The Brides of Solomon (8 page)

In cold blood I should never have dared to engage myself in the streets of so very foreign a town; but curiosity about the Bomb overcame all else. I was as eager to get the horrid details for my
school friends as any reporter for his editor. I quietly opened and closed the front door, and slunk along the Appel Quay, keeping close under the houses in case anyone should come out on the
balcony and spot me. I crossed Franz Josef Street and then, with enough people between me and the balcony, went over to the river side of the Quay.

There was nothing much to see at the car. The right back wheel and its mudguard looked as if they had been involved in a nasty smash—a sight far more familiar now than then. Imagination
produced a few drops of blood on the road. Or perhaps they were really there.

I wandered along the embankment with some vague idea of detecting traces of the would-be assassin in the river-bed. There were none, and I found myself a quarter of a mile from home with no
satisfactory reason for being where I was. I became embarrassedly conscious of my outlandish appearance. In honour of the Archduke I had been compelled to put on my Eton suit—then worn by all
small boys on Sundays and formal occasions. I don’t know whether Sarajevo had ever seen such an outfit before. No one assumed that I had escaped from a circus, so it cannot have been as
startling as I supposed.

While I fiddled around, no doubt taking refuge in day dreams, the two hedges of police and public opposite our balcony had grown up again. The Archduke was due to return. Worse still, there was
a third hedge stretching across the Appel Quay where the procession was to turn right into Franz Josef Street. I was completely cut off from home.

I disliked crossing the empty, wide road with everyone’s eyes upon me. However, I had to get back to the balcony before my absence was discovered. I pushed self-consciously through the
line of people into the open, and was at once turned back by a policeman. His reaction, I think, must have been one of sheer surprise. He was understandably nervous.

Turned back almost simultaneously was another spectator, a sharp-featured young man little taller than my over-grown self. He too was trying to cross the road and had left it too late. We
exchanged glances. I remember his brilliant blue eyes in a yellowish face. He beckoned to me, and said in German (which I understood, though nothing would induce me to mumble it unless
compelled):

‘Come with me! I will take you across.’

Then he asked the policeman if he couldn’t see that I was a little well-born foreigner and harmless. His tone almost implied that he was my manservant or tutor. With an arm round my
shoulders, taking away by his middle-class poverty the shame of my resplendent Eton suit, he led me across the road.

We entered the crowd lining the corner of the Appel Quay and Franz Josef Street, and mingled with it. I began to bolt for home, but the procession was on us. The police car came first, then the
car containing the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife. I remember Count Harrach standing on the running board on the left-hand side of the car, shielding the Archduke with his body. It did not
occur to me that such was his motive. It just seemed a gallant and genuinely Ruritanian way to ride.

The cars turned into Franz Josef Street. My kindly little friend leaned forward and fired twice. I was some distance from him and did not at first realise what he was doing. In 1914 we had not
yet been educated by war and movies. Nothing spectacular happened, except that the Archduke leaned back and Sophie put her head on his knees. Then the wave of the crowd curved over Gabriel Princip.
Above the bent heads and shoulders I could see Count Harrach put a handkerchief to the Archduke’s mouth. It turned suddenly red as in a conjuring trick.

When I reached our door, the von Lechs and my parents came pouring out of it; they did not notice that I had joined them from the Quay, not from inside the house. I never told them. I never said
a word of my adventure at school. Guilt was already present, though it was many years before I admitted to myself that Gabriel Princip, seizing his opportunity, had used me to bluff his way through
police and crowd to Franz Josef Street. Without me, he would have had to fire from some point on the Appel Quay past or through the protecting body of Count Harrach—a shot so long and
hopeless that he would have drawn from his pocket only, perhaps, a cigarette.

H
E
still used to finger his captain’s uniform and wonder how the devil he had got into it without a major interruption of his life. There had
been, of course, a sudden rush of unfamiliar incidents, but no break in the continuity of the self and the work which he knew, no chrysalis period of military training. At one moment he had been
manager of a fleet of barges on the gentle Severn; at the next he was an army captain running lighters in a Mediterranean aflame with war. A deputy Assistant Director of Transportation they called
him. It seemed a long title. He was used to being called the Young Boss. His father was the Old Boss.

And here he was in Piraeus Harbour, emptying into his barges the holds of the freighters which raced up from Alexandria; unloading on the quay or—if the weather were kind—at little
ports on the other side of the Corinth Canal; storing and stacking; managing his Greek lightermen with the aid of a foreman who, sober, much resembled his old Severn-side foreman drunk; and
commanding his small detachment of military through a sergeant-major who was the recoil mechanism between himself and the Army. The sergeant-major took and distributed the shocks so that the Young
Boss—no, Captain Coulter, of course—could go on doing his job without disrupting the still unintelligible organisation of which he was a part.

Sergeant-Major Wrist was in the eyes of Coulter a character straight out of Kipling—pliant, resourceful, with as neat and tough a body as if he had polished and brushed it along with his
equipment for twenty-five years of morning parades. He had managed to stay alive through one war already—not to speak of several expeditions which he described as picnics—and he freely
expressed his intention of staying alive through this one. Coulter liked that. It was a proper old-soldierly way to talk. He felt that Wrist was wasted on a non-combatant job in the docks, and was
sure that he must have pulled every possible regimental string to avoid it.

Their life of mere hard work was not, however, likely to continue undisturbed. That morning, April 6, 1941, Hitler had declared war on Greece. It was the end of five uncannily peaceful months
while the Greeks fought only Italians, and the base had been free to pour in the seaborne supplies from Egypt. Coulter did not think the Germans were likely to bomb Athens. Their pedantic minds
would conceive that, at least, as sheer barbarism. But they were bound to have a shot, instantly, at knocking out the Piraeus.

He was still in his dockside office when the stroke came, alone with the sergeant-major who never objected—especially when they had first had an informal meal together and some
drinks—to staying at leisurely work up to any hour of night. There was very little warning. When the sirens screamed, Sergeant-Major Wrist at once enjoined his Captain to take refuge in the
concrete shelter beneath the quay. Those, he said, were the Orders. A minute later, when they were at the door of the shelter, the raid began.

Coulter let the sergeant-major pop into the burrow, and himself stayed above ground and watched. This then was war. Flame. Noise. Space geometry of searchlights and tracer. The upward flowering
of explosions. The hammering and tinkling and whining of bits of metal. A mind quite arbitrarily prepared to lay long odds that its body stood in empty air between flying objects.

He was fascinated both by the scene and by the fact that his curiosity seemed to be greater than his fear. He had been just too young for the first war, and all his life had been envious of that
experience which had destroyed a fifth of his near contemporaries at school. At the age of seventeen he had been conditioned to the prospect of death. Three weeks was the average fighting life of a
British infantry subaltern on the western front, and he had been disappointed that he was just too young to take the gamble.

He knew all right that he had been a young fool—it had seemed to him in peace utterly incredible, this desire to immolate oneself for the sake of excitement—and yet, when a second
war came along, it appeared that he was merely an older fool. He could perfectly well have been running barges in the unraided Severn instead of a port which—if there were anything in all the
military theories he had read—was doomed to absolute destruction.

So this was all. Well, but to endure it for three weeks needed, no doubt, such sustained courage that one might welcome the end foretold by the military actuaries. All the same, it was
exhilarating to find—after twenty years of wondering about it—that one wasn’t particularly afraid. Coulter was annoyed at himself for this sudden vanity. What were a few bombs
compared to forcing oneself to jump out of a trench into the steady, calculated fire of 1917. No. No, this wasn’t the real thing.

It was over in ten minutes. A lucky string of bombs had erased the northern block of sheds and set the s.s.
City of Syracuse
on fire. Her crew—those few of them who were on
board—had tumbled down the ship’s brow and bolted for the dock gates as soon as she was hit. It wasn’t surprising. In her holds were two hundred tons of explosives and ammunition.
The ship’s officers of course would know it, though it was possible that the crew, up to the moment they were ordered to clear out, did not. For the sake of security and to avoid the risk of
devastating sabotage in a port where there had been German agents at large till the previous night, her cargo was officially described as mere military stores.

The
City of Syracuse
did not directly concern Coulter’s office since she was discharging into the railway trucks alongside, not into lighters; but he had heard of the nature of
her cargo and assumed that all the British working in the port were equally well informed. Security seemed to him to limit discussion rather than knowledge.

A naval launch was desperately trying to shift the ship into the outer harbour, but neither man nor rope could exist on her flaming bows, and the launch had not the power to tow her stern
foremost. When the stern cable charred and broke, the Navy gave up. Very reasonably, too, thought Coulter.

The sergeant-major took his time in the shelter—and why not, since the all-clear had never sounded?—and missed such excitement as there had been. He now appeared, unruffled, at
Coulter’s elbow.

‘Gone to fetch a tug, I expect, sir,’ he said, watching the launch scatter red foam from her bows as she slid away from the
City of Syracuse
into outer darkness.

‘Perhaps,’ answered Coulter, giving the Navy the benefit of the doubt. ‘But the nearest tug is in the naval basin. It’ll take her a quarter of an hour to get here, and I
think that’s just ten minutes too long.’

‘She does seem to be burning pretty fierce, sir,’ Wrist agreed coolly.

Except for the occasional fountains of flame from the
City of Syracuse
, the docks were at peace under the moon. The tough central core of the northern sheds stood up sheer from a pile
of rubble on which the dust was already settling. There were no troops about, for at that hour of night all of them, except the A.A. gunners, were back at their billets in the town. The duty clerks
in the port offices were being marched away. The ambulances had cleared up the few wounded who could readily be found, and gone. The Greek fire brigades were presumably fully occupied in the town,
for a glow over distant streets showed where another string of bombs had fallen.

As Coulter and Wrist turned to go, a staff car raced up the quay and stopped opposite to them. In it were the Area Commander and his Adjutant, perfectly cool, perfectly dressed. God knew what
they hoped to do there! If it came to that, thought Coulter, God knew why he was still there himself! Theirs presumably was a moral duty, but he hadn’t any duty whatever. Some of his barges
were adrift in the harbour, but he could only let them stay there until the Navy brought a tug.

‘Good evening, Coulter,’ said the Area Commander. ‘Barging in again, I see.’

It was a steady joke, which pleased the Commander very much. Somehow it pleased Coulter, too. It meant, after all, that the Commander recognised him, liked him, knew what he did and appreciated
it. And that could stand repetition.

‘Anything we can do, sir?’ he asked.

‘If I were you,’ said the Area Commander, ‘I should get out of here pretty damn quick. There’s nothing any of us can do.’

He left his car and passed a pleasant word with the sergeant-major, even exchanging a casual reminiscence as one old soldier to another. Then he walked off on a tour of the docks to assure
himself that there was no man in need of help.

‘Well, he isn’t taking his own advice, sergeant-major, but we will,’ said Coulter, as if it were a foregone conclusion.

He started towards his waiting truck. Wrist pointed to the sliced cube of the northern building, outlined against the burning
City of Syracuse.

‘There was a gun up there, sir,’ he remarked. ‘I suppose they’re all right.’

It seemed to Coulter exceedingly unlikely that the gun crew would have cleared out leaving any of their number alive on top of the building. Still, it was just possible that the whole lot had
been hit and forgotten, and that there might be a survivor in no state to climb down.

‘Shall we go and see, sir?’

What particularly annoyed Coulter was that he knew just where and when his sergeant-major was likely to be a bit of a fraud. Indeed he doubted if you could become a sergeant-major at all without
a keen appreciation of the value of eyewash. He did not believe for a moment that Wrist would have made this intolerable and officious suggestion if it hadn’t been for the presence, somewhere
in the docks, of the Area Commander.