“What sergeant?” the adjutant asked.
“Chap I met in the Trictrac. Awfully nice fellow. I said to him, you look a bit fed-up, and he said so would you look fed up if you had to look after five hundred bloody mules, so I said that’s an awful lot of bloody mules, and he said you bet it’s an awful lot of bloody mules, and to cut a long story short we went to see them and he swapped them for the tender.”
“He must have been drunk.”
“Soused as a herring.”
“We need the tender,” Piggott said,”to get home.”
“Take a mule. Take any mule.” Milne waved at the moonlit mass of animals. “Shop around. Find one that fits. Take two, and give the other to your mother.”
“I’ll go and get the tender,” Piggott said to the adjutant.
“You’ll have to run,” Milne said. “He told me he was going to drive to Paris.”
Mayo gave a little scream of pain. “That beast bit me!” he said.
“He’s got a girlfriend in Paris, you see.”
“Bugger the girlfriend,” the adjutant said bleakly.
“Very unlikely,” Milne said. “Not according to what he told me.”
Lord Trafford fell asleep, in mid-sentence, in an armchair. His cousin Rupert, the general, played poker with the hard core of the Old Etonians, including the four from Hornet Squadron. After an hour or so they stopped to eat sandwiches of beef tongue and chicken.
“Has it ever occurred to you,” said the general,”that this would be a much better war if all the Russians were in France, and we and the French were in Russia? Our men rot in trenches until they get blown to glory. Any bloody fool can do that. The Russian army is perfectly qualified for trench warfare. They’ve got an endless supply of bloody fools. But there’s no trench warfare to speak of on the Eastern Front. It’s all war-of-movement. Professional fighting. That’s what we’re good at. We should be there, having the time of our lives in the wide open spaces. They should be here, doing what they’re good at, which is dying for Holy Mother Russia. This is a very badly arranged war.”
“What about Salonika and Gallipoli?” someone asked.
“Not a funny joke,” the general said. “Your deal.” Kellaway kept falling off his mule.
He was unused to wine. His father kept a bottle of sherry in the house and it always lasted a year. The pungent ordinaire of Le Trictrac had gone down Kellaway’s throat like water. The faster he drank it, the less he noticed its coarse taste. His speed amused other people, and they kept refilling his glass. He was flattered by their attention, so he kept entertaining them. He was, inevitably, sick; but once his stomach was empty he found it easier still to pour more wine into it. He had been standing, singing, when the room lurched. He had tried to grab a table. The table had turned into two tables. He missed them both. His legs were as slack as string. The roaring noise faded like a big wave receding. He collapsed and knew nothing of it.
Now, every time he fell off his mule he banged and bruised his arms and shoulders, which made it all the harder for him to remount and cling to the animal’s skimpy mane. “Grip him with your knees, for God’s sake,” the adjutant kept telling him. “Use your thighs, man. That’s what they’re for.” Kellaway did his best, but from time to time his mind wandered off and left him; and then everyone had to stop again until Kellaway had been found and picked up.
Only Milne remained cheerful. “This is wonderful exercise,” he said. “The night, and the countryside, and the fresh air – it brings you closer to nature. Don’t you agree, Tim?”
“As long as it brings me closer to my bed I’ll agree to anything,” Piggott said.
Mayo said: “Keep your bloody mule away from me, Douglas. The brute keeps trying to bite me in the leg.”
“I’m nowhere near you, damn it,” Goss snapped.
“Well, who’s that, then?” Mayo kicked at the mule alongside.
“You do that again and I personally will bite you in the arse,” O’Neill said.
“Jesus…” Piggott tried to ease his aching backside. “At this rate it’ll be dawn before we get home, and I’m flying after breakfast”.
“Are you absolutely sure this is the right road, Rufus?” the adjutant asked.
“Well, it may not be the quickest route,” Milne said,”but it’s by far the prettiest.” A bank of cloud slid over the moon. Now there were two sorts of blackness to look at: earth and sky. Kellaway swayed and tried to make his knees do something other than tremble. Despair filled him like a fever. He had joined the RFC quite willing to die, but not like this. This was not just rotten, it was endlessly rotten.
The cloud thickened. A wind came in from the west, ruffling the poplars that lined the road, and a light rain drifted over the plodding mules. The night and the journey seemed endless, shapeless, hopeless. Kellaway slept, and awoke feeling utterly lost. “Here we are, home again,” said Milne.
The adjutant grunted. He recognised the Pepriac crossroads. Now for a hot toddy and bed, a great deal of both.
“Haiti” The challenge was so loud that the leading mules checked. “Who goes there?”
Milne peered at the figure standing in the entrance to the aerodrome, and saw the dull gleam of a bayonet. “Good heavens,” he said. “Friend, of course. Several friends, in fact.”
“Advance, friend, and be recognised”. The order was crisp.
Milne got off his mule. He could see a roll of barbed wire in front of the sentry, blocking the entrance. “I’m Major Milne, commanding officer,” he said. “Who are you?”
“Corporal Lee, sir. I shall have to ask you for the password, sir.”
“Password? What password?”
There was a pause. “That’s for you to tell me, sir.”
“Look here…” Milne walked forward and Lee operated the bolt of his rifle. Milne stopped. “You wouldn’t actually fire that thing, would you, Lee?”
“Not unless I have to, sir.”
“Sensible fellow.”
Behind him, Tim Piggott lost patience and dismounted. “Look, this is bloody ridiculous,” he barked, striding towards the sentry. “We’re all—”
The bang made everyone jump, and the puff of flame from Lee’s rifle was imprinted on their vision. He had fired high. Now they heard him re-load. “Jesus Christ,” Piggott breathed.
They went back to the others. “Does anybody know anything about a password?” Milne asked. At first nobody spoke. Then Kellaway, sitting in the middle of the road, swallowed something that he should have spat out “Shit,” he muttered.
“That’s not it,” O’Neill said.
“I remember brigade gave out passwords,” Milne said,”in case we got shot down in No-Man’s-Land, or something. Trouble is, the password gets changed every day. But I think they were names of flowers.”
“Geraniums,” Goss called to Lee. No response. “Roses. Tulips. Daisies, marigolds, daffodils, pinks, carnations, dahlias, winter-flowering jasmine. “Lee was silent
“Jasmine isn’t a flower,” Jimmy Duncan said.
“Yes, it is.”
“No, no. Jasmine’s a bush.”
“Balls! It’s a flower, ask anyone. Ask Lee. Corporal Lee, is jasmine a flower or a bush?”
It had begun to rain again. Lee’s voice came out of the wet, black night: “I couldn’t say, sir.”
“Well, you’re a fat lot of good.”
“But I can tell you one thing, sir. It’s not the password.” Lee sounded as if he might possibly be enjoying himself.
“This is absurd,” Milne said. “Who put you here?”