The Challenging Heights (3 page)

‘So who’s fighting who?’

The sailor grinned. ‘As far as I can make out,’ he said, ‘everybody’s fighting everybody.’

The North Sea was grey and ugly-looking but they managed to get ashore at Oslo and Copenhagen, where Captain Baird, in command of the soldiery, was carried back on board drunk and speechless. Because Riga was at the moment occupied by the Bolsheviks they landed at the minor part of Libau, which was supposed to be the seat of the provisional government of Latvia. To Dicken’s surprise, the man standing by the Crossley tender on the quayside as they came alongside was Flight-Sergeant Handiside, who had introduced Dicken to the RFC in 1915. He was wearing only three stripes on his arm.

‘Handiside!’ Dicken said. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘Same as you, I imagine, sir. Wondering what the hell’s going on. I volunteered for South Russia and this is what I got. Minus my crown, of course, because I dropped a step in rank, like a lot of us. You were a major when I last saw you. You’ll be pleased to know Mr Hatto’s here as well.’

‘He is?’ This was unexpected to say the least, because Hatto was supposed to be in Yalta.

‘He’s in Riga with the Navy at the moment, but he’ll be back soon.’

‘There are Germans here, too,’ Handiside went on. ‘They’re flying Siemens-Schuckerts, which is against the armistice rules because they’re not supposed to have anything at all, and the Allied Control Commission’s constantly after them.’ In Handiside’s grin was all the sympathy and understanding of one flying type for another. ‘They operate from a field near the frontier and, when the Commission arrives, they fly over the border where they can’t be caught and the mechanics remove the spark plugs of the Commission’s cars and let the tyres down while they’re arguing in the office with the CO. There are some White Russians, too – anti-Bolsheviks – pilots, but they’ve got no aeroplanes so they just hang around looking sad and hoping someone will take them up for a flip.’

As they drove from the docks they passed Russian infantry officers swaggering along the streets, a grotesque sight, their chests ablaze with meaningless decorations they’d resurrected for the benefit of the local girls. According to Handiside, they were as unamenable to discipline as their troops and were frightened of being shot in the back if they ever left the protection of the British and the Germans. With them were their priests, dressed in red or blue gowns, with greasy curls, shaggy hair and whiskers. The airmen alone were different because most of them had flown in action and their commanding officer, a major called Samonov, wore the British Military Cross.

Though the war had been over for months now, it had left a hundred and one controversial areas of territory. The one thing that was needed was food but nobody had any to give, and the idealistic foundations of the new post-war world were already being built on dubious, much disputed foundations. The area where they were operating had been fought over half a dozen times and the houses, built of wood and more Russian than German, had a battered look, while the fields had all been denuded of their animals and crops.

‘The poor sods are practically starving,’ Handiside explained. ‘They’ve been living on dried fish and bread made of rye-straw for nearly two years.’

The squadron was flying from a field near the port but there were no hangars and no perimeter fence. It looked like a pocket handkerchief and the machines were DH4s which required not less than 550 square yards to get down if every landing was not to be a squeezing sideslip, while, because of the surrounding pines, taking off meant yanking the machine into a climbing turn immediately the wheels left the ground. The mess was in an old house which had once belonged to a Baltic manufacturer and Dicken was given a vast room with a floor of polished wooden tiles so warped by damp that, as he stepped inside, a ripple ran along them right to the window while the cupboard door swung slowly and dolefully open. As he unpacked, he heard the sound of an aeroplane engine and soon afterwards a DH4 appeared over the trees. It was sending out puffs of black smoke and its engine sounded like a can full of stones.

‘Mr Hatto’s,’ Handiside said as he went outside. ‘It’s got a Liberty engine. They say it was designed in a New York hotel in three and a half hours. This one sounds like it.’

Hatto climbed from the cockpit as the propeller jerked to a stop. ‘I’m thinking of donating it to a museum,’ he informed Handiside. Then he saw Dicken and yelled with delight.

‘A gloat dance is called for, I think,’ he said. ‘We should celebrate.’

‘Should we?’ Dicken asked as they caught their breath. ‘I thought we were going to South Russia. Vines. Sunshine. Palaces full of grand duchesses and princesses. This is some bloody place neither of us had ever heard of before.’

Hatto grinned. ‘I nearly
did
go to South Russia,’ he explained. ‘There were two ships in Southampton Water and they took me off the one I was on and put me aboard the other. And that one brought me here.’

‘I think somebody’s got it in for us, Willie.’

‘I think somebody has. And I think I know who.’

‘Not Diplock?’

Hatto was studying him with a rueful grin. ‘I got in touch with Tom Howarth who made a few enquiries. We were due to go to 47 Squadron in South Russia but the appointments were changed at the last minute.’

‘What’s it like here, Willie?’

‘Chap called Cuthbert Orr’s in command. Flew SEs in France. He’s as mad at Diplock and the Air Ministry as the rest of us. The aircraft are old – procedure for take-off is start up, cross all disengaged fingers and let her rip – but there aren’t many, anyway, so we have to take it in turns to fly ’em. And that’s when the weather permits because the climate’s horrible.’

‘What about the fighting?’

‘Still trying to work it out.’

When Orr appeared, he turned out to be a pale-faced man with a large black moustache and icy eyes. He couldn’t speak German and was largely dependent for his information on Hatto who could. Most of his days were spent trying to work out what to do with the admiral in command, a fierce little man whose chief wish seemed to be to get to grips with anybody who wanted a fight, no matter whose side they were on, and with the army, which was being raised to deal with the Bolsheviks under an urbane Irish Guardsman called Harold Alexander.

Dicken’s arrival brought the number of pilots up to twelve, but the need for observers seemed to have been overlooked and the pilots had to double up with each other in that capacity. Most of the flying seemed to consist of reconnaissances to find out where the Bolshevik forces were so that the mixed force of German Landeswehr, Letts, Poles and White Russians that formed the anti-Bolshevik army could operate against them. Occasionally, because the Navy were operating light craft along the River Dvina, it consisted also of shooting up or bombing their opposite numbers in the Bolshevik naval forces further inland along the river. As they worked, the White Russian flying officers under Samanov, sad-eyed and despondent, their shoulders wearing great epaulettes like boards, watched them gloomily, and when the army finally captured several truckloads of equipment and found aeroplanes among them, in spite of their age and shocking lack of care, Samonov fell on them with delight and began to assemble them at full speed. They had originally been captured by the Bolsheviks after the French had evacuated Odessa in the Ukraine, transported north across Russia, and recaptured by the British near Archangel, to be finally brought south to the Baltic. There was a German Rumpler, a British DH4, two German Fokker DVIIs and a French Nieuport.

‘The Bolos have exactly the same aircraft,’ Hatto pointed out. ‘So it’ll be a good idea to move warily when you’re up.’

The Latvian government was run by a man called Ulmanis who, because he had been chased out of Riga and didn’t trust the Germans under von der Goltz in Libau, was at that moment in Windau. His government didn’t seem to do much more than issue proclamations and publish pamphlets and there was remarkably little sign of order because the streets of Windau were muddy, shabby and full of the refuse of the four armies which had passed through it.

Near the aerodrome was a meadow full of wild pansies, voilets, cornflowers, clover and buttercups, with, on the far side, a lake where they could bathe, though as the weather grew warmer the midges were so voracious that the only way they could do it was to drive to the water’s edge in a tender, fling off their wraps, plunge in and remain up to their necks until on a signal, they all rushed out, grabbed their wraps and drove away as fast as possible. One day as they were swimming, a small and ancient Caudron looking like a box kite dropped into the field. The pilot was a Bolshevik who had had enough of fighting and, still dressed in bathing suits and fighting off the midges, they took him prisoner with his own pistol. He had news that the Bolsheviks were trying to advance near the village of Miloradnyi and the order to bomb them was given by Orr.

The attempt to get everybody off the ground was farcical. The mechanics had stripped down three of the troublesome DH4s and only two managed to get away, one of them turning back within ten minutes. Excited at the chance of action, the Russians rushed to their battered machines but they had not yet been properly serviced and two of them conked before they had even left the ground and in the end, flying as Hatto’s observer, Dicken found he was in the only machine in the air.

They found the Bolsheviks among the forests near the solitary eastbound railway line but, with bombs in short supply, they had had to load up with hand grenades and a lot of empty beer bottles which made a whistling noise as they fell. Flying low through a scattering of fire that put holes in the wings, they tossed out the hand grenades but, as the Russians dispersed, the DH’s engine began to falter. It picked up again almost at once but for safety Hatto swung west. As he did so they realised one of the thick fogs which infested the area had come down and the ground beneath them was completely obscured.

‘Best keep going west,’ Dicken yelled.

‘The bloody compass is dud,’ Hatto shouted back. ‘I don’t know which is west.’

‘That way!’ Dicken pointed.

‘I think it’s that way.’

‘You’re wrong!’

‘No, I’m not.’

Staring downwards, Dicken was convinced he was right. In the observer’s cockpit was a spare joystick which he unfastened and brandished in front of Hatto’s face. ‘It’s that way,’ he yelled in a fury. ‘And if you don’t turn I’ll knock your brains in.’

With the faltering engine, they struggled on, only to find, as the fog lifted abruptly, that they were both wrong and west was at right angles to the course they were flying. They were still laughing at themselves when the engine cut completely.

As Hatto glanced round, Dicken saw the alarmed look in his face. ‘Bet you a quid you can’t land without crashing,’ he yelled.

Heading for an open space in the forest, they just failed to clear the trees and Dicken was shot out of the rear cockpit as the machine came to a full stop, wedged firmly in a vertical position between two giant pines. Dazed and stupefied, he sat up to see Hatto climbing from the pilot’s cockpit. The ground around them was littered with empty bottles.

‘They’ll decide we were drunk,’ Hatto grinned. He stared about him, rubbing his shoulder and looking for the Bolsheviks they’d just been bombing. ‘Strikes me,’ he went on, ‘that we’d be wise not to hang about here.’

Following the single railway line, they headed west along the edge of the forest. The sun was out now so that they had to stumble along in the heat in their heavy flying clothes, plagued by midges that seemed to come in millions from among the trees and lakes. After a mile or two, they came to a clearing where sleepers were stacked and among them they found a small rusting hand-driven trolley. Using pine branches, they levered it on to the track but as they clambered aboard, they heard shouts and saw men on horses appearing among the trees.

‘Christ,’ Hatto said. ‘The Bolos! Look slippy, old fruit!’

They began to pump the handles but the trolley was old and tired and it was hard work, though, once they got the handles moving, they began to move faster and faster. A few shots whistled over them but nothing came very near and, surrounded by the squeaks of the handles and the oil-less wheels, they managed to make their escape.

A few last shots whistled overhead as the horsemen dropped behind and disappeared, and they stopped the trolley to get their breath back, sitting on the platform, smoking and enjoying the sunshine.

‘Not bad here,’ Hatto remarked.

‘I’ve seen worse,’ Dicken admitted. ‘But not much worse.’

Hatto smiled. ‘Old Parasol Percy Diplock would enjoy this place. All those midges. People who shoot at you. Lots of non-comfort.’

‘Pity we can’t get him to join us.’

‘Fat chance of that. I expect he’s got all his anchors out to make sure nobody moves him far from London.’

It was Dicken’s turn to smile. ‘It would be a triumph if we
could
get him here.’

‘Perhaps we should bend our minds to that end. Nothing vicious, mean or vengeful. Just something to take that smug look off his face.’

They were still enjoying the sunshine when it dawned on them that the trolley they were sitting on had started vibrating and that the vibration was coming from the rails beneath, and finally that the Bolshevik horsemen had disappeared not because they had grown tired of the chase but because there was a train approaching and they were in the way and likely to derail it.

‘Good God,’ Hatto yelled. ‘The bloody thing’ll flatten us!’

As they struggled in a panic to lever the trolley from the rails, they heard the shriek of an engine whistle and the engine hurtled at full speed round the bend towards them. Alongside the driver, his moustache bristling with ferocity and clutching a revolver as big as a cannon, was Orr coming to their rescue. The truck behind was filled with men with rifles.

They had good reason to celebrate that night because news had come in that the White Russian armies were closing in and the Bolsheviks were on the run everywhere.