“Too late now,” Hopton said.
He stood at one end, with the four pilots facing him. “Come forward!” he ordered, and four pairs of arms stretched out, holding imaginary oars. “Follow my stroke, chaps. In when I’m in, out when I’m out. And remember to kick.” He took a lungful of smoky air, and began to sing.
They got the idea. Lean forward at the start of each line, lean back at the end. Four pairs of heels kicked hard and the couch raced away. Hopton followed. His voice had the clarity and purity of youth.
They squeaked to a halt ten feet from General Wrangel. Tommy Hopton led them in three huzzahs for Wrangel’s army. The performance was a huge success. One word was roared, again and again.
“Encore,” Borodin said. “They want more.”
The crew reversed their positions while Hopton rehearsed the Russians. “Swing, swing together,” he sang to them, and they shouted it back to him. He took his place, and the crew, expert now, made the couch whizz to the rhythms of the next verse:
“I’m not a sentimental man,” the C.O. said to the adjutant, “but you must admit, Uncle, this warms the heart.”
“Those wheels are playing merry hell with that table.”
“Oh, bugger the table. These boys fought for England. Now for Russia. True patriotism.” He had a little trouble with the word, so he took another stab at it. “Patriotism.” Better.
Hopton finished the verse and the Russians took their cue. “Sving, sving togezzer,” they sang, a hundred and fifty of them, all swaying from side to side. Hopton responded: “With your bodies between your knees…”
“King and country,” Brazier said. “They swallow that claptrap when they enlist. It gets blown away in battle. Battle’s the only test.”
“Nonsense. Loyalty’s what matters.”
“Loyalty to your pals. Nobody else.”
The couch rolled to a halt. The crew had done two lengths; panting and sweating, they thought they had finished. Relentless, thunderous slow handclapping told them otherwise. Again, they reversed their positions. Hopton began verse three, and they sprinted away.
Griffin pointed. “Hear that? We’ll to the flag be true! We’re here to save this world from bloody Bolsheviks.”
“Bully for you. I’ve fought all sorts of ruffians. Boers. Fuzzy-wuzzies. Huns. Not to save the world. Save the regiment. Sometimes the platoon.”
“Airmen are different, Uncle.”
Brazier grunted. “You live and die for your friends.”
Sving, sving, togezzer, the Russians chanted, and then the stunt began to go wrong. Tired legs gave an unequal shove and the couch veered to the left. Hopton shouted a warning. They thought he was urging them on and their feet kicked harder until the whole gesticulating contraption shot over the edge and fell into the laps of half a dozen generals too fat and old and squiffy to avoid it. Everyone else cheered. The Royal Air Force could do no wrong.
Dawn was nudging the eastern horizon when the carriages left for Beketofka, moving at a gentle trot to avoid awakening the pilots. The drivers knew how best to earn a fat tip.
Only Brazier and Count Borodin were awake, and after the din of the banquet they enjoyed the silence of the countryside. Mist as soft as smoke filled the hollows. Sometimes a pair of ducks emerged, flying fast and noiseless, and vanished. A rim of sun showed itself. It picked out the mist tops and soon it was making long, elastic shadows of the carriages. It washed the sky clean of stars. Another fine day on the way.
As it rose, Brazier turned his face towards it and welcomed the warmth. The dazzle made his eyelids almost close. Almost. He made out a shape, a low silhouette. He shielded his eyes.
“Borodin,” he said quietly. “Isn’t that your mass grave?”
“Yes, I expect so.”
“I’d like to see it.”
The count looked at him. If he said, No, that’s not possible, or Why? It’s just plague victims, if he said anything at all, the adjutant would not argue, he would simply get out and go. “If you must,” he said. He told the driver to stop and wait.
They walked across boggy heathland and stood on the edge of the hole. It was at least thirty yards long. It was half-full.
“All male, I see,” Brazier said. “A very selective plague.” He walked along the side. “But no boots. Perhaps they caught the disease through their feet.” He walked on. “And some without breeches. They don’t look very sick, do they? Dead, yes. Sick, no.”
“Bolshevik commissars, officers and N.C.O.s,” Borodin said. “When we take prisoners, we recruit the ordinary soldiers into our army. We shoot the rest. Boots and breeches are scarce in our army.”
“How many?”
“About three hundred. And you have my word that when the enemy take prisoners, they do not kill them as humanely as we do.”
They walked back to the carriage.
“You take it all very calmly,” Brazier said.
“How would it help if I were otherwise?”
“Ah. A good point.”
Jonathan Fitzroy’s ad hoc committee met in a filthy temper.
It was Monday, it was bucketing down with rain, it had been raining everywhere all weekend, the entire county cricket programme had been washed out. The prospects for Wimbledon were grim. All the best salmon and trout rivers were in flood, the water looked like cocoa, two Welshmen had been drowned while trying to fish the Usk, probably poachers using worm as bait, so nobody grieved too much. Today’s papers didn’t help. They gave the government a good kicking for the unemployment figures (up again). They gloomed about farmers’ warnings that the harvest would be ruined. And the Metropolitan Police had found a member of the House of Lords behind a bush in Hyde Park with a trooper from the Coldstream Guards, both stark naked, at three in the morning.
James Weatherby was reading the report in the Mail when General Stattaford sat beside him. “Look on the bright side,” the general said. “His Lordship is sixty-eight. The night was black as sin, the rain fell in torrents, and he was stripped to the skin. Makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it?”
Weatherby grunted. “You can replace a trooper,” he said, “but we’ve lost a vote in the Lords. And that’s serious.”
“Gentlemen,” Jonathan Fitzroy said. “May we start? Our last recommendation was, I’m afraid, rather kicked into touch by the P.M. ‘A decent life for all Russians’ is good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go anywhere. His words. Rather like being kind to one another. Even the Cabinet agrees it’s desirable, but how?”
“Do they want us to make policy?” Sir Franklyn Fletcher said.
“Because that wasn’t in the original prospectus.”
Fitzroy was built like a bruiser but his footwork was nimble. “I think it revolves around what we feel the British people believe to be right and apt,” he said, “which in itself is a product of what they feel can be done. Thus what should happen and what can happen are so closely linked as to be virtually identical.” He beamed at each man in turn.