Soldiers

by Tom Remiger

  ‘Goodo,’ said Breen. If there was an attack it would be problematic, but there was no need for the captain to hang about all night when he could meet the colonel and formulate a plan.

  ‘Just lay them down any way you like. Don’t go buggering about trying to find the positions. If we’re lucky, they’ll think there’s hardly anyone here.’

  Breen looked out into the darkness before he replied. ‘What do you mean?’

  The captain paused. He didn’t want to be misinterpreted. ‘When they attack.’

  ‘I don’t see that there’s going to be an attack. They’d wait until they had air support again in the morning, surely.’

  ‘We have to act like there’s one coming. Why would they be so far forward?’

  ‘Then,’ said Breen, ‘your place is here. You can send any runner down to fetch another guide.’

  ‘Breen,’ said the captain, then, in another tone of voice: ‘Daisy. No, no,’ he said. ‘It has to be someone who can explain adequately. Who can explain himself. I’ll try to get you all out. That’s why I’m going, you see.’

  ‘We can’t go,’ said Breen.

  ‘We have to go. If they don’t attack now, they’ll kill us all in the morning anyway. We do as we’re told, but…’ said the captain. His voice was gentle.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ said Breen. ‘Without this hill, they’ll have the airfield.’

  ‘They’ve smashed them to bits. We take the vows,’ said the captain. By now it seemed he was no longer arguing with Breen, but speaking to the ball of fear within himself, speaking nonsense words over the perfumed darkness of Crete. He was talking in a quiet rush, the sound of a distant river. ‘Obedience, poverty, chastity. We’re a sort of priesthood. The whole army can break the last, but not the first.’

  ‘What,’ said Breen.

  ‘That’s the theory, but then there’s the individual who must apply the theory. To himself alone. And of course, failure is inevitable. We are not sufficient to stand. I don’t mind if you know, but I’d rather the others didn’t.’

  His voice changed. ‘I had better be reporting back now. We’ve no time to waste. As I said, you’re in charge. Good luck.’

  Breen looked at him, then looked down to where the marks of rank on his shoulder were hidden in the dark. It felt like he was saying goodbye to a friend. It was as if the train was pulling in to the station and there was no way he would ever see him again. Perhaps he might on the street, twenty years from now: an awkward conversation, or a glimpse from the top of the bus; a rounding of the corner and a final farewell unspoken amid the we-must-see-one-another-agains. The difference was there.

  Maybe the captain believed it; maybe he didn’t. They never talked properly again.

  ‘Anyway,’ said the captain, ‘I’m a sick man. I’d be no good here. The dysentery…I wish you’d agree with me. It would be easier then.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ Breen said.

  ‘You could come with me,’ Sinclair said. His voice had dropped to a whisper; probably only Gibson, the closest, could hear.

  ‘You have to go alone,’ said Breen, equally quietly. ‘There’s no need for two to report back. No way to explain it. And I don’t know that I’d want to.’

  ‘Daisy,’ the captain said. ‘It’s not my fault.’

  ‘You need to report back, and collect a new guide. I understand,’ said Breen, louder now. ‘It makes sense to send someone who can understand new orders and come back.’

  There was an explosion like a sped-up film of a flower unfurling. The captain said something, but Breen must not have heard it. He would have said something back otherwise; he must have.

  Breen returned to his platoon.

  ‘The captain’s gone back to report and get us a new guide,’ he said, wanting there to be no doubt about what Sinclair was doing. He was doing it for the good of all. ‘We’d best scatter ourselves about.’

  ‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,’ said Gibson. ‘Come here, sir.’

  Breen walked towards him, straight-backed. They moved beneath a tree. ‘There’s not going to be any attack until morning, is there?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Breen. ‘That’s why it’s so bloody ridiculous of him. He’s doing the right thing for the wrong bloody reasons, the bastard. He’s got it into his head that we’re all going to die.’

  ‘No need to bloody shout it out for the boys,’ said Gibson. ‘The bugger’s buggered off, then?’

  ‘The bugger’s buggered off.’

  ‘It could have happened to any of us. Someone will send him back soon enough, and next time he’ll know it’s happening, and he’ll stand up to it. Let’s get the firing lines laid out.’

  His common sense and reliability were a relief to Breen. ‘Gibson. Thanks.’

  ‘There’s no point having a commander with the wind up anyway. Better you or one of the other two.’ His foot shuffled the dirt. ‘I’m sorry. I know—’

  ‘She’ll be right,’ said Breen. ‘Let’s see how the ground looks.’

  There was no attack. The captain came back after a couple of hours; he said there’d been a conference and he hadn’t wanted to interrupt.

  The lieutenants had met and shifted Tiger to second-in-command. They told the captain that Tiger had seniority, but that was a lie. Breen went back with relief to his platoon.

  ‘We’re pulling out,’ the captain told Tiger.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Tiger.

  ‘The airfield. We’re abandoning it. We’ll cover the other battalion’s evacuation, and then be gone from here ourselves.’

  Tiger was nothing more than a looming presence. ‘As we were, then, sir?’

  ‘As you were.’

  The captain went back again, to watch the evacuation. When the others were all gone, he pulled the company in. They arrived back in their own battalion’s little valley in the early morning. As the sky began to lighten, the paratroopers huddled in the airfield’s wreckage realised that the hill was empty.

  26

  Their transport planes started coming in that afternoon. The artillery kept the airfield under fire, but the planes kept coming and one by one the guns were destroyed and now the enemy had reinforcements.

  ‘Just look at the sky,’ said Parkinson.

  The dive bombers would circle about for a bit, prolonging the agony and the anticipation. Then they would come down in lines, their engines screaming defiance. The bombs dropped and wobbled and steadied; they seemed to fall slowly, and the wind whistled through them so that they howled. Then there would be a sound like a hand slamming down on a paper bag filled with air, only louder, and the buzzing sound of shrapnel into the trees. The pressure wave punched you into the ground while you lay there, and it plucked at your clothes. Somewhere someone would be sobbing or moaning in pain or fear.

  The next day the battalion prepared for an attack from the direction of the river, the direction the parachutists had attacked the airfield from.

  Instead, the enemy rushed Lookout Hill at dawn. Bluey had been nearest. He left the third of his platoon who had been allowed to sleep, and drove the enemy back again with the remainder.

  ‘A beautifully conducted operation,’ said the colonel, watching through his binoculars. He had refused a German pair for patriotic reasons. ‘And—yes, there they go.’

  Bluey sent a wavering line of prisoners down the hill, their hands on their heads and their faces gaunt from lack of sleep.

  ‘That’s not a good sign,’ said Baird to the captain.

  ‘Sleeping?’

  ‘They’re surrendering too easily. They think they’re going to be rescued in a day or two. Good work yesterday, by the way. It’s a pity you couldn’t convince them to hold on. We’ll have to go in again tonight.’

  The planes were tearing up and down the ridge line. They were leaving the battalion’s valley alone for some reason; the olives must have been shielding them. It was crammed with men, pullulating, said Christie, like maggots in a corpse. The bat
talion held steady. Around them slept the survivors of the airfield. The companies who were supposed to be dead had fought their way out. There were few of them left, but they were there.

  They dragged the dead to lie together, abandoning them halfway through when a plane came over. They tried to bury the New Zealanders, and they managed it some of the time, but it takes a long time to dig a grave out in the open. They left the Germans where they were. There wasn’t time.

  Breen’s tea, steeped cold, seemed to have the metallic taste of blood. He hadn’t realised before how much someone wounded would smell of warm blood. The dead didn’t smell like that. It must have been the warmth that did it.

  They watched more parachutists landing about the airfield through the day. There was no attack, but mortars came into action and a surviving anti-aircraft gun, captured from the drome, kept spitting at them. The bombing and the planes and the mortaring meant that every half an hour or so there was another casualty. They laid out captured German recognition signals to confuse the planes. They received their own mortars in return.

  More paratroopers landed. The colonel sent out patrols to squeeze them into the Maori Battalion, and the paratroopers died.

  The village in front was bombed heavily. There were no soldiers left there, but the enemy moved in to occupy it.

  The bombing moved to batter other companies. The colonel sent Sinclair’s company forward to support them, anticipating a following attack. Late in the afternoon it came from the north, pushing at the barbed wire strung across the crossroads. The two companies already dug in there drove them off, and there were many bodies hanging in the wire.

  ‘We couldn’t let you have all the fun, now, could we?’ Morrie said to Breen. He had taken over a platoon now. There were vacancies, all right. Morrie wore a blazing smile but his eyes wouldn’t quite meet Breen’s.

  There kept being more wounded, but there were few deaths.

  After the attack came troop-carrying planes. They tried to land at Maleme. The zeroed guns roared out at them. When they tried to land on the beaches, the machine guns tore them up. The mortars found the ranges of the beaches and waited.

  The planes began to land on the west of the airfield, out of range.

  ‘Now comes the heavy stuff,’ said the colonel. ‘They want our guns shut up before they can do anything.’

  The machine guns ran out of ammunition about then, and they had to be re-equipped with captured guns that the Aucklanders brought in. The enemy kept trying hopeless probes against them.

  ‘So,’ said the colonel in the officers’ conference, ‘the situation is stable but I don’t think we can call it good.’ It was decided the airfield had to be recaptured. The counterattack was organised to start early the following morning.

  That night they watched flashes of gunfire in the Aegean darkness; the navy was sinking the invasion fleet. The battalion watched and waited. There were only two of their machine guns left.

  In the early hours they could see that the attack had reached the edge of the airfield. But now there were German planes overhead, hundreds of them like seabirds above a boil-up, and any attempt to cross the open ground of the airfield ended in death. More troop-carrying planes were coming in, crashing into the pockmarked runway, and the enemy sprang out from them into battle.

  The Maori Battalion drove off an attack with a bayonet charge, and the first the battalion knew of it was the sound of a rush and a yell.

  The last two machine guns were finally destroyed. At 4.30 a.m. the brigade received orders to withdraw. There would be no further attempt at a counterattack.

  They moved out slowly. Sinclair’s company was the rearguard. They left the wounded who could not walk behind; the medical officer, Reece, stayed with them. He had blood under his fingernails when he shook hands with the colonel.

  Each time they got clear of the pursuing soldiers, more planes would appear and there would be another burst of machine-gun fire, slowing them down. When the dive bombers came over, the men’s eyes went big. Every olive tree they sheltered behind seemed too small. In the lull between each dive there would be flurries of panicked sprinting, men hurling themselves beside one another.

  The sky was patterned with flares, signalling to the planes to go there, do that, kill those ones. At dawn and dusk they were like fireworks. There was always noise, everywhere. The birds sang sometimes in the middle of the night, woken by flares or tracer bullets.

  The New Zealanders formed a new line to defend, a shorter one. They spent the twenty-fourth and the twenty-fifth of May waiting.

  27

  On the evening of the twenty-fifth, the battalion was called forward again. They marched towards a village they did not know the name of, and when a plane came over they stood still beneath the trees, having removed their helmets, so that they would not be detected.

  Stricken men came down the hill, stumbling quickly like figures in a dream. They looked at the company marching up against them and said nothing, saving all their breath for running.

  The colonel was lying by the side of the road, waving his helmet forward. There were spent bullets dropping to the ground, and blood coming from his ankle where one of them had hit him.

  The men marched on. They were wheeled into position defending a line that was almost broken. The village was to the front, sprawling over the top of the hill. An occasional sound of gunfire grew to a crescendo. The spent bullets stripped the olive trees.

  An unfamiliar colonel stood by the roadside. He wore a peaked cap instead of a helmet and he looked like a man admiring bloodstock, a pipe in his mouth. A wounded sergeant lay beside him, calling out: ‘All soldiers over this way.’

  A rabble of men was falling back, what looked like hundreds of them coming down the hill.

  There was a terrific noise of gunfire. Two tanks came surging out of the village. Fear rippled through the company.

  ‘Ours,’ said Bluey very loudly.

  ‘You need to retake the village,’ said the colonel. ‘The tanks have been doing a reconnaissance.’

  ‘Is there time for reconnaissance? How should we do it?’ asked Sinclair as if he hadn’t heard.

  ‘There’s no time for that,’ said the colonel. ‘We can’t hold the line as we are. We just need to punch them back, and reorganise these men. Just follow the tanks. A company on each side of the road.’

  The tank commander walked stiffly towards them. He was an Englishman, blond, as big as Tiger. ‘Stiff with Jerries,’ he called out.

  Parkinson was standing beside Breen. ‘Thank Christ I’ve got a bloody bayonet,’ he said. Breen realised how muscled he was. There was blood on his face. Shards of olive bark.

  ‘Right,’ Breen said. ‘Tiger? What’s the plan?’

  ‘My platoon first, Bluey’s boys, you behind. We’ll go straight up the road. Morrie, you bring your boys through behind the houses. There’ll be machine guns.’

  Morrie went up to the colonel. ‘We’re ready.’

  ‘Good show,’ he said. ‘They’ll run like hell.’

  ‘Best fix bayonets,’ said Breen.

  It was a few minutes past eight in the evening.

  The tanks revved their engines into a roar. Small groups of men joined them from who knew where, and a whistle blew.

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ said Major Faulding. The tanks clattered away. They started to move. It was getting dark and they did not need to fear the planes.

  There came a cheer. Then they cheered again, and they started to run. They started firing into the air or in front, and the quality of the cheer changed. Flares came up from the village and mortars sounded from far beyond.

  A tank lost its track and crashed into the side of the road. The other started to turn and Tiger banged furiously on its side until it started to push forward. There were tracer bullets coming from the windows of the houses, lighting up the night.

  The cheer became ragged, faltered, and something more terrible. There were yells and screams, the sound of disparate
school hakas mingling with the drumming of boots on cobblestones, and Bluey shouting: ‘Hooks forward!’ There were voices as high as cats, and deep as dogs, and the sound of grenades going off, and the flares were still blazing into the skies and behind them came the crumpling sound of the mortars, falling behind.

  The colonel was in the road behind them, exposed to fire, shouting, ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ and the tank officer was lying wounded out of his wrecked tank shouting, ‘Come on, New Zealand!’ and Tiger was calling out, ‘We’ll kill the whole world!’

  The screaming was loud enough to split the sky and the bayonets went in with what Tiger called hesitant ease, afterwards, into the throats with a wet sucking sound as the company smashed into what must have been the enemy forming up in the square. Parkinson had a German by the throat and was shaking him, and then the resistance slackened, and the boys were running forward into the darkened streets, and there was the sound of women screaming and a dead girl hanging out the window of a house.

  The captain seemed to stumble and fall, and Breen went back to him as the grenades thrown through windows blazed out and sent glass whirring into the street, or burst roof slates up into the sky, a flower of them exploding out and the heavy petals of debris falling upon the dead.

  Suddenly there was no one there. Close by, a wounded man was breathing in a liquid way, with heavy difficulty.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ said Sinclair. ‘Daisy, I just can’t. It was all right while we were running together.’ His face was pale and his left thigh was shaking slightly as he knelt.

  ‘Come on, sir,’ said Breen quite formally. ‘We’ll lose them.’ It was as if he had not heard the captain at all.

  ‘Don’t ignore me,’ the captain said. ‘Please. I thought I could do it, but I can’t.’

  ‘Then you’d better go back,’ said Breen, ‘and explain yourself.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said the captain. ‘You know what they think of me. They’ll ruin me. I’ll never be allowed to forget.’

  Breen did not answer. He started to walk away. The captain could see that he was about to break into a run, trying to stay with his mates. The men had gone around the corner by now, and there was an explosion of shouts and the sound of several grenades going off.