by Jim Gregson
I felt ridiculous, like a Hollywood toughie looking after his men. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to safeguard them. What really troubled me was that I felt a charlatan, totally unfitted for the task allotted to me. But there was no sign of any attack; no evidence, indeed, of any human presence save ours. Even Harry Hart and his eight men on the other side of this valley had disappeared from us for the last hour, because of a fold in the hill.
I turned and waved my men forward. Then I heard my corporal, panting with effort at the rear of the file of climbing men, muttering something about their sergeant being an expert sniper. Amazingly and probably cravenly. I was in that moment glad of the fiction. I smiled grimly to myself, but I did not laugh outright at my own expense, as I would have done elsewhere. Anything that bolstered my authority would help the efficiency of this small, isolated group of fighting men. Even the spurious had a function here.
Whilst we enjoyed the longer break warranted for lunch an hour later, the cynicism bred on much army experience took over the group. After more than four hours, we had seen not a hint of a hostile presence. Nor had we heard the sound of firing from any of the other valleys which ran away from the summit of this peak. All our previous breaks had been fairly quiet. That stemmed not only from the effort of climbing with rifle and small pack but from the tension which came inevitably with real action and a real enemy, after so much waiting and wondering.
Now, after eating their substantial sandwiches and feeling refreshed, scepticism prevailed amidst my eight. No bloody enemy here, was there? If EOKA had been here at all, they were long gone by now. The bleeding brass hats had got it wrong, as usual. There were no hostile Cyps here. They were in Nicosia or Famagusta, the bastards, planting bombs and shooting British squaddies in the back.
I listened and said nothing. I was too weary to argue. Fatigue came not from the physical demands of the climb, but from the tensions I had endured throughout it. I felt both responsible for these men and unequal to the task. They were voicing the ritual grumblings about army inefficiency as they finished their meals and lit their fags, but the greatest inefficiency was right here amongst them. The man who controlled their movements was untrained for the task. He was here only because of a fit of pique in a pompous RAEC major.
I kept such thoughts strictly to myself. I lit my cigarette and gazed around the dramatic, empty landscape. I studied the spectacular ridge above us, which ran up to the summit of the mountain, the clear blue sky above the peak and the birds that circled high above us. There couldn’t be many more tranquil and beautiful scenes in the world. Yet I was leading a team of fit young men who were armed and vigilant; we were searching these quiet slopes for men to fire at and kill.
A strange world, my masters’.
The men were more relaxed as we climbed on after lunch. They talked more to each other and paid less attention to the steeply sloping land around us. They didn’t believe there were enemies here. They didn’t believe that anything would come from this exercise. I held my peace and hoped they were right. Yet even I could not dismiss a slight sense of deflation in that thought.
Then, as we rounded a boulder and opened up a new vista ahead of us, something revealed itself, as starkly and simply as if it had been a cinema poster. Forty yards beyond the great rock which had been our landmark for the last half hour, there was a smaller, flat-faced stone. It was a slab with a smooth surface, around six feet high and four feet across. It seemed almost designed to carry some sort of message.
Today it did just that. The letters were scratched clearly and neatly, almost carved into the surface. They gave the impression that much care and no little pride had been applied to them. All six letters seemed to have been executed skilfully and unhurriedly. ENOSIS.
We gathered in a semicircle and stared at the slab and its message, as if we were worshipping at the tabernacle of some obscure religion. This work was recent. Very recent. Recent enough to set us looking anxiously over our shoulders for any sign of the hands that had executed it. The letters stood out very clearly, dark yellow against the greyness of the rock. There was a small line of powdered stone at the base of the rock, accumulated there as the surface had been scratched away to proclaim this message.
This had been executed, I judged, within the last couple of days. Perhaps within the last couple of hours: it looked very new. ENOSIS.
We all knew what it meant. Union with Greece. The slogan of Colonel Grivas and his unofficial guerrilla army. The word daubed on the walls of towns and villages throughout the island.
No one needed any explanation, but my corporal said loyally from the back of the group, ‘Sergeant Gregson knows Greek.’ I let it go. He was trying to support me and it would have been churlish to demur. Bad for morale, too: you had to be constantly aware of morale whilst on active service, they’d told me.
One of the squaddies muttered, ‘He knows every fucking thing!’ I gave him a glare and said nothing.
We stood for a moment longer, studying the care given to the work and the freshness of its execution. It looked as if it had been scratched with a specialist tool, but that seemed unlikely up here. A heavy knife or dagger, perhaps, or a small axe. Or a deftly wielded bayonet.
Every one of us kept a more watchful eye on the land around us as we climbed on towards the head of our valley. It was probably no more than the stark suggestion of the single word on the slab we had left behind, but each of us felt that he was being observed, that faces we could not see were following our movements and perhaps mocking our every stride.
We could see Sergeant Hart and his group now, moving ever closer to us as we approached the point where the four valleys converged beneath the precipitous crags that guarded the summit. I’d been a mountaineer in Britain since my boyhood, which meant that my natural inclination was to press on towards the summit in search of that sense of achievement which always comes from reaching a peak. ‘We knocked the bastard off!’ as Edmund Hillary had said on his return from the summit of Everest four years earlier. How clear and simple and heroic that world seemed to me now, when compared with the confusions of this one.
As if to underline that, one of the men beside me panted, ‘Wish we could shoot that fucking Grivas into bloody bits! Cyprus is British, innit? So what the hell is the bastard on about?’
I wasn’t going to get involved in any discussion about that. Probably I was shaken enough by the ENOSIS slogan to share some of his feelings. And anything but agreement would be bad for morale, wouldn’t it? But I did say, ‘Grivas fought fiercely against the Germans in Greece during the war, and then against the Communists when they tried to take over his country afterwards. I suppose we must have thought him a hero, in those days.’
He looked at me curiously, but didn’t argue. Instead, he turned to the soldier behind him and said, ‘He knows every bloody thing, does sarge!’ He sounded quite resentful about that. But I decided that a reputation for omniscience, however spurious, could only help my standing here.
We were about to join up with Hart and our colleagues at the agreed point when a small military helicopter arrived, disturbing the warm, still air above us with its distinctive sound. Captain Foulkes climbed stiffly from it and asked each of his sergeants for a report on the day’s findings. I logged the position of the ENOSIS rock and gave my opinion that the letters had been carved very recently. There were similar reports from other NCOs in the neighbouring valleys, confirming that EOKA had been here in the last day or two and might still be in the area.
No one reported a sighting of the enemy or any hostilities.
Foulkes nodded. ‘Right! We’ve now covered this area comprehensively, as we were ordered to do. You can sleep back at base in the valley tonight. Return by slightly different routes from the ones by which you arrived here, please, to make the survey as comprehensive as possible. Well done to all of you!’
He climbed back into the helicopter and swiftly disappeared, giving us a final wave as he soared above us, like Christ on Ascensio
n Thursday. Typical bloody officer, I thought resentfully. Let the men under your command do all the bloody work, then appear at the end to take their reports. Wearing an immaculate uniform your batman had prepared for you, whilst your men had toiled up a mountain through the heat and soiled their kit. Zoom back to base and claim the plaudits for anything achieved. Jammy bastards, officers!
Yet as we prepared to move on I knew that this was the most effective way of searching the difficult territory of the Troodos. Men had to search the area on foot, whilst a senior man kept an overview of the exercise and co-ordinated it. But that didn’t alter the fact that it was much easier to zoom up here in a helicopter than to grind your way up here over six hours, with rifle in hand and pack on your back and the constant thought that you might become a target at any moment. Jammy bastards, officers!
We descended rapidly. My mountain experience elsewhere told me that we should be back at base in around two and a half hours. For the most part, we followed the route we had climbed. We made a couple of deviations to cover ground which seemed worth exploring, without finding anything else of interest. The men paused automatically beside the ENOSIS rock, but I took them on another four hundred yards before I allowed them to rest.
It was on one of our departures from the route by which we had ascended that we made our second discovery. We were no more than sixty yards to the left of the point where we had ‘taken five’ as we climbed. There was a small depression in the ground here, sheltered from any winds and quite invisible from the route we had used to toil towards the head of the valley. It was in the bottom of this dip that we saw unmistakeable signs of a recent human presence.
Blackened earth and grey ash. Small scraps of charcoal round the edges of a neat dark circle. There had been a fire here, with men gathered around it. How many men? That was impossible to tell: the circle was four feet across and the fire must have given out a considerable heat.
I moved the ashes cautiously with my foot. A tiny spiral of smoke rose for a little while into the still air. I stooped and moved the charcoal with my knuckles. Its underside was red for a moment, then died to black with the exposure to air. The ash did not burn my knuckles, but there was still warmth within it.
Men had been here, almost certainly Grivas’s EOKA men. Last night, possibly. Certainly not earlier than the night before last.
Seventeen
Our accommodation in the foothills of the Troodos made me appreciate how fortunate I’d been to be billeted at Dhekelia. After months in my comfortable room in the sergeants’ mess, I was back in a tent. There were only a few one-storey permanent buildings at this base. They housed the administration unit, the mess facilities, and a small field hospital.
But only officers had roofs over their heads. I’d almost forgotten how much time you spent stooping in a tent when you were a tall man. After the long day on the hills, I felt all of my six feet four as my back and my limbs complained about the unaccustomed exertion.
The sergeants’ mess was simply a large hut with an improvised bar at one end of it. There weren’t many of us here to share it. But the army thought it was important to reward rank with privilege: that was an important factor in preserving good order and discipline. I found I could still get rum and coke here, at prices even more derisory than those prevailing in Dhekelia. Harry Hart and I sank thankfully on to canvas chairs and prepared to discuss the day’s events.
‘No sign of Grivas and his fucking cut-throats,’ said Harry.
‘For which thank the Lord!’ I said. It was an instinctive reaction, spoken without thinking. There had in fact been several signs of the enemy, though we hadn’t sighted him in person. I took a large gulp of my drink to celebrate that.
‘We’ll get that bastard, sooner or later,’ said Hart feelingly.
I looked hard at the clear, intense face. He was older than me. Twenty-seven or so, I judged. ‘You really want action, don’t you, Harry?’
‘Want to kill people, yes. It’s what I joined for.’ He spoke as if it was a statement of the obvious, as if he shouldn’t have needed to voice it. He was looking straight ahead as I glanced at him. He wasn’t drunk and he was entirely serious. He was open and honest about his views. Why shouldn’t he be, when he was just iterating the norm? I glanced around the hut. The squaddie behind the bar at the other end of it was the only other person here and he was polishing glasses. I said in a low voice, ‘I spent most of today praying we wouldn’t come under fire.’
Hart didn’t look at me. There was a strange, faraway look in his very blue eyes. ‘I want the fuckers to come out and fight! Don’t you? It’s what I joined for. Didn’t you?’
‘I didn’t join,’ I reminded him. ‘I’m here for two years’ national service. I’m here because I have to be, not because I want to be.’
‘But aren’t you tempted to sign on? You’re a sergeant already, and you’ve got sniper qualifications and languages. You could go a long way in today’s army.’
I wasn’t either a marksman or a linguist, but this wasn’t the time to tell him that. I smiled and said, ‘You sound like a recruiting sergeant.’
‘Not me, mate. I want to be where the action is. But I’m right, aren’t I? You’d do well, with your background and what you have to offer.’
‘I wouldn’t do well.’ I spoke with determination, then hastened to back off. ‘I could do all right in the RAEC, I suppose.’ I thought of pink-faced Major Barker, the man who had sent me here to act the part of a sergeant – which was what I still felt I was doing. ‘There isn’t too much competition in the RAEC. I’ve been told I could make captain pretty quickly, if I signed on. That would give me a lot more money than I’d make as a teacher in civvy life.’
‘There you are, then. There’s fuck all to discuss, is there?’
‘There is, Harry. I’m not committed to army life, as you are. It would be a career move if I signed on, and I couldn’t stand the army as a career.’
Hart glared at me for a moment, then went and bought more drinks. I hadn’t been tactful: in effect, I’d questioned the fundamentals of his philosophy. But I had been challenged, and tact was a quality Harry wouldn’t understand and wouldn’t welcome. It was no use talking about different philosophies, because Harry had probably never even heard the word. That wasn’t being patronising. Harry Hart was much better fitted to life here than I was.
I tried to moderate my stance when he returned with the drinks. ‘I just don’t think I’m cut out for real action, Harry. Take this exercise. I’m doing my best and I’ll go on doing that, but I know I won’t be happy if we start killing people.’
‘It’s what I joined for.’ He repeated the words as if they were a political catch phrase, but he spoke with utter certainty. I waited for him to modify the statement, but he took a long drink of rum and coke, looked into his glass, and nodded his head firmly several times.
I knew I should leave this, should simply accept that we had different approaches to life which would never converge. But I carried on, like a child picking at a scab. ‘You can’t have joined up to kill people, Harry. People you don’t even know. You’re exaggerating.’
He looked at me in wonderment, as if it were I and not he who was propounding a strange attitude. ‘It’s what I want to do, Jim – what I’ve always wanted to do. I just need to know I’ve got right on my side. There’s nothing to equal the feeling that you’re defending your country and shooting down the bastards who want to attack it.’
‘But there’s more to life than fighting, isn’t there?’
Harry shook his head hard, as if this was a new idea he was struggling to take on board. ‘There might be other things, but fighting’s the important one, isn’t it? I used to get into fights at school and get caned for it. And then when I’d left I’d be in scraps around Leeds. We had gangs and we kidded ourselves it was for real. But then, as soon as I was eighteen, I joined the army and it was for real. No one takes you to court for fighting here, do they? That’s good, that is. You can
be a hero when you kill the bastards who are attacking your country.’
I went and got more drinks. We were drinking too quickly, but I couldn’t leave this here. I thought, whilst I waited at the bar, of Joy and the money from snooker I’d locked away in the sergeants’ mess safe at Dhekelia before I came here. That was the supplement for the marriage allowance of forty-nine shillings a week which was accumulating against the day when I got out of this. I thought of Joy to remind myself of what was the real world for me, because that sane and orderly place seemed very remote from the Troodos and what I had to do here.
Hart seemed to be looking at me with a new suspicion as I slid the drink into his hand. I said as coolly as I could, ‘But we’re not at war, Harry. We’re not defending ourselves against tyrants. This isn’t thirty-nine to forty-five, with Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese there to hate. You can’t fight all the time. You can’t build your life around fighting. Your opportunities to kill people are going to be precious few.’
It sounded to me as if I was being insulting in stating the obvious, but Hart took no offence. ‘Suez was good. We were giving Nasser and the Gypos a right thrashing there, until the bloody politicians pulled us out.’
‘I think that might have been the Yanks, telling us our days of empire were over,’ I said, as mildly as I could.
‘Whatever.’ Harry waved his hands wildly in the air, as if some justification for renewing violence might be captured there. ‘Anyway, we were pulled out, just when we were going to tan the arses off the bastards.’