Derek Robinson - A Splendid Little War

“Always welcome, sir. Merlin Squadron will be honoured.”

“Awfully kind. Here come two chaps you’ll find essential.” Much saluting took place. Davenport said: “May I present Count Borodin. He’s your liaison officer with General Wrangel. Speaks better English than I do.”

Borodin was tall and slim, under thirty, clean-shaven, sleek, in a uniform of soft green and grey, free from decorations. He looked like the kind of officer who carries the maps for a general. He said, “An honour, wing commander. General Wrangel sends his compliments. He looks forward to seeing your machines in action.”

“And I look forward to seeing his men biff the Bolos.” Borodin, Borodin , Griffin thought. Where have I heard that before?

“And Sergeant Major Lacey runs your Orderly Room,” Davenport said. “With a certain flair not entirely found in King’s Regulations.”

“Well, a Camel Squadron needs flair. Bags of flair.”

Griffin didn’t like the looks of Lacey. Not tall enough for a sergeant major. Too young, and his uniform fitted him too well, he’d had it tailored, by God. There was something wrong with his eyes too. They looked calm and clever and a little bit amused. What in hell’s name was there to be amused at? Nobody got to be a sergeant major by calmness and cleverness and laughing at things. “I shall depend on you to uphold the traditions of the squadron, Mr Lacey,” he said. Whatever the hell that meant.

“Yes, of course. I am also your Signals Officer, sir. I operate the radio. Messages have arrived from General Holman at the Military Mission H.Q. in Ekaterinodar, marked Urgent and Most Important.” Now there was a hint of a smile. He didn’t talk like a sergeant major, either. He sounded like a bishop announcing a winning hand at whist.

“Lead on,” Griffin said.

The C.O. took the largest compartment in the Pullman coaches. It even had a bath. A silent Russian with a Mongolian face and the build of a 15-year-old boy gave him a whisky-soda and ran the bath, helped him out of his sheepskin coat and flying boots and would have undressed him completely if Griffin had let him. He retired immediately to a corner and squatted on his heels.

Griffin slid into the bath and let the warmth drive out the cold from his stiff limbs. His mind looked back at the tedious hours of flying since Ekat. He’d heard people talk of the famous Russian steppes. Now he’d seen one. Flat and empty. And endless. Presumably somebody scratched a living down there. Dreary, dreary. He’d never understood what his father saw in agriculture, and he’d been happy to leave it to the old man.

His father, Henry Griffin, had inherited a corner of Leicestershire that was big enough to reach well into the counties of Rutland and Northamptonshire. His grandfather, Spencer Griffin had acquired this corner when he made an obscene amount of money out of guano, seagull droppings. He bought a small Atlantic island that was deep in the stuff, just when agriculture was booming and needed fertilizer. It was like shovelling up money. When the boom ended he bought land: farm after bankrupt farm. Farming didn’t much interest him; in fact, compared with his triumphs in guano, nothing much interested him; so he lived in London, and had the decency to die at the age of forty-eight when he walked home in fog as thick as mushroom soup and caught pneumonia.

So his son got the farms. Now Henry was a good farmer, good enough to know eventually that his own son — John — had an incurably low threshold of boredom. Show him a field and it yawned like the prairie. So did young John.

He was a strong, cheerful lad but school was a mystery to him and forget even the thought of college. He was good at foxhunting and he joined the Quorn and the Belvoir, and enjoyed it. When there was no hunt, he was a dashing point-to-point jockey. He was twenty-two when war broke out. That was serious, but not as damned serious as what happened when his horse abruptly refused and sent him flying arse-over-tit into a pile of rocks. He broke an arm and a leg and several ribs.

They took a long time to heal. By then, the war was bogged down in the Trenches, so he joined a cavalry regiment. Good chaps, but no action. The only action seemed to be in the sky. Aeroplanes looked fun.

In 1916 the Royal Flying Corps took him — good horsemen made good pilots, everyone knew that — and, amazingly, he found something useful that he was very good at. An appetite for the kill helped. A fat slice of luck did no harm. And for the lucky ones, promotion was rapid.

Major-General Trenchard headed the R.F.C. and he believed in aggressive patrolling far behind the enemy’s lines. So did John Griffin. “They started it,” he told his squadron, “so let’s get over there and finish it.” If that was costly, well, they were all volunteers, nobody said war was cheap. And the dead made no complaints. Decorations and further promotions proved that Griffin must be right.

Now he was a wing commander, with a whisky-soda, in a hot bath, and he had a bunch of young brigands to lead in a bright and breezy new war. What could be better?

He reached for the signals and read General Holman’s orders. “Get Borodin,” he told the Russian boy-servant.

As he soaked in the tub the count gave him an outline of Wrangel’s plan to capture the south side of Tsaritsyn: bombard the trenches, infiltrate the outer defences, assault the city. “We have tanks which—”

Griffin raised a hand. “Enough. Something I learned in France was, get it on half a sheet of paper. More than that I’ll forget anyway.” He looked at his fingers. The tops were wrinkled. He stood up and let the water drain from him. They made an interesting contrast: the polish of Imperial Russia, or what was left of it, and the intrepid aviator, naked and dripping, here to show them how the Allies duffed up the Hun. “Who was that strange child I found in here?” Griffin asked.

“Your servant. A plenny . Each of your officers has a plenny , we find them loyal and eager to please. Yours is called Jack.”

“An ex-Bolo? You captured him?”

“The plennys were happy to change sides. The Red Army forced them to fight. Your chef, for example, was formerly with the Hotel St George in Moscow but the Bolsheviks put him in their infantry, a foolish move.”

“Our train has a chef?”

“You can have two, if you wish. They cost nothing.”

“We shall need another. Ekat is sending me six bombers and their crews right now. A dozen men.”

“Twelve more plennys , then. Of course. We have what you might call a plenitude.” He handed Griffin a towel.

“Thanks.” What exactly did ‘plenitude’ mean? He let it pass. Borodin’s English was too damn good to be true.

The plennys woke the pilots at seven, with glasses of Russian tea. It wasn’t Earl Grey, but as they sipped it and enjoyed the comfort of clean sheets and sunshine, they began to think that the long, sometimes hard and dirty and often bitterly cold journey had been worthwhile if it helped to restore the good old days. You wouldn’t get tea in bed under the Reds.

The plennys had brushed the uniforms, cleaned and polished the boots, made the buttons shine. The pilots met for breakfast in the bar, which doubled as a dining room. Griffin liked their smartness. “This isn’t France,” he said. “People wandered into the Mess wearing rugger shirts and jodhpurs. Not our style. We’re here to show the flag.”

“Which flag is that, sir?” Wragge asked. “Hackett’s an Aussie, Bellamy’s Canadian and Dextry claims to be Irish.”

“Give the butter a shove,” Griffin grunted.

“Ireland’s British,” Maynard said.