“Not a parade, Uncle. Just assemble them.”
He found a box to stand on. The size of the crowd sobered him. Until Russia, he had risen no higher than flight leader, responsible for half a dozen pilots. Now he was looking at well over a hundred men.
“I’ll make this short and sweet,” he said. “Well, I hope it’s sweet. Two things. First is why we’re here, and that is to fly aeroplanes. Your job, all of you, is to help us do that. If you’re not helping, you’re hindering. Do it your way, do it any damned way you like, but keep Merlin Squadron flying. Second: let’s enjoy it. Any fool can make war miserable. We’re a long way from home, but let’s get as much fun as we can out of being in this peculiar country. That’s all. Carry on, adjutant.”
Wragge beckoned to the count.
“There’s a Russian official watching us,” Wragge said. “See him? Too fat for his fancy uniform. Could he be the stationmaster?”
“Almost certainly.”
“Ask him what happened to our express-train status.”
The stationmaster saw them coming and his fingers thought about buttoning his coat, fumbled, and gave up. Borodin asked him a question and got a short and surly answer. “Wrong identification letters on the front of our locomotives,” Borodin reported. “Nothing he can do.”
“I see. How would General Denikin handle this situation?”
Borodin laughed. “Hang him.”
“And the Red Army?”
“Torture, and then hang him.”
“Interesting. Would it make the trains run faster? Don’t answer that, it was a thingummy question.”
“Rhetorical.”
“If you say so. We’ll compromise. We’ll tie the bugger to the front of the locomotive and leave him there. He’ll make a very good identification. He’ll clear the line like a dose of salts. We’ll go like a rocket.”
“Yes.” Borodin thought about that. “And if it fails? We might hit a train in front of us.”
“Then the stationmaster will be the first to know. Tell him.”
Borodin translated. The man seemed baffled by the news. He protested loudly and a gang of plennys led him to the locomotive of “A” Flight’s train and roped him to the front. “He says this is outrageous,” Borodin told Wragge.
“So is hanging about in sidings. We’ll leave him there for the night. Give him time to brood. Russians are good at brooding, aren’t they?”
Wragge gave all ranks one hour to stretch their legs and see something of Makeyevka. Count Borodin asked the squadron doctor if she would like to go, and if he might escort her. “I won’t suggest that we take the air,” he said. “In these parts, breathing is something to be avoided.”
They took a droshky. Slag heaps and factory chimneys dominated the landscape. Rusting railway tracks wandered off and got lost. The air smelt of burnt carbon and tasted of sulphur. “If you lived here for fifty years you’d never grow to love it,” she said, “because you’d be dead by forty.”
“It’s horrible. But this is the Donbas, the richest part of all Russia. Almost all our coal comes from here. Masses of steel. If it weren’t for the Donbas, there would be no railway lines.”
“Admirable. I hope their chronic lung disease allows them to raise a feeble cheer. Can we go home now?”
“I just want to show you the town. It’s not far.”
Makeyevka turned out to be modern and sensibly planned, with wide avenues. There were the usual onion domes, blackened by years of pollution. Everything was smoke-stained: the houses, the trees, the river, the clothes, the people. Borodin pointed to the balcony of a hotel. “Last year Nestor Makhno made a tremendous speech from there, all about anarchy and what a fine thing it is, and to prove it his army would fight everyone in the name of a free and independent Ukraine. He was very popular. Still is.”
“Are we in the Ukraine?”
“Yes.”
“And do they support General Denikin?”
“Probably not. I expect he’ll capture some of it. Everyone does. Then they lose it. Fighting in the Ukraine is like filling a wheelbarrow with frogs. Anyone can do it but nobody can keep the frogs in the wheelbarrow.”
“I need a drink. Let’s go home. Top speed.”
They drove back to the squadron trains. He paid off the droshky and they walked to The Dregs. “I’m glad you stayed with us,” he said. “I feared you might want to escape the sad memories.”
“I reported to Mission H.Q.,” she said, “and ten minutes of whisky breath and pipe smoke was more than enough, so I scuttled back here, where there’s a job for me.”
A flight-sergeant was waiting, and he saluted. “Beg pardon, ma’m. Aircraftman Simms reported sick. Unfit for duty. Boil on his backside, ma’m.”
She looked at Borodin. “When all else fails, there are always boils on backsides. Lead on, flight sergeant, before it explodes and kills the onlookers.”
At first light next morning, the C.O. met the adjutant and the count on the platform. “What news?” he asked.
“I set an armed guard, in case his friends came to save him,” the adjutant said. “If he has friends. A poor specimen. Whimpers a lot. It got very cold.”
“He’ll survive. He’s fat,” Borodin said. “Most stationmasters are. Bribes, bribes. I saw him after supper and he told me we could have the correct identification plates for a hundred roubles.”
“Cheeky devil.”
“He was lying. I could tell. His kind always lies.”
“We’ll go and see him,” Wragge said.
All the strength had drained from the stationmaster’s limbs. He hung from his ropes like an out-of-work puppet. The colour had gone from his face. His belly slumped: a sack of waste. His eyes were half-shut as he watched them approach.
“Tell him we’re leaving in an hour,” Wragge said. “Tell him we want genuine plates or we’ll have a head-on collision and he’ll be meat in the sandwich.”
Borodin told him, and the stationmaster began to sob. He croaked his answer.
“He swears on the soul of his dead mother and various Christian saints,” Borodin said. “But he’s still lying.”
“Breakfast,” Wragge said.
The Dregs was a subdued place. Camel pilots drifted in, sensed the atmosphere, got on with their eggs and bacon.
“We’ll have one more crack at him,” Wragge said. “Try and terrify the truth out of him.”
“If it doesn’t?” the adjutant said.
Wragge sipped his coffee and failed to find an answer. “We’ll never catch Denikin if we keep limping along,” he said. “He’s probably advancing faster than we are.”
The squadron doctor came in, carrying a small box that was heavily sealed and decorated with a large red cross. “I’m acting on orders from Mission H.Q.,” she said. “This won’t take long.”
Wragge waved a hand.
She cut the seals and opened the box and took out a couple of small glass tubes, closed with corks. “Morphine. Wonderful painkiller. A few grains of morphine are a godsend when you have typhus. Tif, the Russians call it. Also dysentery, which gives you terrible griping pains in the gut. And cholera. Morphine won’t save you but you suffer less. Ditto malaria. H.Q. wants every man to have a phial of morphine.” She handed them out.
“Thank you, flight lieutenant,” Wragge said.
“There’s more. If you swallow the entire contents of a phial, you will die quickly. You may feel this is preferable to being captured by the enemy. It’s the real reason why H.Q. wants everyone to have a phial.”
“Crikey,” Jessop said. “Crikey Moses.”
“Suicide,” Maynard said. “That’s a bit steep, isn’t it? I mean to say, it’s asking an awful lot of a chap.”