Corporal Cotton's Little War

by John Harris

  Kalani was a small place, shabby for the most part, and the main road had been taken up for repairs so that the bus had to stop outside the centre of the town and they had to walk the rest of the way over a path made of planks and flat stones.

  The weather was still unsettled, with a fluky wind threatening rain. The sea had risen and the waves were punching at the cliffs, and, as they approached the town centre, the rain finally came. The stones shone in the grey light as it pounded down. Everybody vanished from the streets into the shops and taverns, and the slanting alleys and the climbing steps among the tiers of white cube houses ran with water.

  They found a café and ordered wine. Through the window they could see the jetty and the masts of the boats almost misted away by the rain. A giant acacia shaded the terrace but provided no shelter against the downpour that blew and spat and crackled against the windows. A dozen broad streams rushed down the steps and across the square, carrying pebbles and twigs and scraps of paper with them.

  The café was jammed with people, talking or playing cards. The whitewashed walls were hung with prints of steamers and ferry-boats, and there was a gilt mirror and a picture of a girl in Edwardian dress alongside a photograph of the King of the Hellenes. Everybody seemed nervous and ill at ease, the wireless blaring out in a crackling drone that obscured the voices of the customers. The programme seemed to be one long news bulletin that appeared to consist only of a long list of military disasters. The centre of Belgrade had been destroyed by Nazi bombers which, unopposed and skimming the rooftops, had rained down their missiles on the stricken city for three days. Thousands of people had been killed. ‘Yugoslavia must be crushed,’ the Germans were declaring. Meanwhile the Greek army, which had successfully resisted the Italians for six months, was now on the brink of capitulation before the German might. For Britain, Greece had proved nothing but another Norway. Her expeditionary force of sixty thousand men had been overwhelmed by the sheer weight of metal and, with inadequate air cover, was disintegrating into a nightmare.

  Cotton listened with a stony expression. He had come to find out what was happening and the news was shattering.

  ‘It’ll come right,’ he kept saying to himself, but however hard he searched for a tiny gleam of encouragement, it eluded him. Of a good church-going family, he felt that somewhere there should be divine retribution against the forces of darkness that were oppressing the world, but nowhere – nowhere – could he see any sign of God’s justice.

  From where they sat, they looked over the harbour. But there seemed to be no unusual activity, no ships that could be used for an invasion of Crete or Malta or Egypt, nothing but a lot of caiques, small boats and one lost ferry. It puzzled Cotton, because he couldn’t understand why the Germans had pushed so far ahead of their main army to capture Aeos if they weren’t using it as a jumping-off spot.

  As the rain stopped and the sun came out, they saw the two caiques they’d spotted off Kharasso Bay towing in another vessel with a charred black mark along its side. Its bows were pitted with bomb splinters and it was packed with khaki-clad men, British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers who had tried to escape from the mainland. Some of them were wounded and all of them were saturated.

  Cotton watched them climb ashore, sullen and defeated under the laughter and jeers of the triumphant Germans standing on the jetty. His face wore the same set look it had worn as he had listened to the news, and he sat in grim silence, Annoula’s tragic eyes on his face.

  They hung about Kalani all day. But the trip seemed to have been pointless. Whatever the Germans were up to on Aeos, they were keeping very quiet about it. There weren’t even any rumours and, apart from the sight of the British prisoners of war, the only untoward incident involved more of the tough-looking soldiers they had seen near Panyioti’s house, who had tried to stop the bus they were on. Occasionally they had seen some of them about the town, swaggering along the narrow streets and pushing the islanders into the gutter. Only one boy, hot-blooded enough to be defiant, had disputed their passage, and he was slammed against a wall and left huddled at its foot, his face bleeding, feebly spitting out teeth. Cotton’s great fist clenched but Annoula had dragged at his arm and pulled him away.

  They ate bread and sausage in a bar as they waited for the bus back across the island, drinking a solitary thin beer between them. The German soldiers puzzled Cotton. They had learned there were about three hundred of them, billeted in Panyioti’s place, and Cotton couldn’t make out why an island the size of Aeos – which had already been subjugated – needed three hundred tough soldiers in addition to the Luftwaffe units, lines of supply troops and engineers.

  The bus was late and, as they continued to wait, the soldiers from the captured caique were halted nearby, their eyes bitter and angry, while the German soldiers who guarded them chatted to German pioneers who came up to stare. Cotton’s heart felt like ice. How much longer would it be before the whole of the civilised world was standing sullen and cowed in front of the triumphant Nazis?

  One of the staring Germans, a blond, blue-eyed, ideal Nazi superman, pushed forward. He was staggeringly handsome and eager to show off his ability to speak English.

  ‘I sink ze var goes bedly for you, eh?’ he said to one of the soldiers. ‘But perhaps you do not know how to fight a bettle, hem?’

  The man he addressed, a short, sturdy New Zealander with a face like a terrier, looked up under the lock of greasy dark hair that fell from beneath his helmet.

  ‘Fuck off, you Nazi bastard,’ he said quite clearly.

  The other Germans gave a shout of laughter and the one who had spoken swung his fist in fury. The soldier staggered away, his lip bleeding. As he straightened up, the German glared.

  ‘Vat do you say?’ he demanded.

  ‘I say “Fuck off, you Nazi bastard”,’ the soldier repeated firmly. The German was about to use his fist again when he was dragged away by his friends and a ripple of clapping ran through the café. The New Zealander heard it and gave a mock bow as he wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his hand.

  Cotton’s big hands gripped the table in front of him. His face was like granite, his heavy jaw set, his eyes glittering and angry, and it required a tremendous physical effort to sit still. Annoula saw his distress and put her hand on his, staring at him intensely with her huge black eyes, transmitting her own quiet spirit through the touch of her fingers, trying to express without speaking her sorrow and her sympathy.

  Then the German guards threw away their cigarettes and began to push the soldiers into line again. As they tramped off, their heavy boots crunching against the surface of the road, Annoula leaned forward. ‘It will not always be like this,’ she said.

  Cotton found it hard to see a time when it might be different. The Nazis were swarming all over France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Bulgaria, Rumania, Yugoslavia and now Greece. How much bloody worse could it get, he thought in an agony of shame.

  Her hand was still on his, clutching it with thin strong fingers. It seemed to calm him and, as his heart stopped thudding in his chest, he let out his breath in a long shuddering sigh. Defeat was a terrible thing to watch.

  The bus was already almost full as it arrived for the return journey. It seemed a good idea to go on into Ay Yithion to see Howard and ask the Varvaras’ help in the matter of extra petrol, and Cotton sat in silence the whole way, unaware that he was clutching Annoula’s small paw in his great fist.

  Howard lay on a shabby bed in a whitewashed room, staring at the ceiling, and though he looked bored he seemed better and recognised Cotton at once.

  ‘’Lo, Royal,’ he whispered. ‘Gi’e us a kiss.’

  Cotton smiled and pushed a couple of packets of cigarettes into his hand.

  ‘We goin’ to get away, Royal?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cotton said with certainty. ‘We’ve nearly got the boat fixed. When we have, we’ll come and collect you.’

  ‘You won’t forget?’

  ‘No. We’ll n
ot forget.’

  ‘Good old Royal. Always one to remember.’

  Cotton flushed. ‘They’re red hot on remembering in the Marines,’ he said gruffly.

  Out in the blinding sunshine again, Cotton felt faintly depressed at Howard’s weakness. Annoula was watching his expression. During the day, she had constantly studied him, almost able to read his thoughts. Her own family had been easy-going, devious and careless. Cotton was quite the opposite – meticulous, detailed, rigid in his attitude to duty and painfully honest in his execution of it. Disaster had drawn them together in a flood of fearful uncertainties and she had been conscious for some time of a growing warmth between them.

  ‘He’ll be all right,’ Cotton said to her, trying to reassure himself more than anything else, and she listened to him solemnly, worried by a sense of uncertainty and insecurity such as she’d never known before.

  As they entered the café, looking for the Varvaras, the questioning gaze of twenty different people settled on Cotton; but then the Varvaras entered and, as they sat down alongside him, the suspicious eyes turned aside, satisfied.

  ‘They thought you might be a German,’ old Varvara explained. ‘There have been strangers about. They’re looking for partisans.’

  ‘Are there really partisans?’ Cotton asked, thinking of the wretched group round Petrakis in the goatherds’ cave.

  Varvara’s eyes blazed. ‘Greeks are fighters,’ he said. ‘Didn’t we throw Mussolini out? There are men in the hills near Cape Asigonia.’

  ‘Communists?’

  Varvara looked shrewdly at Cotton. ‘There are Communists and Fascists and farmers and probably a priest or two. They have no politics. They are simply Greeks.’ He shrugged. ‘Unfortunately, they have no guns and soon they’ll need guns.’

  His son indicated the radio. ‘They say the Germans are after the Corinth Canal. If they get that, they’ll cut off the Peloponnese peninsula from the rest of Greece. There’ll be no Thermopylae this time. It would leave the passes over the Pindus Mountains unguarded.’

  His father leaned forward. ‘You have this from the Prime Minister – Koryzis himself?’

  The young man slammed a hand down on the table. ‘I read!’ he snapped. ‘I listen to the radio! I am not blinded by a pride left over from the Golden Age. It’s the end of the British army. The Germans are already saying that they will start the final evacuation of the mainland any day now and that then their aeroplanes at Yanitsa will have a better killing than they did in France and Norway! After that there will be only local resistance – and without guns.’

  Cotton had been listening gloomily, feeling hopeless and helpless. Then he remembered he was a Royal – not somebody out of the back row of the chorus at the Windmill Theatre. He was supposed to know what to do, because his training told him what it was. And even if he weren’t sure what it was, he could still go on trying, couldn’t he?

  His head jerked up. ‘I know where there are guns,’ he said abruptly.

  The Varvaras sat up. ‘Where?’

  ‘In the goatherds’ cave on the slope overlooking Xiloparissia Bay.’

  The girl’s eyes lifted quickly to Cotton’s face but he ignored her.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘May my eyes fall out.’ Cotton fell back on his mother’s way of insisting. ‘May my tongue dry up.’

  Varvara looked at the girl then back at Cotton.

  ‘Do you know the cave?’ Cotton asked.

  ‘Everybody knows it. We shelter there when we’re searching for snails. They come out when it rains and everybody goes looking for them. Sometimes we get caught in a second storm.’

  ‘There are guns there. They were being carried by the British boat in Xiloparissia Bay to Antipalia for any resistance movement that might be started when the Germans came. When the Germans searched her, they missed them. They were taken up there by Greeks.’

  ‘Which Greeks?’

  The girl lifted her head. ‘My cousin Chrysostomos,’ she said quietly.

  The Varvaras exchanged glances. ‘That man!’ In the old fisherman’s words there was a whole world of contempt. ‘He’s nothing but a gangster, good only for boasting round the Kalani bars. Who’s with him?’

  ‘Two others. One of them came from Antipalia. Perhaps he learned about the guns there.’

  Varvara reached across the table and laid a hand on Cotton’s arm. ‘You have done the island a great favour, my son,’ he said.

  ‘I want one from you in return,’ Cotton said frankly.

  The old man sat back and glanced at his son. ‘Which is?’ he said slowly.

  Cotton explained their need for any extra petrol they could get.

  Varvara smiled. He seemed relieved it was no more. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said.

  When Cotton started back the track was deep with mud, and rivulets of water were running off the mountains, but suddenly the clouds rolled back and the sun came out hotly, and steam began to rise from the rinsed earth. Somehow it gave him encouragement. At the top of the hill, looking down into Xiloparissia Bay, he stopped, listening to the hum of an aircraft. A flight of Junkers 87s – the dreaded Stuka dive-bombers – were flying along the coastline and he watched them swing inland to where the new airstrip was being built, knowing that they meant death to some poor bastard, and probably the end for some fine ship.

  Feeling unbelievably alone, he set off down the hill in silence. At the bottom, Docherty met him. He seemed to have forgotten the beating he’d received. ‘See anything?’ he asked.

  ‘Only a bunch of swaddies the caiques brought in. The poor bastards were marched away to be prisoners of war.’

  Docherty said nothing because the idea of being a prisoner, of standing behind a barbed wire fence for the rest of the war, without girls and dancing and fornication, was a horror beyond his imagination. Then he forced a grin. ‘One thing,’ he said. ‘I’ve finished the starboard engine. Tomorrow I’ll finish the port engine. All we need now is some more petrol.’

  Cotton was so surprised at Docherty’s success he managed a smile through his depression. ‘I’ve arranged it,’ he said.

  Docherty whistled and did a few fancy steps round him. ‘Good old Royal,’ he chirruped. ‘You’re enough to make a man grow two heads.’

  Suddenly Cotton felt better, and part of a team once more.

  Twelve

  Lieutenant Ehrhardt’s face was worried. ‘Our two hundred and fifty friends at Panyioti’s place,’ he said. ‘Perhaps the islanders don’t know who they are, Herr Major, but you know and I know, and, now it seems, so do the men at the airstrip.’

  Baldamus’ eyes grew cold. ‘I hope they’re not talking,’ he said. ‘Only among themselves. They’re grumbling that they ought to be used to help. They claim there’s a hell of a lot to do and they feel they should give a hand.’

  Baldamus’ nose wrinkled. ‘It’s nothing to do with them. If they want special treatment, they should join special units.’

  Ehrhardt shrugged. ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ he said. ‘We’re also getting complaints from the villagers at Xinthos. A girl was raped. Chickens have been stolen. Pigs have vanished. They know damn well who was responsible and they’ll soon start asking themselves, who the hell are these damn people?’

  Baldamus said nothing and Ehrhardt went on indignantly. ‘They need to do something instead of simply sitting on their back-sides wrecking Panyioti’s place. According to my information, they’ve torn it apart. What they haven’t stuffed into kitbags to take back to Germany, they’re burning to make fires, or swapping with the villagers for food and booze.’

  Baldamus stared at his fingernails. ‘Try having a word with their commanding officer, Captain Haussmann,’ he said. ‘I’m told he’s a reasonable chap.’

  ‘Not that reasonable,’ Ehrhardt said shortly. ‘I can’t get near him. I’ve tried. They’re not allowing anyone within a mile of the place. They’ve thrown up road blocks and they stop everyone who goes near. Needless to say, nobody tries.’r />
  Baldamus began to frown again. He hadn’t really expected trouble of this sort and it was clear that Ehrhardt’s sympathies lay with the men at the airfield.

  ‘They’re not very popular, are they?’ he said.

  ‘Elite units never are. What they need is some hard work or some hard fighting.’

  Baldamus pulled a face. ‘I suspect they’ll get plenty of both of those before long,’ he observed mildly. ‘Very well, I’ll go and see Haussmann. Perhaps he’ll listen to me. I’ll tell him my instructions about keeping the place sweet, and ask him to keep his men under control. After all, they’re not barbarians. They’ve got to measure up to the rules. If necessary, I’ll see that one or two of them are picked up by the Provost Department and offer to court martial them. That ought to make them think.’

  ‘Unless it brings the whole damn lot down on our necks,’ Ehrhardt said. ‘These special units are very much their own masters; especially since Holland and France. They’ve got it firmly in their heads that they’ve won the war and deserve special treatment.’

  ‘Not from me,’ Baldamus said. ‘There’s too much going on, on this island.’

  There was indeed, even beyond the scope of Baldamus’ command.

  The following day, they decided there was nothing much more they could do and that night they were all so exhausted they slept like logs. Except for Cotton, who sat dry-mouthed and red-eyed on the deck on watch until Bisset appeared, languid as ever, just before dawn to take his place.

  ‘I’ll try to get a couple of hours,’ Cotton said.

  ‘Make it four.’

  ‘Two’ll do.’

  Cotton woke as if to an alarm clock to get them all on their feet. Shoving the canister of chloro-sulphonic from Claudia alongside the other, they poured the contents of two of the drums of petrol into the tanks by means of a home-made funnel.