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Authors: Derek Robinson

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“Onwards!” said Nancy Hicks-Potter.

“And upwards!” said Laura da Silva.

Dash stopped trying to guess. They were all topping girls, all. They all had crystal-clear, expensively educated voices. They all had spiffing chests.

The whist ended. He said goodnight, took his candle, hurried upstairs, got into his pyjamas, then had a better idea and took them off. The bed was so cold that he jumped out and put them on again. He lay awake, occasionally squirming as lust visited his loins. Eventually Madeira overtook lust and he slept.

He awoke smoothly and swiftly when the bed was invaded by a silky tangle of limbs. By now he was a veteran of this business of nocturnal seduction; he knew exactly how to handle it. He did a lot of handling and a steady amount of kissing and he did his level best to prolong the thrill, until his body leapfrogged his good intentions
and exploded like a firecracker and left him as limp as yesterday's salad. That was the time to speak. The room was so black that he could make out nothing, not even the shape of her head. What to say? In his mind he rehearsed phrases. May I know your name? Awfully formal. What about: I don't think we've been introduced ... Not in good taste. He cleared his throat. As he did, she slid out of the sheets. “I say ...” he whispered. The door clicked shut. Too late.

Twice more, that night.

He awoke feeling fuzzy in the head and stiff in the thighs and bruised about the balls. Everyone was at breakfast, full of chat and bustle. He ate an enormous meal and realised how impossible it was now to ask anyone anything. He should have spoken up at the time, in bed. But if he had done so, she might never have returned. No secret, no sex. He was caught in a wonderful trap.

Nothing he had been taught at Monmouth School had prepared him for this. At Monmouth he had dissected a frog and got the impression that reproduction was all a matter of tubes. Well, clearly that was not an adequate explanation.

It was time to leave. He kissed everyone and said goodbye. Everything was delightfully bewildering.

When Daisy carried him into Pepriac, he was ravenously hungry and so pale that his freckles seemed to float on his skin. He ate, and immediately went to bed. “Give it up,” Simms advised. “It's only Charlie Chaplin, after all.” But Dash shook his head. “I can't disappoint everyone now. Isn't this what we're fighting for?” Simms stared. “No, it isn't,” he said. Dash blinked three times and then his eyes closed.

* * *

Dash got up in time for dinner. With the C.O. away, and the aerodrome so boggy that there was no prospect of flying, the atmosphere in the mess was relaxed and cheery.

“O'Neill sent me a postcard,” the doctor said. “Packs of wolves are roaming in Westminster. They ate the Home Secretary.”

“O'Neill couldn't tell a wolf from a white elephant,” Gerrish said. “He's blind as a bat.”

“I've often wondered about bats,” McWatters said. “Clever little
creatures. Fly like the devil and never hit anything. Your churches are full of them, padre. How's it done? What's the trick?”

The padre took some more roast potatoes. “God moves in a mysterious way,” he said.

“Chap called Mannock in 40 Squadron,” Lynch said. “Only got one good eye. The other's not worth a damn.”

“That's nothing,” Simms said. “The whole of 56 Squadron's only got one ball.” It was an old joke, and it produced a few tired groans. A new man, called Griffiths, looked puzzled. “Albert Ball,” Simms told him.

“Oh, yes! Captain Ball,” Griffiths said. He was glad to be part of the conversation at last. “People were talking about him at the depot. What's his score?” It seemed a perfectly natural question, but as soon as he'd asked it, Griffiths knew it was wrong. Bad form to discuss scores during dinner. “Doesn't matter, really,” he mumbled. His face was hot.

Lynch took pity on him. “A couple of dozen,” he said. “The answer to your question is a couple of dozen, which puts Captain Ball far out in front.”

“And all done in a Nieuport,” Ogilvy said. “Ball prefers the Nieuport.”

“I want Nieuport,” the duke said abruptly.

“Get me Nieuport too,” the count said.

Everyone looked. They were serious. They sat straight-backed, heads high, and looked down their beautiful noses at them. “This is not the time or the place,” Ogilvy said. They spoke to each other in Russian. “Two Nieuports,” the duke said. “Quick. Tickety-boo.”

“You mean lickety-split,” Munday said. “Tickety-boo means all-serene.”

“Tickety-boo
and
lickety-split,” the duke said.

“We'll discuss it later,” Ogilvy said.

“Please, sir, can I have a new bicycle?” McWatters said.

“Tell me, Uncle,” the doctor said, speaking slowly and clearly so as to distract attention from the Russians, “tell me, why is the British Army so fascinated by Ypres? It's a smelly bog. I should have thought the Allies had all the bog they needed. Yet every time I pick up the paper, there's another thumping great Battle of Ypres going on.”

“Only two battles,” the adjutant said. “Strategic necessity.”

“Oh. I see. Well, that's all right then.”

“Russia got biggest bog,” the count said with a gloomy pride.

“Pinsk Marshes. Big as Switzerland.”

The duke said: “German Army invades Pinsk Marshes. Russian Army attacks German Army.” He knocked his knuckles together. “All lost in marshes. All.” That silenced the rest of the squadron. “Great victory for Tsar,” he added.

“Plenty more armies in Russia,” the count said.

“My goodness!” the padre exclaimed. “Rice pudding. With currants in it. What a treat.”

The wind howled suddenly in the chimney, and the stove roared. The doctor glanced at the adjutant. “How are our coal stocks?”

“Excellent. All thanks to Lieutenant Dash and his cousin, the pork sausage maker.”

“Ah. Well done, lad.” A dozen fists briefly pounded the table in applause, and Dash nodded. For the first time, he felt accepted by the squadron.

* * *

As he walked to his hut, Captain Brazier heard music coming from the orderly room. He found Sergeant Lacey playing the gramophone as he worked at his desk.

“Sounds like a fight in a fireworks factory,” the adjutant said.

“Stravinsky. His music for the new Diaghilev ballet,
Les Arbeilles
. It's on in Paris. You'd love it. Pure joy.”

“Stravinsky,” said the adjutant. “Isn't he that anarchist-musician johnny? Caused a riot?”

“And a very splendid riot it was,” Lacey said. “At the
première
of
The Rites of Spring.”

“I suppressed a riot once. At the market place in Peshawar. And a very splendid suppression it was.” Lacey rolled his eyes. “I assure you, sergeant. I had the ringleaders tied to the mouths of our cannons and I blew their little Indian lights out. Blew them clean out!”

“Rather like a birthday cake,” Lacey said. He was flicking through a batch of signals. He held up a pink form. “Plum jam. Brigade are still unhappy. The quartermaster insists that we have two hundred pounds
more than our entitlement.” Lacey polished his glasses with the flimsy paper.

“We explained all that. Didn't we?”

“We said that he sent us strawberry jam in error and that we returned it.”

“Well, tell him again.”

“No, no. The man is a halfwit. He needs guidance.” Lacey rolled a form into his typewriter and rattled out a reply:

Plum jam, squadron entitlement for, mislabelled as supplied, local transfer of. Your PNT/14Q dated 06.03.17. Can confirm manufacturer's error resulted
200
lbs jam labelled plum in fact contents half strawberry half raspberry therefore transferred to
40
Squadron on authority Duty Officer that Squadron
.

The adjutant read this. “Blame it on the manufacturer. Quite right. I suppose you had a reason for picking 40 Squadron.”

“They moved to England last week.”

“Ah.” He signed the paper. “Duty officer, eh? Could be anybody. Poor chap's probably gone west by now.”

Lacey leaned against the doorframe, his thumbs hooked in his pockets. “Probably,” he said. Brazier sat squarely, and cleaned the nib of his pen with a bit of blotting paper. Eventually Lacey looked at him and said: “Strawberry jam.” Brazier raised a bushy eyebrow just a fraction. “Isn't there something horribly symbolic here?” Lacey asked. “The army can afford to lose millions of men, year after year. But not a few cases of strawberry jam. Jam
matters.”

“Civilian talk,” Brazier said briskly.

“Jam matters more than men?”

“Regulations matter more than anything.”

“War isn't regulated. War is confusion and disorder and luck and waste, especially waste. Every week – even now, when nothing is happening – hundreds of men, wasted. Thousands of tons of shells, wasted. So why this obsession about jam? I apologise for interrupting you.”

“Not a bit of it. I'm pleased to see you developing the Fighting Spirit, Lacey.”

“Mere bile, sir.”

“You should apply for a commission.”

“I should take one of Beecham's Pills.”

“We need keen young subalterns at the Front.”

“Only because you keep losing them. Which reminds me. Your ammunition has arrived.”

He fetched a wooden box stencilled Signal Flares (Very Pistol) Handle With Care, and placed it on the adjutant's desk. “A posthumous token of respect from the late Lieutenant Morkel.”

Brazier prised open the lid and eased a few records from their straw packing. “Band of the Grenadier Guards ... ‘Blaze Away' ... ‘Colonel Bogey' ... ‘Sussex by the Sea' ... Good. Real music, this.” He dug deeper. “Hullo ... Orlando Benedict and his Savoy Orchestra?” He peered at the labels. “‘I'm Lonesome for You' ... ‘Here Comes Tootsie' ... ‘If You Could Care for Me' ... ‘Poor Butterfly' ...” One nostril flared. “Tosh. Utter tosh.”

“I think Captain Lynch hoped it might soften your stony soul, sir.” Lacey pointed at a label. “Novelty foxtrot. Splendid exercise for the deskbound office worker.”

Brazier grunted, and put ‘Blaze Away' on the gramophone. “Keep your jazz,” he said. “This is real music.”

* * *

The day after he left France, Cleve-Cutler was eating breakfast at Taggart's hotel, near Piccadilly. Taggart was a gloomy Irishman with an eyepatch and a bad limp. He had been invalided out of the R.F.C. early in 1915 when a friendly shell had rushed through the gap between his wings and removed several vital struts, forcing him to make a messy landing in a wood. Now he sat at Cleve-Cutler's table and helped himself to toast. “My advice,” he said. “Wear mufti. Otherwise wherever you go, the bloody civilians will buy drinks for you, and then they'll ask you how many Fritzes you've shot down.”

“Fritzes? They really say Fritzes?”

“They know nothing. All they know they read in the bloody silly newspapers, and that's lies dreamed up by the bloody silly War Office. Cavalry of the clouds, that's you. Take their drinks, tell them any old lies, fuck their women if you want to, they'll consider it a privilege, with those wings on you and all, like being fucked by an angel.
Just don't take anything they say seriously. They know nothing.” He limped away, dropping crumbs.

Cleve-Cutler wondered what to do with his week. If he moved fast, he could catch an express and be in Cornwall by tea-time. Grey seas, grey granite, soggy moorland. His parents would ask a lot of questions. Then their friends would visit and ask the same bloody silly questions: what's it really like? When are we going to win? And, no doubt: how many Fritzes have you shot down? Resentment gripped like indigestion. If he told them what France was really like, they'd never believe him. Bugger Cornwall.

So he stayed at Taggart's and went to a different show every night; often two shows, with supper in-between or after or both. The West End of London was bustling with young officers. He quickly fell in with a bunch hellbent on squeezing the most out of their leave. They called him the Mad Major – to the infantry, any R.F.C. major was mad – and when they ended up at Taggart's, he made jugs of Hornet's Sting for them. They thought he was a hell of a fellow. He relaxed in the luxury of not being a commanding officer. For the first time in a year, he did what he damn well pleased. It was a strange experience, like taking his clothes off in a crowded room, and he soon grew sick of it, but for a few galvanic days he thought he was happy.

He went to a dance. It was a tea-dance, held at Malplacket House. The young Lord Malplacket had gone to France with his regiment in 1914 and soon was Mentioned in Despatches for conspicuous gallantry, too conspicuous for his own good: a German sharp-shooter picked him out and picked him off. Nobody in the British Army wore a steel helmet in those dashing, innocent days. Eventually the remains got shipped home and placed in the family vaults while a cannon left over from the Civil War boomed out the dead man's years. His widow wondered what to do with herself. Belgian refugees needed help. She found them dull. The Red Cross wanted people to roll bandages: not a thrilling prospect. She decided that her war-work was to give tea-dances at Malplacket house for officers on leave. Every afternoon, the ballroom was brisk with the foxtrotting of subalterns and widows. Cleve-Cutler went, and found it the most enormous fun.

The second time he went, he saw a girl sitting in the gallery that overlooked the ballroom. Emerald dress, dark red hair. Quite alone.
He danced a waltz and got some lemonade for his partner and looked up. Still there. Still alone. He excused himself and found the stairs to the gallery.

“Hullo,” she said, as if they had known each other for years. “You're wasting your time with me.”

BOOK: Hornet’s Sting
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