Sergeant Gregson's War

by Jim Gregson

  He plainly wasn’t one for the details or the subtleties of argument. I said desperately, ‘But you can’t live just for fighting, Harry. There isn’t enough of it to keep you happy.’

  Hart frowned and pursed his lips. ‘But there’s action here, isn’t there? You must feel your blood racing, when you think there might be Cyps with guns around the next corner.’

  ‘Yes. I felt that today, but I can’t say that—’

  ‘Well, there you are, then! It’s what we live for, like I said. It’s what all our training is about. Killing the bastards who are attacking Britain.’

  In that moment, I envied him. It must be wonderful to see things in black and white, to have no doubts about your cause, to have a fierce desire to eliminate anyone who didn’t subscribe to it. It must surely make courage very easy. I was worried about my own courage.

  I let the silence hang between us whilst we pulled at our drinks and studied our glasses. Rum and coke was an appealing colour in the dying light. I tried not to think of it as the colour of blood. At length I said quietly, ‘What will you do when you leave the army, Harry?’

  ‘I’m not leaving, mate. I’m signed up for twenty-two years.’

  ‘But you’ll have to leave eventually. You’ll only be forty, even after a twenty-two stint. What will you do then? You won’t be able to make killing your life’s work, back in civvy street.’

  Again it sounded to me like an insult, and again Harry didn’t see it like that. ‘I’ll find something. I don’t need to think about that yet.’

  ‘But you’ll need to alter your thinking by then. You won’t be able to go to prospective employers and say, “I kill people. That’s what I like doing and what I’m good at.” They’d think you were joking, Harry. And there’s more to you than that. You’re better than that.’

  His brow wrinkled. He resented being challenged like this. I don’t think he ever had been, as he’d risen up the infantry ranks. He wasn’t stupid, but he’d disciplined himself so stringently to military thinking that he didn’t wish to step away from it now. Especially now, when there was the prospect of real action. Tomorrow there might be enemy scalps available to him; tomorrow he might be able to put his righteousness into practice. He said stubbornly, ‘There’ll always be a demand for people like me – people who’ve served their country.’

  ‘I hope there will be. But there won’t be if you just want to kill people. There’s more to serving your country than that, especially when we’re not at war.’

  ‘I made sergeant in nine years. I must be doing something right.’

  ‘Of course you are. You’re a bloody sight better sergeant than I’ll ever be. But life isn’t as simple as you’d like it to be – not even army life.’

  ‘It’s what I joined for, the fighting. And when it’s over, I’ll get a job in civvy street. They’ll always want people like me. There’s security work.’

  ‘And you might be very good at that, Harry. But only if you adjust your ideas. Not if you want to kill everyone who’s breaking the law. You can’t just beat up anyone who doesn’t obey your rules. You simply can’t do that nowadays, even in the police.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a fucking policeman!’ His face set sullenly. Like most regular army men, Hart had a deep suspicion of and a deep contempt for military policemen. In their view, you only did that job if you weren’t fit for any other sort of army work.

  ‘You’ll be too old for the police anyway, if you complete your twenty-two. But I reckon you’re not going to get much killing, even in the army. Even the situation here is going to be settled by people sitting around a table, not by killing people and capturing territory.’

  ‘The bastards are killing us.’

  ‘I’m not defending the bastards who are killing us, Harry. If we come up against them tomorrow, I’ll be trying to blast them before they blast me, same as you will. I’m just saying you need to think beyond just killing people, because there won’t be too many opportunities for doing that.’ I grinned, wondering how I’d got here. I’d never wanted to argue with a fighting man like Harry. It felt both presumptuous and patronising for a young squirt like me to be disputing things with him like this. I couldn’t think of any way of lightening the argument, so I went shamelessly for flattery. ‘You made sergeant in nine years. You could make WO 2, even WO 1, if you play your cards right. But I think you need to think beyond just killing people.’

  As I tried to get to sleep in my tent, I felt guilty. I shouldn’t risk taking the edge off a fighting man, just when that edge might be most needed. But I’d been fascinated as well as appalled by a man who said he only wanted to kill and only wanted to equip himself to kill. And I was genuinely worried about how one-dimensional men like Harry Hart, who’d accepted the army ethos so completely, would cope with life beyond it, which must inevitably come to them.

  I’d been self-indulgent, too. In this strange place where I felt so alone, I’d needed to re-assert the values of the world from which I had been extracted.

  *

  The next morning was cool and bright again, perhaps a degree warmer than the previous day. This was the weather that made Cyprus a holiday island and the most coveted of army postings in more peaceful times.

  Captain Foulkes made it clear to us that today was not such a time. ‘I’ll put you in the picture and tell you what we have learned so far. EOKA are in this area: we know that from what you chaps discovered yesterday. In the four valleys which you covered on this side of the peak, you found the sites of three fires. There were approximately five miles between each site. We found the slogan ENOSIS in two places, but bits of propaganda don’t matter to us: it’s better that they’re spending their time cutting out letters rather than cutting throats in Nicosia or Larnaca. We’re moving north today, covering another flank of the mountain.’

  Harry Hart was in search of the villain who could make him a hero. ‘Is Grivas with them, sir?’

  ‘We don’t know that, sergeant. He may well be. He’s certainly directing the movements of his unofficial army in this region. But the Troodos covers a huge area, as you’re well aware by now.’

  I felt bold enough to speak up for the first time. ‘Do we know how many men Grivas has deployed in our area, sir?’

  ‘It’s difficult to say. They like to move in groups of around fifteen to twenty. From the evidence of the three fires you’ve found, that would give us forty-five to sixty. But that’s not much more than guesswork. They recruit from towns and villages as they proceed. Locals tend to join them for particular attacks, then go back to their usual work afterwards; that’s often the way with terrorists. It’s always difficult to estimate how many of them are around at any particular moment. But remember that we are a regular, organised, well-equipped army. Provided that we keep our discipline, we have the edge on Grivas’s collection of layabouts and discontents. And we’ll make it count!’

  There was a ragged cheer of affirmation from the thirty-six men he was addressing. I tried not to entertain the thought that one at least of his sergeants was neither a regular nor organised. But I couldn’t dismiss the idea that EOKA knew and loved this country, which was alien to us. I wanted to ask how much this silent and concealed enemy knew about British army planning and the movements of this particular section of it. But of course I said nothing. I knew I’d only get a bland and evasive reply, the sort I’d have given myself if I’d been in Foulkes’s boots.

  Standing silently beside the eight men I was to lead, I was seized once again by the overwhelming sense of farce which seemed to inform most of my army experience. I knew I mustn’t allow it to grip me here, in this most real of situations, where life was pared to the bone. Life and death might be involved here. And the men on both sides cared about what they were fighting for, so this was no moment for cynicism.

  Yet I couldn’t escape the vision of the enemy watching us and smiling at the futile moves the stupid British were making. In these hills, we were the clumsy foreigners. It was the nativ
es who knew the best strategies.

  But Captain Foulkes was speaking again; I needed to listen and take note. ‘Slightly different strategy from yesterday, chaps, because of different terrain.’

  Officers always used that word, ‘chaps’, when they wanted to be matey. If they were left one to one with us, we wouldn’t be chaps then. You had to be ‘out of the top drawer’ to be a suitable companion for an officer. I was feeling very vinegary this morning. Perhaps I was still depressed by my exchanges with Harry Hart last night. I knew that Foulkes was a decent man, doing his best like all of us in this strange situation.

  This was an acting game, really. Foulkes probably didn’t know much more than the rest of us. No doubt he was having to force the conviction into his voice as he issued our orders. ‘The north side of this hill slopes more gently and uniformly than the valleys you covered yesterday. There are possible hiding places which need to be investigated, but generally speaking you’ll be able to see much further than you could yesterday. For that reason, the groupings will be different. Sergeant Hart and Sergeant Gregson?’

  ‘Sah!’ I let Harry’s thunderous monosyllable answer for both of us.

  ‘You will combine your groups of eight men and operate together. You should fan out across the hillside wherever possible, to ensure comprehensive coverage of your allotted area. Is that clear?’

  ‘Sah!’ Harry Hart positively enjoyed subservience, I thought sourly. But he was a necessary cog in the well-oiled army machine.

  We piled into a truck and travelled fourteen slow miles to confront this new flank of the mountain. The slopes here were smoother than the ones we had climbed yesterday, as Foulkes had told us they would be. But they looked long and monotonous. My experienced Lake District eye told me that it would take us four to five hours to scale this side of the mountain. For mountain it certainly was: this was no hill, whatever the officers might call it. I scanned the long rise for any sign of EOKA, saw none, shouldered my rifle, and prepared for a taxing day as the sun climbed steadily.

  Hart and I took the extreme positions, one at each end of our ragged line of men, with fourteen privates and two corporals toiling steadily up the slopes between us. Hart signalled the first ‘Take five’ after two hours and we lit our Woodbines and gazed back towards our starting point to assess what we had so far achieved in the way of height.

  One of my men was a Brummie who had never climbed before the previous day. He gazed towards the peak through the smoke of his fag and said, ‘You feel small up here.’ He swept his eyes round towards the two or three buildings in the valley behind us, which looked like toys from this height.

  ‘It’s the effect of the mountains.’ My evangelist’s zeal sprang too readily forth – perhaps it was escapism. ‘When you see only peaks and skies above you, it puts things into perspective. Human concerns always seem to become more petty as you climb higher.’

  Harry Hart glared at me as if I were speaking treason. ‘We need to keep our eyes trained for Greek bastard Cyps! That’s why we’re here. We haven’t been sent up here to enjoy a day’s hike!’

  I nodded cheerfully. ‘Hence the rifles and the ammo. So that we can blast the people who live here off the face of the earth, if we get the chance.’ I felt men looking at me and realised I must preserve morale. ‘Sergeant Hart is right. It’s good to breathe in clear mountain air, but we need to keep our eyes skinned all the time. It’s when you relax that you’re at your most vulnerable.’

  In the absence of any trace of EOKA, we made steady progress. We were approaching the top of this seemingly interminable slab of mountain when we stopped for our major break and unwrapped the packed lunches which were our field rations. I found a convenient flat rock and gazed across at the ground on the other side of the fissure which had appeared beside us as we neared the appointed summit of our climb. ‘Food always tastes better when you’re high in the mountains,’ I said enthusiastically to the men around me. ‘When you’ve climbed hard and you’re hungry and tired, marge taste like butter and cookhouse sandwiches taste like caviar!’

  ‘I’ve never had caviar,’ said the Brummie dolefully.

  ‘Neither have I,’ I said hastily, anxious to assert my proletarian status.

  It was at that moment we heard the first shot.

  It caused a rapid reaction in the eighteen men who had been enjoying a well-earned outdoor lunch. To those inexpert in army procedures, it might well have looked like panic. Hart and I ordered our men to take cover, but that was a reflex action and hardly necessary.

  We’d been sensible enough to select a gentle hollow to provide us with a little cover for our longest rest of the day. Now we scrambled between rocks of various sizes at the edge of it and prepared to defend ourselves. The bullet had come from the other side of that deep fissure beside us, from behind an irregular line of rocks that provided natural cover.

  Whilst the men trained their sights on those dark shapes and watched for any sort of movement, I snatched a quick look behind me, in case the single shot had been no more than a diversionary tactic. Perhaps the real attack was going to come from an entirely different quarter. But there was no sign of the enemy there – my ‘people who live here’ had become ‘the enemy’ with the sharp crack of that single shot. The self-preservation instinct is much stronger than liberalism.

  Even as I glanced fearfully behind me, a more concerted burst of fire confirmed that our attackers were concentrated behind that ridge of rocks which stood out in black profile against the sun. We were not in great danger now, so long as we remained sensibly behind the rocks on which we were resting our rifles. These were much superior to the enemy’s armaments, Captain Foulkes had said. I was suddenly grateful to that young and erect symbol of British authority.

  A voice behind me said, ‘You’re the sniper. You give the firing orders.’

  It was Harry Hart, taut as a drawstring, eyes on the long row of rocks on the other side of the chasm. I shut my eyes: you couldn’t laugh now, however great the absurdity. I summoned al the authority I could muster. ‘They’ve chosen a good spot. We’re not likely to hit anyone, unless he bobs out and shows himself. But let’s show them that we’re not sitting ducks and that we’ve located where they are. Spread out a little and choose a target exactly opposite you. We need an enfilade of fire, so that they know we’ve got them covered. With a bit of luck, they’ll think they’re heavily outnumbered. Get into position without showing yourselves. Sergeant Hart will tell you when to fire.’

  I couldn’t believe that I was giving orders like this, or that fighting men were taking me seriously. There was nothing here that had even been mentioned to me in training. Perhaps I was directing a posse in a cowboy film. But there were no horses here, and an enemy we didn’t know and had never seen.

  None of us knew how many Cyps there were across there, or what kind of arms they carried. A ragged volley from the distant ridge of rocks confirmed that they had us in their sights. No casualties, but a fragment of rock flicked the beret of the man next to me. They had the range.

  It was difficult to judge just how far away they were, with the deep cleft of ground between us. Three to four hundred yards, I thought, but I knew I was guessing. There weren’t many of them, unless some were holding fire. That was unlikely, I thought. Those unseen men were controlled by ideology, not discipline. There was movement now; an arm waved above the rocks, and Harry Hart gave us the order to fire. I kept the rifle sight steady and pressed the trigger very gently, as I remembered I should do for accuracy. You had to obey all the rules when you were good enough to be a designated sniper.

  The fierce kick of the butt against my shoulder told me finally that this was for real. We had fired in pleasing unison – good old British army discipline. We couldn’t possibly have hit anyone, but we heard a pleasing cacophony of bullets against rock in the distance. We’d let the buggers know that we were armed and organised, that we planned to be the hunters not the hunted. It was important for the men around me to know t
hat we were the aggressors here.

  I was thinking about my men, acting almost like a proper sergeant. I felt surprisingly calm. The two-year farce of my national service had suddenly become a very black one.

  We lay tense and observant, whilst seconds stretched slowly into minutes. No more shots came from behind the boulders we were studying so intently. Then I caught a movement, perhaps a hundred yards right of the point whence the firing had come, a little lower down the mountain. A man’s head and shoulders, moving fast. Then others following at the same point, passing across a gap between the rocks where there was no cover and each figure was visible for a fraction of a second.

  Others had seen it as well as me. Hart gave the order to fire again, but we had probably missed the chance. Unless there were others following a different route, there were no more than a dozen of them at the outside. I looked at Hart twenty yards away along the line of our soldiers, willing him to take over.

  He yelled at the men, ‘Round the top end of this dip, then down the other side. Fast! We’ll have the bastards!’

  Probably he knew, as I did, that there was little chance of that, unless the Cyps stayed to confront us. The fissure between us and the enemy was too steep-sided for us to move directly. As Hart had seen, we needed to move a little higher, skirt the top of the chasm, then descend across gently sloping ground towards the spot whence the enemy had chosen to attack us.

  We did this as rapidly as we could, moving in single file, adopting a low, simian gait which took advantage of whatever minimal cover was on offer. No further bullets followed the earlier fire against us. Gathering confidence from this, we moved more swiftly and openly as we approached the spot whence that attack had come.

  We stopped there on Hart’s command for a moment. There was flattened grass where men had lain and trained weapons upon us. I glanced back at the spot where we had been then. With the sun now behind us, it looked very close, as if any target there must have been very exposed. But none of us had been hit. And the enemy, once they had been spotted, had retreated. That made others as well as me more confident. Harry Hart shouted, ‘Come on, lads! Let’s get the bastards! We’ll teach them to take potshots at British soldiers!’