War Story (27 page)

“I've kept it warm for you,” Cleve-Cutler said.

*

The noise of snoring woke Paxton, and hatred flared like a fire in sudden wind. It was a primitive, grunting snoring, typical of O'Neill. Paxton snarled. The snoring stopped. Too late, of course: sleep was impossible now. He sat up. The billet was empty.

Kellaway came in, swinging his sponge-bag. “I can't tell you how unspeakably filthy you look this morning,” he said.

Paxton tried to speak but his mouth seemed to be stuck together. He was wearing his uniform, including shoes. He must have slept in his clothes. He got his lips apart and cleared his throat. The effect was nothing to be proud of. “Unspeakably filthy,” Kellaway said.

Paxton got to his feet and walked to the foot of the bed. His knees wobbled as if taken by surprise and he had to clutch at a chair. For a few seconds the floor receded enormously until he felt as if he were looking down from a mountaintop. His ears made a note higher than any violin could reach.

O'Neill kicked the door open and came in whistling. Paxton had to sit down.

This whistling was slow torture. It was never loud and it never stopped; it just warbled on and on, endlessly, like the whistle of a kettle always coming to the boil but never making it. Half the time O'Neill was flat. If he had been flat all the time Paxton could have accepted it but instead O'Neill's whistling slipped off-key and then, after a bar or two, found it again, for a short while. He often skipped a beat; sometimes he skipped whole bars and picked up the tune at odd and disturbing places. His whistling never paused but it was always sluggish. It dragged. It was slipshod. It drove Paxton mad. He hunched his shoulders and clenched his teeth.

“Hard cheese on Jimmy Yeo, wasn't it?” Kellaway said.

O'Neill stopped whistling. Paxton slowly relaxed. “Oh well,” O'Neill said. “There are worse ways to go. Bloke I knew caught the Queensland potato blight. His name was Lewis. He looked so bloody awful he had to go round with his head in a sack. Five years he lingered. They called him Lingering Lew.”

“You do talk a lot of balls,” Kellaway said.

“Mind you,” O'Neill said,”he never looked as bad as
that.”

They gazed at Paxton. “A cold bath would do you a world
of good,” Kellaway said. “The CO wants to see us all in half an hour.” Paxton tried to stand, but one leg was much shorter than the other. Either that, or the floor was cockeyed.

Cleve-Cutler assembled his officers in the debris of the mess and held up a canvas message-bag with a German eagle stamped on it. “The enemy dropped this behind our Lines at dawn,” he said. “It's addressed to me, here. Full marks to German Intelligence. It contains some personal items found in the wreck of Yeo's FE, and there's a note saying both men will get a military funeral. I'm glad about that. The padre's going to say a few words.”

There was some shuffling of feet. Broken glass tinkled.

“The squadron has lost two good friends,” the padre said. “Two thoroughly decent sportsmen. I know you will agree when I say they each played a straight bat, often on a bumpy wicket, and indeed they had assembled a very creditable score when, out of the blue, the Great Umpire in the Sky decided that both their innings were closed, as one day He will for each and all of us.

“If his decisions sometimes seem hard to understand we always have the Bible to turn to for help. It has never failed me, and it did not fail me now. Last night, I admit, I was sorely puzzled by the actions of our French allies. I prayed for guidance, and when I awoke this morning the answer came to me immediately: Exodus eight.” He opened his Bible. “Verse 8. Pharaoh says to Moses: ‘Entreat the Lord, that he may take away the frogs from me, and from my people'. And verse 13: ‘And the Lord did according to the word of Moses; and the frogs died out of the houses, out of the villages, and out of the fields.'” He closed his Bible. “They had a plague of frogs, you see. Well, in a sense, can we not say that we too, yesterday, suffered from a plague of frogs? And that our remedy was very similar? The Lord smote the frogs of Egypt, and we smote the frogs of France. In both cases, the godly people were not plagued by frogs any more. The message of God's holy word,” he said, waving it above his head,”is here for all to see, if only we look hard enough. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

They mumbled their amens.

“Thank you, padre,” Cleve-Cutler said. His fixed half-grin glittered with an amusement that perhaps he really felt. “As far as I'm concerned a plague of frogs consists of one, and in future if one frog pilot so much as looks at you sideways, blow his head off. Okay, that's all.”

As they dispersed, Goss said to the padre: “I never knew all that stuff about frogs. How on earth did they get into the houses?”

“It's rather a complicated story, Douglas. You see, God wanted Pharaoh to let the Israelites go out of Egypt, and when he refused, God sent this plague of frogs to show Pharaoh that he meant business.”

“And did it work?”

“Well, no, it didn't, so God sent a plague of lice to Egypt, and when that didn't work He sent swarms of flies, but Pharaoh still refused to let them go.”

“What a bally nerve.”

“Yes. So God sent a murrain upon all the beasts of Egypt. That's a disease like boils, very unpleasant. Then he sent plagues of hail and locusts, and a plague of darkness.”

“My stars. Not very nice for Pharaoh's mob.”

“No.”

“And I expect God got His way in the end.”

“Yes.”

“He usually does, doesn't He?”

“I suppose so.”

“In fact Pharaoh was a bit of a chump to think he could win.”

“A bit of a chump. Yes.”

Cleve-Cutler was sitting on his bed, reading a letter from a friend in his old squadron and grinning because it was a very funny letter, when Foster knocked on the door.

“Want a whisky?” Cleve-Cutler said. “You look absolutely frozen.” It was not a cold day.

“No thanks.” Foster sat in a chair, didn't like it, got up and sat on the floor in a corner of the room. “The other day you offered me a job in another outfit. Acting CO.”

“It's gone.” Cleve-Cutler found a couple of glasses and wiped them with a towel. “D'you want to move, Frank?”

“Yes. Now.”

“Can't be done, old boy. I need you here.”

“Oh well.” Foster found a long, thin splinter of wood in the wall of the hut and began pulling it free. “Doesn't matter. I don't deserve to be given a squadron, I'm too stupid. I've been incredibly stupid.”

Cleve-Cutler poured whisky and gave him a glass. “Yes?” he said.

“I can't believe how dense I've been. I really, honestly did think it would all be over soon. Then we'd all go home and …” He stirred his whisky with the splinter. “It's going to go on for ever, isn't it?”

“Look on the bright side, Frank. Lots of lovely promotion waiting for chaps like you.”

Foster aimed the splinter like a dart and tossed it across the room. “Stupid and blind,” he said. “I thought I'd never cop it. Other people go west. Not me. Now I know better. Or worse.”

“Oh, tosh!” Cleve-Cutler said. “Your chances
improve
with experience, everyone knows—”

“Flamer,” Foster said. “I'll be a flamer. Quite soon.”

“Bet you won't. Week's pay. How's that, Frank?”

“It's bound to happen.” Foster made a sour face. “Doesn't matter.”

“It matters to me. I need you.”

Foster stood up and drank the whisky. “Incredibly stupid,” he said, and went out.

Nothing was heard from the French about Foster's revenge. It was assumed that the incident was closed. Brazier told Cleve-Cutler of an occasion late in 1914 when English artillery had accidentally dropped a few shells on a French position. Before the French protest could be translated the same number of French shells had fallen among English troops. “Nothing left to be said, after that,” Brazier remarked. “Or written. I gave our gunners a damn good rollicking but you won't find a whisper of it in the regimental history. Now then: what d'you want me to enter in the squadron diary regarding the loss of Yeo and his observer?”

“Killed while attacking an enemy balloon,” Cleve-Cutler
said. “You might chuck in a ‘gallantly'. That never did any harm.”

“And Foster's business?”

“Exactly. It's Foster's business. Nothing to do with us.”

Nevertheless, Cleve-Cutler knew that Foster's state of mind was something he could not ignore. The man still did his job well but off-duty he could be touchy and unpredictable. Sometimes he was as debonair as ever; at other times he laughed when there was no joke to laugh at; and once or twice he withdrew into a kind of frozen silence while conversation went on around him.

“You know him better than I do,” Cleve-Cutler said to Piggott. “Have a quiet word with him.”

Piggott had a chance for a quiet word when he found Foster sitting alone at the end of the bar, holding a fly-swat. He seemed to be in a cheerful mood. “See that fly, Tim?” he said. At least a dozen flies were circling nearby. “That one on the left… No, it's in the middle now … There he goes … I'm going to kill that fly, Tim. Sooner or later he'll wander over here and then …” Foster demonstrated a brisk swat, and smiled. “One dead fly.”

“I see.” Piggott got himself a bar stool. “Does it have to be that particular fly?”

He had asked the wrong question. All Foster's cheerfulness faded away. He looked saddened and weary. “Probably not,” he said. “I suppose one dead fly is worth just as much as another. What's the price of a dead fly nowadays? About a thousand pounds, isn't it?”

Piggott was baffled, but he decided to go along with what might turn out to be an elaborate joke. “It depends who's buying,” he said.

Foster got off his stool, thrashed about with the swat, and drove all the flies away. “They'll be back in two minutes,” he said,”so I don't see the point of it all. Do you?”

“Maybe there isn't a point.” Piggott's threshold of tolerance for foolishness was low and he had almost reached it. “Listen, Frank,” he said, “we're all as cheesed-off as you are about what that murdering frog did.”

Foster frowned hard. “I don't follow you, Tim.”

“That awful business with Yeo.”

“Oh, that.” Foster tossed his fly-swat in the air and deftly caught it. “Doesn't matter.”

Cleve-Cutler listened to Tim's report. “Oh well,” he said,”he'll get over it, I expect. Whatever it is.”

All the FEs were up on patrol. Kellaway had gone to hospital to have his head examined. The aerodrome was dull. For ten minutes Paxton threw an old tennis ball for Brutus to chase. Then he went to the adjutant and asked permission to go to Amiens for a haircut. “Get me some decent ink while you're there,” Brazier said. “This Army stuff's like gnat's piss.”

A wagon was leaving the transport section. Paxton waved it down. Corporal Lacey was driving. “I have a few calls to make
en route,”
Lacey said as Paxton got in. The cab was stacked with boxes of Havana-Havanas. “I want to collect some new old furniture to replace the old old furniture in your mess, for instance.”

“Sorry about that. Childish way to behave. Mindless destruction.”

“Do you think so? I'm surprised. The apparent vandalism of squadron parties and mess nights is squarely in the Western tradition of emotional relief through the exercise of seemingly primitive orgies of self-indulgence which are actually very tightly contained.”

“Tightly contained?” Paxton scoffed. “Don't talk rot. We smashed everything in sight.”

“Exactly. Everything in sight
in the mess.
It was like Carnival, or Mardi Gras, or New Year's Eve in Glasgow. A beano as an essential corrective to the restraints and restrictions of the rest of the year. With all due respect to the Duke of Wellington, the battle of Waterloo was not won on the
playing-fields of Eton. It was won in the shambles and wreckage of the Fourth of June celebrations, when the Old Etonians proved they were as happily violent as any, and far more so than most.”

“Tosh,” Paxton said. It wasn't an adequate answer, but Lacey engaged the clutch and revved the engine and after that it was too noisy to talk.

They drove over washboard
pavé
and rutted side roads and potholed farm tracks, calling on depots where stores were heaped in small pyramids of boxes that could be seen a mile away. Sometimes Lacey stopped at the main entrance; more often he went to the back and talked to a shirt-sleeved NCO who lived in a small guard hut with a large guard dog. Cigars changed hands; goods were loaded into the wagon: timber, carpet, drums of olive oil, bits of plumbing, rolls of canvas, a cinema projector, much furniture, a piano, a hip-bath, and more that was hidden inside wooden crates. He also collected items at military storehouses in requisitioned barns and farms. There were so many stops that Paxton lost interest until he saw Lacey and a sergeant discussing a cow. Lacey didn't take the cow but he did come away with a box of live hens. “What's wrong with the cow?” Paxton asked, sarcastically. “Too heavy?” “Too pregnant,” Lacey said.

At last they drove into Amiens. Occasional gaps in the streets showed where bombs, or perhaps long-range shells, had fallen, but the town was full of life, most of it in khaki and all of it with francs to spend. Lacey trundled through the centre, pointing out the good places and the bad.
“That's
the only shop to go to for handkerchiefs … This little restaurant on the corner is very sound on fish … I can't recommend that café unless you're desperate for company … Stay away from
them
, they're so overpriced it's quite criminal… Excellent
pâté
here …” Eventually he ran out of shops and increased speed.