Sergeant Gregson's War

by Jim Gregson

  I looked at the service watch that had been issued to me for this exercise. It was twenty-seven minutes since we’d left the hollow where we’d been fired upon. The Cyps were moving downhill, over territory they knew well. They’d be a mile and a half away by now, perhaps more. I suppressed a feeling of relief about that. We weren’t going to catch them on the mountain, and once they’d left it they’d be out of our area quickly. Even if they didn’t have transport, villagers would shelter them, pretending to the British that they had legitimate occupations in the rural life of the region. There was sympathy for their cause, even among those who would take no active part in it.

  The best we’d be able to claim would be that we’d suffered no casualties and driven this bunch of Grivas’s men out of the Troodos. That would be a negative sort of success.

  Then, when we had moved four hundred yards down the slope in feverish pursuit, I caught a movement behind rocks on our left. I was at the back of the group, with Hart racing along as fast as he could go at the front in pursuit of glory. I yelled out urgently, ‘Watch out to the left!’

  If there were two or three men there with rifles or Sten guns, they could do a lot of damage to our exposed file of men plunging down the slope. But no shots came. There were not two or three armed and savage men behind those boulders, but one young, wounded and frightened man.

  We moved cautiously in upon him and rounded the rock with rifles trained, then relaxed.

  He was little more than a boy. Sixteen, perhaps. He had black, unkempt hair and the brown skin of one who spent much of his life in the open air. His brown eyes looked wide and unnaturally large in the thin, terrified face. He held his hands above his head in submission and he was gesturing with his chin towards his side. The lower part of his shirt was soaked in blood. There was a small hole towards the front of it and a larger, more ragged one six inches further back.

  One of our bullets must have hit him. I wondered irrelevantly whether it was mine and hoped, even more irrelevantly, that it wasn’t.

  Sergeant Hart had him by the throat when I arrived. ‘Tell us where that bunch of fucking cut-throats have gone, you little bastard! Tell us right now, or we’ll fucking kill you!’ He pressed his rifle against top of the slender throat, forcing the boy’s head back whilst he dropped both his hands to clutch at his side. Harry was wide-eyed with hate and quivering with frustration.

  The youth probably knew not a word of English. But he understood what this British sergeant was threatening and he believed him. His eyes were as wide and as unblinking as Hart’s. But they were so swollen with fear that they seemed to fill his face, overwhelming his other features. He was whimpering with fear and he managed only four words, ‘No! I no know!’ He shrieked with pain as he took his hands away from his side and tried to raise them again above his head.

  Hart pressed the rifle even harder into his captive’s throat, until the youth fell onto his back with a scream of agony. One hand clutched the wound in his side, with blood now seeping between his fingers. The other one was held up in supplication towards the man pressing the rifle into his throat.

  Hart moved the rifle and held it in his left hand. He threw his right hand in a wide arc, crashing the back of it hard against the face of his cringing adversary. ‘Tell us where they’re heading, bastard! This is your last fucking chance!’ He lifted his rifle by the barrel and held it in both hands above the thin body, threatening to swing the butt and crash it down upon the helpless head.

  ‘Enough, Harry! That’s enough!’ I had my hand on his shoulder, shouting before I knew it. I’d planned to let Hart take command and say nothing for the rest of the day. Now, when I least wanted it, I was back at the centre of things.

  Hart looked at me wonderingly, as if he’d forgotten I was there. Perhaps, in the wild aggression of that insane moment, he had forgotten that anyone but he was there. For an instant, I thought he might hit me. But there was never any danger of that; his military discipline was far too deeply entrenched for that to happen. He said, ‘This bugger knows where they’ve gone. He’s got to know. And he’s going to tell us, or we’ll finish him off here and now.’

  ‘He’s not going to tell us. He probably doesn’t know. He’s a kid, Harry. He’s caught up in something he doesn’t understand.’

  Hart looked at the men behind me and read support for him in their faces. ‘He’s attacking the British army. We don’t stand for that.’

  ‘If you want to help EOKA, carry on. The best thing you could do for them is to kill off this lad. He’s wounded and he’s a prisoner. You’ll turn him into a bloody martyr. You’ll bring out hundreds more men against us.’

  I’d no idea whether that was true. It was no doubt wildly exaggerated. I knew only that I had to save the boy.

  Hart stared at me wild eyed. He seemed to be struggling to take in words he did not understand. He glanced down at our prize. The youth lay stricken and fearful, with a trickle of blood from his lip running in slow motion over his chin. ‘This cunt knows stuff! And he’s going to fucking tell us! Don’t come your bloody Geneva Convention rubbish here, Jim. We’re not at war and this sod’s not a soldier.’

  ‘He’ll be questioned, in due course. But not here. And not like this.’

  Hart turned from the figure on the ground at his feet to the expectant faces of the sixteen men behind him. Perhaps he saw some support for me there. I’d no idea about that, because I wouldn’t take my eyes from his. I was an amateur soldier trying to control a professional and I felt that if I gave the slightest sign of weakness I would lose.

  Hart glared at me for another moment, then dropped his eyes to the pathetic figure on the ground. I had words and he hadn’t. And people with words could always outsmart you, unless you had a higher rank. He snarled, ‘Look after the little fucker yourself, then! I’m taking my men off to get those murdering bastards!’

  He broke into a fast trot at the head of his men, racing along, risking a fall on the sloping, uneven ground. The men he led could hardly keep up with him. Action was the relief he needed after all those words. The pursuit of our vanished attackers was as necessary to him as the flow of his blood.

  I looked down at the wounded man on the ground. He understood now that he wasn’t going to be killed, but he looked younger than ever in his exhaustion, and the wound in his side was steadily seeping blood. He’d been a victim for me when he was in danger. Now he was no more than an encumbrance. He was the enemy again – a helpless enemy, maybe, but a man who might have killed any of us an hour earlier. He was a bloody nuisance, but we had to get him down to the valley and the medics. I said, ‘Does anyone know first aid?’

  The corporal in my group, who had hardly spoken all day, said, ‘I know a wee bit. I’ve got the kit.’ He was a Glaswegian; to my great relief he now acted as if he had seen injuries like this before. He wiped the man’s face, stemmed the bleeding on his lip, and turned to the wounds in his side. He cleaned them as gently as a mother tending her child and pressed cotton wool and lint over them. Then he put a strip of plaster across to bind his dressings tight against the wounds, causing his patient to scream with the sudden pain of the constriction as he did so.

  The corporal smiled down grimly on his efforts. ‘You were lucky, son. Just flesh wounds. Six inches left, you could have bought it.’ He looked up from the uncomprehending face into mine. ‘Bullet went in and out of him, sarge. Looks worse than it is. The bleeding’s almost stopped. I should think he can move without doing himself too much damage.’

  The youth who lay wincing beneath us understood not a word of this. But he had divined that we were helping him, that the real danger to him had gone leaping away down the hillside. When I motioned to him that he should rise, he did so, resting heavily upon the arm of the Glaswegian corporal until he had his balance.

  Then his dark eyes flashed left and right over this ground he knew so well, assessing the possibilities of escape. ‘Don’t even think about it!’ I growled harshly into his ear.

&
nbsp; There was no way he was fit for either resistance or escape. I looked at the expectant faces around me. After the exchange I’d had with Hart, I was an unknown quantity to them. They were wondering what this young beanpole who had taken on Sergeant Hart would do next. I spoke with all the authority I could muster. ‘We must get this little sod down to the valley. He’ll be questioned at base about whatever he has to offer. And whatever your feelings, you must treat him with care. He could be a valuable source of information.’ I very much doubted that, but it seemed the best way of protecting our wounded adversary from any further violence.

  The boy limped along, accepting help from men in the uniform he hated when he had to. He clutched the dressing at his side and cried out involuntarily with pain whenever he had to stumble over uneven ground. I realised after a little while that we were letting him lead the way over this terrain he knew so well, even though he was a prisoner in our hands. It was the sensible thing to do, in a world which at that moment did not seem to me at all sensible.

  Captain Foulkes was waiting for us beside the truck that would take us back to base. He came a little way up the mountain to meet us when he saw why we were descending so slowly. We delivered to him the single, wounded prisoner, who was our only evidence of an eventful day. Harry Hart and his party had, as expected, not sighted our EOKA attackers again.

  I gave Foulkes a short verbal report on the events of the day. I had no idea what Hart had said ahead of me. I gave as brief an account as possible of the moment when we had come under fire and of our reaction and subsequent pursuit of the Greek Cypriot attackers. I made no mention of Hart’s treatment of the young man who was now near to collapse behind me. I commended the corporal who had patched up the wounds in the prisoner’s side and rendered him fit in my view to struggle down the mountain with us.

  I turned now to look at the youth. He looked even slighter and more vulnerable as the trappings of our more civilised life closed in around him. ‘This boy will need to be questioned by someone with good Greek, sir. I doubt whether he knows very much about the plans of the senior men who were with him when he was shot.’

  Foulkes nodded, then looked with some distaste at our dubious capture. I think he thought as I did that the youth was more likely to be a nuisance to him than a help. ‘We’ll let the medics attend to him first. I’ll get someone in to question him in the morning.’

  We climbed thankfully into the truck and watched our stricken and pathetic prisoner being led away to a bed and clean sheets and expert medical treatment. He clutched his side still, a slight, stooping exhausted figure.

  A trophy of sorts, in this strange war which wasn’t a war.

  Eighteen

  I cannot remember how much longer I spent on detachment in the Troodos. Days merged into weeks and time seemed irrelevant in that strange world, where we searched for an enemy who technically did not exist.

  It was the usual experience for army men on active service: ten per cent of your time spent in meaningful action, ninety per cent of it in boredom. I led my group of men up and down various hills allotted to us in the Troodos, but without any other major incident. Twice we heard distant firing in other valleys, but we were not attacked ourselves, and did not sight or pursue EOKA forces.

  The threat of being dispatched from this world to the next one at any moment was very slight, but ever present. Without it, I would have thoroughly enjoyed my exploration of the Troodos. It was good mountain country, with some spectacular ridges, though without the lakes which so enhanced my favourite part of England. We weren’t allowed to strike out for the summits, which took the edge off the sense of achievement and reminded us of our darker mission. I wrote short and studiously uninformative letters home to Joy, as security dictated.

  Much to my relief, I was separated from Harry Hart, who was dispatched with his unit to a different sector. Harry was a man I would have wanted by my side in the trenches or the jungle, but not anywhere else. I remained under Captain Foulkes’s command and got to know him quite well, on the basis of a few clipped exchanges in front of the troops and some more informal conversations at the end of the day.

  Foulkes must have known how ill-fitted I was for the tasks of flushing out and pursuing terrorists. Indeed, I made little secret of my limitations in our private exchanges. But he never suggested that he had any doubts in front of the troops: he treated me as if I were as reliable as the most grizzled veteran among his sergeants. In truth, the army system carried me through. The troops I led automatically respected the three stripes on my arm and I kept my face straight and acted as if I knew what I was doing. It helped that I was as fit as any of my men, and far more experienced over mountain terrain than all but one, a Welshman who had spent a lot of time in Snowdonia.

  For the most part, we were engaged in showing the British flag and registering a British presence. We were letting Colonel Grivas know that he could not roam unchallenged over the high ground which seemed to be psychologically important to both sides in Cyprus. I wondered sometimes how I would react to real battle conditions, but I realised in these weeks that the same question applied to most of the younger men in the regular army. Perhaps the difference between them and me was that I had no real wish to find out.

  The regular soldiers, as opposed to national service men, knew that conflict was their raison d’être and could advance their careers. But they lived from day to day and month to month and simply accepted what came to them. It saved you from thinking, the army system. That was an idea that had been quoted with approval to me many times in my various sergeants’ messes. Before I’d been conscripted, I’d spent three years with university tutors who had insisted all the time that I must think for myself. The idea that it was a luxury not to have to think seemed a strange concept to accept, but I was the exception here.

  Then, as abruptly and as irrationally as it had begun, my time in the Troodos was terminated. Foulkes was waiting for me when I returned from an uneventful trek up a shallow valley. ‘You’re to return to Dhekelia. Apparently the Royal Army Education Corps is in urgent need of your services.’

  ‘As it was when I left,’ I said stoutly. ‘Has any reason been given for this startling change in British policy?’

  ‘None whatsoever, Sergeant Gregson. “Ours not to reason why,” as Kipling has it.’

  ‘I think it’s Tennyson, sir.’ It still gave me a little kick to correct an officer, even one I liked. ‘Charge of the Light Brigade. I hope you’re not planning any gallant cock-ups like that here.’

  ‘Who knows?’ said Foulkes cheerfully. ‘I’m only a humble captain. Cock-ups have to come from a much higher level than that to be really effective.’

  *

  My room had been kept for me in the sergeants’ mess at Dhekelia. No one had known how long I was to be away. And, as usual, army rumour had ridden hard on the back of mystery.

  My special skills had been required elsewhere on active service. I was now not only a specialist marksman but the user of a highly sophisticated new weapon, an expensive rifle which was accurate at up to half a mile in the hands of an expert. My mission had been to shoot down Colonel Grivas, after special intelligence had revealed his position in the Troodos. I was not sure how much of this was genuine rumour and how much was a leg-pull perpetrated by Percy Bishop.

  ‘Any luck with the sniping?’ Percy asked at the dinner table on my first night back. I tapped the side of my nose and refused to comment, whilst both of us kept our very different Lancashire faces entirely serious. More comedians to the square terraced mile in Lancashire than anywhere else in the world, I’d read. It was all connected with cotton mills and cobbles and clogs, Percy reckoned.

  We took a quid from two more gullible men an hour later. ‘Jim’s as accurate on the snooker table as he is with his rifle,’ claimed Percy happily.

  I had a much harsher experience when I confronted my commanding officer in the education centre on the following morning. Major Barker was no longer a major. He now had the
brand new insignia of a lieutenant colonel upon his shoulder. He displayed it to me at every opportunity.

  I was almost speechless at the sight, reduced to the monosyllables of ‘Yes, sir, no, sir,’ compelled upon me by the system. Even using the strange criteria that controlled army promotions, it was incredible to me that this over-inflated windbag had been elevated to lieutenant colonel.

  As Barker zoomed his shoulder once more beneath my eyes, I gritted my teeth and asked, ‘Do I gather that congratulations are in order, sir?’

  ‘What? Oh that!’ Barker preened himself coyly, sinking his chin into his neck. He looked like a spoilt and overfed Persian cat. I liked cats, but I’d never taken to Persians. ‘Yes, I’m lieutenant colonel now, don’t you know? Can’t think what I’ve done to deserve it.’

  Neither could I. ‘It’s a mystery, sir, isn’t it?’

  He was too pleased with himself to be as deflated as I’d have wished. ‘Come in very handy for my pension, this new rank will. I’ve only four months to go now, you know.’

  ‘I’m sure the army will miss your services, sir.’

  Irony wasn’t in Barker’s armoury. He took this as a routine compliment. ‘It may be that I have you to thank for this timely promotion, Sergeant Gregson. In some small measure.’

  I hoped intensely that it was not so. ‘How might that be, sir?’

  ‘Well, apparently the authorities were very pleased with many of my educational initiatives. In particular, with my ensuring that so many senior NCOs of long standing in the Dhekelia area have secured success in the ACE Class One examinations. Apparently several units wrote in to confirm their appreciation of what I had offered to them. It was my initiative, of course, but I am aware that you were of considerable help in implementing it and teaching the classes concerned. If I get the opportunity, I shall mention your name in high places.’