Derek Robinson - A Splendid Little War

“You should regard this as background briefing,” Fitzroy said. “Keeping you au fait with the mise en scène , so to speak.”

“Prime Ministers love secrecy,” Delahaye said. “It makes them feel in control.”

Weatherby finished his champagne. It was flat, like the general atmosphere. “Britain’s at war, but we can’t talk about it,” he said. “What can we talk about?”

A servant tapped on the door and wheeled in the soup.

“Denikin’s broken out of South Russia,” General Stattaford said. “That should be fairly safe. It was in The Times this morning.”

They buried Hackett on the steppe.

Sergeant Stevens had been the first to find the body, and after one glance he had covered it and told the adjutant that nobody should come near it. The ground crew made a coffin. Stevens and a mechanic lifted the body and placed it inside and he watched as the lid was nailed down. Then he went in search of Susan Perry.

She was treating Marines for cuts and bruises and a possible dislocated shoulder. “Instantaneous,” he told her. That was all. He could think of nothing to add; nothing that would help, anyway. She nodded and got on with her job. Her face was as blank as a sheet of paper, and as white.

Brazier was waiting for him. “Ideally, he should be buried in Taganrog,” he said. “H.Q. will have a padre. He’ll organize the cemetery.”

“Not unless you’re ready to ask the doctor to do another embalming.” Brazier rolled his eyes. “Thought not,” Stevens said. “Taganrog’s two days away, maybe more. The guts are…” He decided not to discuss the guts. “This heat’s getting worse. Inside a boxcar it will be twice as hot.”

“So we do it now.”

The squadron knew the routine. They formed a hollow square around a grave dug by the plennys . Susan Perry and Count Borodin stood together. Four officers carried the coffin. Lacey followed. He spoke the familiar words, paused, and uttered his eulogy:

The pallbearers did their bit, while Lacey said his final piece. The firing party blazed away. Susan Perry and Borodin walked to the grave and looked down at the box made of packing-case planks. She dropped a handful of earth onto it; so did he. They walked away. “He was so happy to be engaged,” she said. “He was like a boy on his first bicycle.”

Colonel’s Kenny’s coffin was intact; it was taken to “B” Flight’s train. But the Marines’ train was ruined. Its windows were shattered, its roofs were split, a fire had burnt out the kitchen. Brazier ordered the carriages to be uncoupled and, one by one, they were capsized. So were the remains of the engine. It took every available man, hauling on ropes, but it cleared the line. The Marines found new quarters amongst the ground crews. Merlin Squadron got on the move again. Cautiously.

Borodin took a bottle of brandy and two glasses to Susan Perry’s Pullman car.

“I’m told this is traditional after the… um… ceremony,” he said.

“Funeral,” she said. “Burial. We buried him, because he was dead. No euphemisms, please. Nobody passed away. He didn’t go to his rest. He died. But the bottle is a kind thought and yes, I’d like a glass of brandy.”

“Good. So would I.” He opened the bottle and poured. “Sometimes the English are too much for me. Russians let their emotions show at funerals. Men cry when they lose a friend. This English restraint, this silence, is hard to take. I found it… heartbreaking.”

“You were not alone.” She took a healthy sip of brandy. “Daddy Maynard’s stiff upper lip began to wobble when Lacey played his ace.” Borodin cocked his head. “Right at the end,” she said. “‘We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone’. English understatement. There’s no defence against it.”

“Yes.” This was not what Borodin had expected. He had been ready to comfort a grieving fiancée but he wasn’t prepared for a candid review of the funeral service. “What will you do when we get to Taganrog?” he asked. “Stay in Russia? Go home?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to think. I can’t just forget James, can I? But what’s the point of remembering him? He’s the second man I lost almost as soon as I found him. I don’t think I was meant to be happy. Being happy is the kiss of death.”

Borodin studied her. If a highly attractive, intelligent woman like this despaired of happiness, something was wrong with the world. Without thinking, he said: “Marry me. I promise you a long life of gloom and misery.”

She laughed, briefly. Well, that was better. “You wouldn’t survive the honeymoon,” she said. “You’d be doomed.”

He’d taken one chance. He took another. “If it happened at the end of the honeymoon, I wouldn’t mind. There are worse ways to go.”

She finished her brandy and looked at him, a long look that could have meant anything. “What became of the gloom and misery you promised?”

“Understatement,” he said. “I’ve caught the disease.” She held out her glass and he poured more brandy.

In The Dregs, the adjutant had taken Tusker Oliphant into a quiet corner and was trying, and failing, to persuade him to be the new C.O. Tusker was the most senior officer. He had an unblemished record. King’s Regulations were very clear.

“It won’t work, Uncle.”

“It must work, Tusker. You’ll have my full backing.”

“That won’t change the chaps. I’m a bomber boy. Fighter boys won’t accept me. D’you know what my chaps call them? Camel-drivers. Often worse. And they call us Number Nines. You know what they are.”

“Sick-parade pills. Cure for constipation.”

“Well, then.”

“Schoolboy behaviour. They’ll do as they’re bloody well told.”

Oliphant rubbed his eyes, and sat with his head in his hands. “Remember McCudden? James McCudden?”

“Never met him. Different squadron.”

“He shot down fifty-something Huns. Got the V.C., D.S.O. and Bar, etcetera. But first he won an M.M.” Oliphant looked up. “Not an M.C., Uncle. An M.M.”

“So McCudden rose through the ranks.”

“Started as an air mechanic. Ended as a major. When he got his V.C., the generals offered him command of 85 Squadron. One of the best. They didn’t want him. Turned him down.”

“The pilots decided?”

“He hadn’t been to the right school, Uncle. His father was a sergeant-major. And 85 was stuffed with public-school types.”

Brazier rubbed his chin. He shaved twice a day and it would soon be time. “You know this for a fact?”

“I know McCudden went to 60 Squadron instead. Everyone believed 85 wouldn’t have him because he wasn’t one of them. Well, neither am I. But the Camel-drivers are. Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Sherborne, Tonbridge.”

“They accepted Hackett.”

“He frightened them. And he wasn’t a Number Nine.”

“You’d get a squadron-leader’s pay,” the adjutant said, but he knew from Oliphant’s sad smile that money couldn’t change anything.

Sergeant Stevens had rescued a percolator from Colonel Kenny’s Pullman. Lacey watched him brew coffee. “I’ve decided to make you my fag,” he said. “I take it you served your time as a fag at Winchester.”