Corporal Cotton's Little War

by John Harris

  She looked scared and backed away. ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘You’d better.’ Cotton lifted the tommy-gun and, cocking it, pointed it at her chest. ‘Where are they?’ he demanded.

  ‘They’re hiding.’ She looked agonised and desperate at his change of manner. ‘What have they done?’

  ‘They’ve stolen everything we possessed,’ Cotton said. ‘They’ve been over the whole boat.’ He stopped dead, thinking, then he whirled round. ‘Bisset, you and Chippy go and check the stuff we took ashore! The food. The planks. The dinghy. And the guns. Don’t forget the guns.’

  Without a word, Bisset turned and climbed from the boat, followed by Gully. Cotton pushed the girl against the engine-room bulkhead and pointed the gun at her again.

  Kitcat’s jaw hung open. ‘What’s she done, for Christ’s sake?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s not what she’s done,’ Cotton snarled. ‘It’s what her bloody cousin’s done! We were going to transfer everything from this boat to Loukia and repair it. The bastards have taken the lot.’

  Docherty glared at the girl who stared back at him with huge dark eyes. ‘You know what she wants, don’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Shut up, Docherty,’ Cotton said. Even now, in his fury, he was embarrassed by Docherty’s suggestion.

  ‘She wouldn’t worry. Them wops go at it like ferrets.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  Docherty was about to continue but changed his mind and stopped. Cotton’s face was dark with anger and for a moment Docherty thought he might even turn the tommy-gun on him.

  Bisset reappeared. He looked as calm as if he’d just been to fetch the milk from the front step. ‘Nothing’s been touched,’ he said. ‘Petrol, wood, dinghy, guns. They’re all there.’

  ‘That’s something then,’ Cotton said. He gestured at the girl with the muzzle of the gun. ‘Where’s Petrakis?’ he demanded.

  She hesitated before replying. ‘He’s in the goatherds’ shelter,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  She pointed to the hill. ‘It’s up there. It’s a big cave with room for the animals in winter.’

  ‘Do you know where it is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’d better show me the way.’

  Her face became anguished. ‘I daren’t.’

  Cotton grew angry. ‘Who is this cousin of yours, for God’s sake? God Almighty? I want back everything he took off this boat. It belongs to the Royal Navy, and I want it.’

  She gazed at him for a long time and he could see she was trembling; then she nodded.

  He went on staring at her for a moment longer, his eyes angry, then he turned. ‘Gully, you look after the kid. Docherty, get everything ashore we’re likely to need. I’ll go after that lot with Bisset. Christ knows when we’ll be back but we’ll be bringing what they took. You can bet your life on that.’

  Docherty didn’t argue and Cotton was about to climb down from the boat with Bisset and the girl when he stopped and thrust one of the rifles into Kitcat’s hands. ‘Can you use one of these things?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m better in a turret.’

  ‘I expect you’ll manage. Keep your eyes open.’

  He thrust the second rifle at Bisset and gave the girl a push. Without speaking, she led them along the water’s edge to the rocks and began to climb.

  Halfway up she tried to explain. ‘It was none of my doing,’ she said.

  ‘Never mind that,’ Cotton said sharply. ‘Just show us where he is.’

  She didn’t speak again, but kept on climbing. As he started to pant, Cotton wondered if she’d try to run. He knew he’d never be able to catch her if she did and he knew he couldn’t shoot her. He hoped she’d not try to run.

  The night’s rain had left the path running with water and slippery. It was an old stream bed and climbing it was like going up a rickety staircase which was always in danger of collapsing. Constantly, their feet slid away from them as the surface crumbled, and Cotton was wearing only rubber-soled pumps so that the stones dug into the soles of his feet.

  Near the top of the hill, the girl branched off from the stream bed between two boulders, and they saw they were in a second smaller stream bed that fed water to the other. They continued to climb across the purple-brown boulders, their shoes everlastingly slipping in the mud, and again the girl turned, this time by a huge rock overhung by cactus. In front of them, Cotton saw a pile of manure and realised that for some time he’d been treading in the small hoofprints made by a donkey.

  ‘How much farther?’ he asked.

  ‘A long way still.’

  ‘If you try any tricks–’

  She gave him a cold look. She seemed frightened no longer, only full of dislike for him. ‘I shan’t try to trick you,’ she said.

  They went on climbing until the bay below seemed only a cleft in the rocks, and they could no longer see the boat between the trees.

  ‘Chrysostomos will have others with him,’ the girl said. ‘He has men up there and might not want to give you back the things he’s taken.’

  ‘He’d better,’ Cotton growled. ‘How many of them are there?’

  ‘Chrysostomos says there are many.’

  ‘Right.’ Despite his ancestry. Cotton had the Englishman’s contempt for dark-skinned foreigners. He’d often heard it said that an Englishman was equal to two Germans, three Frenchmen and any number of wops, and he believed it. It was nothing to do with race, only background and that sense of superiority the British had enjoyed for generations.

  He turned to Bisset and indicated the rifle. ‘Can you use that thing?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m a Regular like you,’ Bisset said. ‘Among other things in peacetime, they taught you to shoot and not to panic when disaster’s hanging over you.’

  Cotton looked quickly at him, wondering if the airman was suggesting he was getting hot under the collar too soon, but Bisset had the placid self-assurance of a butler bringing in the port and Cotton could only admit to himself that, if there were one thing that Bisset was not, it was excitable.

  The girl’s steps had slowed down now and she began to look uncertain, even unwilling. Cotton gave her a push. ‘Don’t stop,’ he said.

  She gave him a bitter glance and began to climb faster so that it took Cotton all his time to keep up with her. Eventually they reached a small plateau, backed by a low brown escarpment.

  ‘There’s a cave,’ the girl said.

  They moved forward more slowly, keeping close to the cliff and treading warily. At last, they saw the hole in the cliff face. There was no sign of life.

  ‘That it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do they live there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All the time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The bareness, the starkness of the landscape, startled Cotton. ‘How?’ he asked.

  ‘They’ve got fires. And blankets. They carry water up.’

  The sheer graft of it troubled Cotton.

  ‘Girls?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Have you lived here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’ve been here before?’

  ‘I helped them carry bedding up when the Germans came.’

  ‘Are you a Communist too?’

  ‘I believe in God,’ she said. She spoke simply and Cotton didn’t doubt her word.

  ‘Then why do you help them?’

  ‘Because he is part of my family and Greeks are very close. I expect eventually, when things grow better, I shall live in the cave with them.’

  ‘With all those men? Aren’t you afraid?’ Cotton noticed that, in his concern for the bleakness of the life she was choosing, he’d forgotten to be angry with her. She hadn’t forgotten to be angry with him, though.

  ‘Chrysostomos is my cousin,’ she said coldly. ‘He’ll look after me. Besides, by then there’ll be other girls. Someone must resist the Germans.’

  ‘We’re doing our best,’ Cotto
n said.

  She sniffed. ‘But, at the moment, it’s not very good, is it?’ She spoke simply and, remembering Norway and Dunkirk and France and the men being evacuated at that moment from the Greek mainland, Cotton had to admit she was right.

  He stopped. The cave lay just ahead, sheltered by creepers and saplings. He gestured to Bisset and they moved again, the girl behind them now. At the entrance to the cave, they halted again, then Cotton drew a deep breath. God alone knew how many men there were inside and how many of them were armed. He looked at Bisset.

  ‘Right?’ he said.

  ‘Right!’

  They entered the cave at a rush, the girl following them. Then they stopped dead. Inside were Chrysostomos Petrakis, the two other men, Xilouris and Cesarides – and the donkey, munching at a pile of dried grass.

  Cotton stared round him. The cave represented living at its starkest, devoid of comfort beyond mattresses made of ferns and a fire on which a blackened pot simmered.

  ‘Where’s the gang?’ Cotton demanded.

  Petrakis and the others said nothing and Cotton jeered. ‘This all there are?’ he said, realising at once that Petrakis was a man who fought with his mouth, persuading people he was a great leader when his band consisted only of himself, a donkey and two men who were little more than boys.

  The three Greeks had straightened up. They had been bending over a pile of sacks and Cotton saw at once that they contained all the things they’d carried from the boat. Tools. Spark plugs. Spare parts.

  ‘I’ve come for that,’ Cotton said.

  Petrakis smiled. ‘It is only klepsi-klepsi,’ he explained. ‘A little stealing. All soldiers do it. It’s even permitted if it isn’t too much.’

  ‘That lot belongs to His Majesty King George VI.’

  ‘King George VI?’ Petrakis’ eyes glittered. ‘Who is he? I don’t bother with King George VI. Or King George of the Hellenes either. I am a Communist. I suppose you know what a Communist is?’

  ‘We have Communists in England.’

  ‘Pò-pò!’ Petrakis sneered. ‘British Communists are British first and Communists afterwards. Greek Communists are different.’

  ‘I’ve noticed.’

  Petrakis’ face was dark with anger as he gestured at the sacks. ‘This is ours,’ he said.

  ‘It belongs to the Royal Navy,’ Cotton said stubbornly. ‘You stole it. I’ve come for it!’

  ‘No!’ Petrakis barked the word angrily. ‘We need it.’

  ‘What for?’

  Petrakis glanced at the other two Greeks. ‘Because you are losing the war,’ he snarled.

  ‘We’ll win in the end.’ Cotton had never been in any doubt about that. He towered over the Greek, burly, strong and black-haired, the tommy-gun in his fists. ‘Put it in the sacks,’ he said. ‘Then get the donkey loaded. We’re taking it back with us.’

  Petrakis looked at the girl. ‘You brought them here,’ he accused. As he stepped towards her, his hand lifted, Cotton moved in front of him and jammed the muzzle of the tommy-gun into his stomach. Petrakis’ hand dropped and he stared at the girl with glittering eyes.

  ‘You’ll pay for this,’ he said.

  For a moment she stared at him, confused by her loyalties. Then she drew herself up. ‘You do not believe in God!’ she burst out. ‘You have told me often! Your god is the Communist party!’

  Cotton pushed her aside. ‘Load the donkey,’ he said.

  Unwillingly, Petrakis and the other two stuffed their spoils back into the sacks and tied them across the back of the minute beast.

  ‘Better search the place for weapons,’ Cotton said to Bisset. ‘I wouldn’t want to be shot in the back.’

  Bisset moved further into the cave. He returned with two rifles and a tommy-gun.

  ‘That’s a help. Any more?’

  ‘I didn’t see any. But there are plenty of places they could have hidden ’em. I didn’t think now was the time for a prolonged investigation.’

  The girl looked at her cousin and then at Cotton. ‘I must come with you,’ she pointed out. ‘I cannot stay here now.’

  ‘No.’ It didn’t seem unreasonable. ‘Okay. You’d better go ahead and lead the donkey. You go with her, Bisset. I’ll back you up. There’s a manoeuvre for this. It’s called leap-frogging. A hundred yards down the slope – at a nice easy range where you could hit what you aimed at – make yourself comfortable and shout. I’ll pass through you. If they shove their heads out, let ’em have a shot to make ’em pull ’em back quick.’

  As Bisset and the girl set off down the side of the hill with the donkey, following the winding path that curved like a discarded snake skin towards the sea, Cotton waited behind the rocks outside. Up against the escarpment in the sun, the heat seemed stuffy and oppressive. He could hear the mutter of guns to the north and somewhere out of sight the low hum of an aeroplane engine. He shifted restlessly, wanting to be away.

  Petrakis was watching him from just inside the cave and he was aware of his stare of hatred like the blade of a knife. Then he heard Bisset’s shout and, without looking back, he turned and began to march down the path.

  Seven

  ‘All right.’ Major Baldamus looked up at Captain Ehrhardt. ‘So these survivors were picked up and there was another boat, and the Luftwaffe missed it.’

  Ehrhardt shrugged. ‘According to my sergeant, Herr Major, there were no footprints leading from the beach – only into the sea – and he could only imagine, since the boat and the rubber dinghy were missing, together with the weapons – two light machine-guns and a 20-millimetre cannon by the look of the mountings – that this boat must have been accompanied by the third boat you mentioned, and that when the Luftwaffe had gone, they paddled out and were taken on board with what they could salvage. They’re doubtless now back in Crete.’

  Baldamus shrugged, nagged by doubt. There was a lot at stake and he felt it was unsafe to assume too much. ‘But just suppose they weren’t picked up?’ he said.

  Ehrhardt shrugged. ‘There was no sign of them.’

  ‘Even so, we’d be unwise to risk any more men down there yet. It’s just possible, I suppose, that we could be wrong, in which case they’re in those hills with two machine-guns and a cannon. Not exactly something to argue against. Fortunately, they can’t harm us so we’ll leave them alone. However, we’ll have a watch kept – from the sea, as I suggested. What have you found us?’

  Ehrhardt grinned. ‘Two large caiques have been taken over, Herr Major. We found them in the harbour here. We’re mounting machine-guns on one of them at this moment. I’ve sent the other down with drums to lay alongside the wreck in Kharasso Bay and pump out the petrol. It’s better if it belongs to us than to the Greeks.’

  ‘That was quick thinking, Ehrhardt.’

  Ehrhardt grinned again. ‘Well, the other one was stripped and pumped dry by the islanders,’ he said. ‘Just before we arrived. It occurred to me they might try to do the same with this one. When the sergeant went through it yesterday he removed everything that was left.’

  ‘And doubtless at this moment he and his merry men are flogging half of it round the market place in Kalani.’

  ‘It’s soldier’s pay.’

  ‘Indeed. So long as we get some of it. Just for the look of the thing.’ Baldamus lit a cigar and drew gently on it for a while. ‘When your caique’s finished pumping out, have her armed like the other. Their job will be to make sure none of the Greeks slip south to say what’s happening in Yanitsa. They’ll make a daily circuit of the island and keep their eyes well open.’

  Baldamus drew on his cigar comfortably and glanced at the papers on his desk. The build-up at Yanitsa was still increasing; he was erecting tents all round the edge of the strip now, and clearing families from the houses in the village alongside to make billets. A bar had been taken over as a headquarters for the Luftwaffe captain who was running the place, petrol was being stacked in heavy jerricans inside the wire compound that was being put up. Marquees for workshop
s had been erected and a separate mess arranged for the flying crews of the Junkers of Fliegerkorps IX and the Messerschmitts and Dorniers of Fliegerkorps VIII.

  The place was beginning to look important. If it grew any more important, Baldamus decided, it would need someone with the rank of colonel to run it. And that colonel, he intended, would be Renatus von Boenigk Baldamus. General Ritsicz had promised it.

  ‘Make it clear that no one’s to leave the island, Ehrhardt,’ he said. ‘It’s absolutely essential that no one knows we’re here. All fishing vessels are to report nightly and I’ve asked the Italian navy to supply us with a launch. It’s due to arrive tomorrow. General Ritsicz’s got the Wehrmacht to supply an officer and an NCO with sea experience, together with two or three sailors and engineers and someone to fire a gun. After all, the British might decide to do something mad here.’

  As it happened, the British were already doing something mad. At least, some of the British were.

  A sunset like watercolours on wet paper was just fading into darkness as Cotton and Bisset climbed down to Kharasso Bay. Over the noise of the stream they could hear the croak of frogs so that the silence sounded like the silence of a Hollywood thriller. Then a nightingale started singing among the bushes and somehow it relieved the tension.

  Then, as they were walking down the hill, Cotton sensed that everything was not right. He touched Bisset’s arm and stopped. As he listened, he heard the clatter of stones, then, through the foliage, he saw a man picking his way up the slope, moving as fast as he could go, his breath coming in sobbing pants. Under his arm in the last of the light they could see a blue blanket and a jar, and then in the undergrowth they saw a bicycle.

  ‘It’s that chap who hid the rum,’ Bisset said. ‘He’s come back for it.’

  Cotton’s eyes glittered. ‘And the way he’s moving,’ he said, ‘he’s seen somebody on the boat. Get over there. I’ll wait here.’

  The girl was watching them silently, her eyes wide, and Cotton pushed her into the bushes. His stomach heaving, he reversed his rifle and held it by the barrel.

  She put her hand on his arm. ‘What are you going to do, Cotton?’ she whispered.