by Iain Gale
The talk throughout the temporary camps was that the enemy would attack the island soon, but no one seemed to know when. It was clearly imperative, then, that Lamb find the King before it happened. An amphibious landing was forecast by some, probably at Suda Bay. Others, though, Lamb among them, thought a paratroop attack would come first and then, with that toehold established, a heavier landing from the sea. It had worked for the Germans at Corinth and before that last year when they had dropped from the skies and taken the Eben-Emael fort in Belgium. But however it came, Lamb knew that it must come. And when it did, he thought, he would be more than ready for a fight. In the meantime all he could do was keep his ear to the ground and try to get in with the High Command. He had made a couple of good contacts on Freyberg’s staff at Creforce HQ and that of General Weston, commander of Suda Force and CO of their own brigade sector under Brigadier Kippenberger. There were far too many generals on the island, he thought, all jostling for position. It was said that every time General Weston sent a telegram or a memo to General Freyberg he had to send a duplicate to General Wilson and even to Wavell. Some said he even had to send one to Churchill. With so much paper flying about it was hardly surprising that information, right or wrong, had begun to leak out. There might be a general rule of ‘hush-hush’ but every day seemed to bring fresh rumours. Some even said there were German spies on the island, who had come across from Greece dressed as New Zealanders. If there were, Lamb laughed to himself as he looked in the shaving mirror, he certainly hadn’t seen them. None of the Kiwis he had encountered to date looked anything like German soldiers. For a start, they tended to be dressed almost in rags. Thank God his men had managed to keep most of their uniform intact, and their weapons for that matter. He thanked heaven for Bennett and his other NCOs. Even Valentine.
He had just finished shaving and was wondering where he had put his comb when an officer walked into the area of olive grove in which his men had made their home. The sentry snapped to attention, and the officer spotted Lamb wiping the soap from his face with the filthy towel which was the best Smart could find.
‘You the North Kents? I’m looking for a Captain Lamb.’
Lamb pointed to the painted sign bearing his name and that of the unit, which the officer appeared to have missed. ‘You’ve found him.’
‘Ah, yes. Good morning. We’re moving you, Lamb, you’ll be glad to know. There’s a transit camp down at Perivolia for the odds and ends. Sorry, didn’t mean anything by that. It’s just that you’re not on your own. There are at least a couple of hundred who’ve lost their units. In fact, your command seems to be one of the more intact. Well done.’
‘Thank you. When do we move?’
‘Oh, whenever you want, really. It’s very relaxed. But I should get there sooner rather than later or all the best places will have gone. Got any tents?’
‘None to speak of.’
‘Well, then, I’d say that was all the more reason to get a move on, wouldn’t you? Cheerio.’
And with that he was gone. Lamb seethed for a couple of minutes, then, finding his comb, slicked back his hair with the contents of a half-empty bottle of Trumper’s Eucris that Smart had managed to find in someone’s haversack, and turned to Bennett.
‘Sarnt-Major, they’re moving us to a camp. Get the men moving. Tell them it’s first come first served and if they want a bed or a tent they’d better snap to it.’
Even Lamb was surprised by the short time that it took to get the company on the road. They marched the three miles to the transit camp, which lay south west of Canea, in column of threes with Lamb and the two lieutenants at their head and reached it by late morning. It was a desolate place, a huge field of tents and a cluster of corrugated iron sheds, spanning an area 1,000 yards wide, between the tiny hamlets of Kharakia to the north and Galaria to the south. The tents, Lamb thought perhaps a hundred of them, were laid out in long lines like any military camp you might have seen for the last 200 years. At the end of every seventh line stood a camp stove, and around these stood clusters of men with tin cups and mess tins, waiting for tea. Others sat on the parched grass and earth between the tents, reading or writing, while on the far north side a group of men were kicking a ball about.
Eadie spoke. ‘Well, it’s better than what we’ve come from, sir.’
‘If we can get a tent. Look.’
Lamb walked up to a corporal who was leaning on his rifle at what he supposed was the camp perimeter. The man, seeing an officer approach, managed a semblance of smartness and saluted. Lamb returned the gesture.
‘Corporal, who’s in charge here? We’re the new arrivals.’
‘Captain Page, sir. You’ll find him over there.’ He indicated a tent, standing on its own. Lamb walked across. Outside the tent a wooden signpost had been hammered into the ground. It read:
‘Capt. WS Page, RTR, O/C Transit Camp A.’
He pushed back one of the flaps and walked in and coughed. Inside a young officer was seated at a table covered with sheaves of paper. He was writing. As Lamb entered he looked up.
‘Yes? Who are you?’
‘Lamb, North Kents. We were told to report here.’
‘Oh yes. You’re the last ones, aren’t you? Sorry. Not much left for you. We did keep a couple of lines of tents but the Hussars took them earlier this morning. Should have been quicker. I think there may be one line left. How many have you got?’
‘Around forty of my men, and three officers.’
‘Well, you’ll need one tent for the officers of course, one for the NCOs and another seven for the men.’ He flicked through the sheaf of papers and shook his head. ‘Sorry, by the look of things we only have five. That’ll have to do. Anyway, I’ve just had a signal from the GOC. He’s of the firm opinion that the entire division is to be sent back to Egypt, and that goes for us lot too, you included, I imagine. So you won’t be here for long.’ He looked back down at the paperwork and then had a thought. ‘Oh, the officers’ mess is over on the right. Dinner at eight. Not obligatory.’ He looked back down and Lamb saw that their conversation was over. He turned and left the tent.
Bennett was waiting. ‘Any luck, sir?’
‘You might call it luck. We’ve been given five tents between us.’
‘What, all of us, sir? That’ll be cosy.’
‘We’ve had worse, Sarnt-Major. At least we’re under cover and we might have better mess tins to use than petrol cans.’ He paused. ‘The good news, according to the commandant here, is that we’re due to be shipped back to Egypt. So I shouldn’t get too comfortable.’
They found the tents and, much to their delight, a blanket waiting for them upon each of the beds. The disappointment, however, was that between the five tents in the remaining line there were only thirty beds. The men drew lots for who would be the first to sleep upon the ground, and Bennett drew up a rota. By the evening they had settled in.
The new billets were more comfortable, certainly, but Perivolia was no more than a tiny village. Whenever he could he would walk the mile or so from the camp and sit for half an hour in one of the local kafeneios in Galatas on what passed for the main square, watching the world go by. A couple of cups of strong Turkish coffee and somehow everything seemed, unaccountably, slightly better, even if he could still see the German bombers flying in on their daily run to bomb Heraklion or Suda, and even if his sips of the bitter black liquid were occasionally punctuated by the tremors of falling bombs. Sometimes he would take Eadie or Wentworth, and sometimes both, designating their coffee mornings as impromptu order groups about nothing in particular. The atmosphere was torpid and in this lotus-eating climate of quiet anticipation the island seemed to function as it must have done for hundreds of years.
While the women never seemed to stop working, the local men drank their coffee and their raki, read their newspapers in the cafés and talked of goats, women, the climate and the crops as they had for hundreds of years. They smiled and played with their moustaches and made thumbs-up signs a
t the British and New Zealand soldiers as they passed by. Lamb noticed how when they were not working the women tended to stay inside and how the older women were clad almost head to foot in black. The younger girls, of course, were quite different. For one thing, some of them were disarmingly pretty and not a few favoured a more European style of dress.
There was an air of unreality after the horrors of the mainland, and he wondered when it would come to an inevitable end.
The few lightly wounded they had brought away from Greece were being treated at the 7th General Field Hospital which had been set up three miles to the west of the old port and was staffed by seventy British nurses. It was filling up too with cases of dysentery and Lamb prayed that his men would not succumb. He had lost too many already. They all had lice, of course; the camp was rife with them and they were no respecters of rank.
Life at Transit Camp A was better than sitting in another olive grove, but only just. It held about 600 men, his own men and others like them who had missed their parent units during the retreat from Greece. Each group had some sort of cohesion, though he wondered how they would come together in the event of action.
The daily routine became a grind and still there was no word from any of his contacts of the whereabouts of the King. Waking from habit at 6 a.m., Lamb found himself at a loose end by 8. Luckily that was the precise time every day that the Germans chose to come over. And this morning was no different.
Overhead he heard engines but experience had taught him that this was no raid, just a recce plane, the local ‘shufti’ flight from Rhodes which the Germans sent out every day at the same time. No one bothered to fire at it.
‘There he goes again, sir. Like clockwork.’
‘Yes, that’s the Jerries for you, Sarnt-Major. They certainly make things run on time. Very efficient.’
Bennett laughed. ‘Let’s hope not, sir.’
‘Mr Wentworth tells me he’s organised a swimming party for his platoon, down on the beach.’
‘Yes, sir. Very nice idea too, sir. Just like Tottenham Lido. Lovely.’
‘We need to make the most of this phoney war, you know. It does the men good, Sarnt-Major, even though we all know it can’t last forever. Make sure they take their weapons with them, will you, just in case. We can’t be too careful.’
‘D’you think Jerry’ll attack here, sir?’
‘Yes. It stands to reason, if he wants the desert, and we know that for certain. It’s my opinion that they’ll hit us with whatever they can. But by that time you and I may have been sent to the desert again.’
‘Back to Benghazi? Not again? Oh, my good lord. I think I prefer it here.’
Lamb laughed. ‘But you might not when Jerry comes to call.’
They had made a new company HQ at the end of the first row of tents. It was slightly better than the effort back in the olive grove and consisted of a table set up beneath a tamarisk tree with beside it the original blancoed sign with Lamb’s title on it. He was sitting at it later that morning when a man in black rode past on a donkey. Lamb waved at him and muttered a hello, to be rewarded with a nod and a smile. The local priest had become something of a celebrity every day riding his donkey straight through the middle of the camp, as he had done for years before it existed.
The church bells rang out the hour and Lamb stood up and brushed back his hair with his hand. The weather was becoming hotter by the day and he reminded himself to give another talk to the men that afternoon on the importance of staying in the shade and keeping fluid levels up – which did not imply drinking as much of the local wine as they could get their hands on.
He called for Smart, who appeared, as he always did, within a few moments. He was bearing a pair of gleaming, polished shoes.
‘Your shoes, sir.’
‘I swear I don’t know how you do it, Smart. You’re a marvel. I’d given up on those.’
‘Never give up, sir. You know that.’
Lamb tied his laces. ‘I shan’t be here for lunch, Smart. Get yourself something, and remember to stay out of the sun. Last thing we want is you going down with sunstroke.’
For lunch it had become something of a habit for Lamb to mess with his fellow officers from the transit camp and occasional visitors from neighbouring New Zealand units. The food was hardly haute cuisine, no different in fact from the men’s rations: bully beef and biscuit, supplemented with local olives, oranges, lemons and when they could get it ice cream. Eaten in convivial company it became more passable, and Lamb had struck up a rapport with a few of the officers, in particular a large, broad-shouldered Kiwi major named Macdonagh and a pleasant young lieutenant in the tanks named Roy Farran, who knew Hallam.
Today, though, he had decided to pay a visit to the Hartleys and the other civilians in Canea. He had no interest in Miranda Hartley, of course; it was merely that he still felt responsible for their welfare. While Papandreou was pleasant enough, he hoped the buffoon Comberwell might not be there with his odious ‘gung-ho’ chatter.
There was precious little transport to be had on the island and Lamb walked the two miles from the camp to Canea. He was rewarded by a thick deposit of dust on Smart’s beautifully polished shoes.
The house owned by Mr Papandreou’s cousin, a professor of archaeology in Athens, was set back from the road about half a mile outside Canea on the Galatas road. Lamb had sent a runner to find it the previous day, saying he would drop by, and he found Miranda Hartley in the walled garden, waiting for him.
‘Captain Lamb, Peter. What a lovely surprise to get your note yesterday.’
She tidied her hair and gave him what he presumed she thought was her most disarming smile. ‘Now tell me, is there any news? What’s to happen to us all? Are the Germans going to attack us here? When will we get away to Egypt? It’s been days, you know. We’ve heard nothing.’
‘Hasn’t anyone been to see you from the legation?’
‘No, not a soul. I know that there are some of their people on the island but we haven’t seen hide nor hair of them. We keep asking but no one tells us anything. And now everyone’s saying that the Germans are coming.’ Miranda looked at him. ‘What are we going to do? Do you think they’ll attack?’
Lamb thought it best to be honest with her. ‘Yes, I’m afraid I do. They must. Hitler needs Crete if he’s to take Egypt, and that most certainly is his plan. They’ll come, I’m sure of it. The real question is, will we still be here when they do? Will you be here?’
She looked away. ‘You’ll be staying. If they come?’
‘It’s my job. My duty. But we should get all of you away before that happens.’
She looked at him and he said nothing. He had guessed that she had been attracted to him but, while she was attractive, it was not mutual and he had hoped there might be nothing in it. This was the last thing he wanted.
‘Mrs Hartley …’
‘Miranda, please … Peter.’
‘Of course. Miranda. I’m sorry.’
A servant appeared from the house bearing a silver tray and on it two large glasses filled with ice and a clear liquid, each topped with slices of lime. She said, ‘I thought you might want something. Gin and tonic?’
He took one of the glasses. ‘Thank you. That’s perfect. Where’s your husband?’
He cursed. That had not been said at all as it had been intended. One look and he knew at once that she had misinterpreted his purpose.
‘I don’t know. I think he went off with Mr Papandreou to look at some archaeological site. He’s a desperate Classicist at heart. Quite far away. He won’t be back for hours. Neither of them will. And heaven knows where Mr Comberwell is. He disappears for hours at a time and never tells anyone where he’s going.’
She looked at him, pleadingly. He ignored it. ‘You should keep track of him and your husband, and I strongly advise you both to get your things together. You can be sure there will be a ship for you soon, and you should be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. I mean it.’
Pu
zzled at Lamb’s apparent sudden departure from the idea of an illicit afternoon liaison among the lime trees, she changed the subject. ‘The King’s here, you know. The King of Greece. On the island. Isn’t it exciting?’
Lamb tried to disguise his very real excitement. ‘Yes, I had heard that, and his new prime minister.’
‘Julian says he’s heard that General Freyberg wanted the King to go to Egypt, out of harm’s way. But that General Wavell and the Government in Britain think it better that he should stay. So he’s staying.’
Lamb said nothing for the moment, but he wondered whether Freyberg, the GOC Crete and one of the few men on the island in direct contact with Britain and privy to all the Government’s intelligence, knew something about the timing of a German invasion that he did not.
Lunch was cold cuts, but to Lamb it might as well have been a five-course banquet at Simpson’s, such had been the monotony of his recent diet. He ate voraciously, worried that he might look greedy, and throughout it all Miranda Hartley smiled at him indulgently, looking at times, he thought, like someone who was fattening up a pig. Her conversation now turned to things back in England, to the social season and the sort of subjects he thought he had left far behind when he had divorced his wife – society subjects, racing, the latest débutantes and some court scandal about which he had not a clue. He nodded politely and bluffed his way through. For pudding they had ice cream and peaches, not tinned as he had become used to, when he could get them, but fresh from the tree. As they sipped at the dessert wine, a Tokay from the house’s excellent cellar, Miranda expounded the theories of Mussolini and explained to Lamb why Il Duce was so very different from Herr Hitler, who was a nasty, priggish little man.
‘At least that’s what a friend of Julian’s says. Quite common. Not a statesman at all. Not like Il Duce.’
‘Yes, it’s a shame we have to fight him, really.’
