For half an hour he wandered about, watching troops erect tents. Then he decided to go home. Kellaway was where he had left him, still asleep. By now Paxton was too weary to be angry. “Come on,” he said.
Kellaway awoke like a child, smiling, yawning and stretching. “Goodness, I’m thirsty,” he said. “D’you know, I just had the most extraordinary dream. I dreamt I was back at school, and it was last summer, because I was captain of tennis which I was, you see – only I was in uniform, and…”
Paxton let him ramble on as they walked back, until he lost patience and interrupted. “Why did you tell all those frightful lies?”
“Steady on. It’s only a dream.”
“I’m not talking about your dopey dream. I mean all the lies you told the Northumberland Fusiliers at lunch.”
“Lunch?” Kellaway kicked at a dandelion. “Did we have lunch?”
“You told them you’d shot down seven or eight Huns.”
“No! Really? What a spoof!” Kellaway was delighted.
“There is such a thing as honour, you know,” Paxton said.
“Did they believe me?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I don’t see how anybody’s honour has suffered, then. Do you?”
Paxton felt trapped. “It’s just not good enough,” he said.
Chapter 11
Flying two patrols a day was not unusual in 1916. Plenty of Quirks went up twice a day, coming home for lunch as if they were keeping office hours. But at least the crews of Quirks had specific jobs to do, and once they had done them they could quit, put the nose down and buzz off. FE2bs led a different life.
They were built to fight. The initial stood for ‘Farman Experimental’ but a lot of people assumed they meant ‘Fighting Experimental’, and some of the more gung-ho pilots actually called their machines ‘fighters’ instead of ‘scouts’. Cleve-Cutler was one of these. When his flight commanders complained that they hardly ever saw enemy planes, and so two patrols a day were twice as pointless as one, he said: “Not at all. Now we own the sky. If Jerry wants it back he’ll have to come up and fight us for it.”
“I think Jerry’s trying to bore us to death,” Gerrish said.
“Then stir him up. You’re supposed to be flying offensive patrols, so be more offensive. Be downright bloody disgusting.”
“I couldn’t do that,” Foster said. “Nanny made me promise. However,” he added as he saw Cleve-Cutler’s expression, “I suppose I could always shoot Nanny first.”
“And don’t be so damned cocky,” Cleve-Cutler said. “Remember what happened to that chap Dobson or Hobson or whatever his name was, at Lagnicourt last month.” The meeting broke up in silence. Hobson had crashed in flames, caught by a low-flying enemy machine which shot him down when he was only fifty feet off the ground, thinking his patrol was over, probably thinking the other plane (if he saw it) must be British. Nobody knew what Hobson had thought. Nobody caught the other plane, either.
Flying offensive patrols was a wearying grind. There were the physical demands of going from ground level to the same height as the top of a small Alp and sitting there for an hour or more in a Force 10 gale. Do it twice a day for a week and your body starts to complain: the head throbs, or the sinuses burn, or the ears develop a persistent buzz. But that was trivial. The great strain was the search, and it grew worse when there was nothing to find. The sky became achingly empty. Impossibly empty. Some pilots and observers lost faith in their own eyes. The less they found the more they worried. After all, they were up there to kill someone. Where was the bastard? Stealing into their blind spot? About to kill with the shot the victim never hears? So they searched, and worried. A man would have to be crazy not to worry. On the other hand, worry was exhausting. Worry too much and you might end up too tired to search. It was something to worry about, was worry.
Little of this showed on the ground. They had the elasticity of youth, and in any case it wasn’t the done thing to reveal one’s emotions except on the subject of sport, or perhaps dogs. The squadron had a good spirit, better than it had had under Milne. The mess was much improved now that Appleyard had gone: better food in more variety, no more damn mutton, some decent wine and even occasionally a few crates of real English ale. A new cricket bat appeared, thought to be a gift from Paxton which was only right since he’d made Tim Piggott break the old one. The mess got a piano. It had three bullet-holes in the front and a dead pigeon deep inside, but it was a piano, even if the G below middle C made a twang like a departing arrow. Corporal Lacey had bought it with some of Paxton’s cigars. Paxton also got part of the credit for two sofas and a set of cane chairs, none new but none badly broken. “I see the new boy has been making himself useful,” Foster said to Piggott as they went in to dinner.
“Up to a point. Lacey wangled the stuff with his cigars. Lacey can get anything. Paxton couldn’t get wet in a rainstorm.”
“I wouldn’t mind a French virgin. Can Lacey get me a guaranteed French virgin?”
“I believe there’s one left. Six years old, very ugly. Ten cigars.”
“I’ll think about it. Ten is a bit steep.”
After dinner most officers took their coffee in the anteroom. Boy Binns could pick out a tune on the battered piano, after a fashion, and a group of singers and saboteurs clustered around him. Paxton sat by a window and watched the sunset. Others sprawled in chairs and read yesterday’s newspapers. The adjutant sat in a corner and smoked a stubby briar pipe while he fed bits of cheese to the dog Brutus.
Eventually, inevitably, there was a fight between the singers and the saboteurs, and the piano swayed violently. Boy Binns quit. The fighters chased each other around the room until they made themselves so unpopular that they took their fight outside and the anteroom became almost silent.
Thus everyone heard Spud Ogilvy’s grunt of surprise. He was reading his mail. “This’ll interest you, adj,” he said. Captain Brazier tossed a fragment of cheese. It was like a token opening bid with a poor poker hand. Ogilvy said:”Old friend of mine, chap I was in the trenches with, says he served under you. He says ‘I hear you’ve got our old CO, the amazing Basher Brazier, fastest gun on the Western Front’. Did they really call you Basher?”
“It was a corruption of ‘pasha’. That’s what the Egyptians used to call me.”
“Then he says: ‘Too bad about the blue blood, but how can you tell what colour it is unless you make a few holes in the bag?’ What on earth does that mean?”
“Can’t imagine.”
“And he ends with a bit of verse. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if Jerry don’t get you then Basher must’.”
“It rhymes,” Brazier said, getting up. “Not much else to be said for it.” He clicked his fingers and Brutus obediently followed him out.
“My word,” Ogilvy said. “I must write and ask him what he meant.”
“Another thrilling episode of this gripping yarn next week,” Foster said. “Be sure to place an order with your newsagent.”
Paxton paid a mechanic to make the hinges on his trunk tamper-proof. Next day he found the lock and the hinges intact, but the trunk was nailed to the floor. He had to borrow a crowbar, all the time wondering how O’Neill could possibly have got inside it again. He saw the answer when he prised it free. O’Neill had got under the floorboards and driven the nails upwards. Paxton, grim with determination, paid again to have the trunk encased in sheet steel. He had not known he was capable of such rage and loathing. He dreamed of doing things to O’Neill’s helpless, squirming body of such a mounting ferocity that he startled himself. But when he saw the armoured trunk he felt a rush of glee. “That’s the stuff!” he said. “That’s the answer!”