To Look on Death No More

by Leta Serafim

  “Go,” Leonidas said. He was pale after the exchange with Fotis. “Go.”

  Haralambos had been right from a military point of view, O’Malley thought. Wrong from every other one. At least half of the men came from Kalavryta. In effect, he was asking them to abandon their families.

  O’Malley walked part way to Kalavryta with the cook. All was quiet, only the long line of trucks around the perimeter evidence of the German presence. Thin wisps of smoke rose from the chimneys, and he could see lights in many of the windows. People must be having supper now. Putting their children to bed. A light rain was falling and it dampened the bark on the trees. Somewhere off in the distance an owl gave voice to the approaching darkness.

  A bottle in hand, Roumelis lumbered alongside him. He’d offered it to O’Malley, but he’d declined, saying he was on guard duty that night and had to have his wits about him.

  “How are you going to get into Kalavryta?” he asked the cook. “Ebersberger sealed the place off.”

  As always, Roumelis made light of the situation. “On tiptoe.” Drawing himself up, he spun around like a ballerina, his great gut wobbling from side to side.

  He continued to prance around, raising first one foot and then the other, taking care to keep his toes pointed. He had it down, the bowlegged gait of male dancers and the poses they struck. It was funny watching him barrel around in his tattered pants, wall-eyed, so he was.

  O’Malley had a lump in his throat. “You stay alive, you hear?”

  The cook didn’t answer. He took off a moment later, leaping high in the air as he ran.

  Performing still.

  * * *

  Later that same night O’Malley dragged the radio up to the top of the tower and tried to raise the British officer he’d spoken to in the past. After identifying himself as ‘Barabbas,’ he hurriedly explained the situation: “It’s a matter of life and death. The village of Kalavryta is completely surrounded. The unit I’m with doesn’t have enough men and ammunition to mount an attack and we need air and ground support, ammunition most of all. You can use the airfield I built, make the drop as soon as you’re able.”

  He worked to tamp down the Irish in his voice, thinking he’d stood a better chance if the man thought he was English.

  Enunciating carefully, he gave him the map references for the airfield. “It’s secure, high up in the mountains and well away from the German advance. Your planes should have no trouble getting in and out.”

  The officer on the other end repeated the coordinates back to him and signed off. O’Malley waited by the radio all the next day but heard nothing. Growing more and more agitated, he radioed again that night.

  “The British Command in Cairo vetoed the drop,” his contact reported. “Due to hostile action against its British field agents by ELAS forces in Greece, the Command will no longer supply them with ammunition.” He recited this in a clipped monotone as if he were reading from a piece of paper.

  “How do you expect us to stave off destruction if we’ve no bullets?”

  “If you are indeed as poorly armed as you say, Barabbas, I suggest you and your comrades retreat.”

  “What about Kalavryta?”

  “You’ve been ordered to leave the region.”

  O’Malley gave up trying to sound like an Englishman. “Pog mo thoin,” he bellowed.

  “Means ‘kiss my arse’ in Gaelic. And so you can, you miserable gobshit, so you bloody well can.”

  “I see. You’re Irish.” The man’s voice was thick with condescension.

  “Shut up and listen. Germans killed nearly one hundred fifty people here yesterday and burned four villages. Half the people they killed were monks, men of God. They’re on a rampage. They’ll stop at nothing.”

  “I will relay your concern to Cairo,” the man said stiffly.

  “Tell your commanding officer he’ll have blood on his hands if he doesn’t help.”

  “I’ll make a note.”

  And with that, he was gone.

  “You can’t be doing this! You can’t! You can’t!” O’Malley tore off his headset and slammed it down.

  Leonidas picked up the headset and rubbed it against his sleeve. “Even if your friends in Cairo dropped a thousand guns, it wouldn’t matter. Not now. It’s too late.”

  “We can’t just stand by. We can’t let this happen.”

  “We can and will.” Leonidas’ voice broke. “May God forgive us.”

  Chapter 22

  Leonidas sent the oldest man left in the unit, a white-haired farmer named Menelaos, to Kalavryta to find out what was happening. He was convinced the man’s age and stooped posture would protect him and allow him to move more freely about the town.

  Menelaos took his time getting ready, rubbing dirt on his face and into his hair, perfecting the shuffling gait and empty-eyed stare of an elderly man, half gone in the head. He dressed himself in old-fashioned garb—voluminous, ballooning pants dating from the last century and tall leather boots, a fringed band around his head.

  “I’m a farmer, been out in the field.”

  “That’s right. And now you’re on your way home.”

  The wind was freezing and the antartes hunkered down in the tower after the old man left. They didn’t dare light a fire, lest they alert the Germans of their presence on the hill. It was very misty, fog boiling up from the river and overtaking the land.

  Menelaos returned a few hours later. “Germans imposed a four p.m. curfew and are going from house to house, kicking in doors. ‘It was like an earthquake,’ my daughter said. ‘The soldiers were all shouting, their eyes full of murder.’ They had a maskoforos with them, pointing out where the antartes live. I was hiding in my cousin’s house, but the window was open and I could hear him talking. They must have brought him in from outside. He isn’t anybody I know. They haven’t killed anybody yet, been too busy stripping the place. They looted the cathedral, took everything that wasn’t nailed down and pissed on the floor. Then they ordered the town treasurer to open up the bank so they could clear it out, too. After they finished, they made him hand over his watch and his wedding ring.”

  “What else?” Leonidas asked.

  The old man rubbed a hand across his grizzled chin. “Ebersberger keeps telling people, ‘You have nothing to fear. We won’t harm you.’ ”

  “What about Blume?”

  “He’s interrogated a few people. I saw him standing outside, smoking a cigarette. Looked like he’d been hard at work. Jacket was bloody.”

  “You think it’ll end there?”

  “No.” The old man’s voice was full of gravel. “I think they’re just getting started.”

  * * *

  “I arranged for my daughter’s son, Nikos, to keep an eye out,” Menelaos said. “He’s a clever boy. He’ll be able to get in and out of Kalavryta without being spotted.”

  He himself had been stopped by the Germans on his second trip to the village and was afraid to go back. The officer who’d questioned him had been reluctant to let him go. Only the intervention of an elderly woman who claimed he was her senile husband, given to wandering the streets, had saved him.

  The other men had teased him when they heard the story, saying he’d best be careful after the war was over—that the old woman would come for him, force him to make good and marry her.

  Menelaos had laughed until he had tears in his eyes. “She can’t have me,” he’d cried, thumping his chest. “I will defend my honor.”

  * * *

  There’d been a lull after the initial burst of German activity, a three day hiatus. Military trucks were seen leaving town, piled high with furniture.

  “That’s how they measure their success,” Leonidas said. “Not by the territory they seize, but by the tonnage they steal.”

  “Good at killing, too,” O’Malley said, fiddling with his gun. He’d spent the last forty-eight hours cleaning and re-cleaning it, slipping the cartridge in and taking it out again. Pure foolishness, a tic almost. Still, th
e repetitive motion comforted him, made him feel as if he were still a soldier, not standing idly by watching the Germans devour a village. If it hadn’t been for Danae, he’d have proposed he and the others make a kamikaze run at Kalavryta. Go out with guns a-blazing. But he wanted to stay alive now. More than anything, he wanted to stay alive and get to Coroni.

  “How many you think they’ll kill?”

  “In 1941, Keitel declared the Wehrmacht would kill ten Greeks for every dead German. Later he raised the number to fifty. Ebersberger is a man who obeys the rules. That means more than a thousand will die before he quits.”

  Sliding the bullets out in his gun, O’Malley bounced them up and down in his hand. “Count the dead, do they, same as accountants?” The thought amused him. Some ledger that would be.

  “Yes,” Leonidas said. “Germans keep track of everything. They are nothing if not thorough.”

  The old man, Menelaos, had decided he wanted to be with his family in Kalavryta and had left with two others the previous night, further reducing the number of antartes. Those who were left in the tower had done nothing but clean their weapons over the last few days, and the lack of activity was beginning to wear on them.

  Haralambos spent his time reading and rereading his Communist tracts, while Leonidas spent hours up on the butte with his binoculars trained on Kalavryta, watching and waiting for the Germans to make their move. A young farmer named Babis had taken over Roumelis’ job, boiling horta over charcoal in the depths of the tower. They’d long since exhausted whatever food there’d been in Mazeika, scouring the fields until there was nothing left save nettles, dandelions and a few frostbitten onions. At the beginning of the siege, O’Malley had feared dying from a German bullet, but now it was the specter of starvation that haunted him.

  Restless and unhappy, the men began to fight among themselves, arguing over the death of the POWs, who was responsible for the slaughter.

  “Why’d you kill them?” a man yelled at Alexis.

  “Because they were Germans,” Alexis shot back.

  “You stupid cunt.”

  “I did what I had to,” Alexis said, trying to brazen it out. “I did what was necessary. We were ordered to move out, remember? It’s on Velouchiotis, whatever happens. Take it up with him.”

  “Velouchiotis didn’t give the order. It was Dimitris Michos.”

  “No, it wasn’t. Michos is from Peloponnese. He’d never risk Kalavryta.”

  “Well, someone did.”

  And so it went.

  O’Malley spent most of his time with Leonidas, watching Kalavryta from the butte. “When do you think they’ll get to it?”

  “I don’t know. Tomorrow, the day after.”

  Judging by the circles under his eyes, his friend hadn’t slept in days.

  O’Malley pitied him. Knowing what was coming, it had to be like watching his family die a second time.

  * * *

  O’Malley had just bedded down for the night when Leonidas came stumbling into the tower. “A flare just went up. An arc of green light over the village.”

  A few minutes later the bells of the church began to toll.

  “It’s started.”

  It was two a.m., December 12th.

  Chapter 23

  The dense fog seemed to magnify the sounds, the pealing of the church bells, and clamoring of soldiers, the sense of loss they all felt.

  Nikos, Menelaos’ nephew, arrived a short time later. He’d run the whole way, he said, desperate to give them the news.

  “The Germans told everyone to go to the school with blankets and enough food for one day. They’re going to move us away from the front, they said. That’s why we need food, for the trip. My mother was worried, afraid we wouldn’t have enough to eat if the journey was long.”

  The antartes exchanged glances. “Did they say you were being resettled?” Leonidas asked.

  “Yes, how’d you know?” the boy answered. “Resettled in a better place.”

  The antartes who had returned to the village, Fotis and the others, had left their hiding places and were joining their wives and children in the school, the child reported. “A German soldier told a neighbor not to go. He said the soldiers were going to kill us, but the neighbor’s a drunk and no one believed him.”

  It was all a game to the child. “My mother said he was a fool and not to listen.”

  He kept fidgeting as he told his story, unaware of the seriousness of what he was relaying. “My uncle told me to hide in the house and get word to you as soon as I could—not to come back, no matter what. Soldiers were going up and down the street, making sure no one was left. A woman two doors down had a new baby and her husband had stayed behind to help her. He didn’t want to leave, but they dragged him off, too. I was scared, but I did what my uncle said. I hid in the chimney and waited, snuck out again when it was quiet. It was still dark, so no one saw me. The Germans were all standing around in front of the schoolhouse. I looked for my mother, but I didn’t see her.”

  “Is everyone still at the school?” Leonidas asked.

  “Yes. The whole town. No one ran away. The mayor asked what was going happen, if they were going to kill them. ‘Nein, nein,’ the Germans said.”

  “Did the mayor believe them?”

  “Sure, everyone did. When they first came, they made us stand in the square and listen to a man with a bullhorn. ‘I swear nothing will happen to you,’ he said. ‘I give you my word as a German officer.’ Another soldier translated what he said into Greek; that’s how I know. The first man said it over and over. He promised.”

  “He gave you his word as a German officer?” Haralambos was taking down everything the boy said.

  Nikos nodded. “There’s bunch of soldiers in Kepi’s cornfield. I saw them when I was coming here. They’re setting up machine guns.”

  O’Malley looked where the boy was pointing.

  Almost at our feet, he thought. We’re going to have a ringside seat.

  * * *

  At first O’Malley thought it was the rising sun bathing the clouds with fire. Then he realized it was Kalavryta. The Germans were burning Kalavryta.

  The soldiers had torched the fields first, apparently counting on the rising wind to fan the flames. Sounding the alarm, a donkey in a nearby pasture began to bray, its agonized cries adding to the horror. The fire quickly grew in intensity, fueled by the olive trees and the brush, the acres of dry grass.

  O’Malley watched the shifting smoke through his binoculars, trying to chart the fire’s progress, the movement of the flames as they roared toward the village. It exploded like a bomb when it reached Kalavryta a few seconds later. The Germans must have poured petrol everywhere, soaked the place.

  Within minutes, the houses began to collapse, and the air grew rank with swirling debris. Flames poured forth from the cataclysm, columns of sparks shooting hundreds of feet in the air.

  The Germans had retreated to the far side of the village and stood watching it burn, their faces lit by flames. It was a well coordinated effort, Stukas passing overhead as if on cue, their engines whining as they dive-bombed the town. A few minutes later, the anti-aircraft guns started up. The Germans’ aim was unerring, and entire blocks began to fall as if made of sand. Even though he and Leonidas were a good quarter of a mile away, they could feel the force of each blast, the ground shaking beneath them. Somewhere the donkey continued to bray—weaker, its cry faint now. O’Malley felt like he was watching the end of the world.

  At 10:30 a.m., a whistle sounded, the little cog train announcing its departure from the station. O’Malley watched it go, stunned by the incongruity of what he was seeing, but then these were Germans they were dealing with and that’s what Germans did. They kept to a schedule. Be it for trains or fire bombing a village, they were systematic till the end.

  The whistle continued to blow, as forlorn a sound as he had ever heard. The train was pulling a long line of cars this time, more than half of them loaded with animals—sheep a
nd goats mostly—the rest with domestic goods and farm equipment. Taking everything they could, the Germans. O’Malley wondered where the train was going. If there were special Wehrmacht units whose task it was to unload the possessions of the dead.

  An hour later, a group of Germans soldiers left the village, marching a long line of Greek men in front of them. They were herding them at gun point into the cornfield the boy Nikos had spoken of, not far from the cemetery where Stefanos lay buried. Many of the Greeks were carrying blankets and parcels of food.

  O’Malley closed his eyes. It was as if they were on their way to a picnic.

  He could see all the men clearly through his binoculars, the color of the blankets the Greeks had over their arms and the Jaeger insignias on the hats of the soldiers, the dull sheen of their guns.

  He heard shouting, watched a soldier prod a man with his gun.

  Sloping steadily downward, the cornfield formed a natural amphitheater overlooking the town. The Germans had chosen the site well, O’Malley thought, watching the Greeks file in. It was perfect for their purposes. Many of the assembled were young—boys no older than ten or eleven years old. The faces of the older people in the field were taut with anguish. They were talking to one another, pointing to Kalavryta and gesturing in distress. As Ebersberger had intended, the sight of the Greeks’ burning homes was to be their last on earth.

  Eight soldiers with machine guns were kneeling on a rise to the rear of the Greeks, spaced evenly apart. Unlike the villagers, who’d been roused from their beds, they were dressed in fresh uniforms, the metal on their harnesses gleaming in the sunlight. Doehnert and Ebersberger were there, too, overseeing the preparations.

  The guns the soldiers were manning were MG 42s or ‘Spandaus,’ as the British called them. O’Malley had come up against them before and thought the German name, ‘bonesaw,’ was more apt. The machine gun was like a mighty scythe, taking down all before it.

  Judging by Ebersberger’s gestures, he was explaining what he wanted done to the men. One of the soldiers pointed at the boys in the field and said something, apparently questioning the children’s fate. Furious, Ebersberger shouted at him and made a slicing motion with his hand. The soldier gave a curt nod and resumed his position. The rest of the men appeared unaffected by the order they’d been given and went about their work, adjusting the ammunition belts and sighting the guns. A job, this was. A job like any other.