Hornet’s Sting (55 page)

Far from cutting their losses, the General Staff ordered more attacks. The original Push had involved only a hundred thousand men. Plenty more were waiting in the Reserves. Damn it, they'd been expensively trained and drilled; they were ready. It would be a criminal waste not to use them. It would mean that all those gallant lads who'd fallen would have died for nothing! God forbid.

The new attacks failed. The German Army had been ready for Third Wipers, and it had built a deep belt of concrete pillboxes. The concrete was very thick; sometimes even a direct hit only scarred it. The blast probably killed the machine-gun crew inside, but they were quickly replaced. Tanks were the obvious weapon against pillboxes. They struggled in the swamps, flooded and stalled. When British infantry tried to rush a pillbox they got cut down. If, at huge expense of blood and bodies, they captured a pillbox, its only entrance was on the enemy side. Hun guns pumped shells and bullets into the opening. Meanwhile, British artillery went on chewing up the battlefield. Each time Hornet Squadron flew over it, the ground looked more than ever like a flooded moonscape.

* * *

Dando's notes on Paxton began with concussion. He felt pretty sure about that, because any pilot who survived a crash must have whacked his head on something hard, and this head was badly cut. So were the knees and elbows. Dando suspected that a couple of ribs were cracked. There was heavy bruising almost everywhere. What worried him most, however, was the total lack of appetite and interest. Most patients got thirsty, even if they weren't hungry. Most patients talked, too. “Find out if he's in pain, if you can,” Dando told McWatters. “I can't get anything out of him.”

Paxton moved only his eyes when McWatters came in. His eyes looked tired. His skin was slack and shiny.

“Hullo, Pax.” McWatters squeezed a foot through the blankets. “I hear you walked all the way to Wipers. Never realised you were so jolly fit. How are you feeling? Chap called Morkel is looking
after your flight. Bit swarthy. Decent enough otherwise.”

Paxton did not move. McWatters got a chair.

“You probably want to hear all the gossip, don't you? Let's see ... The mess had pheasant for dinner last night, flocks of the bloody birds! Sergeant Lacey got them.
And
the wine, crates of it, spanking good stuff. The man's a magician. Of course we do D.O.P.s all day, usual grind. Remember Mackenzie?”

Paxton frowned. McWatters was startled at how old it made him look.

“Woolley got him kicked out of A-Flight. The little sod flies on his own now. Keeps getting flamers, or at least he claims he does, so the Yanks are happy ...”

Paxton was struggling to get his arm out from under the blankets. McWatters helped him, and said, “D'you want... I mean, can I ...” With immense effort, Paxton scratched the tip of his nose. His arm flopped. McWatters tucked it out of sight.

“Here's something to make you laugh. You remember that nurse who told me she'd been rogered by our little choirboy? All codswallop. Fairy tales. God knows why, she's an absolute stunner, I mean ...”

Paxton's eyelids were falling.

“I'd better push off.” McWatters stood up. Paxton blinked, and half-opened his eyes. “Smuggler's Boy,” he whispered. “Did Smuggler's Boy do it?”

“Haven't the foggiest old chap. Better get some rest.”

* * *

McWatters had never seen an enemy formation bigger than six until a dozen Huns came up through a hole in the clouds.

He laughed. It wasn't funny, but he had sucked in lungfuls of air and he had to do something with them. Now he felt tired; his limbs were heavy. Fear did that. He was familiar with fear. It would vanish with action. He rocked his wings, test-fired the Vickers, made sure the whole flight was awake, and immediately dived into the attack. Why not? He was more or less up-sun and he had height advantage. No point in waiting.

They were Halberstadts, two-seaters with two guns, big strong beasts
but they lacked a Biff's performance. They certainly couldn't climb as steeply as the Biffs could dive. McWatters heard his wires start to scream, glanced at the airspeed dial and saw it nudging two hundred, and looked up. The Huns were starting to scatter. Good! A spot of panic would even the odds.

Now he picked out a Halberstadt with commander's streamers on the wing-struts, made it his target and fired. For a few seconds the air was laced with tracer. Everything shook: the Hun, the Biff, McWatters himself.

It was not a good fight. Too many machines in too little space meant much wild flying and few clear shots. The flight went clear through the Halberstadts and used its speed to climb away, all except Drinkwater.

His place at the rear meant that he suffered most from the confusion. The few shots he fired went wide. No shouts of joy came from his gunner. Another blank. He tightened his grip and heaved on the stick just as a Halberstadt skidded across his path. He gave it a burst. He saw it wing-over and fall, smoke gushing from its engine. “Bull'seye!” he roared. He thrust the stick forward. Bagged a Hun at last! he thought. He was going to make sure of victory if he had to chase the blighter right down to the ground, and that was what he had to do.

The Halberstadt was heavier than the Biff. Its exhausts kept pumping huge amounts of oily smoke but apparently its engine still worked. It kept Drinkwater out of range.

He was sure he could change all that when the Hun had to flatten out and the chase became a charge across the countryside. He was frustrated again. Obstacles got in the way: trees, hillocks, churches. The German pilot knew the land. When at last Drinkwater got the Biff lined up for a shot, swirling smoke hid the enemy. It was maddening. To make matters worse he saw tall trees racing past his wingtips. The Hun had found a gap in a forest. Smuts from his exhaust coated Drinkwater's goggles. When he dragged them off, the Halberstadt had vanished. A few seconds later the forest ended and he was skimming over farmland.

The Hun must have escaped down a turn-off in the trees. Left or right? Drinkwater guessed left. He banked hard and chased along the edge of the wood and met the Halberstadt coming head-on. He took a second to fire and that was a second too long. A burst from
the Spandau hit his head. The Biff flew into the ground at about a hundred miles an hour.

An oil leak had caused the Halberstadt to make so much smoke. Its Mercedes engine seized-up while the pilot was circling the wreckage. He glided to a bumpy landing. Neither he nor his observer bothered to look at the bodies. They'd seen that sort of thing before, and it wasn't good for the appetite.

* * *

Tchaikovsky ended with a crash, and then threw in two more final thumps for good measure. The needle hissed. Lacey reached without looking and lifted the arm.

“I see
The Times
says we've captured another farmhouse at Wipers, sir,” he said.

The adjutant was invisible in his office, but his door was open. He did not speak.

“It wasn't like this at the Somme,” Lacey said. “All the talk then was of how soon we'd capture some real towns. Bapaume and Péronne, I seem to remember...”

No comment.

“We nearly got them. Nearly got Péronne, anyway. Then there was Arras, where we captured several important villages. Isn't that right, sir?”

More silence.

“And now we're two weeks into Third Wipers, and the news is we've taken another farmhouse. First it was towns, then villages, now it's farms. What next, do you think? When the next Big Push takes place, will
The Times
be applauding the capture of a vegetable garden?”

“Come here,” the adjutant said.

“Or a large herbaceous border, perhaps.” Lacey went in. Brazier was sitting, hunched at his desk. His great fists were clenched and rested on each side of an open file.

“You never wrote that poem you gave us. The commanding officer used it as a tribute. Now it turns out to be a fraud.”

“More of a
collage
, sir. Perhaps a
mélange.”

“Colonel Bliss calls it a damn fraud. Line one is stolen from ... Rupert Brooke.” Brazier spoke heavily; he might have been naming
a defaulter. “Whoever he is.”

“Was, alas.”

“Shut up, sergeant. ‘Now God be thanked'. Brooke wrote that. ‘From this day to the ending of the world!' Stolen from
Henry V
, would you believe! Shakespeare!”

“No mean thief himself, sir. Who is to say —”

“Shut your treacherous mouth!”
Brazier roared like a drill sergeant. Lacey recoiled. He had miscalculated; the adjutant was in a rage. “Next you raided Tennyson. ‘Blow, bugle, blow!' Stolen from a song. ‘Was there a man dismayed?' Stolen from ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade'. ‘Who rush to glory, or the grave?' Stolen from the poem ‘Hohenlinden' by Thomas Campbell, and no thanks to you the theft was disguised when the major changed the ending. ‘Land of our birth, we pledge to thee' you thieved from ‘The Children's Song' by Rudyard Kipling, no less. That leaves ‘Dulce et decorum' etcetera, which is public property, I suppose.”

“Horace, actually,” Lacey said before he could stop himself.

“So five-sixths of your poem is stolen property. You've humiliated the C.O., you've blackened the reputation of the squadron, you have obliged me to apologise in person to the brigade commander. The editor of the
Yorkshire Post
has publicly accused the Corps of ...” He searched in the file. “... ‘of making literary sport out of its sacred duty to honour its dead'.” Brazier clenched his fists and rubbed the knuckles together. “Now speak.”

“Oh, it was a joke,” Lacey said gloomily. “I couldn't think of anything original, so I cobbled together some stuff I remembered from school. It was all so obvious, I was sure someone would see through it. It wasn't even good verse, it certainly didn't make sense, I mean I never expected anyone to
like
it. Quite the reverse.”

“The editor of the
Yorkshire Post
claims he brought the whole shabby business to our attention weeks ago.”

“I scrapped it, sir.”

“You
destroyed
an official
signal?”
The adjutant's knuckles changed colour.

“Not a real signal. Just a note from the newspaper.”

“Theft, insolence, failure to obey an order, and now wilful destruction of an official communication.”

“Anyway, that first verse was superseded by then. You already had
my second verse, sir. Nothing wrong with that. All my own work. Entirely original.”

“Are you completely witless, sergeant?” Brazier took a paper from the file. “Or do you think everyone else has brains of cheese? Your second verse began, ‘Armed with thunder, clad with wings', did it not?”

“Yes. That's what I wrote.”

“That, sergeant, is what you copied.”

“No! No, sir, that's not true.” Now Lacey was outraged. “That second verse is entirely my work, sir.”

“William Cowper.” There was a sour twist to the adjutant's voice. “Wrote a poem called ‘Boadicea'.”

Lacey closed his eyes. “Oh no,” he whispered. Brazier thought he was slumped in guilt. In fact Lacey was swamped by a golden memory of a classroom on a summer's afternoon, with chalk-motes drifting endlessly in the sunlight, and distant sounds of cricket mocking the pupils, and a boy reciting Cowper's imperial anthem.
Arm'd with thunder, clad with wings:
the line had been absorbed by Lacey's brain and, all these years later, blandly offered up as a true gift when it was really stolen goods. He didn't feel guilty; he felt cheated. Yet there was no dodging the truth. He was the victim, but he was also the cheat.

“What now?” he asked.

“Oh, you lose your stripes and tomorrow you report as sanitary man in the Front Line trenches, where you spend the rest of the war with a bucket, collecting the daily droppings of the troops.” Brazier took a moment to enjoy Lacey's stricken face. “That's if it's up to me. Unfortunately it's up to the C.O.”

“Oh.” Lacey chewed his lip. “Perhaps he'll see the funny side of it.”

The telephone rang. The adjutant answered it, and said, “Yes, immediately.” He hung up. “You can ask him yourself, sergeant. The C.O. wants you in the sick bay. Take your pad and pencil. Go now.”

* * *

When Paxton had been led out of the battlefield, he had not wanted to go to a regimental aid post to have his injuries examined. The doctor at the aid post had looked him over and decided he should go to a hospital by way of a casualty clearing station, but Paxton disagreed
violently. He insisted on returning to Gazeran. There was a struggle, which turned into a fight just as fresh casualties were being hurried in. The doctor had told Paxton to go to hell and when he looked up from the bloody stretchers, Paxton had gone. Paxton got a lift to Poperinghe and found General Disinfectant's H.Q. there.

The doctor had a keen sense of duty. As soon as possible, he had telephoned Gazeran and talked to Dando. An hour or so later, General Disinfectant's car delivered Paxton to the aerodrome. Dando had never seen a man so badly bruised and still alive.

The C.O. had been impressed too. “Shouldn't he be in hospital?” he asked. “He may have internal injuries. Things you can't see.”

“Yes, sir, he may have. But he crashed, he walked right through the fighting, he didn't rest until he got back to his squadron. Here is where he's determined to be, major. If we send him away now, it won't help him to recover.”

From time to time, Cleve-Cutler visited the patient. Paxton never spoke, and scarcely moved. The C.O. always asked him if there was anything he needed; and finally Paxton responded. “Rum,” he said.

Dando brought a bottle and everyone had a tot.

Paxton sighed. “Schnapps is the stuff.” His voice was a husky whisper. “Awfully nice Hun shared his schnapps with me. What a pal ... Best friend. Dead now. Some bastard threw a grenade and ... foof. Some bastard killed my pal. No bayonet. Then I found a bayonet.” There were tears dribbling down his cheeks.