Hornet’s Sting (38 page)

Drinkwater was filthy, and cut about the head and legs. A squad of Pioneers got a rope on the wreck and dragged it and him out of the bog. After that he remembered a middle-aged doctor, a glass of rum, and a deep cellar. An open-truck railway train came along and took him on a dark journey. It was like travelling on the London Underground, except it was different. He climbed a lot of stairs and was put in an ambulance. Then he was at Gazeran, being looked at by Dando. When Dando had finished, the adjutant questioned him about his patrol. “It seems you got Archied,” Brazier said.
“Was anything else noteworthy?”

Drinkwater shook his head.

Routine patrol
, Brazier wrote. “Don't you remember the tunnel under Arras?” he asked.

“Why did they do it?” Drinkwater whispered. The doctor's stitches showed up stark black against his chalky face.

“That's obvious,” Brazier said. “They did it to get the troops to the Front without being shelled by the Hun. The Hun blew Arras to blazes, but he couldn't touch our lads safe down below. And now we get the wounded out in the same way! Lucky you, eh?” He strode away. The door banged.

“I should have crashed the Pup,” Drinkwater whispered. “Crashed it on the guns.”

Dando slid a needle into his arm. “Count to ten,” he said.

“More than ten.” Now Drinkwater was anxious. “At least sixty. I counted sixty ...” His eyes closed. The needle came out.

* * *

The experts had gone off to consult other experts. Cleve-Cutler had a free morning. “Good,” Dorothy said, at breakfast. “You can come with me to Hammersmith.”

“Hammersmith? That's an awful hole.”

“My chums at the War Office don't think so. They've given me a frightfully secret job in Hammersmith. Go and fetch Tommy. He must come too. Otherwise he'll just skulk in his room.”

Cleve-Cutler climbed the stairs. He was sexually content, and full of bacon and eggs, and rested by a good night's sleep; so his mind was relaxed and free to let the pieces of the puzzle drop into place almost without his knowing it. He tapped on the door and Tommy Blanchflower opened it. “You've deserted, haven't you?” Cleve-Cutler said.

Tommy was barefoot, and his toes were plucking at the linoleum. “Not really,” he said. “I'm just a bit late. Lost my train ticket.”

Cleve-Cutler went inside. “How late?”

“Um ... two weeks.”

“Then the military police are out looking for you, old chap. Anyone who overstays his leave by two weeks is a deserter in their books.”

“Didn't overstay my leave.”

Cleve-Cutler sat on the bed and waited.

“Didn't take any leave.” There was a hint of defiance in the voice. “Did a bunk. Walked out. Got a train.”

“Then you're definitely a deserter. And you can't spend the rest of the war hiding in here.”

“I'm not going back
there.”
Tommy sat on the floor. He used the minimum effort: just let his back slide down the wall.

“It's your best chance. Go and apologize to your C.O. Tell him ...” He stopped because Tommy had slumped further, until his elbows rested on the floor. “Not going back,” he said.

“I see. In that case, stop being so bloody Russian and tell me exactly what went wrong.”

“Cub-hunting. I was in the mess one night and the chaps got a bit bored and decided to go cub-hunting. You know what that is?” Cleve-Cutler nodded: it was a kind of hide-and-seek played by young officers, an excuse for noise and bullying and broken furniture. “They made me the cub. I'd seen what they did to the cub if they found him too easily. Put boot-blacking on his balls, that sort of thing. So I found a very good hiding place. Too good, because they never found me. Bad mistake. I heard them getting more and more annoyed, and drunk, and I didn't dare come out. In the end I had to use the lavatory. Everyone had gone. I sneaked back to my room and they'd made an apple-pie bed. So I walked out.”

“For an apple-pie bed? For a joke?”

“It wasn't a joke.” Tommy hooked his big toes together and watched them wrestle. “They despised me. Ever since I told one of them I didn't want to go to France, and he told the rest, they were all against me.”

Cleve-Cutler took a moment to consider that. One possible question was: why apply for a commission if you don't want to serve your country? But he knew the answer. Conscription at eighteen meant Blanchflower would be in uniform whether he liked it or not. Everyone went. “France isn't so bad,” he said. Not so good, either, he thought.

“That's not what my brother said in his letters. He hated it. Got killed a year ago. A cousin got killed too. Knew it would happen. Said so.”

“They died for England,” Cleve-Cutler said. “What better sacrifice
can a man make?” His hand covered his artificial grin.

For the first time, Tommy looked him in the eyes. “They didn't sacrifice their silly lives,” he said. Something like contempt was in his voice. “Other people organised their deaths. Will you go back to France and sacrifice your life?”

“Not if I can bloody well help it.”

“So we're agreed.” That was that. Nothing more to be said.

They went by cab to Hammersmith, through steady rain that was flecked with sleet. Dorothy chatted easily, mainly about racing. The men did their conversational duty, but Cleve-Cutler was considering the fact that, by not having a deserter arrested, he was himself committing a crime. It didn't worry him so that was something else to wonder about.

The cab stopped at a large brick building, once a commercial laundry, now requisitioned by the War Office. “This is where the generals have asked me to do my bit,” she said. “It's where the losers come to collect their winnings.”

An elderly sergeant took their names and led them into the main hall. It still smelt of soap and flatirons. Sitting on benches, waiting with the skill of soldiers who have learned to wait, were about a hundred amputees.

“Now I begin to understand,” Cleve-Cutler said.

“I have no medical qualification,” she said, “but I can give hope.”

An elderly doctor introduced himself. The hall was divided by canvas screens and there was a constant traffic of bustling nurses and men who would never bustle again. “I've got a rather interesting chap for you to meet,” the doctor told Dorothy. “No legs, but what a heart! Name's Miller, so you can call him Dusty.” He took them to a canvas cubicle, waved them in, and said, “I'll be back in half an hour.”

A young man sat in a wheelchair. He had the milk-white skin that goes with red hair. His face was young and his eyes were old. He was holding an artificial leg as if it were made of glass.

“Thank God! A good-looking man at last,” she declared. Without taking her eyes off Miller she said, “You two, toddle off, make yourselves useful. Vanish!”

The elderly doctor was waiting for them. He was bald and broad, with a cheerful mouth and untrusting eyes. “Let me give you the guided
tour,” he said. “We're rather proud of the Hammersmith Factory. Treating the limbless has made great strides lately.” Cleve-Cutler glanced sharply, and saw no sign of irony. “Here's a lucky chap.” They looked into a cubicle and saw a man whose right arm had been amputated above the elbow. “Today's the day he gets a new arm. Let me see the stump ...” It was rounded and red as an apple. The doctor stroked it. He was a craftsman searching for rough edges, bodged workmanship; and finding none. “Do you still miss it?” he asked.

“Yes sir. I can feel it wanting to pick things up.”

They moved from cubicle to cubicle: a man without a foot, a man without half a leg, without two-thirds of a leg, without both forearms. Lieutenant Blanchflower asked the doctor quiet, intelligent questions. Major Cleve-Cutler grunted occasionally and looked nobody in the eye. He wanted a drink. The doctor, pleased to have such an attentive audience, spoke about the problems of shattered joints and ravaged muscles. “Just last week,” he said. “I found this in a patient's buttock.” He rummaged in a pocket and produced a jagged bit of shrapnel, the size of his thumb. “That's what's wrong with this war, if you ask me.”

Blanchflower did ask him. By now Cleve-Cutler wanted a large drink.

“Your biggest enemy in the field is not the Hun,” the doctor said. He had stationed himself where he could watch the shuffling come and go. “Your biggest enemy is a tiny organism,
Clostridium welchii
, which lives in the intestines of animals and is transferred to the fields in the usual way.”

“Dung,” Tommy said.

“Quite so. Most battlefields were farmland, so
Clostridium welchii
is abundant. A soldier struck by a shell-splinter falls to the ground, gets his wound dirty, and infection follows as night follows day. Unless the damaged tissue is soon excised, gas gangrene sets in.”

“Not in the Royal Flying Corps,” Cleve-Cutler said firmly. The constant parade of stumps was making him queasy.

“Peritonitis and septicaemia are the airman's foes, in my experience. If shrapnel penetrates the abdominal cavity, or a bullet impels fragments of uniform into the body, especially if it impacts with bone —”

“Good Lord. Is that the time?”

“My grandfather was a surgeon at the battle of Waterloo,” the doctor said. “He told me that the lance, the sabre and the musket-ball
made the cleanest wounds a man could wish to see.”

“Oh God,” Cleve-Cutler muttered, as another amputee lurched past on crutches. “This is a dreadful place.”

“There's nothing more stupid than a shell,” the doctor said.

“It makes a chap think,” Tommy said.

“I'll meet you outside,” Cleve-Cutler said, and left without shaking hands.

He had to wait forty minutes until Dorothy and Tommy came out. “Aren't they doing splendid work?” she said.

“Don't ask me. This place is a chamber of horrors. It's worse than a zoo. People could pay sixpence to go in and throw buns at the limbless.” His anger surprised her, so he persisted. “Christ knows it's hard enough to fight a war without coming home to this kind of freak show. It's obscene.”

“Goodness.” She widened her eyes. He realised she wanted to hear more.

“Told you Hammersmith's an awful dump,” he said. “Look at the rain! We'll never get a cab.”

“Poor Hugh. Never mind, here comes a nice big bus and it's going our way, what luck.”

“Bus?” Cleve-Cutler hadn't travelled by bus since he'd left school. They got on. It smelled of shag tobacco and sweat. “I missed breakfast,” Tommy said. “I hope you can pay for lunch.” Cleve-Cutler said:
“What?”
The bus moved off. “Well, I'm jolly hungry,” Tommy said.

“Where to, guv?” the bus conductress said. Cleve-Cutler turned, amazed that a second-lieutenant would cadge lunch off him. “What?” he said.

“Where to, guv?”

“Taggart's Hotel.”

The conductress raised her eyes to heaven. Dorothy said, “Here, give me some money.”

He felt better when they reached Kensington and got off the bus. “I apologise,” he said. “Inexcusable remarks. Must have been a bit liverish.”

“Champagne's good for the liver. We'll go to Studley's.”

“Claret's awfully good, too,” Tommy said.

“Shut up, you. And call me ‘sir'.”

“Claret
is
awfully good,” she said. “We'll have lots of claret.”

Lunch was, if not happy, at least convivial. He watched her and thought she must be the only person in London who was not troubled by the war, who actually looked forward to each day and enjoyed it. He found her buoyancy irresistible, infectious. When he took a cab to the War Office, he had to remind himself why he was in England. He was frowning as he walked into the meeting room. It was empty, except for an R.F.C. captain who was looking out of a window. “O'Neill!” he said. “Who let you in? This is no place for a thug like you. And where's my meeting?”

“I work here, sir. And your meeting's been cancelled.”

They took stock of each other. They had not met since the summer of 1916. Both were survivors, in their different ways. Looks ten years older, Cleve-Cutler thought. Lost weight, O'Neill thought. “Colonel Bliss telephoned,” he said. “The Committee of Inquiry is scrapped. New tactics for the Bristol Fighter. Close-formation flying and crossfire are out. The machine is now flown offensively. The pilot attacks —”

“That bastard Woolley's behind this, isn't he?”

“Bliss didn't say, sir. He just said your squadron has flown the Biff like a single-seat scout and got good results.”

“Bastard. Right! I'll soon get back and sort him out.”

“One other thing.” O'Neill waited until the C.O. was looking at him. “You are commanded to represent the squadron at a memorial service in Westminster Abbey for Lieutenant Simon Savage, M.P.”

“When?”

“One week from now.”

Cleve-Cutler thought hard and remembered what Savage had looked like. Bliss was right, of course. The Corps had its enemies in Government; it must put on a show, make friends, win votes. Savage would be a hero at Westminster Abbey; his C.O. must be there. “What about the battle?” he asked.

O'Neill shrugged. “We're not losing. We're not winning, either.”

Cleve-Cutler rapped the table until his knuckles hurt, and he stopped. “On and on and bloody on. It's got so I wouldn't know a victory if I saw one.”

* * *

Arras was a brutal slog, in the air and on the ground. Most R.F.C. squadrons were losing at least one pilot a day. At that rate, an entire squadron would be dead and replaced by the end of April. It didn't work out so tidily, because new boys got killed much faster than old sweats. Still, everyone was looking forward to the offensive promised by the French. General Nivelle had a masterplan that would, he promised, deliver
le dernier coup
, smash the Boche Line and end the war. If it also distracted the German Air Force, the R.F.C. would be very grateful.