Derek Robinson - A Splendid Little War

Wragge waggled his wings and made sure everyone saw the Halberstadt. He thought about the situation. Assume it was a Red machine, up to no good, maybe reconnaissance, counting the troop trains. Maybe bombing. It must have seen Merlin Squadron being unloaded yesterday, so bombs were likely. But no escort? Already, Wragge was searching the blue immensity above him. Suppose the Halberstadt was bait. Those Spads — if they were Spads — had 200-horsepower Hispano-Suizas, big enough to outclimb any Camel. He had specks of oil on his goggles. What was that up there? A Spad or a speck? A short rattle of gunfire made his pulse jump. Dextry was waving, pointing. Far on the left-hand quarter was a smudge of aircraft, only slightly higher than the Camels.

It matured and separated into a group of six. Three were the brown Spads. The others were a mixture: a Fokker Triplane, an all-red Nieuport, and what might be an Albatros. A mongrel lot. Flown by scruffs or aces? Wragge wondered and waited. His Flight was flying broadside-on to their approach. At four hundred yards all the Spads opened fire. Tracer probed and lost heart and fell below the Camels. “Optimistic,” he said, counted to three, and banked hard towards the enemy. Now it was a head-on charge.

Jessop crouched and made himself small. Dextry kept his head up and looked for a gap to aim at. Maynard shouted: “Come to Daddy!” and was glad no-one heard. Borodin murmured a soldier’s prayer for a merciful death if death it must be. And the two formations met in a crash of noise and nothing else. They merged and separated in an instant. Nobody had fired. Firing was stupid if you were about to collide and aimless when you were not.

Wragge banked hard right, the Camel’s trump card, and the Flight followed him. The Reds had scattered. The Spads climbed in three different directions and he chased the middle one until it was a distant blur in his gunsight. He turned and dived back to the fight, but there was no fight: just a huge and empty sky. No surprise. Air combat was like that. He searched and saw dots swirling with the pointlessness of bugs at dusk. He headed for them. One bug turned a hot red and dropped, trailing smoke. Not so pointless after all.

When Jessop came out of the vertical bank, the Triplane swam into view, so he turned and fired and his bullet-stream bent as if blown sideways and nearly hit Maynard. Jessop shouted, and reversed bank, which created a huge skid that washed the Triplane out of sight. Not possible, bloody great Tripe couldn’t disappear like that. Jessop turned the bank into a roll and made that into a sweet barrel-roll and at the top he looked down at Maynard going the opposite way and firing at something, and simultaneously red and yellow tracer chased itself past Jessop, nibbled at his wingtip, made his Camel twitch, and for an instant Jessop was puzzled, how the devil did Maynard do that? He completed the barrelroll fast and Good Christ All Bloody Mighty the Tripe was back again. No mistakes this time. He worked to get behind it. Difficult. Damn thing never kept still.

Maynard was looking the other way when Jessop missed him. He didn’t know whose guns they were, could have been one of three Bolos, not the Spads, they were gone. He banked and turned, looked left and right, banked again, looked up, looked back, banked again, never flew straight for more than ten seconds, never stopped searching. Maynard knew little about girls and sex but much about how to creep up behind an enemy and blow holes in him. He saw an all-red Nieuport chased by a Camel and an Albatros chasing the Camel, and he joined the hunt. He fired brief bursts at the Albatros, very long range but the Albatros took fright, put its nose down, and the Nieuport blew apart.

Dextry was chasing it and the explosion amazed him: who did that? Maynard whooped with glee but he knew he hadn’t scored. He joined Dextry and they circled the fluttering bits of burning debris, the drifting smoke. Warplanes were dangerous. Sometimes incendiary bullets misfired, touched off a fuel tank, a pilot sat in a wooden frame covered with doped linen and stuffed with explosives behind a red-hot engine, of course some machines blew apart. Nobody said flying was safe.

The flight was over. The Spads were out of sight, the Nieuport no longer existed, and the two survivors had quit in a hurry. Wragge chased them, for sport, and was outpaced. He returned and led the Flight to their landing ground next to the siding. On the way, they met the Halberstadt and shot it down. Its pilot made a brave attempt at a forced landing but the machine was hopelessly lopsided when it touched the ground, and it cartwheeled with surprising ferocity, every impact ripping off a part until there was little left but a trail of wreckage.

Lunch was taken. The Dregs was unusually quiet.

When they landed, the C.O. had talked to Dextry. “We all got back,” he said, “but that’s the best that can be said.”

“Sloppy. Half the time we got in each other’s way.”

“We’ve forgotten what a real scrap is like. I don’t count the Halberstadt. To tell the truth, I felt sorry for the bloke.”

“He didn’t put up much of a fight,” Dextry said. “In fact, he didn’t put up any fight at all.”

That was one of several things which the pilots did not talk about at lunch. Nobody claimed the Nieuport. Nobody mentioned the near-collisions.

When everyone had finished eating, Wragge said, “We’ll go again. This time I’ll take the Nines with us. If there’s an aerodrome at Belgorod and it’s ours, we’ll land there. If the Bolos are there, we’ll bomb the stupid place.”

Tusker Oliphant led the Nines at three thousand feet, high enough to escape machine-gun fire from the ground, low enough to make a bombing run. The C.O. was a thousand feet above with the Camels. They followed the railway to Belgorod and nothing happened. No troops, no guns, no burning ruins. Few people in the streets, and nobody ran for shelter. A train stood in the station, the engine making a stick of brown smoke. That was the sum of the action.

The squadron flew a wide circle around Belgorod and did not find an aerodrome. But two miles north of the town, Tiger Wragge saw a racecourse beside the railway line. At first he was surprised. Racing seemed an unlikely luxury, but then why not? All it needed was space and horses, and Russia had plenty of both. He took the Camel Flight right down to a hundred feet and cruised around the course, a simple oval of grass. A three-coach train stood in a siding. A flag as big as a bedsheet waved in the breeze. It had several colours, which was encouraging. A few soldiers came out to watch the aeroplanes.

Wragge signalled to Borodin that he should land, and left Dextry in command. Borodin and the C.O. touched down on a wonderfully wide, flat, smooth stretch of grass, switched off, and got out.

An officer on a horse cantered towards them.

“I’m second fiddle now,” Wragge said. “This is your show.”

The officer did not dismount. He was an expert horseman and he cut a good figure as he sat and looked down at them. Borodin introduced himself, and the officer dismounted very smartly, and saluted. Wragge strolled up and down while they talked, until Borodin said to him: “The train belongs to a supporter of Denikin, General Yevgeni Gregorioff. We are safe here. The nearest fighting is at Kursk, a hundred miles north. We are invited to meet General Gregorioff in his salon.”

“Tell this chap I’m going to fire a signal flare,” Wragge said. “I don’t want to frighten his lovely horse.”

He got the Very pistol from his Camel and sent the flare arcing into the sky. He dumped his flying coat and helmet in the cockpit. Now he was recognisably a squadron leader, with a slightly battered but rakish cap. “Lead on,” he said. Already the squadron was making its descent.