“Fokker,” O’Neill said. “One Fokker.”
“Make up your ruddy minds.”
“I observed two Albatroses,” Paxton said,”and I should know because I’m the observer.”
Brazier grunted, and wrote some more. “Where’s that black ink you said you were going to get me?”
Paxton had completely forgotten about it. “They were sold out,” he said. The adjutant sniffed disbelief. “Everyone’s been buying it,” Paxton said. “The stuff the Army issues is like gnat’s piss.”
The afternoon patrol was similar but worse. Paxton lost his lunch, bruised his elbows and knees and bloodied his nose. O’Neill told Brazier the German archie had been bad, so he’d dodged about a bit. “Anything to add?” Brazier asked. Paxton shook his head. The archie had been quite light but he hadn’t the strength to get into an argument. Instead he stared at the thick growth of hair sprouting from the adjutant’s nostrils. How ugly. How insanitary.
O’Neill whistled his aimless, dreary whistle as they walked to their billet. Eventually Paxton recognised the tune through the wreckage: it was Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring. Once, Paxton had told Kellaway that it was his favourite piece of music. That was why O’Neill was murdering it, of course.
“I say, you do look grim,” Kellaway remarked. “Pale, too.”
“I offered to lend him my rouge,” O’Neill said, flat as mud,“but he’s very fussy about these things.”
Paxton had a bath and slept for an hour. When he awoke the others had gone. He went outside. The air smelt marvellously fresh, as if he had convalesced for a week. What he wanted above all was tea, hot sweet tea. The mess would have people in it. He went instead to the Orderly Room. Corporal Lacey had a Mozart piano concerto on the gramophone. He reached to turn it off but Paxton shook his head and sat down. Lacey got on with his work. Mozart got on with his genius. The piano duelled brilliantly and courteously with the orchestra and won a fair fight. Silence. Paxton sighed and pointed to the kettle. Lacey made tea. Next door the clerk-typists began pecking.
“I hear you met Mrs. Kent Haffner,” Lacey said. “A very spirited young lady.”
“That seems like a month ago.” Paxton warmed his hands on the half-pint mug. He could feel the tea reviving him. “How do you know her?”
Lacey smiled. “Just chance. I understand you have another uncle who owns a company that makes gramophone records. Why don’t you write to him? Jazz, ragtime, songs from the London shows.”
“Cigars aren’t good enough?”
“Not always. With a supply of records I could get two cows and fifty hens. Fresh milk and eggs for the mess.”
Paxton looked at him. Lacey’s feet were on his desk and his hands were linked behind his head. “I can’t help thinking you should be an officer,” Paxton said.
“I probably should. I don’t want to be an officer. I’ve never wanted to be an officer. War seems to me to be a very silly affair. I can’t see the glory in killing people, still less in being killed.”
“But you joined the Army.”
“Well, I decided I’d better do what I wanted to do before somebody else ordered me to do what I disliked intensely. You see, I never believed that this would be a short war. It was obvious when war broke out that everyone wanted it and was thoroughly pleased with it. They weren’t going to let go of it in a hurry. On the other hand, if it did last a long time, I might get conscripted and sent to stick bayonets in Germans, or, even worse, made to lead other men with bayonets. So I took a course in shorthand and typing. Then I joined up. A man who can type fast and accurately and do shorthand is like gold in the Army. Ask the adjutant. Such a man is never going to be put in the trenches. Nor is he ever going to be pushed into a commission. So here I am, utterly indispensable. What more can a man do for his country?”
Paxton got up and went to the door. He threw the dregs of his tea onto the grass. “He can die,” he said.
“Oh, anyone can die. It takes no great skill to die. No skill at all, in fact. Thoroughly unqualified people do it all the time. Personally, I reckon that dying has been highly overrated. I blame the newspapers.”
Paxton returned his mug. “Thanks for the tea,” he said. “No thanks for the philosophy.”
Hornet Squadron was pleased with itself that night. During the afternoon, Plug Gerrish had found a Halberstadt twoseater and stalked it for twenty minutes until he crept under its tail and Ross, his observer, killed the pilot with a burst of only seven bullets. This was the squadron’s first confirmed kill since Milne’s ramming (which didn’t really count) and it was regarded as a change of luck. Then Goss and Stubbs had come across a German balloon stuck high in the sky. It must have had trouble down below, a jammed winch or something, because they were able to fly right up to it. At first the archie was furious but when the two German observers took to their parachutes the risk of harming their own men silenced the guns long enough to let Stubbs pump tracer and incendiary into the big bag, which burned like a beacon. So it was a happy day. Dinner in the mess was loud with triumph. The air criss-crossed with flying bread.
A reaction set in when they moved to the anteroom for coffee. It had been a long time since the hour before dawn when most had been shaken awake by their batmen. Some, including Cleve-Cutler, wandered off to bed. Foster went for a walk. Others slumped in armchairs or sofas and watched Goss and Ogilvy play ping-pong. The gramophone played loud ragtime until Charlie Essex took off a sock and stuffed it into the speaker. “You chaps haven’t got the brains to do that,” he said. “But of course I was at Cambridge.”
“What else did you learn there?” the adjutant asked.
“Oh… Let’s see. Two pints one quart, four quarts one gallon, and after that you’re too plastered to climb into college so it doesn’t matter.”
“That’s all? Didn’t they teach you anything else?”
“Um… I learned how to do the polka. Well, nearly.”
“Heroic,” Brazier murmured.
Paxton was dozing in a corner, but the word stirred his memory. After a moment his memory reported its findings. “I say,” he said to Dando. “What’s heroic surgery?”
Dando blinked. “Extraordinary question,” he said. “Well, when normal measures have failed to save the patient, the surgeon may take extreme measures – I mean, do things he would normally consider too violent, too dangerous – as a kind of a last-ditch attempt to save the patient’s life. That’s known as heroic surgery.”
“Multiple amputation?”
“Yes, that’s the sort of thing. Why d’you ask?”
“Chap I met the other day was very keen on heroic surgery. Said the record for chopping off all four limbs is just over twelve minutes but he reckoned he could do it in eight minutes dead.” Paxton was about to mention the axe and then thought better of it.
“My goodness.” Dando made his eyes big and wide. “Eight minutes, you say… That’s more than heroic. That’s herculean.”
Gus Mayo stirred and yawned. “Bit tough on the patient, isn’t it? I mean… What if he didn’t want them all cut off?”
“Then he should have said so at the start,” Charlie Essex told him. “Now he hasn’t got a leg to stand on.”
Some laughed, some groaned. Mayo got up and began beating Essex with a cushion. Essex fought back. His chair fell over. The scuffle went on until they were both too tired to fight and lay side by side in a pool of feathers. Goss came by, searching for a lost ping-pong ball, and they tripped him up, so he hit them. The scuffle began again. Ogilvy got tired of waiting for Goss to come back and he left the table. “When it comes to heroic surgery we’ve got the champion right here,” he said. “Haven’t we, adj?”