A Splendid Little War (38 page)

It matured and separated into a group of six. Three were the brown Spads. The others were a mixture: a Fokker Triplane, an all-red Nieuport, and what might be an Albatros. A mongrel lot. Flown by scruffs or aces?
Wragge wondered and waited. His Flight was flying broadside-on to their approach. At four hundred yards all the Spads opened fire. Tracer probed and lost heart and fell below the Camels. “Optimistic,” he said, counted to three, and banked hard towards the enemy. Now it was a head-on charge.

Jessop crouched and made himself small. Dextry kept his head up and looked for a gap to aim at. Maynard shouted: “Come to Daddy!” and was glad no-one heard. Borodin murmured a soldier's prayer for a merciful death if death it must be. And the two formations met in a crash of noise and nothing else. They merged and separated in an instant. Nobody had fired. Firing was stupid if you were about to collide and aimless when you were not.

Wragge banked hard right, the Camel's trump card, and the Flight followed him. The Reds had scattered. The Spads climbed in three different directions and he chased the middle one until it was a distant blur in his gunsight. He turned and dived back to the fight, but there was no fight: just a huge and empty sky. No surprise. Air combat was like that. He searched and saw dots swirling with the pointlessness of bugs at dusk. He headed for them. One bug turned a hot red and dropped, trailing smoke. Not so pointless after all.

When Jessop came out of the vertical bank, the Triplane swam into view, so he turned and fired and his bullet-stream bent as if blown sideways and nearly hit Maynard. Jessop shouted, and reversed bank, which created a huge skid that washed the Triplane out of sight. Not possible, bloody great Tripe couldn't disappear like that. Jessop turned the bank into a roll and made that into a sweet barrel-roll and at the top he looked down at Maynard going the opposite way and firing at something, and simultaneously red and yellow tracer chased itself past Jessop, nibbled at his wingtip, made his Camel twitch, and for an instant Jessop was puzzled, how the devil did Maynard do that? He completed the barrelroll fast and Good Christ All Bloody Mighty the Tripe was back again. No mistakes this time. He worked to get behind it. Difficult. Damn thing never kept still.

Maynard was looking the other way when Jessop missed him. He didn't know whose guns they were, could have been one of three Bolos, not the Spads, they were gone. He banked and turned, looked left and right, banked again, looked up, looked back, banked again, never flew straight for more than ten seconds, never stopped searching. Maynard
knew little about girls and sex but much about how to creep up behind an enemy and blow holes in him. He saw an all-red Nieuport chased by a Camel and an Albatros chasing the Camel, and he joined the hunt. He fired brief bursts at the Albatros, very long range but the Albatros took fright, put its nose down, and the Nieuport blew apart.

Dextry was chasing it and the explosion amazed him: who did that? Maynard whooped with glee but he knew he hadn't scored. He joined Dextry and they circled the fluttering bits of burning debris, the drifting smoke. Warplanes were dangerous. Sometimes incendiary bullets misfired, touched off a fuel tank, a pilot sat in a wooden frame covered with doped linen and stuffed with explosives behind a red-hot engine, of course some machines blew apart. Nobody said flying was safe.

The flight was over. The Spads were out of sight, the Nieuport no longer existed, and the two survivors had quit in a hurry. Wragge chased them, for sport, and was outpaced. He returned and led the Flight to their landing ground next to the siding. On the way, they met the Halberstadt and shot it down. Its pilot made a brave attempt at a forced landing but the machine was hopelessly lopsided when it touched the ground, and it cartwheeled with surprising ferocity, every impact ripping off a part until there was little left but a trail of wreckage.

Lunch was taken. The Dregs was unusually quiet.

When they landed, the C.O. had talked to Dextry. “We all got back,” he said, “but that's the best that can be said.”

“Sloppy. Half the time we got in each other's way.”

“We've forgotten what a real scrap is like. I don't count the Halberstadt. To tell the truth, I felt sorry for the bloke.”

“He didn't put up much of a fight,” Dextry said. “In fact, he didn't put up any fight at all.”

That was one of several things which the pilots did not talk about at lunch. Nobody claimed the Nieuport. Nobody mentioned the near-collisions.

When everyone had finished eating, Wragge said, “We'll go again. This time I'll take the Nines with us. If there's an aerodrome at Belgorod and it's ours, we'll land there. If the Bolos are there, we'll bomb the stupid place.”

Tusker Oliphant led the Nines at three thousand feet, high enough
to escape machine-gun fire from the ground, low enough to make a bombing run. The C.O. was a thousand feet above with the Camels. They followed the railway to Belgorod and nothing happened. No troops, no guns, no burning ruins. Few people in the streets, and nobody ran for shelter. A train stood in the station, the engine making a stick of brown smoke. That was the sum of the action.

The squadron flew a wide circle around Belgorod and did not find an aerodrome. But two miles north of the town, Tiger Wragge saw a racecourse beside the railway line. At first he was surprised. Racing seemed an unlikely luxury, but then why not? All it needed was space and horses, and Russia had plenty of both. He took the Camel Flight right down to a hundred feet and cruised around the course, a simple oval of grass. A three-coach train stood in a siding. A flag as big as a bedsheet waved in the breeze. It had several colours, which was encouraging. A few soldiers came out to watch the aeroplanes.

Wragge signalled to Borodin that he should land, and left Dextry in command. Borodin and the C.O. touched down on a wonderfully wide, flat, smooth stretch of grass, switched off, and got out.

An officer on a horse cantered towards them.

“I'm second fiddle now,” Wragge said. “This is your show.”

The officer did not dismount. He was an expert horseman and he cut a good figure as he sat and looked down at them. Borodin introduced himself, and the officer dismounted very smartly, and saluted. Wragge strolled up and down while they talked, until Borodin said to him: “The train belongs to a supporter of Denikin, General Yevgeni Gregorioff. We are safe here. The nearest fighting is at Kursk, a hundred miles north. We are invited to meet General Gregorioff in his salon.”

“Tell this chap I'm going to fire a signal flare,” Wragge said. “I don't want to frighten his lovely horse.”

He got the Very pistol from his Camel and sent the flare arcing into the sky. He dumped his flying coat and helmet in the cockpit. Now he was recognisably a squadron leader, with a slightly battered but rakish cap. “Lead on,” he said. Already the squadron was making its descent.

General Gregorioff was a tubby little man, almost bald, with a thick black moustache that reached his chin. He greeted his guests cheerfully, without moving from a cane chair overflowing with pillows. His right leg rested on a stack of blankets. He had no English. He and Borodin
exchanged compliments, and the count explained to Wragge that the general had very bad gout and was on medical leave from the Front. That explained the young and attractive nurse.

“Ask him where the three White fighter squadrons are,” Wragge said. “And the aerodrome?”

Armchairs were brought, and they settled down to a friendly chat. Wragge examined the general's quarters. Bookshelves, a baby grand piano, family photographs, thick carpet, velvet curtains. Not Spartan. Coffee was served. Good coffee, better than The Dregs. The general was an affable man, and whatever Borodin was saying to him, it made him laugh.

Then the audience was over. Everyone smiled happily. An aide opened doors and helped them descend from the train without breaking a leg.

“What did you get out of him?” Wragge asked. “Apart from merry laughter.”

“For a start, the three squadrons of White fighter aircraft don't exist. Nor does the aerodrome. Denikin has no machines, except us.”

“I see,” Wragge said. “No, I don't. What about that signal from Mission H.Q? Colonel Somebody. Boss of Aviation.”

“Subasnov. The general was very amused by that story. He knows Subasnov well. The colonel was on Denikin's staff, the biggest chump in the army, couldn't be sacked because of his political connections, so Denikin gave him Aviation and sent him as far away as possible to bother someone else. The general says Subasnov talks magnificently. If talk won wars, we would be in Moscow now.”

“So he lied.”

“Yes and no. To an Anglo-Saxon he lied unforgivably. To Russians he adjusted the facts to agree with the way the truth ought to be. A great army deserves to have an air force, and of course Mission H.Q. was impressed by what he said.”

“Absurd. He must have known he'd be found out.”

“True. But Russians can't stop themselves. There's a word for that kind of lying. We call it
vranyo
. It satisfies some inner need. Russians lie even when they know the listener knows they're lying. So,
vranyo
does no harm, does it?”

“
Nichevo
,” Wragge said. “Is that right,
nichevo?
”

“Excellent. You are thinking like a Russian.”

“And the promise of an armoured train. Was that
vranyo
?”

“In its purest form. By the way: Denikin had one aeroplane. The Halberstadt two-seater. He sent it to count his troop trains because the telegraph line was broken.”

“We shot down a friendly machine.”

“General Gregorioff says the telegraph is working now.”

“So …
nichevo
again.”

“His very word.”

“Mine too. From now on we'll fight like Russians. We'll
vranyo
like fury and if anyone doesn't like it,
nichevo
.” Wragge shouted for Maynard, ordered him to fly back to the trains and tell them to move up to the racetrack sidings. “Tomorrow we go to Kursk,” he said. “That's where the fun and games are happening.” He said nothing about the Halberstadt. Fog of war. Forget it.

The gardens at 10 Downing Street were neither large nor glorious, but at least the roses were splendid at this time of year. The Prime Minister preferred to hold his garden parties there. It meant he didn't have to trudge around somebody else's pride and joy, shaking hands with strangers until his knuckles ached. It meant that as soon as the party was over, he could get back to his desk. And if it rained, there were always drawing rooms for the guests to shelter in.

He kept the guest list short. Senior Cabinet members, a few ambassadors, some admirals and generals, maybe an artist or a poet, if they were house-trained. No novelists, no playwrights. Drank too much, got into arguments with other guests. Not garden-party material.

The guest list was one of Jonathan Fitzroy's duties, and he quietly added the names of his Ad Hoc Committee on Russia. It was a white-tie occasion, so the garden would look like a penguin colony, and that answered the need for secrecy: his committee would hide in plain sight.

When the P.M. had done enough partying and withdrawn, and the guests were leaving, the committee gathered in a little summerhouse. Fitzroy put a pack of cards on the table. “A harmless subterfuge,” he said. “In case anyone looks in.”

Weatherby dealt a few cards. “I can't play anything except Snap,” he said. “My children are demons at Snap. I never stand a chance.”

“Mine were like that,” Delahaye said, “until I began to cheat. That fooled them.”

“You've got to be ruthless with children, in my experience,” General Stattaford said. “Or they lose all respect. My parents were quite foul to their children, I'm happy to say. It made a man out of me.”

“The modern child is over-educated, in my opinion,” Sir Franklyn said. “I heard my granddaughter singing ‘Lloyd George is my father, father is Lloyd George'. The child is only nine. I asked her what it meant and she said she didn't know.”

“I bet she did,” Weatherby said. “They know everything.”

“Perhaps we should ask them to advise us,” Fitzroy said. He was a bachelor; other people's children bored him. “A little omniscience about Russia might be helpful.”

“Not any more,” the general said. “The Reds are routed. Denikin's on a charge. In war, momentum is everything. We proved that in France. Once we broke the enemy line, the Huns couldn't stop running. Reds are the same.”

“But not in Siberia,” Sir Franklyn said. “They seem to have the better of Admiral Kolchak.”

“A sideshow. Denikin's campaign is the key. Poltava has fallen. Kharkov has fallen. Kiev has fallen. Odessa won't hold out much longer. Denikin will take Kursk. Then it's a straight run to Moscow.”

“Napoleon said that too,” Delahaye said. “Mind you, it probably had more panache in French.”

“His mistake was getting the weather wrong,” Weatherby said.
“Beaucoup de neige
. Dreadfully
froid
. Hadn't done his homework.”

“And no railways. So no return tickets.”

“Denikin has got everything spot-on right,” Stattaford said. “Summertime, and the railways lead to Moscow. All he needed was a spell of training, courtesy the British Army, to stiffen his ranks. I never doubted it.”

“Excellent. Now, how do we translate this for the P.M.'s benefit?” Fitzroy asked. “Triumph of right over wrong? Death-blow to Communist world domination? Last battle of the Great War, and Britain helped to win it? What's the message?”

“Well now,” Sir Franklyn said. “Russia is a very big country. Let us not cheer too soon.”

“The Treasury will cheer if Denikin takes Moscow,” Charles Delahaye said. “Then we can stop throwing money at Russia with both hands.”