“Two hundred pounds of Amatol,” Griffin said. “It turns a Bolshevik into a pound of strawberry jam. Look closely or you won’t find anything. Go and see Colonel Davenport, the aerodrome commandant. If he says yes, you can go.”
When Davenport saw them approach they reminded him of his son. Well, many young officers made him think of Phillip, dead in Flanders like thousands of other subalterns. Why him? Why not? Phillip caught a packet in Flanders and now he was buried at St Margaret’s in Chalfont St Giles. Just look at these two: medium height, grey eyes, square chin, good teeth. Could be brothers. Twin memories, sent back to haunt him. He got rid of them quickly. “I doubt you’ll find much of interest,” he said. “Ruins are ruins. God knows I’ve seen plenty. Sergeant!”
He gave his orders. “I want these officers armed and horsed. You are their escort. Any threat, bring them out fast.” They left. But the memories lingered.
Armed meant holstered revolvers. The mounts were Cossack ponies. The sergeant carried a leather whip; its thong was so long that the tip bounced in the dust as they rode. “You rather remind me of the American cowboys, sergeant,” Gunning said. “Herding cattle and so on.”
The sergeant thought about that. “This bleedin’ country, if you’ll pardon my French, sir. It’s not like anywhere else.” That ended the conversation.
The city stank. The air was foul with the smell of unburied dead, both human and animal. This was not guesswork; Gunning and Lowe could see the carcases, mostly blackened and bloated. More bodies were hidden in the ruins, releasing a stench that was as sweet as sugar and as sour as vomit. The officers held handkerchiefs over mouth and nostrils. Useless. Even the ponies tossed their heads and blew noisily, hating the air.
There was nothing noble about the ruins. The walls that stood were black with smoke. Those that fell were hillocks of rubble. Some streets were still burning. The sergeant followed what might once have been a broad avenue. Soldiers watched them pass. Some were wounded, some were drunk, some were both. Their uniforms were far from being uniform: tattered, filthy, a mixture of colours. Most were barefoot. All looked underfed. “Keep moving,” the sergeant said, and as he spoke a handful of women and children saw the visitors and ran towards them, shouting, pleading. Their rags were worse than the soldiers’. The sergeant cracked his whip at them, left and right, but they came on and the lash knocked a few to the ground. “Go!” he bawled. “Go, go!” Gunning and Lowe turned the ponies and whacked their heels against the ribs.
They stopped when they were outside the city, and let the ponies recover.
“The whip,” Gunning said. “Was that absolutely necessary?”
“They’re starving,” the sergeant said. “If you’d given them a crust of bread, sir, ten thousand more of them would come out from nowhere and knock us all down. That’s what hunger does, sir. Real hunger.”
They rode back to the aerodrome, thanked the sergeant and went to say goodbye to Colonel Davenport. They found him outside his office with Count Borodin, both men looking at five corpses laid out in a row, face up. All five wore the grimy, shapeless, sheepskin clothing of Russian peasants, with one small addition: red stars cut clumsily from cloth were pinned to their chests. “The two on the end are far too old,” Borodin said. “Even the Bolsheviks wouldn’t conscript such grandfathers.”
“You’re right,” Davenport said. “And if those cut-throats killed these two, they probably murdered them all.” He turned and stared at a pair of Russian men standing beside a farm cart.
“They want ten roubles per head,” Borodin said. “Fifty roubles. Not bad for a night’s work.”
Lowe could still taste the stink of Tsaritsyn and he cleared his throat. Davenport looked and saw two well-brought-up young Englishmen whose faces were utterly empty of understanding. “Some idiot offered ten roubles for every Red Army soldier brought to us,” he told them. “See the result. Civilians, all civilians. Russians kill their neighbours and pin a red star on them. If we pay, there will be more. If we don’t there will be trouble.”
“Every Russian village has a feud,” Borodin said sadly. “It’s our national industry.”
Davenport squared his shoulders. “Did you two find what you wanted in Tsaritsyn?”
“Yes, sir,” Gunning said.
“Interesting city, sir,” Lowe said.
“We really ought to get back to our squadron, sir,” Gunning said. They saluted and marched away.
“Five roubles a head, no more,” Davenport decided. “And I won’t pay until those thugs have buried the bodies, here and now.” Borodin beckoned to the waiting pair. “For two pins I’d bayonet them both,” Davenport said. “That’s what this country needs: a bloody good purge.”
“The Cossacks used to perform that duty for the Tsar,” Borodin said, “but in the end their hearts weren’t in it.”
The mist dissolved and a soft sun gave the remains of the day an easy warmth. The steppe was changing colour: traces of red and yellow and blue could be seen in the distance. Wildflowers wasted no time here. Winter turned to summer with only a slight pause for spring.
Alongside the trains, some of the airmen were playing a casual game of football — the moustaches versus the clean-shaven. When the game began, Dominic Dextry had been exercising one of the Cossack ponies, riding bareback, and the animal enjoyed chasing the ball, so he declared himself referee. He was Irish, from County Cork, and he applied Irish rules to the game. The moustaches scored a goal but he disallowed it and penalized them for foul play. “That’s ludicrous,” a moustache said. “Totally asinine.”
“Well, the ball was in an offside position, so it was.”
“Don’t be absurd, Dominic. The ball cannot be offside.”
“It can in Ireland.”
“That’s because there’s too much Guinness taken, faith and begorra.”
“Nobody says begorra in Ireland, and I’ll fight any man who says otherwise, begorra so I will, I will.”
“Your horse is eating our football, Dominic.”
“And after three hundred years of potatoes and English tyranny, can you blame the poor creature?” But the ball was too big for the pony’s mouth and it lost interest. There was grass to be eaten. Football was amusing but grass was better.
Dextry slid off and lay on his back, looking at the sky. It was entirely a faded cornflower blue that wouldn’t be allowed in Ireland, where there were always bully-boy clouds bustling in from the Atlantic. He snapped a stem of grass and chewed it. The pony moved its head and licked Dextry’s ear, found it curious but tasteless, went back to real food.
Dextry missed Ireland, or some of it. He missed the talk in the Cork bars, always fast and funny and never two people agreeing on anything, so that an evening was better than a Dublin play. He missed the games, the Gaelic football that was something between havoc and homicide. And the sweet smack of a shinty stick. Shinty made English hockey look like badminton on the vicarage lawn. But his family had money and they had sent him to school in England, to Rugby school, where he was taught a more gentlemanly kind of football, even if his legs still had the scars to prove it. Every year he went home on holiday, and then one year he arrived to find the big old house in County Cork was a smoking ruin.
The English said the Irish liked a fight, and there were sixty thousand Irishmen in uniform in France, every one a volunteer, but Dominic discovered there was also a corrosive and undeclared war in Ireland which he had never suspected, and much of it was between Irishmen. He was sixteen. His family moved to Dublin and stayed with relatives. Dublin was a bleak and brooding place, not knowing whether to back the sixty thousand or to give the English a good kicking. Dominic left. He went to Wales and stayed with a friend from school, and tried to empty his mind of Irish bloody politics until the fight had burned itself out.