A Splendid Little War (42 page)

Edwardes had his own tent but no bed. “Camp bed broke long ago,” he said. He gave Maynard some blankets. “Find a small hole that fits your hip. After that, it's like a featherbed.” He was right.

Breakfast was a black-bread mutton sandwich and a glass of Russian tea, brought to him in the tent. Another treat for the guest. He sat in the
sunshine and watched the gun crews doing chores. He had a nagging feeling that he should be busy, but there was nothing he could do. Edwardes wasn't there. He folded his blankets. He got his hands wet with dew and washed his face. He walked to a tall tree and emptied his bladder against it. What now? He went back to his tent and sat in the sun.

About an hour later, Edwardes came back on the same big horse.

“Meeting with the Russian commander,” he said. “Denikin's advance is still advancing, and we've got orders to go with it. Pockets of Red resistance to be snuffed out. It's up to you, but I don't recommend staying here. An unarmed Englishman on his own is asking for trouble.”

“You were going to send a message to my squadron.”

“I told a bloke on the staff about you. He promised to do something. Don't bet on it. They're big on promises.” Maynard turned away. He had heard a faint growl, no louder than the drone of bees but deeper. He searched the sky and found a distant speckle of dots, quite high. “That's the squadron,” he said.

Edwardes gave him some binoculars. Nine aircraft, flying high in the east. He followed them until they were lost behind cloud.

“Forget about the message,” he said. “I think they're on the move again.”

“Doesn't surprise me. Everyone's chasing the Bolos now.”

Already the tents were down and dumped in a big farm cart. Everything went into the cart: cooking pots, a few rifles, some sacks of stuff, shells, a bundle of firewood, and Maynard. The horses were harnessed. The field guns rolled. Maynard's cart followed. Some men rode. Most walked.

It was pleasant countryside, all woods and meadows, occasional valleys and hills. After an hour or two its pleasantness wore thin and Maynard would have swapped it for a good straight road. The cart had no springs. Farm tracks were tolerable but they were rare and mostly the cart bumped and jolted. He made himself as comfortable as possible on the tents and blankets and watched the sky go by. He'd give a year's pay to be up there in a Camel.

They didn't stop to eat. He found some stale bread in a sack and chewed on that. The sun was burning his face so he covered it with a handkerchief. He had no idea where he was going and he didn't want to ask Edwardes for fear the man would tell him and it would be really
remote. He might end up living with this gang for a week. Or more. He itched and scratched. There was something in this bloody cart that was biting him. He opened his shirt and smelled himself, and got a sour whiff of old, dried sweat. Horrid.

The sun was going down when the gun team plodded over a rise and the ground exploded in front. Several explosions: high fountains of brown earth and blast that ruffled Maynard's hair. Everyone was shouting. Men were releasing the horses and dragging the guns into position to fire. Maynard stood and watched them load and was shaken by the savage crack of their detonations. He had never been near artillery before. He had no idea how loud it was. How harsh. Someone kicked his leg.

It was Edwardes. “Get down, you bloody fool! Get out of here! Run, run!” He went back to his guns. Maynard ran as fast and as far as his flying boots would let him. He stopped and looked back. The guns were doing very well without him. Edwardes was using the binoculars, shouting, pointing, and then in a blink they were all gone, swamped by pounding, furious shell bursts which swallowed the gun team and when the smoke drifted away, only a little tangled wreckage was left. Maynard could not believe it. The phrase ‘wiped out' presented itself. Men said the enemy had been wiped out and that was just what had happened here. Guns and gunners, wiped out, vanished. As if they'd never been.

Maynard walked away. After a while he found a hollow in the grass, so he curled up in it. Nothing made sense to him and he stopped thinking. He fell asleep. That was where the Red soldiers found him.

He was a rarity, a curiosity. They knocked him about a bit, just enough to realize that he wasn't Russian, and gave him to an officer who, mysteriously, was riding in an open horse-drawn coach, rather like the
droshkys
of Taganrog. More questioning. “Angliski,” he said through a split lip. He was blindfolded and seemed to spend several hours in a series of vehicles. The blindfold came off and he was in the boxcar of a railway train. A very young soldier with a very old rifle was guarding him. Outside it was night. The train started.

Maynard felt rotten. His head hurt, one eye was swollen shut, he could taste blood from his lip, and his tongue found gaps where teeth had been. His body ached from the impact of soldiers' boots.

The guard looked to be about sixteen, and not very bright. Maynard pointed forward, the way they were going.
“Na Moskvu?
” he said. The
guard thought about it.
“Na Moskvu
,” he said.

That decided Maynard. He was damned if he was going to Moscow. He was damned if he could see how to avoid it, but he sat still and behaved nicely. His chance came when the guard slid open the boxcar door and prepared to urinate into the night. Both hands were needed to brace himself. Maynard dived past him and hoped for a soft landing. Instead he dived into the stone wall of a cutting and broke his neck.

The guard fired his rifle three times and the train stopped. An officer and five men walked along the track and found Maynard. He looked very dead indeed, but the officer shot him to make sure. Then the men shot the guard. They threw the bodies in the boxcar.

“Chef says we're out of mustard,” Tusker Oliphant said. “We're one hell of a long way from Taganrog.” He was looking at a map. “Not much hope of getting supplies sent up here.”

“The further from England, the closer in to France,” Wragge said. “As my dear old dad used to say. We'll be in Moscow soon, at this rate. Lots of mustard in Moscow. Famous for it.”

They were in the C.O.'s Pullman, with Rex Dextry, drinking coffee.

“I can live without mustard,” Dextry said. “As long as we don't run out of cheese. That's unthinkable.”

Oliphant was estimating distances on the map, using hand spans. “Supposing we're halfway between Kursk and Orel … That makes another sixty, seventy miles to Orel. Then Orel to Tula, say a hundred, and Tula to Moscow, hundred and fifty. All told, three hundred miles or more.” He looked up. “Can Denikin do it?”

“Why not?” Wragge said. “He's already captured half of Russia. Not Siberia, but who cares about Siberia, they've all got icicles on their testicles, while we've got the best airfield since Tsaritsyn, so well done, Rex.”

“We strive to please,” Dextry said.

He had found a short spur of railway that forked away from the main line and gave up after a mile. An engineer's mistake, evidently. The rails were rusted and grass grew high between them. Everything was blessedly quiet. The loudest sound was the bleating of lambs in a meadow as big and smooth as Lord's cricket ground.

“Down to business,” the C.O. said. “First point is, are the machines all operational? Yes? Good. Right, the Nines can get on with their knitting while the Camels go and find the Bolos.” A tap on the door. Lacey came in, handed him a paper, said: “From Mission H.Q.,” and went out. As Wragge read it, his eyebrows rose. “Goolie Chit,” he said. “Anyone heard of it?”

“Yes,” Oliphant said. “My brother's with a squadron in India, on the North-West Frontier. He mentioned it in a letter.”

“Did he, by Jove? Well, according to H.Q., it's a linen envelope attached to the fuselage. On the outside, it says in the local lingo that this is a British officer, help him and you shall be rewarded. Inside are twenty gold sovereigns.”

“That's right. If it works, you get to keep your goolies. My brother says the natives are a bit ferocious and the women are even worse. Afghans and so on.”

“Bless my soul.”

“Famous last words, if you get engine failure over the Khyber Pass.”

“Mmm. It's marked ‘For Information Only'. H.Q. thinks only of our welfare.” Wragge stuffed it in a pocket. “I'll ask Borodin what he thinks.”

They went out and enjoyed the sunshine. Wragge breathed the sweet smell of lush countryside at the height of summer. “Reminds me of the Scottish Borders,” he said. “I wonder if there's any trout fishing near here?”

“About Daddy Maynard,” Dextry said. “When should we count him as lost? Uncle was asking.”

“Give him a day or two,” the C.O. said. “You never know. Daddy's no fool. Not like that clown who got lost at Butler's Farm. Silly ass was only three miles from the field. Barnett? Burnett? No.” He clicked his fingers. “Bennett. Got it.”

“Never knew him,” Dextry said.

The four Camels followed the railway north. It was stocked with troop trains. Few were moving and the rest had emptied their troops into the fields beside them. They sat or lay in the sun, doing what all soldiers do well, which is wait. Cook fires were everywhere. Soldiers learn to eat whenever possible, in the certain knowledge that they'll go hungry soon. Some waved at the aircraft. Others saved their energy.

A few miles further on, Wragge found the reason for all this nothing-doing. Lengths of track had been torn up and squads of engineers were restoring them. Presumably the Bolos did it. Some holes were big enough for shell craters. Or perhaps dynamite.

The Camels climbed to three thousand feet and spread out, four hundred yards between each, the better to search the land. They saw nothing to defend, no towns, no rivers except the one the railroad followed. It looked half-dried-up and no obstacle to anyone.

They cruised on for ten, twenty miles, looking down at empty countryside and up at empty sky, down again, up again. “Christ!” Dextry said aloud. “This is boring bloody country. Where's the damn war?” Borodin was not bored. This was his Russia and he was proud of its enormous spaces, there was room to breathe in Russia, more than anywhere in the world. Except perhaps China, but China was full of Chinese who, let's face it, can't write
War and Peace
or paint anything except urns and vases and couldn't spell Tchaikovsky let alone play him. Jessop was getting a sore neck and wondering what it would be like to be stripped naked for an examination by Flight Lieutenant Perry. Would she have warm fingers? Strong warm fingers? His stomach muscles tightened. Wragge worried what he would do if someone's engine went on the fritz now. He kept looking for landmarks, something a search party could find. That was when he saw the tents. Brown bell tents, sixty, seventy, maybe more.

He waggled his wings and waved, and as the Flight came together he searched below for a marker. He saw a wood shaped like a broken star: that would do.

He got the Flight between the sun and the camp, and dived. Nobody fired up at them. A handful of men ran. He got a clear view of rows of tents with well-trodden paths between them. The Camels buzzed the camp, low enough to wake the dead. Still no gunfire. As the C.O. pulled out and climbed away he glimpsed stampeding horses, scared by the racket. But no men.

The Camels flew a mile-wide circle around the tents and found nothing. Wragge's fuel gauge read less than half-full, and it was unreliable. This was not the time or place to meet the Red air force. Combat drank petrol. Nobody wanted that. They headed south.

The landing ground was easy to find: just follow the rail line and find the rusty spur. The field looked wonderfully green, and the C.O. knew that something was badly wrong when he saw a Nine lying flat on its belly and another with its tail high and its nose buried in the grass. He landed, saw Oliphant waiting, taxied towards him, climbed out.

“We got strafed,” Oliphant said. “Ten minutes after you left. Three Spads, not the same bunch you saw, these were black. Caught us on the hop. My chaps did their best to get off the ground, but that one lost its wheels and looks like a pregnant duck, and that one overcooked his throttle so his tail came up too soon and he snapped his prop. Then the troops got the Lewis guns going and scared the Spads away, thank Christ.”

Wragge did some counting. “You're one short, Tusker.”

“Ah … now for the bad news. Tommy Hopton did manage to get airborne. With Mickey Blythe. Naturally the Spads went for him and there was a hell of a scrap. We watched it all. They got him in the end. Three to one: pretty lousy odds. He was a flamer, Tiger. They both jumped.” He pointed to a distant wood. “Somewhere over there, probably. I've got search parties out.”

“Jesus Christ Almighty.”

“They did the right thing, Tiger. Taking off, I mean. Better to be up there than strafed down here. If you'd seen—”