Corporal Cotton's Little War (13 page)

As they hurried after the girl, they heard the sound of vehicles beyond the hill and shortly afterwards saw soldiers climbing down at the other side of the bay. They wore square German helmets and they could hear their shouts.

Petrakis and Cesarides had disappeared and only the girl remained. They all crouched among the rocks, praying that Howard, who had been roughly handled during the climb, would not cry out.

Watching between the clefts of stone, they saw the Germans, led by a sergeant, reach the beach. Baldamus’ instructions that they leave Kalani at first light had been thwarted by the arrival of another two Junkers and the need for vehicles to unload them. The sergeant seemed irritated, as if the stuffy heat in the narrow bay was causing the thick clothes and equipment he was wearing to chafe his sweat-damp skin.

As they reached the sand, they crossed to the three blanketed shapes under the trees. For a while they stood in front of them, talking; then they scrambled aboard
Claudia
and began to move about her decks. As they stopped by the 20 mm and 303 mountings, one of them pointed out to sea.

‘What’s he saying?’ Cotton whispered.

‘They think we’ve bunked with the guns,’ Bisset said. ‘They think there were two boats and that we’ve been picked up.’

The sergeant gestured and one of the Germans ran for the cliff and began to toil upwards.

Bisset watched him. ‘He’s been sent to warn the Luftwaffe that there’s another launch in the area with survivors.’

After a while, the Germans climbed down from the boat and the sergeant sent two more men up the cliff. They returned with spades and began to dig.

‘Now what the hell are they up to?’ Gully demanded.

‘They’re digging graves, you bloody fool,’ Bisset said.

The Germans scraped three shallow holes at the head of the beach and laid the bundled shapes in them, then the sergeant, who’d been poking about in the trees, reappeared with three short stakes which he stuck in the sand above the graves. They saw him writing in a notebook, then he tore three sheets out and fastened them to the stakes, while the soldiers stood still for a moment by them. After a second or two the sergeant pointed at
Claudia.

The men who’d first disappeared up the cliff had returned now and they began to swarm all over the boat. The luxurious blue blankets that Spiro Panyioti had provided for his comfort were tossed down. The sheets followed, together with other articles.

‘They’ve got the rum,’ Gully groaned.

The Germans were passing the rum keg around, swigging from it as it went from hand to hand. When they’d drunk, they poured the water from their bottles and, filling them with the rum, tossed the keg aside. By now they were laughing and joking among themselves.

A few tins of food that had been overlooked were also passed down and stacked on the beach, and the sergeant set up a carrying party which began to lift their finds up the cliff. As they went, one of them, an older man with a lined face and bowed legs, vanished among the bushes.

‘What’s he up to?’ Bisset said.

‘The bastard’s hiding the other rum jar and one of the blankets,’ Cotton said.

‘What for?’

‘What for?’ Gully’s words were almost a moan. ‘So he can come back later and nick it for himself, I expect.’

Carrying the boat’s equipment up the cliff required several trips and Gully was complaining all the time.

‘All them lovely blankets,’ he said. ‘They’d have fetched a quid apiece in the bazaars in Alex.’

When they’d finished the Germans stood on the beach talking, the sergeant shouting to a man on
Claudia’s
bow.

‘They are saying they will come back to pump out the petrol tanks,’ the girl said.

‘Can
you
understand them too?’

‘Yes.’

He didn’t ask her how or why, but just accepted the information. ‘When are they coming?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Are they going to destroy her?’

‘They haven’t said so. They haven’t destroyed the other boat.’

By the time the Germans disappeared it was evening and the sun had gone. When they heard the German lorries drawing away and were certain the coast was clear, they stood up, easing their muscles.

Cotton looked at Howard, comatose now in the shadows on the stretcher. ‘We’d better get him to the village,’ he said.

The girl shook her head. ‘It’s too late. And the path is bad. Can he live through the night?’

Bisset nodded and she gestured. ‘Then keep him here. I’ll get them to send a boat round. If you try to take him over the top tonight you’ll kill him.’ She gave Cotton a smile which transformed her sobersides little face. ‘You are safe from the Germans now. This is the high part of the island, and they prefer to stay in the plain near Kalani. They know there are a few groups of patriots who have hidden in the hills. That’s why they don’t go near the other boat. My cousin says they took away the guns and set fire to it. He put the fire out. It had a good engine, I think, and there are less holes in it than in this one.’

‘Will you come back tomorrow and show us how to get to it?’ Cotton asked.

‘If they’ll let me.’

‘Who?’

‘Chrysostomos and the others. They haven’t finished with it yet.’

‘What are they doing to it?’

She smiled again. ‘Mostly arguing. They are good democrats and believe nothing should be done without everybody having his say first. I expect they’ll still be arguing when the Germans decide to come back and tow it off.’

‘Can it be towed off?’

‘Chrysostomos is thinking of towing it off.’

Cotton’s heart thumped. ‘Will it float?’

‘With a few holes plugged up, it will, I think. The fishermen thought so too.’

Cotton looked at Gully; then he turned back to the girl. At that moment she seemed the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. ‘We’ll wait for you here on the beach,’ he said.

As she turned away and began to climb in the growing darkness, Gully rounded on Cotton. ‘It’s going to rain, he complained. He pointed at the sky which was changing in the west to a deep violet-grey. ‘We should have gone to the village. We’re going to get wet.’

Cotton turned and glared at him, his face only inches away from the carpenter’s. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll get wet. But we’re staying here.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s my guess those bloody Greeks’ll be back first thing tomorrow morning to get our guns.’

Gully’s jaw dropped. ‘What!’

‘I’ll bet my last bob the bastards were watching us from up there somewhere.’ Cotton gestured towards the slope of the mountain and, as he did so, he noticed that the first spots of Gully’s rain were falling. ‘I expect they want ‘em for their gang of bolshie patriots or something.’

‘Well, why can’t they ‘ave ‘em?’

‘Because they belong to the navy,’ Cotton said. ‘And I want ‘em myself. That lot couldn’t do a thing with them. They don’t know how.’ He had all a trained soldier’s contempt for amateurs. ‘That’s why when they come back tomorrow to fish ‘em out, they’ll find I’ve been there first.’

4

‘You know what?’ Gully said.

‘What?’Cotton asked.

‘I think you’re bloody barmy.’

‘That’s what Docherty thought,’ Cotton pointed out. ‘I think he was wrong. I think you’re wrong.’

He was quite unperturbed by Gully’s opinion. Though Gully had been right about the weather, and it had not only rained, it had poured, and he had spent a wretched night under an overhang in the stream bed with Howard, hidden from the boat, damp, chilled and miserable, watching the trickle of water by his feet grow wider and faster until it lapped his shoes. But at least Howard had been dry and it had seemed safer there than on the boat where they might have been surprised and unable to get him away.

Docherty studied the lopsided launch. With her tilted deck and mast and the smashed wheelhouse, she looked a total wreck. ‘Suppose the Germans come and set fire to her?’ he said.

‘And suppose they don’t,’ Gully added. ‘What’s the difference? She won’t shift. So we’ve got guns and petrol but no bloody boat.’

‘There’s the other boat,’ Cotton pointed out patiently. ‘That girl said she was in better shape than this one.’

Gully grunted. ‘I still think you’re barmy,’ he said.

Cotton shrugged. He’d been called a few names in his time. ‘It takes all sorts to make a Marine,’ he said, unperturbed. ‘We once had a woman in the corps even. She was wounded six times at Pondicherry and finally kept a pub at Wapping.’

Gully stared at him as if he were mad but Bisset, guessing what it was that was driving Cotton, broke into an unexpected grin.

Gully shrugged. ‘I still think you’re barmy.’

Cotton didn’t bother to answer. What was in his mind would never have made sense to a civilian. Though Gully didn’t know it, he’d been prowling round even before first light, looking for a safe place to hide
Claudia’s
guns, the dinghy and the petrol.

‘I mean - ‘ Gully was just beginning to get properly wound up’ - what can four of us do to a set of Germans?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ Cotton said calmly. ‘I expect I shall think of something.’

‘I mean -- getting us up at this bloody hour, with nothing to eat in our bellies, swimming around picking up guns and things!’

Stark naked and looking like a large skinned bulldog, Cotton sat in the dinghy between the two dripping Lewis guns, shivering. ‘I’m doing the swimming,’ he pointed out. ‘Me and Docherty. You’re just sitting in the boat pulling on the oars. I don’t know what you’re complaining about.’

‘What are you going to do with the bloody guns anyway?’

‘Shoot Germans, I expect,’ Cotton said off-handedly. ‘I haven’t worked it out proper yet.’

They landed the Lewis guns and, while Cotton stripped them down, Bisset carefully wiped the parts and greased them well. When they’d assembled them, Gully and Bisset rowed the dinghy out again, towing Cotton in the water behind. Docherty had started working in the silent engine room.

‘Did you ever swim the Channel by any chance?’ Gully asked.

‘No.’ Cotton answered seriously. ‘You need a lot of fat on you for that. Like you.’

While Gully and Bisset waited in the dinghy, Cotton took the end of the heaving line and dived down into the clear water among the rocks and the waving seaweed and the sea urchins under
Claudia’s
stern, and attached it to the barrel of the 20 mm. As he burst to the surface, gasping, Bisset and Gully began to heave.

The rest of the weapon followed and Bisset pulled for the shore, with Gully sitting in the stern and Cotton swimming alongside. Cleaning and pulling the gun through, they greased it like the Lewises; then, wrapping all three weapons round with shreds of clothing rescued from the forecastle, they stuffed them under the rocks in a hole Cotton had found, and covered them carefully. Cotton was in no doubt about what he was doing. His mind was clicking along precisely now, like a ship’s chronometer, ticking off each item as it occurred to him.

When they’d hidden the guns, he cleared the beach of footprints with a branch torn off one of the overhanging trees. As he finished, he found he was standing near the graves the Germans had dug. The papers the German sergeant had stuck on the stakes all read the same thing:
‘Ein unbekannter englishche Matrose’
a small gesture of respect from one fighting man to another.

He glanced to the north. The faint thud of guns which had died away during the night had started again. The high hills seemed to muffle the sound but it was always there, insistent and menacing.

They were among the bushes in the stream bed, bending over Howard, when the girl returned. There were three men with her this time, the third one the same age as Petrakis, wearing black shabby clothes and tall boots and carrying with him the smell of an unwashed body. Cotton noticed that Petrakis was carrying a towel and the third man, whom he assumed was Xilouris, was leading a donkey laden with a folded rubber dinghy, encouraging it along with cricket-like noises made with the mouth. ‘Psoo! Psoo!’

‘Kalo ksimeroma’
the girl said. ‘Good morning.’

‘Where’s the boat you promised?’ Cotton said immediately, his face full of suspicion.

She gestured towards the sea. ‘The Germans came to the village,’ she said. ‘They are commandeering boats. It was difficult.’

‘The kid’ll die if he doesn’t see a doctor.’

She knelt alongside Howard. He seemed to have recovered a little and managed to smile at her. ‘Hello, Mum,’ he said.

The girl lifted her face. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘They will come tomorrow. Please understand. They are willing to help. They will look after him in Ay Yithion.’

Cotton wasn’t so sure and his mind was full of nagging doubts. ‘What about the Germans if they find him?’ he said.

‘It’s a chance we must take. We are Christians and there is a doctor. They would never turn him away.’

Cotton searched his conscience. He’d heard of Germans deporting or even shooting people who hid British prisoners of war. He wasn’t sure that he had the right to ask. He stared at Howard. The boy’s face was grey and he knew they certainly couldn’t care for him themselves much longer. He nodded, still unwilling to push the responsibility on to someone else.

Petrakis interrupted. He had listened to the exchange with barely concealed irritation, as though a dreadfully hurt boy was no concern of his. He pointed towards the hill.

‘She will take you to the other boat,’ he said.

He seemed eager to be rid of them and Cotton frowned. ‘Aren’t you coming, too?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘The Germans’ll be back soon,’ Cotton said. ‘To pump out the tanks. They’ll be coming round by boat. We heard them say so.’ He looked at Howard. He felt dreadfully hampered by the wounded boy and for the first time he realized how it was that senior officers could take the decision to leave their injured behind. It had always seemed a cold-blooded thing to do but at that moment he knew just what prompted it.

For a moment they were at a loss what to do with the boy. The three Greeks hadn’t waited to see what decision they’d make and had already begun to head towards the beach. Cotton watched them, narrow-eyed and suspicious; then Bisset volunteered to stay behind with Howard while the rest of them went to inspect
Loukia.