Corporal Cotton's Little War (2 page)

He did sort out the matter of the melon and the Cretan’s face. As Cotton had expected. After all, supported by his wealth, Patullo had wandered intimately in peacetime Rumania before finding his way to Greece long before Mussolini had decided it might look better as an Italian colony. He knew Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece like the back of his hand and had sailed his own boat among the Dodecanese and Cyclades Islands. But his hope of being a simple sailor had been dashed at once when someone in Alexandria had recognized him. Since everybody even then expected Mussolini to march into Greece at the first opportunity, and since nobody else spoke Greek, and - despite what they always said at home -- none of the Greeks spoke English, he had been commissioned at once, posted to
Caernarvon
and put in charge of Intelligence.

The matter of the melon was settled within ten minutes and he caught Cotton up as he was trying to explain to his friends what had happened to the fruit he’d promised to produce.

‘Really should be more careful whom you pick on, Cotton,’ he smiled. ‘That chap had a knife.’

Cotton straightened up, every inch of him a Royal Marine, stiff in starched khaki drill. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘I took it off him.’

‘Might have been nasty, though,’ Patullo said. ‘Cretans aren’t noted for having the sweetest of dispositions and they actually enjoy being warlike. They sometimes even wear empty ammunition belts stuffed with pellets of paper just for the look of the thing, and whole families conduct vendettas for generations.’

Cotton began to see he’d probably been lucky and he stiffened again. ‘I expect I could have handled it, sir.’

Patullo looked up at Cotton’s square bulk and the blue emery paper of beard on his big chin. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You probably could, shouldn’t wonder.’ He paused. ‘You were pretty articulate back there, Corporal,’ he went on. ‘In Greek, too. Did you know what you were saying to that chap?’

Cotton’s face reddened. ‘Yes, sir, I did,’ he said. ‘I told him I didn’t really want his bloody melon any more so I’d make him a present of it. I did.’

‘You did indeed.’ Patullo smiled again, then he paused and stared hard at Cotton. ‘Where did you learn to speak Greek like that?’

Cotton frowned. ‘When I was a kid, sir,’ he said. ‘I lived with a Greek family. There’s a lot of Greeks round London.’ He didn’t explain that the family in question was his own and consisted of his mother, father and three adoring older sisters, Elene, Rhoda and Maria, and that if everybody had his own, his name was not Michael Anthony Cotton, under which label he’d enlisted in the Royal Marines, but the Mihale Andoni Cotonou he’d been given at birth.

Patullo smiled again. ‘I thought you didn’t sound as though you’d learned it at night-school,’ he observed.

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, it takes all sorts.’ Patullo seemed happy to have found a fellow Greek scholar. He had never kept himself aloof from the lower deck like some of the officers and had employed his inherited self-confidence, wealth and creative power to splash on the canvas of the everyday life of
Caernarvon
some of the colour of his own past. ‘Lafcadio Pringle was an Irishman of Welsh descent, and
he
spoke Old Norse, Flemish, Tibetan, Czech and diplomatic Latin, and he ended up as a corporal of Uhlans in the Polish army. You that sort of chap?’

‘No, sir,’ Cotton said, wondering why he hadn’t kept his big mouth shut and who the hell Lafcadio Pringle was when he was at home.

It was a small incident and it had taken place in late 1940 when the Italians had first gone into Greece. Now, five months later, since he was well aware that he was blessed with nothing else beyond the Greek language in the nature of unusual gifts,

Cotton suspected that it was responsible for his being present in this hut near Retimo, standing in front of a scrubbed army table covered with maps, being stared at by Patullo and two other men.

There was a pile of signal flimsies in front of them and Patullo was tapping one of them.

‘Loukia to Scylla
...’ he read out.’...
ETA 1315....’

Cotton shifted his position slightly. ‘Who’s Loukia, sir?’ he asked. ‘A young lady? It’s a young lady’s name.’

Patullo glanced at the other two men behind the table then at Cotton, his face bland and smiling. ‘Yes, it is, Cotton,’ he said. ‘A
Greek
young lady’s name. But, as a matter of fact, in this case,
Loukia’s
a motor launch. That’s why she’s sending her estimated time of arrival - at Antipalia on the mainland.
Scylla’s
the code name for the base here. These two gentlemen to be precise. Lieutenant-Commander Kennard and Mr Ponsonby, of the Foreign Office.’

Kennard nodded his acknowledgement of Cotton. Ponsonby’s expression seemed to indicate that Cotton probably smelled.

Patullo paused, moving a few papers about on the table in front of him. Since the incident with the shopkeeper in Heraklion, he had taken a great delight in getting Cotton to one side so he could toss phrases at him, testing him, teasing him, quoting a lot of ancient Greek poets Cotton had never heard of and saying he reminded him of Homer or Aeschylus. If Patullo hadn’t been so obviously normal - his escapades with the ladies of Alexandria had become notorious even with the lower deck - Cotton might have thought he was making advances to him. As it was, he had long since realized it was nothing but Patullo’s weird sense of humour at work.

He stood now, stiff and motionless, well aware that there was something in the wind. There’d been something in the wind ever since
Caernarvon
had arrived in Suda Bay, and he was just  waiting to see how it concerned him.

‘Loukia.’
Patullo sorted out his papers and raised his eyes again. ‘A motor launch, Corporal,’ he explained. ‘Indeed, a damned fast motor launch. What you’d really call a high-speed motor boat.’

‘I see, sir,’ Cotton said.

He was giving nothing away. In
Caernarvon
there were a lot of people who considered that Cotton was not particularly bright. In fact, he was brighter than he seemed and he was a sound Royal Marine because the discipline and tradition of the corps had been well instilled into him and he believed in good order and had no objection to being told what to do. He was also an old soldier, and had an old soldier’s sharp awareness of ‘buzzes’, of things that went bump in the night, and duties that might be unpleasant and were best avoided, at one with all those sly, wily men who knew exactly which side their bread was buttered, ancient in the service and all-wise when it came to dodging church parades. Whatever it was that was in the wind, it smelled to Cotton as though it was going to concern him very deeply.

It was Ponsonby who spoke next, taking over from Patullo.

‘There were three of these boats originally,’ he said in a voice that sounded like a file rasping on the edge of an anvil.
‘Claudia, Loukia
and
Irene.
They were a class of boat developed for rich people to enjoy themselves in, and they belonged to the Greek millionaire, Spiro Panyioti, who used them for fishing and that sort of thing. He gave them to us after using them for evacuating his family and personal fortune from the mainland.’

Cotton waited. They seemed, he thought, to be going halfway round the bloody world to reach the point.

‘We mounted 303s on them,’ Kennard joined in. ‘Only Lewis guns, unfortunately, which aren’t so hot, but we did get some captured Italian 20 mm cannons from the Greeks, and we put one on the stern of each against aircraft. Unfortunately we lost
Irene
a few days ago. She disputed the right of way with the destroyer
Wryneck,
and not unnaturally came off worst. Now, in what seems to have been the last flicker of life in the Italian navy,
Loukia
seems to have been caught by
motoscafi anti-sommergibili
- fast motor launches to you, Cotton - and has been wrecked, leaving us only
Claudia.’

Patullo pushed a sheaf of flimsies across the table. ‘Better read the messages, Cotton,’ he said helpfully. ‘They can tell you as much as we can.’

It wasn’t difficult because there weren’t many.
‘Blenheim bomber landed in sea . . .’
Cotton saw.
‘Investigating survivors.’
They told a tragic little story in as few words as possible but Cotton, who’d been involved in picking up a few survivors since the war in the Mediterranean had come to life, could well imagine the drama that had gone on in the cramped forecastle of the little vessel, with anxious seamen knowing only a little of medicine and surgery crouched over a soaked and wounded airman gasping out his life.

There was a second or two of silence; then Ponsonby went on, ‘They were taken off course by the ditching,’ he said, ‘and the Italians got them. It seemed that was the end of it, but then a Blenheim of 113 Squadron from Nyamata, in Greece, reported seeing a boat ashore on the island of Aeos and it seemed as if it might be
Loukia.
We got them to fly another recce over the place, and, sure enough, it is
Loukia.
She’s beached there and seems to be wrecked. But there were several men standing by her on the sand, waving, so it seems some of the crew survived. We have to find them.’

‘Why, sir?’ Cotton had never before known the services to be so bloody keen to pick up odds and sods who got left behind.

Ponsonby looked at Kennard, who shrugged; then he lit a cigarette, slowly, carefully, as though he were wondering how much to say. ‘You know the situation on the mainland, Corporal?’

Cotton knew it only too well. The British army, which had been put smartly on shore in March, looked very much now, in April, as though it would have to be taken smartly off again.

Kennard picked up a piece of paper. ‘On March 4th,’ he said, ‘at the Greek government’s request, we began to land an army. On April 6th, the Germans launched their attack in the Balkans. They have now reached Yugoslavian Macedonia and are approaching the Salonika plain, and the Greeks west of there on the Albanian front are expected eventually to surrender. That would make our position untenable, and a withdrawal to a position round Mount Olympus has already been planned. It seems that when it starts it will continue to the coast.’

Cotton didn’t really need telling. He was no strategist, but the road outside was already dusty from the troops marching from the landing stages where the transports were dumping them from the mainland. That spring of 1941, the Germans could count the divisions they had available in dozens, the British on one hand, and Corporal Cotton had never expected the soldiers to stay long in Greece. Every man in the fleet could have told them what the result would be, even as they’d disembarked them at the Piraeus.

‘See you later,’ they’d said. ‘At the evacuation.’

Ponsonby tapped the ash off his cigarette and spoke again. ‘That’s old news now, of course. What you probably don’t know is that months before the decision to send British troops to Greece was finally taken, Admiral Cunningham set up a plan to bring them all out again.’

‘An eminently sensible precaution in view of our track record up to now,’ Kennard said.

There was a clear atmosphere of tension and worry, and Ponsonby sniffed. He looked like a man who believed in last stands - so long as he personally didn’t have to make them.

‘As a result of all this’ -- he was looking out of one eye at Kennard - ‘arrangements were made to hedge our bets in case of defeat.
Loukia
was carrying a consignment of weapons for the Greeks.’

‘Quite simply,’ Kennard said bluntly, ‘we were intending to stir up trouble for the Germans after we’d left.
Loukia
was sent off under the command of Lieutenant-Commander Richard Samways, an experienced small-boat officer, and her bilges were full of rifles, grenades and other assorted weapons. It was hoped they’d be instrumental in starting a resistance movement.’

Ponsonby took off his spectacles and started to polish them. ‘We think, from the reports we’ve received, that this bay she’s in’ - he glanced at the map - ‘Xiloparissia Bay - is a lost sort of place, well covered with trees at one side, and steep and almost inaccessible at the other. It may be that those rifles are still there. We have to make some attempt to recover them.’

By this time Cotton had begun to suspect the route the discussion was taking and he didn’t particularly like it. He noticed that Patullo and Ponsonby were both watching him carefully.

Kennard continued. ‘Since the navy’s hard-pressed and its launches have to be used for coastal escort work, when we decided to send the guns to Antipalia it was decided that
Loukia
was the only boat we could spare. At least she had a speed of thirty-five to forty knots.’ He pushed several photographs across. They showed a boat, apparently intact apart from a fallen mast, lying on the edge of a beach half-hidden by trees.

‘That’s
Loukia,’
he said.

Cotton studied the men beyond the table. Patullo stared at the papers in front of him. He seemed faintly embarrassed. Kennard looked at Ponsonby.

‘I think he should know,’ he said.

Ponsonby stubbed out his cigarette and looked up.
‘Loukia,
Corporal,’ he said, ‘was also carrying twenty thousand pounds in coinage. Maria Theresas and Napoleons and silver American dollars. Though those coins are no longer legal tender, for your information they
are
still valuable and most governments manage to have a few under the counter for operations when paper money ceases to have much value. They were also to be used for Greek resistance.’

Cotton’s face didn’t change. ‘Very nice, sir,’ he said again.

‘We don’t want that money to fall into the hands of the Germans,’ Ponsonby pointed out. ‘We also want the rifles.’

‘And Loukia,’
Kennard added.

Cotton frowned. They didn’t want so bloody much, he decided. ‘I thought that’s how it was, sir,’ he said.

Ponsonby gave him a sharp, suspicious look as if Cotton were trying to be clever. ‘We expect the Germans to try something here before long,’ he went on. ‘They’re not likely to be happy with an aircraft carrier the size of Crete off their south-eastern flank.’