Derek Robinson - A Splendid Little War

“Bloody hell. And I thought the Plymouth Brethren were peculiar.”

“The Skoptsi get it from the Bible. Matthew nineteen, verse twelve. The formula for perfection.”

“All this purification,” Lacey said. “Isn’t it self-defeating? If the men carry on mutilating themselves, the cult won’t have the wherewithal to reproduce, and they’ll vanish. Yet they looked quite vigorous.”

“I put it down to radishes,” Pedlow said. “Radishes can work miracles. Believe me. I got it straight from God.”

The C.O. woke at eleven o’clock with a hangover that felt like a kick in the head and a tongue that tasted of old socks. He drank a mug of black coffee and told Brazier to assemble both Flights on the grass.

He came out and led them in twenty minutes of brisk non-stop P.T., with ten press-ups for any slackers. Then he split them into teams of five, lined them up, and sent them on a leapfrogging race the length of the train. Wragge leapfrogged three of his team and collided with the last, who was Maynard. Both fell heavily. “Don’t bloody lie there!” Griffin shouted. “Idle on parade! Asleep in the sky! Bolos will biff you!” They scrambled to their feet. When the last team reached the finish, everyone was gasping and some were being sick. “Flabby!” Griffin roared. “Pathetic! Unfit for duty! Fall in and do it again.” They leapfrogged back down the length of the train to the locomotive, working hard and failing often. The plennys watched, amazed and amused.

“Take-off in thirty minutes,” Griffin announced. “We’ll fly up the Volga and sink a few gunboats.” He felt a little better. Every squadron needed to be licked into shape now and then. Exercising power made him hungry. He strode to the dining car and ordered a bacon sandwich, lickety-split. No time to waste. There were Bolos out there to be bashed.

The squadron sat on the grass and rested its aching joints.

“What brought on that lunacy?” Oliphant asked.

“He’s got a sour apple up his ass,” Douglas Gunning said. “Old English saying.”

“We had a games master like that,” Maynard said. “He had the rugger team out doing tackling practice every morning before breakfast. We all had big bruises. Did no good, we lost anyway. Silly bastard.”

“Leapfrog isn’t going to beat the Bolsheviks,” Wragge said. “And I didn’t come to Russia to play the fool.”

“He shot himself,” Maynard said. “Not because we lost the rugger. The police wanted him. Fraud.”

Oliphant got to his feet. “We shouldn’t complain, I suppose. He’s the C.O., naturally he wants a top-notch squadron.”

“He killed Bellamy,” Hackett said. “Bellamy was sick. Should never have been flying.” That left a long silence. Nobody wanted to argue, not with Hackett. They got up and went to put their flying kit on.

Half an hour was not enough.

The bombs had to be carted from their dump in a distant corner of the aerodrome, and then fused and hung on the Nines. Some bombs turned out to be old and corroded — no surprise — and they had to be replaced. One bomb was too big and broke its hanger; more work. One was successfully hung before an armourer saw that it was a practice bomb: a dud. More delay. Griffin growled at them to get a move on. “You can have it fast, sir,” said a flight sergeant. “Or you can have it good. Which d’you want?” Half an hour was not nearly enough.

The crews, and those not flying who had come to watch, were glad of the rest. They sprawled on the grass and speculated what Russian women might be like. Not the peasants. They all seemed to be short and thick. Probably a bit aromatic too. Noblewomen must surely be different. Also Russian ballet dancers. They had legs, long lovely legs. Where were all the ballet dancers? Maybe in Moscow. “ Na Moskvu! ” Jessop said, and nobody laughed. Moscow was a thousand miles away and Jessop was all mouth and no brains.

The adjutant didn’t attend. He was in his Pullman car when his plenny came in, highly excited about something, which turned out to be a train, pulling into an adjacent siding.

It was the personal express of Colonel Guy Kenny, V.C. and much more. The V.C. alone was enough to make Brazier suck in his gut and put extra snap into his salute. He knew about Kenny. Kenny was a legend in the British Army. Six feet three inches tall, the build of a rowing Blue, an eye-patch and a cheery smile. A couple of bullets had rearranged his left ankle, so he used a cane to help him walk. He wore a khaki kilt and a Glengarry bonnet and the purple ribbon of the Victoria Cross, the only British decoration whose ribbon carried a miniature replica of the medal, dull bronze, as tiny as a sequin. Brazier himself had a few medal ribbons, but that miniature turned every other award into a trinket.

“I’m afraid there’s nobody here, sir,” he said. “They’re all at the aerodrome. Preparing for an attack.”

“Perfect. We’ll go and watch.”

Three years earlier, Guy Kenny had been a captain in the London Scottish Regiment. He was thirty. The regiment had been given a section of the German line to capture. That was on 1st July 1916, when one hundred thousand troops climbed out of their trenches and walked — as advised; there was no need to run; seven days of shelling had battered the enemy into silence — across the dry plain of the Somme, so much better than the clogging clay of Flanders. Quite quickly, they found that the artillery barrage had failed to silence the enemy. By nightfall — probably by midday — twenty thousand of that army were dead and forty thousand more were wounded. So began the Battle of the Somme. It was to last another eighteen weeks, but Guy Kenny’s contribution was all over on the first day.

The London Scottish took their objective. Most attacks failed, but London Scottish was one of a few regiments to get through the German wire and kill the machine-gunners and capture the trenches. At a terrible price. Half the soldiers fell, either dead or wounded. In Kenny’s section, all the other company commanders were killed; he was the only surviving officer. Now his men were fighting to hold trenches that had been knocked shapeless by the British bombardment and were cut off by a German barrage that turned no-man’s-land into exactly that. They were running out of ammunition. A relief party of fifty-nine men left the British trenches with fresh supplies. Three got through. Yet the remnants of the London Scottish fought off German counter-attacks all day, and Guy Kenny won his Victoria Cross.

He should have been shot. Statistically, and by any military measurement of risk, his leadership in moving from trench to trench across open ground, often standing upright and directing fire where it was most needed, was sacrificial. It should have been swiftly ended by the enemy. They certainly tried. Shot in the ankle, he hopped and hobbled, and kept command. As the day wore on, and ammunition ran out, he had his men firing captured enemy rifles. When night fell, he counted the survivors, made the only sensible decision, and took them back to their own lines. One eye was closed by a sliver of shrapnel. He didn’t need it. The night was too black to see much.

Griffin was squatting beneath the wing of a Nine, trying to see why an armourer was having so much trouble with the bomb-release mechanism, when he became aware that a couple of mechanics were suddenly standing at attention, and he straightened up too quickly and banged his head and lost his cap.

“Colonel Kenny, sir,” the adjutant said. Griffin grabbed the cap; an R.A.F. officer couldn’t salute bareheaded; besides, he was the C.O., for Christ’s sake. The man he saluted was a giant. Griffin was looking at the ribbon of Britain’s supreme award for valour. This was worse than being in the presence of royalty.