Derek Robinson - A Splendid Little War

“Let’s you and me go and inspect your casualties,” Hackett said to her. “And leave these maniacs to batter each other.”

They walked and she did not take his arm. He was relieved, he didn’t want the squadron watching them stroll like that. Then he began to wonder. Maybe she was being fickle. Women were fickle, well-known fact, everyone said so.

She poked him in the ribs. “Relax your shoulders,” she said. “They’re up around your ears.”

He let his shoulders slump. “Now what?”

“Wave your arms. And whistle. Can you sing?”

He whistled the opening bars of “Waltzing Matilda”, and waved an arm in time with it, and sang the next lines: “… under the shade of a coolibah tree, and he sang as he watched and waited while his billy boiled …” He stopped. “Feel free to applaud.”

“You’ve got a voice like a bucket of frogs,” she said kindly.

“Yes? That’s a compliment where I come from. We’d sooner listen to a bucket of frogs than wrestle a mad kangaroo.”

She laughed, and took his arm. “Give me your hat.” He took off his cap. “Now you’re not the C.O. I’m not going to marry the C.O., but I might just marry you, whatever your name is. What is it?”

“James. Are we going to get married?”

“There’s nothing more certain.”

“Good God. Well, I’m glad you told me.”

They talked of other things: his boyhood in Australia, her life at Cambridge. Music, songs, hits from the shows. Lacey’s amazing ability to supply the Mess gramophone with records of the hits. “I asked him how he does it,” she said, “and he said, ‘I breathe through the loopholes’. What does that mean?”

“It’s bullshit,” he said. “Australian word. It means…” She widened her eyes. It was a look he was learning to recognize. “Oh. You know what it means. Doesn’t matter. Tell me this. Are we really engaged? Or was that just…” He ran out of words.

“Bullshit?”

“No, no. I hope not.” He thought of several answers, some of them romantic, phrases he had never spoken. “Quite the opposite,” he said.

“Do you want to be engaged?”

“Well, it might settle the minds of the squadron. Stop the gossip.”

“Then let’s do it. As long as we both know that it’s just for the benefit of the squadron.” That silenced him. “You may kiss your fiancée,” she said, so he did. That wasn’t for the squadron. That quite definitely was not for the squadron. Bloody hell, he thought. This is a girl in a million. They walked on.

A hospital train trundled past, heading for Ekat, and stopped a quarter of a mile from them.

“Casualties from Tsaritsyn, I expect,” Hackett said. “Do you want a closer look?”

“Not at what’s inside,” she said. “They’re all the same. No dressings, no painkillers, no antiseptic, no drugs and one doctor too tired to amputate.”

They watched from a distance. Men were carrying corpses from the train and piling them beside the track as if they were stacking cut timber. Hackett counted thirty bodies and gave up.

“Gangrene,” she said. “Can you smell it? Like rotten fruit. Slightly sweet but also a yellowy stink. Plenty of dysentery, too. Smells like a broken sewer.” She sniffed the air. “Malaria, too, probably. That can be the real killer. Dead in a day sometimes.”

The men climbed aboard the train and it pulled away.

“What’s the point of a hospital train if they all die?” Hackett said.

“It’s a Russian joke,” she said. “They call it irony.”

Lacey and Borodin sheltered in the kitchen while the passion for indoor croquet burned itself out.

“It will be over in fifteen minutes,” Lacey said. “Fighter pilots have a low threshold of boredom. Have you seen what they read? Cowboy stories. Penny dreadfuls. Ripping yarns. I speak of those who can read.”

“I was a fighter pilot,” Borodin said. “I read all of Tolstoy. War and Peace twice.”

“Heavens above. Don’t tell these hooligans. Your reputation will be in tatters.” Lacey found an apple and began peeling it. “How can we pass the time?”

“I could teach you more Russian phrases. Von! is useful. It means ‘Get away!’ Poyedz is train. Nye refuganski poyedz might help one day. It means ‘Not a refugee train’. What else? You might hear Bozhe Tsarya Khrani at parties. That’s ‘God save the Tsar’.”

“He’s dead.”

“I know. Everyone knows. But some people choose not to believe it. Prazdik is a good word. It’s a celebration. This C.O. should throw a prazdik . He’s become remote. He makes the squadron nervous.”

“It’s the curse of promotion.”

“Time for a prazdik , then. It cures all ills.”

They ate the apple. The noise in The Dregs subsided and they went back. The pilots were searching for lost playing cards. “We’ve got fifty-two but five are jokers,” Jessop said. “Can you play poker with five jokers?”

Wragge found the last croquet ball and gave it to Lacey. “We’ve formed a team to play the rest,” he said. “We are the Public School Wanderers and the rest are Serfs.”

“Abolished in 1861,” Lacey said. “No serfs in Russia.”

“Not that it did them any good,” Borodin said. He was talking to himself as much as to Lacey, but his words were out of character. There was a sudden silence.

“Don’t stop there, old chap,” Dextry said.

“It all depends how you define freedom,” Borodin said. “Yes, the serfs were emancipated, nobody owned them. Good. Now they were peasants, free to survive if they could. Not so good.”

“I bet they got shat upon,” Jessop said.

“They were given land. The Crown had bought it. The peasants, in turn, had to pay back the Crown. Six per cent a year, every year for forty-nine years. Six per cent is a very heavy rate. And the land’s value was always calculated above its market value, often twice as much, so the peasants could never earn enough to make their payments, and they fell deeper into debt.”

“I told you they got shat upon,” Jessop said, pleased at his own cleverness.

“Forty-nine years,” Dextry said. “How many peasants live to be forty-nine?”

“Got it!” Maynard said. He held up the ace of spades. “Now we can play.”

“Let’s leave them to it,” Lacey said. He and Borodin went out. “You surprise me,” Lacey said. “I didn’t realize the Russian nobility took such an interest in the soil.”

“We don’t. I read about it at Cambridge. People kept asking me what Russia was like, so I looked it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica . The 1911 edition.”

“Ah yes,” Lacey said. “By far the best. It’s very sound on the Tudor Protestant sects. Especially in the north of England.”

Hackett awoke suddenly. It was too early, not much more than dawn. He felt tired, and angry because he was tired: what was wrong with his body? Couldn’t it give him a decent night’s sleep? He had a flickering memory of a dream and then it was lost. It left a taste of a struggle with a great problem. What problem? It had gone. But it had been urgent. How could it vanish so fast when it had mattered so much?

He got out of bed, massaged his eyes and squinted at the steppe. It reminded him of his days in the Navy, being on watch when the dawn came up and painted the ocean. Now it was working the same trick on this prairie and turning it… not gold. Not yellow either. And blonde was all wrong too. “Who cares?” he said. He got dressed quickly and pulled on his flying boots and went for a walk in this indescribable landscape while the colours lasted.