There was silence while he topped up their glasses.
“Now we have nothing to talk about,” Weatherby said. “Except the bloody awful weather, and we’ve done that.”
“Perhaps the matter is not yet quite finished,” Sir Franklyn said. “Who will write the Official History of the Intervention?” He looked hard at Fitzroy. “Surely the question has arisen.”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“And is that because you don’t know, or because you’ve been told to stonewall?”
Fitzroy spread his hands. “I’m not at liberty to say that either.” They laughed, except for Sir Franklyn, who gave a wintry smile.
“There won’t be an Official History, will there?” he said. “You needn’t answer that. You already have.”
Weatherby looked at his watch. “I have a train to catch.”
Delahaye shared a taxi with him. General Stattaford chose to walk.
Fitzroy was helping Sir Franklyn into his greatcoat, and finding his umbrella, when Sir Franklyn said: “Just imagine that Russia, France, America, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and a few more — Canadians, Serbs, Chinese — imagine that they all sent armed forces into Britain at different points, in order to decide our form of government. Can you imagine that?”
“Scarcely.”
“And if they did what I’ve said, and if we defeated them, how long would it take the British people to forget this?”
“Oh… generations. Perhaps never.”
“Just a thought. Goodnight, Mr Fitzroy.” He put on his hat, stepped outside and opened his umbrella, and walked into the night.
AFTERWARDS
Every record of Merlin Squadron’s operations in Russia was burnt when the British Military Mission left Taganrog. All of Lacey’s signals, including his exchanges with Captain Butcher about elephant guns and with Captain Stokes about jazz-band instruments, were lost. He kept copies of his fabricated verse eulogies, thinking that they might, one day, be useful for his memoirs.
The squadron disembarked the cruiser at Portsmouth. Most of the ground crew, with their valuable skills, stayed in the R.A.F. Brazier returned to his old regiment, soon grew dissatisfied with peacetime soldiering, and applied for a posting to Palestine, which was now a British Protectorate. He became expert at leading small groups of soldiers in night-time raids on Arab terrorists. In 1935 he was shot dead in one such raid, and was awarded a posthumous Bar to his Military Cross.
Tusker Oliphant left the R.A.F. and worked as a flying instructor at a civil aerodrome. His patience and his calm authority made him popular with students. For many years he organized an annual reunion of members of Merlin Squadron.
Tiger Wragge was offered a job as an R.A.F. test pilot, and took it, on the understanding that he would be free to fly in international air races. His successes in these events won him some public fame. In 1931 he was testing the prototype of a new fighter aircraft when it disintegrated at low level and he was killed.
Junk Jessop left the service and sold Ford cars in London. Later he grew a moustache in the style made fashionable by Douglas Fairbanks Jr (he slightly resembled the actor) and moved up to selling Bentleys. His ghosted memoirs of the Russian war were a minor success, but when the Special Branch questioned him about a breach of the Official Secrets Act he moved to Australia.
The R.A.F. had no use for Borodin, and Susan Perry made it clear that they could never be more than friends. She went back to nursing at Guy’s Hospital and let him stay in her flat until he found a job. Within weeks he married an American film actress who was in London recovering from a divorce. He went with her to Hollywood. When she divorced him he made a career in movies, playing supporting roles as a suave but dangerous Englishman. Susan Perry qualified as a doctor, married a farmer and never regretted it.
Air Ministry terminated Lacey’s commission as an acting pilot officer, so he left the Services. He enjoyed the period of freedom, then became bored and invested his savings in a series of high-risk ventures — night clubs, films, new plays. All failed. In 1923 he re-joined the Army and served in the Pay Corps. In 1925 he vanished, together with a large amount of the Army’s money. He was never arrested. In 1933, ex-Sergeant Stevens met him on a train in France. “He asked me if I thought there would be another war,” Stevens recalled. “I told him it looked likely. He sounded rather nostalgic.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A Splendid Little War is fiction based on fact. The reader is entitled to know which is which.
In brief: the characters are invented but the broad sweep of events is true.
In 1919, Britain did indeed send military forces from all three Services to support the White armies of General Denikin and Admiral Kolchak against the Bolshevik armies led by Lenin and Trotsky. General Wrangel commanded the White Army in the battle for Tsaritsyn (soon to be renamed Stalingrad, and to be fought over in another war) but in this narrative his remarks are invented.
In 1919, Lloyd George was the British Prime Minister and Winston Churchill was his Minister of War. Churchill was obsessed with destroying Bolshevism; Lloyd George was willing to back Denikin and Kolchak while claiming, piously, not to interfere in Russia’s right to decide its own government, a piece of double-think that fooled nobody.
Jonathan Fitzroy’s Advisory Committee on the Intervention in Russia is invented, as are its members: Charles Delahaye, General Stattaford, James Weatherby and Sir Franklyn Fletcher. However, the events that they discuss are true. For example, when Weatherby speaks of mutinies by British Army units in Luton, London and Calais, he is referring to actual events. Similarly, discussion of the Irish problem, or the Royal Navy’s successes at Kronstadt, or the campaign to hang the Kaiser, and many more, are all based on fact.
The Royal Air Force raised new squadrons as part of the Intervention. These flew Camels, DH9s and other aircraft, left over from World War One and showing their age. My accounts of their performance in combat are as accurate as I could make them. An R.A.F. squadron fought in the battle for Tsaritsyn, and it made the long journey — first westward, to Taganrog, and then north for some eight hundred kilometres, to Orel — in support of Denikin’s fast-moving assault, before retreating an even greater distance, to Novorossisk and evacuation by the Royal Navy. However, Merlin Squadron is my invention and none of its officers and men is based on actual R.A.F. personnel. The same applies to Count Borodin and to other Russian officers.
Some incidents in the narrative may seem bizarre or improbable. Was there a Russian religious cult, known as the Skoptsi, whose members self-mutilated in accordance with the teaching in Matthew, chapter 19? There was indeed. And it is true that the British Military Mission H.Q. in Russia issued each aircrew officer with a phial of morphine, both for medical treatment and as a last resort if captured; similarly; ‘Goolie Chits’ were attached to aircraft in India. Both Red and White armies routinely shot any enemy officers they captured, just as units that mutinied or deserted usually shot their own officers. Details of the elaborate banquet to mark the fall of Tsaritsyn are typical of Russian celebrations in those days.
The part played by the London Scottish Regiment in the Somme offensive is based on fact but Colonel Kenny V.C. is fiction. On the other hand, Lieutenant Agar V.C. did indeed lead the M.T.B.s that destroyed the Soviet fleet in Kronstadt; similarly, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson did command a battalion of the Hampshire Regiment in Siberia, where he came to regard the situation as “pretty hopeless”, and led a dozen soldiers in the extraordinary journey to Archangel, which I have described.