The Brides of Solomon (15 page)

‘You take this,’ he said. ‘Lock it up in your safe, quick!’

Before the Curator could get over the shock of an American sergeant, covered with mud from head to foot and offering with outstretched arms an unknown object wrapped in dirty linen, Wagstaff
also was upon him.

‘Is it—is it a baby?’ the curator asked.

‘It is, sir, a fifth-century Attic cylix,’ the colonel replied with dignity.

The curator tremblingly extracted the bowl, and at the sight of it instantly recovered an almost ecclesiastical self-possession.

‘But this is an article of great value,’ he intoned.

‘I know it is. You’ve no idea of the trouble I’ve had preserving it from destruction.’

‘This—um—er—has dispossessed you of it?’

‘Lord, no! It’s his.’

‘Colonel, it is yours,’ said Bill with what he hoped was finality.

The colonel took the bowl with both hands, pledged an imaginary draught to the gods and held it high above the stone floor of the curator’s office.

‘I’ve nowhere to keep it,’ Bill screamed.

‘Oh, that’s all that is bothering you, is it?’ the colonel exclaimed. ‘Well, what’s that damned owl doing?’

A stuffed barn owl in a Victorian show case stood on the curator’s work-bench. Wagstaff lifted the glass dome from the ebony base, and removed the owl which immediately disintegrated into
dust and feathers.

‘Mouldy,’ said the colonel. ‘Disgrace to the museum. That reminds me I believe I’m on the committee. Give you a new one and stuff it myself.’

‘I was indeed considering—’ the curator began.

‘Of course you were. Quite right! Mind if I sit down at your desk a minute?’

The colonel printed a neat card:

He laid the bowl upon the ebony stand and propped the card up against it.

‘That will keep
you
quiet,’ he said, replacing the glass dome, ‘until Bill has a mantelpiece for you again. The sergeant has only to write to you to get it, I
suppose?’ he added fiercely to the curator.

‘Yes, yes, but—’

‘Any objection to the Red Lion now, Bill? It will be a pleasant change to drink out of glasses once more.’

H
E
was a severe creature, the Major, seldom smiling, always aloof. How he amused himself—if he ever did—when there was no war, one
couldn’t imagine. He was a most unlikely person to be a successful leader of partisans in enemy country, for he lacked all the lighter human interests. His men did not love him, but they had
to respect him. His patience was as coldly Napoleonic as his manner. Every operation he undertook had been a deliberate, foolproof success.

Brigadier Callender could only hope that this brilliant managing of luck would continue. He wished he were anywhere else in the world but that naked Greek hillside. At the same time there was no
denying that this was the very glory and height of boy’s book soldiering. His own job was purely administration, but what he administered were all the little British forces operating behind
the enemy lines in Greece, Italy and Jugoslavia; and, since he was not the sort of soldier who preferred his facts on paper, he did at times appear in person to those of his charges who could be
reached at all. He could do a lot to comfort such individualists, each of them forced by isolation to exaggerate his own private and military problems. He was double the age of most of them.

Sixteen men were waiting in a very slight fold of a hillside so open that anyone could see its emptiness at a glance. They were more or less dressed in British uniform; if captured, they could
only hope that the Germans would consider it more, not less. Their presence—since they had taken up their position before dawn—could not possibly be imagined by the enemy post guarding
the bridge three hundred feet below, where the rock-cut road leaped from one bank of the gorge to the other. They had waited all day. They were waiting now for the road patrol to pass. They would
then blow the bridge and wait again till nightfall to get away.

The Major seemed to have a genius for waiting. There he sat, apart as usual, his back against a rock, drafting what looked like a particularly difficult letter with his leather brief-case open
on his knees. Ever since Callender had dropped into this little command—descending god-like upon Mount Olympus—and found himself helplessly committed to an operation for which it was
already on the move, he had never seen the Major without his brief-case. It was slung on his hip together with his maps, inseparable from his person as if it contained the most secret documents in
the whole Middle East.

Tactful questioning had not produced the slightest evidence of what it did contain. His own very personal bottle of tablets perhaps? Well, provided he knew how to use them, there was no great
harm in that. They could all have done with any secret stimulant or bromide—according to temperament—which was going. The brief-case seemed at any rate to supply for the Major that
escape from unpleasantly real reality which men less self-sufficient might have found in a book or a game of chess.

Callender looked over his companions in the hollow. All but the Major were on edge, some fidgety, some unnaturally tense. Three were silently playing cards, with olive stones for chips. The
second-in-command was trying to write home and making a poor job of it. The simpler and more blessed were asleep, but twitching. One or two were trying to read what they already knew by heart. The
sergeant-major was carving a recognisable donkey out of a mandrake root.

The silence of autumn afternoon sang through the mountains and resolved itself into the rattle of a tracked vehicle and the whine of trucks in bottom gear. That, presumably, was the road patrol.
No one moved. Only the Major rolled over to the skyline and had a look at the enemy. The patrol halted, then rumbled on over the bridge and up the pass. The Major returned impassively to his
correspondence.

After half an hour he put his papers back in the brief-case and locked it. This simple action, methodical as that of any business man arriving at his suburban station, seemed to be a recognised
signal. Books were pocketed. The sleepers awoke. Cards were returned to a haversack; olive stones swept into a cigarette tin.

In single file the commando crawled down the sheltering fold until they were within seventy yards of the enemy post, and cover was no more than the foot-high brush of the hillside. The operation
was astonishingly swift and efficient—almost, Callender thought, humane. Not one of the eight Germans guarding the bridge was wounded. Their post was scientifically planned. Their defence
was tactically correct and predictable. Consequently they were all dead.

The charges took eighteen and a half minutes to lay. Then there was no bridge, and the road itself was only safe for foot passengers. The Major’s faith in his sources of information was
justified, for such traffic as interrupted the operation—and hastily cleared off—was civilian and apologetic.

Before the dust wholly settled, the commando had vanished into that inadequate hollow and resumed its former occupations. Callender found the second period of waiting intolerable. The road
below, on both sides of the gorge, began to hum with enemy activity; and what was happening in the valleys across which they had to withdraw he could, as a soldier, imagine. Only the Major knew if
the chance of the sixteen to return to the mountain cave which they called headquarters was really as good as he insisted it was.

The Brigadier reminded himself that patience had been the essence of soldiering since the Siege of Troy. Looking back through his memories of an infantry subaltern in 1916, he found them
dominated by the periods of waiting. Action was a mere flash of blinding light dividing the endless mists of doing nothing. But at least, in those days, they had known what was in front of them and
what behind. These chaps didn’t. Yet they waited till their plan was perfected; waited, at the mercy of a cough, for the moment of action; waited again for the chance to escape. And all this
behind the enemy lines.

He longed as never in his life for a cigarette, which of course was forbidden. The readers of books could not keep their attention fixed. The card-players went through the motions of enthusiasm,
but the deals grew slower until they were finally abandoned. Only the Major was imperturbable. Out came the brief-case, now white with stone dust from the bridge, and to work he went. He tore up
what he had written before the action and started again.

Surely the man, unapproachable as he was, would permit the congratulations of a senior officer? Callender crawled over to him, stopped tactfully, and was beckoned on.

‘If only,’ said the Major in a savage whisper, ‘I could do that to G.H.Q.!’

He jerked a thumb in the direction of the bridgeless gorge.

‘Your wish is shared by quite half the Army,’ the Brigadier answered mildly, ‘generally for the wrong reasons.’

‘
You
people could be a lot worse.’

‘We try. I know how dense we must seem to you sometimes. But we do try.’

The Major’s whispered wrath boiled up again.

‘By God, you do! Look at the trouble you go to just to get us mail! How’s that for administration? And what’s the good of it, sir? What’s the good of it?’

The exasperated exclamation was odd and revealing. The Major might well have asked what was the good of writing home when you were not allowed to say a word of what you were doing, and what you
were seeing or how you lived. But to complain that he could still receive letters! Trouble at home, probably.

Callender made an opening move.

‘What did you do in peace-time?’

‘Me? Cotton.’

The Major’s brusque reply called up a picture of some hardheaded north-countryman for whom bales of cotton had taken the place of human faces. He offered no details of what he did with his
cotton—possibly moved it from hither to yon with solid accuracy and by unexpected routes. Certainly the quicksilver dealings of merchants and brokers were not for him.

‘Is there anything I can do for you if I—when I get back?’ the Brigadier asked, trying again.

‘Yes. Find out who writes letters marked OOA/117/42/K and have him dropped in the drink.’

Callender recognised OOA as originating from the Pay Department. That the Major should be annoyed at some obtuseness in dealing with his pay and allowances was not surprising.

‘I’ll look into that, of course,’ he smiled. ‘But I meant—well, more private troubles. For example, if there’s anything which can only be handled by
a—’ the Major’s cold eyes were embarrassing—‘by a personal friend, would it be any help if I were to ask him to lunch?’

‘I’m not married,’ said the Major bluntly.

A devastating, almost cynical reply. But to the point. Nine-tenths of army misery were due to helpless inability to deal with the problems of wife and children. Still, there were enough other
pitiable human complexities. The Major seemed to ignore them altogether.

At blessed last it was night. The Major led his party over the ridge and down into the broad, cultivated valley beyond—very slowly, of course, but without any marked hesitation. The unseen
pattern of fords and field paths ahead of them did not seem to share the mountain silence, but it was impossible to pin-point a definite sound.

The second-in-command felt his way from the rear up the single file of unhurried, carefully stepping men.

‘I imagine they’ll be holding the Ktipito track in force, sir.’

‘I have no use for imagination,’ the Major snapped. ‘I like to know.’

The boy was only a shadow on the night, but Callender could see from his cheerful bearing that he did not resent the snub. All of them were accustomed to the Teutonic lack of frivolity in their
leader’s mind. In a way it was a guarantee for his understanding of the enemy.

‘I’m going on until I bump into them,’ the Major added.

Callender’s staff training leaped to his lips in protest. But on second thoughts the Major was right. Reconnoitring was impossible. He could not separate his command or he’d never
see half of them again. The fact was that the man had the ideal character for movement in the dark. Night manœuvres would not go wrong if the leader were so unimaginative that he never
thought a tree-stump was a man, so stolid that he never hesitated as to which of two half-glimpsed tracks was right when he knew perfectly well in daylight which was right.

At the crossing of the main road they did bump into the enemy—if you could call it a bump when you saw him first and merely waited interminably for him to go away. The Major did not even
pay him the compliment of lying down. He sat primly with his back against a fig-tree. His whole familiar attitude suggested that if there had been light for writing he would have opened his
brief-case. That his mind worked on the correspondence was certain.

When movement was safe and road crossed, the ground began to rise and again there was stone underfoot. The enemy was not so silent, not so sure as they that darkness was an ally. The Major,
leading, bumped in person. His commando knife—which Callender so disliked on indents for its air of flamboyant self-consciousness—was effective. So was the drill, even to the catching
of the lieutenant’s body as he fell. He was elderly. He should not have turned out so conscientiously for this kind of duty. He should not have visited his posts alone.

The Brigadier never knew what else they passed on the Ktipito track. He doubted if any of them did. But the point which mattered was that whatever existed outside the twenty-yard range of their
exceptional night sight
had
been passed—and the Major, on any less familiar route, could never have been sure of that.

At dawn they were among the high rocks where even Greeks did not try to scratch the pockets of soil and even the angriest of German commanders could perceive that search for them would be
fruitless. A Greek guide and a mule were there already. The guide had laid out the rations and wine as if for a picnic. He had astonishingly provided a white table-cloth. It was his personal
gesture of hospitality.