Corporal Cotton's Little War

by John Harris

  ‘Recce plane.’ Docherty said. ‘Probably flying south to see what’s lying in Suda.’

  As the German’s engines faded, they became aware once more of the faint thud of guns to the north.

  ‘Some poor bastard’s copping it.’

  They stood listening for a while, their eyes on the speck of the German machine disappearing southwards. Then Cotton turned and began to scramble across the last of the boulders to drop the few remaining feet to Xiloparissia beach. Immediately, he saw Loukia lying at the side of the narrow bay under the overhanging trees. She was blackened by fire and the branches that threw their shadows across her were charred. The splintered mast lay over the stern, its tip in the water, a tangle of wire stays and halyards. From where he stood, she looked a total wreck and his heart sank, but then, as he drew nearer, he saw that ropes had been attached to the shore.

  ‘Who put those there?’ he asked, gesturing as the girl appeared alongside him with the others.

  ‘Chrysostomos,’ she said.

  ‘She’s high out of the water,’ Docherty pointed out.

  ‘She’s bloody nearly afloat,’ Cotton agreed. ‘It looks as if they’ve pumped all the petrol out.’

  When he questioned her, the girl agreed that her cousin and his friends had probably emptied the tanks.

  ‘Where’s the petrol?’

  ‘Ashore somewhere. Hidden, I think. I suppose they’ll sell it, because the fishermen would like it. I think she was almost empty when she ran ashore. Perhaps her crew were expecting to take on more at Antipalia.’

  ‘How do you know she was going to Antipalia?’

  ‘Chrysostomos told me.’

  ‘How did he know? He couldn’t have found out from the crew. The Germans murdered them all, he said.’

  ‘Perhaps Giorgiou Xilouris told him. He was an engineer in the boatyard there.’

  Cotton paused, waiting until Docherty and Gully had moved ahead. Apart from Patullo, and Shaw and perhaps Chief ERA Duff, he’d been the only man in Claudia who’d known about the money and guns Loukia had been carrying, and he’d only been told, he suspected, to encourage him to volunteer for the job of getting them back.

  ‘Where did Chrysostomos get his tommy-gun?’ he asked. ‘I wouldn’t have thought there were many of those about.’

  She shrugged and he went on. ‘Did he find anything on board?’

  ‘Tinned food. I think they got a lot of that.’

  Docherty had managed to scramble aboard Loukia now, climbing along the bow of a tree and dropping to the deck. He disappeared inside the engine room.

  ‘What’s it look like?’ Cotton shouted up to him.

  ‘Engines look all right,’ Docherty said. ‘Except some bugger’s stripped a lot off ’em.’

  ‘What, for instance?’

  ‘Plugs, for a start.’

  ‘Could they be made to work?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What if we replaced the missing bits with the same bits from Claudia? They’re sister ships.’

  There was a pause then Docherty’s head shot up above the well deck, his eyes wide. The simplicity of what Cotton had suggested had startled him. ‘Yeh,’ he said. ‘By Christ, I think they could!’

  ‘How about the propellers?’

  Docherty climbed down to the beach and stripped off his clothes. Indifferent to the girl, he stood stark naked, his body white and knotted with muscle, studying the stern of the boat.

  The girl was watching with interest but no sign of embarrassment. Docherty grinned. ‘She’s never seen one like mine before,’ he said. ‘Ask her if she’d like to hold it, Cotton.’

  Cotton said nothing, faintly embarrassed that the girl might have understood, and Docherty waded out into the water and started to swim. Drawing a deep breath, he disappeared under the stern of the boat. He came up panting.

  ‘One screw’s okay. One’s lost a blade.’ He looked excited suddenly. ‘We could hammer out that bent one on Claudia and put it in its place. It’s the same side.’

  ‘How about the rudders?’

  ‘Twisted like a dog’s hind leg. Both of ’em. You’d never use ’em.’

  ‘That the lot?’

  ‘How much more do you want?’ Docherty frowned. ‘You still ain’t got a rudder, remember. You ain’t got a single sound bloody rudder between both boats.’

  ‘Why not drop ’em out and rig a jury rudder? We’ve got a chippy with us. Why can’t he make one? Or why not straighten the bent rudder from Claudia? Build a fire. Get it hot and hammer it straight. Can it be done in the water? We’ve got a diving suit.’

  Docherty frowned. ‘It might.’

  There was a long silence and Cotton’s impatience broke out once more. ‘We’ve got one bent screw which we ought to be able to straighten, one good screw and one bent rudder! Surely to Christ we can do something! We’ll have two good engines. We can manoeuvre with them at a pinch.’

  ‘It’s a hundred and fifty miles to Crete.’

  ‘In a straight line. With a sea that’s mostly flat calm. We’ve only got to get her out of this bloody bay and point her south. After that, all we’ve got to do is keep her on course.’

  His heart thumping excitedly, Cotton climbed to the deck of Loukia. The wheelhouse was blackened by smoke and flames but it seemed intact. He tried the wheel. It wouldn’t move.

  The compass, the chronometer, the binoculars and the charts had all disappeared, together with the Anglepoise lamp from the chart table. The chloro-sulphonic container for making smoke was still on deck, however, as though whoever it was who had stripped the boat had not understood what it was and left it there.

  ‘The buggers got the rum,’ Docherty said in a grieving voice.

  The captain’s cabin had been denuded of everything and the radio cabin contained only shards of ruined bakelite and the remains of a transmitter. There was no sign of the receiver beyond a few power leads. A fire had also started near the engine room but had been put out before it had done more than char the woodwork of the alleyway and buckle the doors. There was no sign of the equipment normally carried on deck – the scrambling net, the dinghy, the Carley float, the rubber raft and the boathooks. Even the mountings for the Lewises had been removed while the 20mm seemed to have received a direct hit from a shell and was hanging half over the stern, the barrel split, the empty drum a torn rag of steel, the recoil spring and breech shattered.

  ‘That’s no good,’ Docherty said.

  ‘Mounting’s not damaged,’ Cotton pointed out flatly.

  Gully was standing chest-deep in the water by this time, his hand on the hull, staring at the chine where it had been splintered by contact with the rocks.

  ‘What’s it look like?’ Cotton asked.

  Gully lifted his head and smiled. It lifted Cotton’s heart because he knew it meant good news.

  ‘A bloody sight better than Claudia,’ he said. ‘She’s almost afloat and all the holes are above the water line.’

  ‘Can they be repaired?’

  ‘Nothink that can’t be sorted out with a bit of good ’Onduras me’ogany. Aft, when she settles under way, the ’oles would be under water and they’ll have to be fixed. But, lying like this, I could work on ’em. I’d ’ave to make a raft or somefing. But it could be done. There are some ’oles forrard, too, but none of the ribs is damaged.’

  ‘Could it be done quickly? We’d have to be quick in case the Germans came, wouldn’t we?’

  Gully nodded. ‘Yes, it can. There are a lot of small ’oles, o’ course – bullet holes, but they can be plugged. What about aft? I can’t see underneath her. Is there much water in her?’

  Cotton went through the boat systematically, lifting the floor boards and examining the bilges. There was no sign of weapons or money, he noticed. He climbed on deck.

  ‘A bit forrard that must have got in as she came in here,’ he said. ‘Aft, there’s not much at all, so she must be all right there.’

  ‘That’s all right, then.’ Gully grinned.
‘I could make some makeshift rivets and put canvas over the ’oles forrard, then put planks over ’em and screw ’em in place.’

  ‘What about aft?’

  ‘That’ll ’ave to be mended proper. Take out the planks and put in new ones.’

  ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘’Course I can, if I give me mind to it.’

  Cotton frowned. ‘Then give your bloody mind to it,’ he said.

  As they met on the foredeck, they were all grimy from climbing about the charred interior of the boat.

  ‘What about the Germans?’ Gully asked as they climbed down again to the beach. ‘Won’t they come?’

  Cotton asked the girl but she shook her head. ‘Chrysostomos heard them talking in the café in Kalani. They think she’s a total wreck.’

  They had to admit that she looked a wreck but, though to a landsman she presented the picture of irreparable damage, to a sailor it was clear that with a little effort she could be made to float again.

  ‘We’d better get back to Claudia,’ Cotton said. ‘And shift everything we want off her before the Jerries come back to pump out the petrol.’

  They stood on the beach, staring up at the battered boat, all of them suddenly more cheerful. Until that moment, their future had looked bleak. Now there seemed a modicum of hope.

  ‘Let’s get cracking,’ Cotton said.

  They turned and set off across the beach, walking in the sea as the girl had shown them, to avoid leaving footprints in the sand. But, halfway across, a man emerged from the rocks and dropped to the shingle. He wore khaki shorts and a shirt and carried a revolver.

  They all stopped dead and Cotton wondered for a moment if they had at last met the true Resistance on the island. Then he realised that on the torn sleeve of his shirt, the newcomer wore three blue stripes and he was grinning at them.

  ‘Sure glad to see you boys,’ he said. ‘I’m Kitcat. Fred Kitcat. Canuck Air Force.’

  Six

  Kitcat was a small man, completely unlike the pictures of the traditional Canadian that Cotton had in his mind. He was blond, his skin burned and peeled by the sun, and his face was covered by a large moustache and several days’ growth of gingerish beard.

  ‘A goddam Messerschmitt got us near Kotlinos,’ he said. ‘We were flying a Blenheim and they say that if you jump from a Blenheim you hit the tail or get your head cut off by the aerial, so we rode her down. Only me and Travers got out. I got into the dinghy and pulled him in after me. He sure looked bad, and it seemed as if it was all up with me.’ He gestured towards Lozikia. ‘Then this goddam boat appeared round the corner of the island. Jeeze, man, I’ve never been so pleased to see anything in all my life.’

  Cotton’s face showed his surprise. He’d always imagined Canadians to be strong, silent types eight feet tall, thick-set and granite-jawed. Certainly those he’d seen in Canadian ships bearing strange names like Nonacha and Talkeetna and Athabaska that he’d bumped across always seemed to be. It was something to do with the Rocky Mountains and all the forests they had, he believed.

  He wasn’t to know that Kitcat had been a shop assistant from a small town called Pickle Elbow in Ontario, who’d never lived an outdoor life and whose job would have made it pointless being either strong or silent, anyway.

  Besides which, since he hadn’t spoken to anyone for several days, his pleasure at seeing Cotton and his party quite overcame any Canadian reticence he might have had, and his words tumbled eagerly over themselves as he explained what had happened.

  ‘They pulled us aboard,’ he went on. ‘But Travers died right off. They were going to Antipalia.’ Kitcat’s face changed and seemed to close down, as if a shutter had dropped across it. ‘Some mission they were on, I guess. It was decided to take him on there and bury him. But then these goddam MAS boats appeared and that was that. This guy, Samways, who was in command, decided to run for this place. The Eyeties kept hitting us but we weren’t doing so badly because it was only bullets. But then they got a shell on the cannon. That killed three of the crew and put holes in the stern. Then they put one in the forecastle and it hit the stove and set the kerosene on fire and started an explosion in a can of petrol by the engine room door. We were on fire as we ran in and the boat was full of smoke. The mast came down as we hit the shore.’

  Kitcat paused and drew a deep breath. ‘Samways put her on the beach so she wouldn’t sink under us,’ he went on. ‘He thought we might salvage her, do a bit of juggling with the engines to get one going, and get out far enough to wait for the navy or something. But we hit a rock as we came in and I guess the props are done for.’

  Cotton pointed at the hill. ‘What were you doing up there?’ he asked.

  ‘Just sitting,’ Kitcat said warily.

  ‘Got a gun?’

  Kitcat grinned and waved the revolver. ‘Yeah. I’ve got a Bren too.’

  ‘A Bren, for God’s sake!’ Cotton’s heart leapt, and his brain started to click-click again. Three-oh-three, twenty pounds weight, rate of fire 450–550 rounds a minute. One of the best infantry weapons in service, its only fault that it was so accurate all the rounds hit the same spot. But, at least, what it hit it demolished. ‘Where’d it come from?’ he asked.

  Again the shutter came down across Kitcat’s face. ‘We had one or two on board.’

  ‘On a boat?’ Docherty asked. ‘What for?’

  Kitcat ignored the question and Cotton didn’t ask why, because he already knew the answer.

  ‘It’ll be useful,’ he said. ‘Got any ammo?’

  ‘Six magazines and a spare barrel.’

  Cotton smiled. ‘Can you use it?’

  ‘Rather use a Browning or a Vickers K.’

  Cotton’s smile widened. ‘We’ve got two Lewises.’ He glanced about him. Xiloparissia Bay was narrower than Kharasso Bay, with two large clumps of rocks in the entrance. How Loukia, in her damaged state, had run between them without hitting them he couldn’t imagine. ‘What happened to the crew?’ he asked.

  Kitcat frowned. ‘The Germans shot ’em,’ he growled.

  ‘Couldn’t you stop ’em? With the Breen?’

  ‘I couldn’t see ’em. The trees were in the way. I just heard the shooting. When I got down to the beach the whole goddam lot were dead.’ Kitcat indicated a large blue-grey rock close to the water’s edge. ‘They were lying in front of that thing. They’d stripped ’em of their watches and wallets and everything. They’d even cut one of Samways’ fingers off to get his ring. It was a good one. I’d noticed it.’ His face twisted in a spasm of unhappiness, and as he turned and pointed, they saw that there was a line of graves at the other end of the beach.

  ‘I buried ’em,’ Kitcat said. ‘I didn’t do it so goddam good but I buried ’em. Then I thought the Germans might come back so I went on board for food. There was some left but they’d already stripped the blankets and things. After that I went up the slope there and lived for four days under some bushes. I came down when I saw you. You come to pick me up?’

  As Cotton explained why they were there and what had happened to Claudia, Kitcat’s face fell.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he groaned. ‘I’m right back where I was then, aren’t I? In the shit. All the same,’ he continued, ‘I guess it’s better being in the shit with friends than being in the shit on your own. If your boat’s wrecked, what are you doing here?’

  ‘We think we might repair this one,’ Cotton pointed out.

  Kitcat’s eyes lit up but his enthusiasm died quickly. ‘You must be joking,’ he said.

  ‘Samways thought you might, didn’t he?’

  ‘Well, yeah, I guess he did at that.’ Kitcat shrugged. ‘You can count on me anyway.’ He indicated his stripes. ‘Don’t take no notice of these. They’re only aircrew stripes. Until I became an air gunner I was just a goddam fitter.’

  ‘Engine or airframe?’ Docherty asked.

  Kitcat stared at the stoker. ‘Engine,’ he said. ‘I was going to re-muster as a flight engineer for one of the new four-
engine jobs, as a matter of fact. Anything’s better than a Blenheim.’

  Nobody was listening to him and Docherty grinned at Cotton. ‘We’ve got help,’ he said. He swung back to the Canadian. ‘Can you swim?’

  Kitcat gazed at him, puzzled. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m a good swimmer.’

  ‘Under water?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  ‘That makes three of us,’ Cotton said. ‘Where’s the Bren?’

  Kitcat gestured. ‘Up there.’

  ‘Get it. Go with him, Docherty. I think we’re in business again.’

  When they returned to Claudia, however, Docherty let out a howl of fury.

  ‘The Germans have been!’ he yelled. ‘They’ve pinched the bloody spares!’

  Cotton ran to the wheelhouse. The blood had dried to black now but the place was full of flies and loud with the sound of their buzzing.

  ‘It wasn’t the Germans,’ he growled. ‘It was those bloody Greeks.’ He gestured at the girl who was watching them with a worried face. ‘Her cousin and his pals! They’re going to use ’em to repair Loukia.’ He turned to Gully. ‘Get Bisset! Quick!’

  By the time Bisset appeared, Docherty was quivering with disappointment and rage.

  Cotton glared at Bisset. ‘Where were you?’ he demanded angrily. ‘That bloody Petrakis has pinched everything!’

  Bisset didn’t lose his temper. ‘I was up there,’ he said, gesturing. ‘Building a shelter for the kid and fetching him water.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have stopped the bastards?’

  ‘If you go up there–’ Bisset refused to become angry – ‘you’ll notice you can’t even see the boat. And if I had seen ’em, I could hardly have stopped ’em. You had the rifles.’ He looked gravely at Cotton who flushed as he realised the injustice of his accusations. ‘Finally,’ he went on quietly, ‘it seems to me that instead of arguing how we lost the things, we’d be better occupied bending our minds to the problem of getting ’em back, don’t you think?’

  Cotton came to life and whirled on the girl. ‘Where are they?’ he demanded. ‘Where have they gone?’