Corporal Cotton's Little War

by John Harris

  ‘Patullo’s a nut,’ he said. In front of a member of the idle rich like Bisset, Cotton was vaguely pleased to be associated with such a character and such wealth. ‘It was him got me into this. He once told me he took part in a Greek cavalry charge in some rebellion in the thirties and was allowed to keep his horse, saddle and sword as a reward. And I once heard the commander telling the captain that he’d interrupted a dinner at Shepheard’s by standing up at his table and reciting a Horatian ode in honour of a Cantacuzene princess who was one of his girl friends.’ Cotton paused. ‘What’s a Horatian ode?’

  ‘An ode by Horace, I expect. He was an ancient Roman poet.’

  ‘And a thingy princess?’

  ‘A descendant of Cantacuzenus, I suppose.’

  ‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’

  ‘He became Emperor of Byzantium.’

  Cotton frowned. ‘You seem to know a bit too,’ he said.

  ‘It’s been noticed,’ Bisset smiled.

  ‘Are you married?’

  Bisset gazed at Cotton. The Marine was big and clumsy but there was something about him that impressed – if it were only his size.

  ‘Not much fun courting, getting engaged and all fixed up on Naafi notepaper,’ he said. ‘No, I’m not.’

  Cotton was still feeling his way. Bisset’s speech was precise and devoid of service slang and was one more reason why Cotton needed to know more about him. He tried him with the eternal introductory question of all regulars.

  ‘Why’d you join?’

  Bisset’s smile came again. ‘I got taken in by that poster of the blonde. My family said it was a waste of a good education, and I suppose it was. But, you know, a training in classics is no more use to a career in business than it is to the service.’

  Cotton gestured. ‘Why didn’t you try for a pilot?’

  ‘It did occur to me.’ Bisset gave his wide smile again. ‘But it turned out there was a bit of a problem in telling brown from green. I’m colour blind.’

  Cotton frowned. ‘It was the blonde that got me,’ he admitted. ‘I’d read all the stuff, of course. It was the Marines that captured Gibraltar. Gibraltar’s the only battle honour worn on our colours. No flag’s big enough to hold ’em all.’

  Bisset was watching him with mild, amused eyes. He came from a family which took everything for granted – even its own worth and it was a change to meet a man who was naïvely proud to belong to something simply because of its record.

  ‘When they invaded Holland last year,’ Cotton went on, ‘they fell in two hundred of our lot at Chatham – cooks, clerks, barrack stanchions, the whole shebang. Within twelve hours they were defending the Hook of Holland. When they came out they brought Queen Wilhelmina with ’em. Didn’t lose a man either. In fact they had an extra anti-tank rifle.’

  ‘Why didn’t you join the commandos?’

  Cotton sniffed. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘We are commandos. We always have been.’

  A wrinkled crone, covered in black against the heat like an Arab, came down the jetty, making the sign of the cross over them as she passed. She was riding on a mule that was decorated with a string of blue beads on its forehead, and they all leaned on the wheelhouse roof to watch her.

  ‘What’s them bead things for?’ Gully asked, addressing the question to no one in particular. ‘They’ve all got ’em. ’Ouses, babies, mules, carts, boats.’

  ‘To guard against the evil eye,’ Bisset said.

  ‘Whose evil eye?’

  ‘Nobody’s.’ Bisset smiled. ‘Just the evil eye. It’s responsible for all maladies in humans, the malfunctions of boat engines and the dropping dead of overloaded donkeys.’

  In the heat of the early afternoon, Shaw allowed them ashore for a drink, leaving only Chief ERA Duff on board in command of the boat and Howard to do sentry-go with the tommy-gun.

  Docherty was at his most intractable, staring at the signs outside the shops with a disgusted look, as if all Greeks were mad.

  ‘Bloody funny language,’ he said at the top of his voice. ‘Looks like a fly fell in the paint-pot and crawled all over it. It’s worse than that gyppo writing you see in Alexandria.’

  The café was vine-covered and inside people were eating red mullet with retsina and white demestica wine. In the lee of the wall, sponge fishermen were slapping the sand out of their sponges, clipping away the dirt and stones, then soaking them and stuffing them into sacks. A flock of lambs came past, driven to the jetty for transport to the mainland which would probably now never want them, and the air was full of their bleating.

  The sponge fishermen, a boy mending a net, and an old man making a new one from thread, hooking and knotting with dexterity, looked up as they arrived. There was a buzz of chatter going on in the shade inside over the sound of the radio batting out a Greek Orthodox liturgy from the mainland, and their arrival stopped the conversation so that the radio said, ‘Kyrie eleison! Kyrie eleison!’ so loudly everybody looked round.

  Docherty tasted the thin, pale, watery beer cautiously.

  ‘Tastes like horse-piss,’ he complained.

  ‘Shut up,’ Cotton said. ‘They might understand English.’

  ‘Who?’ Gully asked. ‘Wops?’

  ‘They might,’ Cotton said, faintly shamefaced but also slightly indignant that Docherty should regard Greeks as something less than human.

  As they drank, the village priest went past, in his black robes and flat-topped hat, pushing back the sleeve of his robe, then an old man appeared from the café, holding a glass of raki, and stopped in front of them. He wore a beard, a fringed turban, elaborately embroidered waistcoat, cummerbund, tall black leather boots and a pair of voluminous knickerbockers with a baggy seat.

  ‘Known as crap-catchers,’ Patullo said to Shaw at the next table.

  The old man grinned and waved his hand. ‘Welcome,’ he said in English. ‘Rooly Britannia. Goss-savey King.’ He gestured at the radio and lapsed into Greek. ‘That is the true liturgy,’ he said, and Cotton translated for the others. ‘We have the words of the Fathers. The true confession. We have the ikons and the blessed Eucharist to cleanse and unite us.’ He stopped and looked hard at Cotton. ‘You are Greek, my son?’ he asked. ‘You look Greek.’

  ‘No,’ Cotton said quickly. ‘I’m English.’

  ‘You have the Greek language. You speak it well.’

  ‘I learned it,’ Cotton said. ‘I learned it at school.’

  ‘You speak it like a Greek too. You have a good accent.’ The old man paused as Cotton grew more uncomfortable. ‘Where are the Germans now?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. North somewhere.’

  ‘They will come soon. We shall be prisoners. God grant that they will be haunted by the spirits of their victims. They no longer rest quiet in their graves.’ The old man sniffed. ‘The Italians – pò-pò–’ he gestured contemptuously with his fingers ‘–they are mere jackals. The Germans are vampires from hell. But a Greek is a man with a long memory.’ He looked hard at Cotton. ‘That boat of yours,’ he went on. ‘Panyioti, the millionaire, had one like that.’

  ‘It used to be Panyioti’s boat,’ Cotton explained.

  The old man spat. ‘Aie! That was no Greek. He only visited Aeos once a year, and he spent all the time throwing ten-drachma pieces to the poor from his shiny car. True Greeks believe in things. Every day the newspapers report how somebody has been chopped to the navel with a meat cleaver because somebody else didn’t agree with him.’

  They went inside to have a meal because they suspected they’d be living on bully beef and biscuit before long. Patullo paid and it consisted largely of lamb, which Gully suspected and Cotton knew was goat. But with it there was fresh bread and young wine, light, sparkling and cool. Gully inevitably preferred the beer.

  The food was brought by a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl with moist lips, big sticky eyes and a large bust. Gully eyed her gleefully, nudging Coward energetically. Docherty watched her with a hot, longing look in his ey
es, as if he’d have liked to wrench the clothes from her back and fling her down across one of the tables.

  ‘Bit of all right,’ Gully said. ‘Look smashing with a feather in ’er ’at and no drawers.’

  Cotton said nothing. He’d lost his virginity soon after joining the Marines but he’d never gone for lush dark-eyed women. Because of his rejection of his background, he’d always chosen blonde, blue-eyed English-looking girls, but they’d always seemed to lack the steam and passion to match his own. ‘Steady on, ducks,’ one of them had once told him during a bout of intense lovemaking on the settee with her mother asleep upstairs. ‘You don’t have to go at it as if you’re starving.’

  They had cheese that was strong enough to remove the roofs of their mouths and washed it down with cherry brandy at a penny a glass, so that they returned on board feeling mellow and ready for anything. Later in the afternoon, they lay the boat alongside the mole and took on water. Then they slept in the heat, with only Cotton on deck, watching the sky. He didn’t feel like sleeping and had offered to do aircraft look-out. Uneasily he felt that something was stirring in him that was spiritually connected with this island, as if the place was calling to him; and he realised that when the old man had been talking about Greek courage and bravery, he had even felt a certain amount of pride. It was disturbing, because all his life he’d tried to believe he was entirely British.

  As the sun sank, people filled the café, drinking cocoa and wine, and music from a couple of fiddles and a bouzouki started. The sun was setting and the evening was one of beaten gold when the lone Heinkel came over. As it flew off towards the west, they smiled with relief.

  ‘He’s missed us,’ Patullo said.

  But the aircraft returned a few minutes later, grey-green and sleekly streamlined, and circled the harbour about two thousand feet up. Everybody on the wall stared upwards, watching it, men, women and children, holding their donkeys and their fish baskets and their shopping. Then, as the aircraft came overhead again, Cotton noticed that the bomb doors were open.

  ‘He’s going to bomb!’ he yelled, and they all ducked behind the wheelhouse.

  The black crow-like shapes of the women started to run and the wail that went up could be heard over the noise of the engines. Then the yelling was drowned in an iron howling as the aeroplane swept overhead and they saw the bombs drop away. At first they thought they were intended for Claudia but they passed in a descending curve over the boats and landed in the town. Lifting their heads, they saw the explosions puff up in four mushrooms of brown smoke that contained twisting tiles and pieces of wood. Then the aeroplane swept over the town and out to sea towards the north.

  ‘Come on!’ Patullo said, and they started to run down the harbour wall.

  The bombs had fallen among the huddled white houses. Two had gone wide and done no more than dig holes of fresh, pulverised smoking earth in a plot of gardens, but the other two had flung down two of the houses and the Greeks were just dragging out a woman and a child. A donkey lay dead nearby, its blood soaking the earth in a huge sticky pool, and the priest, his face agonised, his hands red, was standing among the rubble muttering a prayer.

  As they lifted the child clear, ominously still, the woman wrenched herself free, her face, her clothes, her hair, white with plaster dust. As she flung herself on the child, wailing, the aircraft passed over the harbour again and released a cloud of pamphlets which showered down to litter the streets.

  Patullo caught one as it fluttered past. ‘“To the Greek islanders,”’ he read aloud so they could all hear. ‘“Be warned! The Greek government on the mainland, having directed hostile actions against the Greater German Reich and her allies, the Führer, Adolf Hitler, has decided the time has come when the Greek people must be taught a lesson. They have the choice of being ruled by their own decadent and corrupt government, or accepting the German army of occupation.”’

  ‘Same bloody stuff they dropped on France,’ Shaw said sourly. The anger of the islanders seemed to have knotted into a bitterness that was directed not against the aeroplane but against the British, and they saw a crowd gather near the end of the mole. The corpse of the child was lying on a slab, the mother still wailing over it. The rest of the village, led by the priest, drew together and began to march towards them.

  ‘I think we’d better go,’ Shaw said. ‘Start her up, Chief.’

  As the engines crashed to life, the crowd stopped dead and only the old man who had talked to Cotton was on the mole to see them off. He seemed to know where they were going and seemed to feel no resentment towards them because there were tears in his eyes as he made the sign of the Cross over them.

  ‘May God go with you,’ he said. ‘May God in his open-handedness bless you with a fine night.’

  Cotton replied automatically as he’d heard his mother call after departing guests. ‘Thank you. Perhaps God will assist us.’

  Staring back, he frowned, uncertain and worried. He’ll need to, he decided.

  Five

  In the headquarters he had set up in the Hotel Potomakis in Kalani, Major Baldamus sat back and considered his position.

  He had done well in France and his promotion had been rapid, but he was also clever enough to have kept his nose clean without claiming that he was part of a master race. He hadn’t particularly wanted a war but, having got one, he was determined to get the best out of it; especially here on Aeos, where he felt he was ideally suited for the job he’d been given. He spoke excellent Greek, had spent a lot of time as an archaeological student in the islands during the thirties, and had used his money to make sure he did it with a certain amount of aplomb. He was, in fact, a German version of Lieutenant Patullo, whom, oddly enough, he had even once met in the Parthenon Hotel in Athens before the war.

  A flight of Messerschmitts had just reached the island to support him and, to maintain them, two more transports loaded with fuel, spares, fitters and riggers. Every public office was already controlled by his men, under the efficient Captain Ehrhardt, and the mayor and the island officials were still under lock and key until he could decide what to do with them. Everything seemed highly satisfactory and he was happy that he had not been obliged to call on the bombers to break the islanders’ will.

  He shifted in his chair and lit a cigar. Contemplating the blue smoke with a certain amount of satisfaction, he felt he had a right to be pleased with himself. It had been a bold stroke to take over Aeos so far in advance of the Wehrmacht. It had been captured entirely by airborne troops and, as General Ritsicz had said, could well be a pattern for the future. Because of the speed, with every hour that passed Baldamus’ position grew stronger, and there was no doubt in his mind that eventually the Germans would control the whole of the mainland and the Greek archipelago as well. From the outset of the Balkan campaign, the British and Greek troops had been falling back in the face of strong and determined attacks.

  Belgrade and Skoplje were secure now, he’d heard, and the panzers were already pouring into Greece. The British would inevitably have to form a new line near Mount Olympus and the River Aliakman – and then only until the growing German flanking movement in the west compelled a further withdrawal. They hadn’t a chance. They were suffering intensely from bombing, because when Field Marshal List’s 12th Army with twelve first-class divisions and over 800 aircraft had started their advance, the RAF in Greece had possessed only eighty usable machines out of a strength of 150; the rest were already unserviceable on airfields all over the country. Once the panzers were completely through the passes and had seized the Salonika plain to establish fighter bases supported and maintained like his own by transports, there would not be a single British unit that could not come under intense and constant air attack, while in the rear every sector of military organisation, ports and aerodromes could suffer incessant bombing.

  Major Baldamus decided he didn’t have a lot to worry about. He had the island nicely wrapped up. The population chiefly lived in the north round Kalani and, since h
e controlled that and the airstrip at Yanitsa, it seemed his worries were over. Surely there could be only a few more days to hang on. The transports and Messerschmitts were merely the first of the supporting units to arrive and, with the build-up going well, he no longer had any fear of a rising against him because the rest of the island consisted of mere hamlets and groups of farms. Though he could hardly patrol them all, he preferred in any case to keep his people close together. It was one of the first principles of soldiering and, since Major Baldamus was rather out on a limb on Aeos, he considered it wiser to avoid trouble.

  It was while he was in this euphoric state that Captain Ehrhardt appeared. Ehrhardt was a small man, with a brown wrinkled face. His uniform was dusty and his sleeves were rolled up to the elbows. Strapped and buckled like a carthorse in his equipment, he presented a perfect picture of a tough German fighting man. As he laid the signal he was carrying on Baldamus’ desk, he gave a slow grin at the reaction he knew it would produce.

  Baldamus looked at the sheet of paper with a lazy eye, still full of thoughts on his own future. Then, as he read the words, he sat bolt upright and stared at his second-in-command with startled blue eyes, his handsome face full of consternation.

  ‘Another British launch?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Herr Major.’

  ‘Like the one the Italians drove ashore near Cape Annoyia?’

  ‘Yes, Herr Major. It’s just reached Iros on its way north. It seems we have sympathisers there who have passed on the in-formation.’

  Baldamus stared again at the signal. ‘But heading north?’ He gazed at Captain Ehrhardt, frowning. ‘What are they after?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Ehrhardt said, ‘they’re on their way to look for survivors from the other one. Though we’ve seen no sign of them. I gather the boat’s a total wreck – holed forward, engines wrecked, underwater gear buckled. The islanders seem to have been poking around it already because the dead have been buried and everything movable’s been pinched. Still–’ he shrugged ‘–perhaps the British think somebody escaped.’