withdraw our forces now, we should be letting down our loyal Russian friends. We came to their aid once. They need us more than ever now.” He looked around. “Maybe it's the decent thing to do.”

“Honest broker,” Weatherby said. “That's us. Hold the ring. Give the real Russians a fair chance. How does that sound?”

“Simple comradeship,” Stattaford said. “Shoulder to shoulder. Guarantee a fair fight.”

Nobody could improve on that. “So we're doing the decent thing,” Fitzroy said. “I think the P.M. might like that. Thank you, gentlemen. Shall I ring for tea?”

Seven Sopwith Camels hung in the sky. Suppose a peasant, half a mile below, straightened his back and saw the ragged arrowhead and heard their faraway drone, it would be as meaningless as luck, as irrelevant as flies on a wall. Long before they faded to a tiny blur, he would have gone back to his toil.

Griffin was at the point of the arrowhead. He had almost lost the sense of going somewhere. Nothing changed, nothing moved, except the Russian landscape which drifted backwards like a vast drab carpet being very slowly unrolled, and even that never really changed. Griffin was not a deep thinker. War had discouraged deep thought: waste of time and effort, why strain your brain when it might be dead tomorrow? But now he glanced down at the unrolling carpet, always the same old pattern, grey and brown, the bloody endless Russian steppe, as bleak as the sky, and he couldn't shake off the foolish thought that this journey could last forever.

It was their fifth hour in the air, and he knew he was dangerously cold. When the R.T.O.'s lorries had taken his squadron to the airfield at Ekaterinodar, he had found seven Camels and a brigadier with fresh orders for him. “Fly your Camels to Beketofka, which is the aerodrome for Tsaritsyn. You can't miss it. Go east and follow the railway line for six hundred kilometres. There's a splendid little war going on at Tsaritsyn, you'll like it.”

“And the rest of my squadron, sir?” Griffin asked.

“Seven Camels is all we have. Your other chaps remain here until we can arrange something. Don't worry, you'll get them all.”

Griffin chose six pilots and told them the plan. “Get a good night's sleep. We're off tomorrow, after breakfast. Take a toothbrush, that's all. The lighter your load, the further she'll fly. So move your bowels too.”

“Six hundred kilometres, sir,” Hackett said. “Camel's range is two hundred, two-fifty with a big tail wind. Have we got a big tail wind?”

“Full tanks, cruising speed, watch your throttle settings,” Griffin said.
“We'll refuel twice. There are petrol dumps beside the railway.”

“Does each dump have an airfield, sir?” Jessop asked.

“No need. The entire Russian steppe is one long landing ground. That's what I'm told.”

Nobody crashed, but the steppe was no bowling green, and the Camels bounced hard on landing and rocked like tightrope walkers. The pilots refilled their tanks, emptied their bladders, ate some chocolate, took off and did it all again two hours later.

Griffin checked his watch. Open cockpits were essential, they gave you a good all-round view, but by God you paid for it. Today's wintry blasts were no worse than usual but five hours of them sucked all the warmth from a man's body and the cold numbed his mind. Cold could be a killer. After a while it made a pilot shrink inside himself and forget his surroundings, which might be a stalking enemy or a sudden snow-covered hill.

Griffin waggled his wings and they all climbed three hundred feet. Now he had their full attention. Stick forward, into a shallow dive. Nothing as exciting as this had happened since the second refuelling when Jessop took off and nearly hit a passing swan.

Griffin nudged the dive more steeply, and the wind in the wires stopped singing and started howling. A small Russian town drifted into his line of sight. Spectators! Good. The altimeter needle fell through a thousand feet and he let it sink to six hundred before he led the flight back up, stick held firmly against his stomach and his backside pressed into the seat as they soared into a loop. Briefly, he put his head back and looked down at little white faces clustered in the town centre. The Camel escaped from the loop and dived. The white faces scattered. “Don't panic,” he said aloud.
Probably never seen a loop
, he thought.
Or a Camel
. The flight levelled out at three hundred feet and got back on course. Nobody was warm, but nobody was sleepy, either.

Half an hour later, Tsaritsyn came in sight. A spur line took the railway to Beketofka aerodrome. A long train stood in the sidings, with steam up. There were canvas hangars, a windsock, several huts and sheds, a tented encampment, three lines of aircraft. A field next to the aerodrome was full of a cavalry camp. The Camels re-formed in line astern and prepared to land, and some people down there fired rifles at them and missed. Griffin cheered. After endless miles of empty steppe they had found the war again.

After the rough and bumpy fields where they had refuelled, Hackett was relieved to touch down smoothly on the turf at Beketofka, and he was pleased to see familiar faces in his ground crew. A sergeant fitter helped him down from the cockpit. “What have you got in the engine, Mr Hackett?” he asked. “Handful of marbles? Bag of rusty nails?”

“It's a dozen gold sovereigns, sergeant. If you can fish them out, you can keep them.”

A rigger was twanging a wire. He made a face. “I know,” Hackett said. “Wait till you see the rudder cables. Treat in store.”

Colonel Davenport was the camp commandant at Beketofka. His left sleeve was pinned up at the elbow, he wore the ribbon of a D.S.O. and his face was as lined as crumpled paper.

“I leave the flying to you,” he told Griffin. “I look after good order and discipline. Got my hands full keeping out those thieving Russians in the next field. Steal the laces from your boots if you don't kick 'em in the teeth first. Cossacks, you see.”

“I think they shot at us when we came in to land, sir.”

“Yes, they shoot at anyone they fancy. At Jews, especially. But that's none of our business. Now: you're here to buck up the White Army, right? So you report to General Wrangel. He's the big chief in these parts.”

“I thought we were under General Denikin, sir.”

“Denikin's C-in-C for the whole South Russian front. Wrangel commands his right wing, what they call the Caucasus Army. Mainly Cossacks. God help the Bolos if Wrangel's army gets inside Tsaritsyn. God help Tsaritsyn, for that matter.”

Griffin's hearing had nearly cleared after more than six hours behind a roaring rotary. “Do I hear artillery, sir?”

“After a fashion. Six out of ten shells don't explode. Dud fuses. But Russian infantry like to hear their guns going bang-bang … Come on, I'll walk you to your quarters.” These turned out to be the train. Half the coaches were Pullmans. “Believe me, it's by far the best digs you'll find in this benighted country.” Colonel Davenport pointed at a thin column of white smoke rising like a prayer from the locomotive, climbing through the chilled air, finally bending to the breeze. “Constant hot water. I wish I had that. I'm pigging it in a hovel.”

“Always welcome, sir. Merlin Squadron will be honoured.”

“Awfully kind. Here come two chaps you'll find essential.” Much saluting took place. Davenport said: “May I present Count Borodin. He's your liaison officer with General Wrangel. Speaks better English than I do.”

Borodin was tall and slim, under thirty, clean-shaven, sleek, in a uniform of soft green and grey, free from decorations. He looked like the kind of officer who carries the maps for a general. He said, “An honour, wing commander. General Wrangel sends his compliments. He looks forward to seeing your machines in action.”

“And I look forward to seeing his men biff the Bolos.”
Borodin, Borodin
, Griffin thought.
Where have I heard that before?

“And Sergeant Major Lacey runs your Orderly Room,” Davenport said. “With a certain flair not entirely found in King's Regulations.”

“Well, a Camel Squadron needs flair. Bags of flair.”

Griffin didn't like the looks of Lacey. Not tall enough for a sergeant major. Too young, and his uniform fitted him too well, he'd had it tailored, by God. There was something wrong with his eyes too. They looked calm and clever and a little bit amused. What in hell's name was there to be amused at? Nobody got to be a sergeant major by calmness and cleverness and laughing at things. “I shall depend on you to uphold the traditions of the squadron, Mr Lacey,” he said. Whatever the hell that meant.

“Yes, of course. I am also your Signals Officer, sir. I operate the radio. Messages have arrived from General Holman at the Military Mission H.Q. in Ekaterinodar, marked Urgent and Most Important.” Now there was a hint of a smile. He didn't talk like a sergeant major, either. He sounded like a bishop announcing a winning hand at whist.

“Lead on,” Griffin said.

The C.O. took the largest compartment in the Pullman coaches. It even had a bath. A silent Russian with a Mongolian face and the build of a 15-year-old boy gave him a whisky-soda and ran the bath, helped him out of his sheepskin coat and flying boots and would have undressed him completely if Griffin had let him. He retired immediately to a corner and squatted on his heels.

Griffin slid into the bath and let the warmth drive out the cold from his stiff limbs. His mind looked back at the tedious hours of flying since Ekat. He'd heard people talk of the famous Russian steppes. Now he'd
seen one. Flat and empty. And endless. Presumably somebody scratched a living down there. Dreary, dreary. He'd never understood what his father saw in agriculture, and he'd been happy to leave it to the old man.

His father, Henry Griffin, had inherited a corner of Leicestershire that was big enough to reach well into the counties of Rutland and Northamptonshire. His grandfather, Spencer Griffin had acquired this corner when he made an obscene amount of money out of guano, seagull droppings. He bought a small Atlantic island that was deep in the stuff, just when agriculture was booming and needed fertilizer. It was like shovelling up money. When the boom ended he bought land: farm after bankrupt farm. Farming didn't much interest him; in fact, compared with his triumphs in guano, nothing much interested him; so he lived in London, and had the decency to die at the age of forty-eight when he walked home in fog as thick as mushroom soup and caught pneumonia.

So his son got the farms. Now Henry
was
a good farmer, good enough to know eventually that his own son – John – had an incurably low threshold of boredom. Show him a field and it yawned like the prairie. So did young John.

He was a strong, cheerful lad but school was a mystery to him and forget even the thought of college. He was good at foxhunting and he joined the Quorn and the Belvoir, and enjoyed it. When there was no hunt, he was a dashing point-to-point jockey. He was twenty-two when war broke out. That was serious, but not as damned serious as what happened when his horse abruptly refused and sent him flying arse-over-tit into a pile of rocks. He broke an arm and a leg and several ribs.

They took a long time to heal. By then, the war was bogged down in the Trenches, so he joined a cavalry regiment. Good chaps, but no action. The only action seemed to be in the sky. Aeroplanes looked fun.

In 1916 the Royal Flying Corps took him – good horsemen made good pilots, everyone knew that – and, amazingly, he found something useful that he was very good at. An appetite for the kill helped. A fat slice of luck did no harm. And for the lucky ones, promotion was rapid.