Corporal Cotton's Little War (12 page)

‘Might work,’ he said. ‘But he needs to be where he can be looked after.’

They spent a wretched night in the wrecked launch, with Howard moaning and crying out in his pain. Cotton was unable to sleep and after a while he went to the boy. To his surprise he found Bisset there, giving him another injection.

‘It’ll help,’ he said. ‘But it’s almost all gone now. We shall have to get him to a doctor.’

When he’d assumed command, the agony of wounded men hadn’t occurred to Cotton any more than the responsibility of getting treatment, and he frowned.

‘Think he’ll be all right till tomorrow?’

‘I suppose so.’ Bisset seemed dubious. ‘I don’t really know.’

As they helplessly watched the boy gasping, Gully appeared with Docherty.

‘How is he?’

‘Bad,’ Bisset said and Cotton crossed himself. Seeing him, Docherty did the same.

Gully drew a deep breath. ‘I wish I was back in Crete,’ he said heavily.

As soon as it was daylight, Cotton made up his mind. Something had to be done about Howard. His torment was getting on top of them. Nobody could do anything for listening to his tortured breathing, which had seemed to echo round the whole boat all night.

As soon as they’d swallowed a cup of tea and a hard biscuit, they began to construct a stretcher made of two poles with blankets lashed across it. It was crude but it worked and they started to get the boy out of the cabin. His agony was unbearable and once he screamed as they manoeuvred him up the lopsided steps, in a way that echoed round the boat and shocked them all.

‘How the Christ are we going to get him ashore?’ Gully muttered.

But Cotton had thought of that and they lashed the boy to the stretcher and lowered it over the side to the sand where Gully and Docherty were waiting.

‘Get him under the trees,’ Cotton said. ‘It’s cooler there.’

His mind was stiff with the problems that filled it. There was just too much to think about and he began to realize just how much Captain Troughton, of
Caernarvon,
had supported on his shoulders. Captain Troughton had two decorations, a lot of gold braid and a considerably bigger salary than Corporal Cotton. Suddenly aware of what he had to carry around with him in a ship of 8000 tons and a complement of 500 men and conscious of his own small load, Cotton felt he was more than welcome to them.

They carried the boy up to the trees, where the other bodies were still lying.

‘Oughtn’t we to bury ‘em?’ Bisset asked.

‘We’ll get the rest of the stuff ashore first,’ Cotton said. ‘The boat and the rafts. Just in case the Germans come.’

They lowered the dinghy and hid it behind the beach in the rocks with the rest of what they’d salvaged. Howard’s cheeks had fallen in when they went to the stretcher and Cotton peered anxiously at him. The party had been halved and somehow it bothered him that Howard was hurt. He had no wish to lose any more by death.

‘Is he dead?’ Gully asked.

‘No,’ Bisset said. ‘In fact, he’s breathing easier. If we could get him to a quack, he might pull round.’

‘We’ll try,’ Cotton said. He drew a deep breath. ‘We ought to go over to the other boat now,’ he went on. ‘To see what we can find. We can probably take him to the village while we’re at it. We’ve got to look for the other boat some time. They might have seen us coming in and be waiting for us.’

As he spoke, he saw Gully staring over his shoulder, his eyes wide, his jaw dropped, and he whirled round, expecting to see that the Germans had arrived. Instead, standing in the shallow water by the rocks at the other end of the beach, he saw two men and a girl. They were all young and wearing civilian clothes, and the men were both armed.

3

For a long time the two groups stood motionless, staring at each other. Cotton’s first thought was that the two men were survivors from
Loukia,
but then he saw they weren’t British and they certainly weren’t servicemen.

The warmth in the narrow bay suddenly seemed oppressive and the thud of the guns to the north seemed nearer. The newcomers appeared to have materialized from nowhere, and Cotton realized they must have climbed down to the beach from among the rocks. There were plenty of these, towering above him in strange mysterious shapes, the burden of stone like battered forts and castles, each joined by bastions and buttresses of gritty earth and clumps of genista, brambles and oleander. His eyes swung back from the tangle of stony sentinels to the civilians and it occurred to him then that if they could descend the hillside without being seen, they must know a footpath, and a footpath was what he, Docherty, Bisset and Gully needed just then.

‘You’d better get talking,’ Bisset pointed out softly. ‘They look as if they aren’t very keen on us.’

The strangers had begun to move forward now. The men had unslung their weapons - a tommy-gun, Cotton noticed at once, and a Lee-Enfield rifle - and they were moving along the beach, their feet in the shallow water, holding the weapons in front of them as if they suspected a trick. They stopped a few yards away. The man in front was thin and brilliant-eyed like a gypsy, with a heavy moustache and a feverish fanatic look. The other man was little more than a boy. The girl was roughly the same age as the younger man; not one of the plump lovelies Cotton had seen in Crete or on Iros, but a slimmer girl with natural grace and charm, her face like a waxen mask. She was bare-armed and bare-legged in a one-piece dark dress, her hair like a dark wave on her shoulders. She had charcoal-black eyes and an attractive mouth which looked as though at other times it might smile easily. Though she was not beautiful in the accepted sense, there was a serene quality about her that indicated she hadn’t always been in the habit of accompanying armed men.

The older of the Greeks, the thin man with the feverish fanatic eyes, said something which Cotton didn’t catch, and the girl spoke in English, her voice low, addressing Docherty who was standing to one side.

‘This is your boat?’

Cotton answered in Greek and three pairs of black eyes switched from Docherty’s face to his.

‘Whose side are you on?’ the thin-faced man demanded sharply, with a marked aggressive hostility.

‘Whose side?’

‘Are you for ELAS?’

‘What’s ELAS?’

‘ELAS is the Greek Communist party,’ the girl explained.

‘I’m not Greek,’ Cotton said stiffly, irritated as he always was if someone suggested he was anything but a pure-bred Englishman able to trace his ancestry back to Anglo-Saxon darkness. ‘I can speak some Greek,’ he added.

The man gestured at
Claudia.
‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘We were coming to the island to look for a boat.’ Cotton pointed towards the cape. ‘It’s over there. In the next bay. We saw it. But we were seen by Messerschmitts and they shot us up.’ He gestured behind him and the newcomers stared solemnly at the three silent shapes wrapped in blankets.

‘They are dead?’ the girl asked, her voice low and grieving.

‘Yes.’

She looked at Howard. ‘And that one also?’

‘No,’ Cotton said. ‘But he’s badly hurt. He needs a doctor. We were going to take him to the village.’

She said nothing, staring at the injured boy with a frown on her face, trying to work out what they could do. In the silence the man with the moustache spoke,

‘Why were you looking for the other boat?’ he asked.

‘We thought we might find survivors.’

‘There are no survivors.’ The words came quickly, as though the speaker were anxious there should be no doubt about the matter.

Cotton frowned. ‘None at all?’

‘None. They’re all dead.’

‘All of them? I was told there
were
some. They were seen standing on the beach waving. A recce plane saw them.’

The Greek glanced at the boy alongside him, then he shrugged. ‘There were seven alive,’ he said. ‘But the Germans came and killed them all. They arrived three days ago. The Western democracies have failed to stop them. The British will leave Greece soon and go back where they came from, and leave
us
to face the Germans.’ He seemed to be a Communist and Cotton remembered the worried Mayor of Iros.

The Greek offered cigarettes. Cotton took one and was about to light it when he removed it from his lips and stared at it.

‘These are English cigarettes,’ he said.

The Greek shrugged. ‘There were a lot left behind.’

‘Left behind where?’

‘Here.’

The girl glanced quickly at the Greek as if she didn’t believe him, and Cotton frowned. ‘I didn’t know we’d been here,’ he said. ‘I thought we were the first.’

‘Oh, no! A ship came in. They had no drachmas so they exchanged cigarettes for wine.’

The girl looked worried and interrupted quickly. ‘What do you intend to do now?’ she asked in her quiet, deep voice.

Cotton gestured at
Claudia.
‘We were wondering if we could repair one of the boats,’ he said. ‘This one or the other.’

‘There is nothing here,’ the Greek said quickly, almost too quickly, Cotton thought. ‘This is a poor island and this end is the poorest part of it.’

‘You’d better hide,’ the girl put in. ‘The Germans know there is a boat here.’

‘How do you know they know?’

‘We have ways of finding out. We have friends who have been taken on by them to clean their quarters in Kalani and at Yanitsa. And friends who own the cafes they use and listen to them talking.’

Cotton studied her grave face. ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Akoumianakis. Annoula Akoumianakis.’ The girl gestured at the older Greek just behind her. ‘This is Petrakis, Chrysostomos. He is my cousin. He comes from Crete. My uncle was a government official who was sent there from the mainland. I come from the Piraeus, which is the port for Athens.’ She gestured at the other man. ‘This is Cesarides, Gregorio. He is only a boy. There is another one up the hill, watching. His name is Xilouris, Giorgiou.
He
comes from Antipalia on the mainland.’

Cotton said nothing for a moment. In its trudging regimental way, his mind was working. Something told him that the feverish-eyed Greek was not to be trusted. ‘And the guns?’ he asked. ‘Why are you carrying guns?’

The girl glanced at Petrakis. ‘My cousin prefers the hills to the towns now that the Germans have come. I was in Ay Yithion just over the cape. It is a fishing village. He came for me and brought me along, too, because I speak a little English.’ She gave a twisted smile and shrugged. ‘But not much. My cousin lives up there.’ She indicated the hills to the west. ‘There are other men, too, and more will join.’

‘How many?’

The girl glanced at Petrakis and he answered brusquely. ‘My cousin says there are many,’ she said. ‘Very many. He has a lot of support.’

Cotton was aware of Bisset watching him, urging him to get on with it so they could continue with what they’d been doing, but he was deliberately slow.

‘How far is it?’ he asked. ‘The other boat?’

‘Three cigarettes,’ the man said.

‘Three cigarettes?’

The girl explained quickly. ‘He is a Cretan and this is how they measure distance on Crete. The time it takes you to smoke a cigarette.’ She smiled gravely. ‘But I warn you, although Cretans can move fast in the hills, they are no judge of distance.’

‘Is he starting a Resistance movement?’

‘We aren’t fighting for the Western democracies,’ Petrakis interrupted. ‘We’re fighting for Greece. And that doesn’t mean the king.’

The girl glanced round her at the cliffs. ‘The Germans will come soon,’ she said uneasily.

‘Where are they?’

‘The north side of the island. They’re building a new airstrip at Yanitsa. It’s flat there. There is nothing but windmills and they are already pulling them down. You ought to hide.’

‘Where?’ Cotton asked and she indicated the shrub-covered hills.

Petrakis gestured at
Claudia.
‘What about the guns?’ he said sharply.

‘What about them?’

‘The Germans will take them when they come. We’ll look after them for you.’

Cotton looked at him coldly. He had already decided he didn’t like Petrakis very much and the thought of handing over Royal Navy guns to a stranger took his breath away.

‘We’ll look after them ourselves,’ he said sharply.

The 303s were no problem because they were on temporary mountings and had only to be lifted off. The 20 mm was more difficult, but Cotton knew what to do and they carefully detached the barrel and recoil spring. They had just finished removing the gun when there was a whistle from the top of the hill and the two Greeks turned at once and ran for cover, splashing in the shallows until they reached the slope. Leaping from boulder to boulder, they disappeared from sight.

‘It’s the Germans,’ the girl said. ‘That was Giorgiou Xilouris.’

Bisset looked towards the three stiffening shapes lying under the trees. ‘What about that lot?’ he asked.

‘There’s no time,’ the girl said. ‘Hurry!’ She gestured at Howard. ’Quickly!’

‘What about the guns?’

Cotton stared about him. It would take them too long to get the guns up the beach and hidden. ‘Over the side,’ he said. ‘As far under the stern as we can get ‘em. They’ll not notice ‘em there with a bit of luck and they’re well greased. It was my job to see they were, and we can get ‘em back before they come to any harm.’

They pushed the guns overboard, so that they dropped under the stern. Then they climbed from the launch’s deck, taking the ammunition, the drums and the breech blocks with them. The girl was still waiting for them, fidgeting anxiously as she watched Cotton’s painstaking preparations.

‘Hurry,’ she called.

Dropping to the beach, loaded with metal objects, they lifted the stretcher as she began to run along the edge of the sea. Then she turned and gestured. ‘In the water,’ she said. ‘Or they’ll follow the footprints.’

They splashed along in the shallows until they reached the rocks. Then, manhandling the stretcher, they followed her up the slope. Behind them there was no indication of where they’d gone, only the footprints round the bodies and the wrecked launch, and the marks on the sand where they’d struggled with the dinghy.