The streets were so jammed with soldiers and army trucks that getting out of Heraklion was a nightmare. The road to Knossos and the Villa was a little better, but not much. Sholto had never been a guest there, although he’d spent years hearing about it from Daphne.
Accustomed to living in a stately country house or a palatial town house, he’d imagined something more impressive than the flat-roofed Victorian mansion that finally met his eyes. Everywhere was a scene of organized chaos. Squaddies were running into the house carrying camp beds and Red Cross stores, and running out of it empty-handed so that they could take another load in.
Amongst army khaki he glimpsed an occasional flash of red cape and white starched headdress. Earlier that morning Brigadier Chappel had made no mention of there being army nurses on the island, although as it was reasonable to expect there would have been some on mainland Greece during the fighting, it was also reasonable to expect that when those troops had been evacuated to Crete, a handful of nurses had been amongst their number.
He strode through the mayhem in the direction of the stone steps fronting the house and then, at the foot of them, came to a sudden, shocked halt.
At the top of the steps a woman was in discussion with the blue-bereted RAMC officer he had seen earlier at the briefing. She was wearing a black, beautifully cut two-piece suit, white shirt, black tie, black stockings and black low-heeled shoes. Her hair was hidden by a black felt hat, a cockade in it indicating rank, and there were service epaulettes on her shoulders. She looked authoritative and, amid the hurly-burly, splendidly calm.
For a second Sholto didn’t recognize her.
Then he realized the woman was Daphne.
He also realized that, in the present surroundings, they could hardly have the blistering marital row he was determined to have.
He took the steps two at time and as Daphne turned towards him, regarding him with an infuriating lack of surprise, he grasped hold of her arm, saying through gritted teeth to a startled Sam, ‘Excuse me, Officer. I’d like a private word with my wife.’
Judging that anywhere in the house would give more privacy than the top of the steps, and without releasing his grip on her, he marched her into the entrance hall. It was just as thronged with people as the courtyard had been.
‘The only empty room is the library,’ Daphne said, finally succeeding in wrenching herself from his grasp. ‘And you’re behaving like an idiot, Sholto. You do realize that, don’t you?’
Goaded beyond endurance, he would have made a physically angry response, but a Greek Orthodox nun was marching towards them, a pile of blankets in her arms.
Once in the library, he slammed the door behind them. ‘How the hell did you have the nerve to needlessly abandon my son? He’s only two years old . . .’
‘Three in two months’ time.’
‘That’s not being three now! He’s two! You’re not fit to be a mother. Or a wife.’
Daphne had been determined to hold on to her temper, but his last accusation was an accusation too far. She said explosively, ‘That last remark is rich, coming from you. You’re the one who is serially unfaithful. Not me. And I’m an excellent mother. Caspian is by now in the safe care of Vanessa . . .’
‘Whom he doesn’t know from Adam.’
‘Of course he knows her. She’s the closest friend I had in Cairo. Vanessa has spent time with Caspian on lots of occasions, but you wouldn’t know that because you were never interested in the way I spent my time, were you? And that was probably because, if you’d asked, it would have led to my asking questions about how you were spending your time – and with whom!’
Sholto slapped her across the face.
She slapped him back.
Panting with anger, they glared at each other, a fraction away from a full-scale physical brawl.
He said tightly, ‘This is the end, Daphne. Leaving our son in a foreign country without one of us being with him is something I will never forgive.’
‘There’s nothing to forgive! It’s government policy to evacuate children. Thousands of them have been sent from London and other cities to Canada, Australia and New Zealand – a good many of them as young as Caspian, and all without a parent in tow.’
‘Their mothers couldn’t leave with them. You could.’
‘And if I had,’ she flashed back, ‘what meaningful war work could I have done in Cairo? The Germans may be causing trouble in the desert south of Cairo, but they stand no chance of marching into Cairo. It’s here that I’m needed. How many men in a battalion, Sholto? I’ve been told it’s anything from five hundred to a thousand. And how many battalions are defending Heraklion? My information is that it’s at least four, possibly five, and then there are a couple of Greek regiments and the city garrison. Do the maths. Think of the number of wounded there will be, and then take on board that for the troops defending Heraklion this is the only field hospital.’
For the first time he didn’t immediately shout her down and she said in a different tone of voice, ‘Of the Queen Alexandra’s army nurses evacuated from the mainland, the vast majority are at Canea and only a small handful are here. Nuns from the local monastery have offered their help, but they are all elderly, and then there is me – and I’ve been thoroughly trained and I know what I’m doing.’
Looking at her, Sholto didn’t doubt it.
His temper spent, wondering where the hell she’d got her devastatingly accurate facts and figures from, he said flatly, ‘Hundreds of German paratroopers landed at Maleme and Canea earlier this morning. The news only came through as I was leaving to come here.’
Although the news meant an almost immediate attack on Heraklion, Daphne didn’t show a glimmer of panic.
He felt a surge of admiration for her, and something else, for in her figure-hugging suit and cockaded hat she looked provocatively seductive.
He reflected wryly that Daphne’s habit of looking provocatively seductive was something he was just going to have to get over. When he had said that her not accompanying Caspian to Cairo was the last straw, as far as their marriage was concerned, he had meant it.
Because he had meant it, he didn’t kiss her goodbye. He merely said, ‘Keep safe for Caspian’s sake, Daphs’, opened the door and walked away.
Daphne stared after him, unable to believe that, with the Germans about to invade, he hadn’t at least attempted to make things right between them.
Because of Sholto always having behaved as if he was still single, they’d had their fair share of fights in the past, and they had always followed the same pattern. Whenever she’d become aware of his faithlessness, she’d screamed at him that he was a bastard and he had yelled back that their shotgun marriage was a marriage he’d never wanted. Then, exhausted, they’d drunk whisky sours and gone to bed – and made love.
The scene that had just taken place between them – and his reaction to it – had been alarmingly different. For one thing, it hadn’t been over another woman. It had been over an action of hers that had, as far as she was concerned, been totally reasonable. For another thing, there was no opportunity for them to go to bed and make up. They didn’t even know when they would see each other again, or even if they would see each other again.
At the thought of the last possibility, Daphne began running after Sholto down the crowded corridor, but a group of nuns slowed her almost to a standstill and by the time she reached the top of the steps she could no longer see him. She ran down the steps and through Sir Arthur’s Edwardian garden, weaving a way through the squaddies still coming and going between the house and the lodge gates, where the lorries – and presumably Sholto’s car – were parked.
And then two things happened.
As she came within sight of the road, Sholto’s car sped away in a cloud of dust, and as it did so there came the familiar drone of German planes. Within minutes the drone became a thunderous, almighty, earth-shaking roar. The air throbbed with the sound of engines and the sky became black with Junkers 52s, all homing
in on Heraklion’s airfield. They came in low and in columns that seemed endless.
In a massive understatement, a squaddie manning one of the lorries shouted, ‘I don’t like the look of that little lot!’
The first of the planes reached land and began shedding human loads. Above the toy-like figures of paratroopers, parachutes burst open. Not all the parachutes were white. Some were pink, some violet, some yellow. Like evil blossoms, they filled the sky and, dreadful as the sight was, a part of Daphne’s brain registered that they were also obscenely, terrifyingly beautiful. Then, from defensive positions on the ground, there came the deafening sound of machine-gun, artillery and rifle fire.
Daphne turned and began running back towards the Villa, which would, she knew, soon be crammed full of wounded men needing emergency attention, and knowing that the hell Sholto had warned her about had started and that there was no telling when, or how, it would end.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
With an attempted invasion of the city imminent, Lewis and Christos had rounded up all the members of the Kalamata team save for Yanni, who still had to meet them in a bar near the harbour. Just as Yanni came trotting in, as heavily armed as the rest of them, there came the drone of approaching planes.
For days Heraklion had endured intermittent bombing raids, but this sound was like nothing previously experienced. Reverberations sent shelves of bottles and glasses crashing to the floor, heavy iron tables shuddered and rocked. The roar of engines was so ear-splitting it sounded as if the world was about to end.
Along with everyone else, Lewis sprinted out into the street and then stood transfixed, for it wasn’t the usual squadron of bombers that were flying in over the sea. It was huge, lumbering air-transport planes and they were coming in tight formation, dropping stream after stream of many-coloured parachutes over the airfield, before wheeling away so that planes behind them could drop their loads.
‘Holy Virgin!’ Christos whispered devoutly as an army of paratroopers began swinging down to earth. ‘There are thousands of them.’
As they watched, defensive ground fire opened up and, as well as shedding paratroopers over the airfield, some planes began shedding them to the west of the city.
‘They’ll try to enter by the Canea Gate!’ Lewis shouted, and broke into a run in the direction of his parked truck.
Within seconds Christos and Nico were squeezing into the truck’s cab with him, as Dimitri, Angelos, Pericles, Yanni and Adonis clambered into its rear.
The streets between the harbour and the Canea Gate were massed with citizens racing to the city’s walls and carrying whatever weapon they’d been able to grab hold of: rifles, shotguns, ancient pistols, knives, rakes, spades, axes, even broom handles. It wasn’t only men who had armed themselves; it was women and schoolchildren, too. Adding to the melee were trucks full of Greek soldiers, some of the trucks heading towards the docks, others to various city gates and bastions.
The Canea Gate was the west gate of the city and, when Lewis arrived at it, so did a couple of hundred men from the city garrison. Seeing Lewis’s uniform, the officer in command made a beeline towards him. ‘I’ve deployed two platoons into the areas they’re dropping into,’ he shouted over the deafening noise of planes and people. ‘The more that can be killed before they reach the ground, or the gate, the easier defending the gate will be.’ Another thought struck him and, despite the emergency of the moment, he paused long enough to add, before getting back to his men, ‘Are you Greek?’
‘Scottish.’
‘You speak like a Greek and have the look of a Greek. No one would know differently.’
Which was all to the good, Lewis thought, considering the role he would be undertaking, if the attempted invasion succeeded and the island was occupied.
He turned to the team, saying succinctly, ‘Follow me!’
The great medieval town gate had two enormous flanking buttresses through which ran two corridors, one to the left of the gate and one to the right. When the Venetians had built the gate in the sixteenth century, they had done so as a defence against the Turks and along the entire length of both buttresses there were positions from which now, four centuries later, bullets could be fired.
Heraklion’s citizens were already surging down the corridors as the roar of Junkers 52s continued to thunder overhead.
Lewis ignored the corridors and, with his team at his heels, raced up narrow steps leading to the walkway that ran along the top of the town walls and all three of its massive entrance gates.
They weren’t the first people to think it would be the best of all positions. Soldiers from the garrison were already up there, as well as a priest, rifle in hand, with a young boy by his side similarly armed.
‘He is my son,’ the priest said, as the team took up positions on either side of him and the boy. ‘While I fire one rifle, he will reload the other. It will not be long, I think, before the first of those who have survived the landing will be upon us.’
Lewis looked down at his watch. It had been early afternoon when he’d left the museum and it was now just after six. By now Kate would be in the cave that was Brigade Headquarters and which was undoubtedly the safest place she could possibly be.
Although paratroopers were still being dropped and many of them were being killed before they reached the ground – even without field-glasses Lewis could see tiny black figures jumping and jerking as they were hit – there was also now the sound of answering ground fire, and some of the ground fire seemed to be coming from sub-machine guns, something Lewis knew the men of the garrison did not have.
He wondered which of the colour-coded parachutes were dropping heavy weapons and what else was being dropped. Even without sub-machine guns, the sheer difference of numbers – two platoons and civilians, against what he judged to be a thousand paratroopers trained to Germanic crack-perfection – was a mind-numbingly unequal fight. It wouldn’t merely be unequal, it would be carnage: carnage that, with only garrison troops and civilians defending the gate, could soon be happening all around him.
Like everyone else, he was kneeling in position against the gate’s parapet, with the stock of his rifle against his cheek. He’d never shot anyone and he doubted if any of his team had – apart perhaps from Yanni who, as a youth, had fought in the Balkan War. He looked towards twenty-three-year-old Nico, who was next to him. Every muscle of his body was tense with nervous expectation. Pericles, on the other side of Nico and fifteen years older, was chewing tobacco, his hawk-like face full of steely resolution.
Suddenly Lewis saw what he’d been expecting to see: civilians and garrison troops making a running retreat back towards the city walls.
At their rear, in terrifying numbers, were steel-helmeted, heavily armed Germans.
‘Let them come,’ the priest growled into his long white beard. ‘In Venetian times these walls withstood a twenty-two-year siege by Turks. And what the Turks couldn’t do, the Huns aren’t going to do!’
Lewis’s finger curled around the trigger of his rifle. Minutes later, as firing all along the city walls on the west side of the city broke out – and feeling unbelievably calm and focused – he fired and changed the clip, fired and changed the clip, fired and changed the clip until dusk fell and the Germans breached the gate, and the fighting in and on both sides of the gate turned into brutal hand-to-hand combat and he hurtled down the stairs to pitch himself into a battle that had become medieval.
Bush telegraph ensured that the villagers of Archanes had an almost blow-by blow account of what was happening in Heraklion. Christos was with Lewis, and Ella knew that now the invasion had started, there was no telling when she would see him again.
With Yorkshire optimism she was sure the city would be held, but with so many German paratroopers having been dropped in and around the city and the airfield, Archanes was no longer a safe place for Kostas Alfred to be.
By the following morning, when fighter planes replaced troop carriers over the city and bombing raid af
ter bombing raid was carried out, Ella had decided the best place for Kostas Alfred was high up in the mountains at Kalamata.
For a long time Christos had had the use of one of the dig’s small trucks. She made a travelling cot for Kostas Alfred by padding a wooden crate that had been used for transporting oranges. Then, with a bag packed with everything her baby could possibly need, she laid him in the crate and put it on the truck’s bench-seat.
With Tinker riding shotgun, the journey to Kalamata took longer than usual, for she was constantly flagged down by people anxious for news of what was happening nearer to the coast. ‘I know very little,’ she said, time after time. ‘Paratroopers have landed – many, many paratroopers – and so there must be hard fighting, but that is all I know.’
The ground steepened and was everywhere covered in pale-lilac sage; the lilac sage depicted in so many of the Palace of Minos frescoes, and on a fresco found at the Little Palace at Kalamata. What would happen to Minoan archaeological sites if the Germans succeeded in occupying the island? And what would happen to the Cretan people? Would they be treated as cruelly as the people of occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia were being treated?
In his orange box, Kostas Alfred had begun grizzling. Ella began singing to him and the grizzling turned to happy gurgling, but her throat hurt with the effort of singing, when in her head she was fervently praying, ‘Please, Heavenly Father, don’t let Christos be killed. Please, please don’t let him be killed! I couldn’t bear it if Christos was killed.’
As she took the winding road up the mountain to Kalamata, her knuckles were white on the wheel, not because the road was a poor one, with frequent perilous drops on one side of it – she had a good head for heights, and the road was one she knew like the back of her hand – but because her heart and mind were in the streets of Heraklion, where the Cretans she now so totally identified with were fighting for their freedom.
When she finally crested the lip of the plateau and saw the village in the distance she felt a spasm of relief. Kalamata wasn’t Heraklion. There would be no slaughter in the streets here; no homes bombed to flaming ruins. By leaving Kostas Alfred in Andre and Agata’s care, she need no longer fear for his safety and could return to Archanes, which was the most obvious place to hear news of Christos. She no longer had any need, either, of worrying about Kate and Daphne’s safety, for by now, thank goodness, they were in Cairo.
Beneath the Cypress Tree Page 31