To Look on Death No More

by Leta Serafim

  The Stuka had strafed it, which meant the Germans now knew it was here. Better to destroy it than let them use it. Land here, they’d be upon the camp in no time.

  “Off with you!” he bellowed to the horse. “Come on, come on!”

  “M’aresei!” Stefanos shouted. “M’aresei to alogo.” I like the horse.

  O’Malley took his time returning to camp, quizzing the boy about Danae as they ambled through the trees. “Your sister ever talk about me? Ever speak about our time together in the cave?”

  Stefanos thought for a moment and shook his head. “Oxi.”

  “Not a word?”

  He pushed his glasses up. “Tragouda to tragoudi sou.” She sings your song. Giggling, he imitated his sister, singing a mishmash of English words.

  Recognizing the melody, O’Malley gave a bark of laughter and began to shout the lyrics, too, amending the words.

  She was lovely and fair as the rose of the summer,

  Yet ’twas not her beauty alone that won me,

  Oh, no, ’twas the truth in her eyes ever beaming

  That made me love Danae, the Rose of Tralee.

  The cool shades of evening their mantle were spreading,

  And Danae, all smiling was listening to me.

  “Nai, afto. Afto to tragoudi.” Yes, that’s it. That’s the song she sings.

  O’Malley sang on, wishing Danae could hear him, could answer him in turn. His music, a bridge between them.

  He’d ask her to marry him one day. ‘Care to hang your laundry alongside mine?’ he’d say, the way men did in Ireland.

  After supper that night, the boy dragged his suitcase over and got out the animals O’Malley had carved for him. He bedded them down on a dingy cloth and gave them a fistful of grass to eat. A blue bead was mixed in with the carvings.

  “Mati,” the boy said, pointing to it. A talisman against the evil eye.

  Stefanos’ treasures. O’Malley touched the animals, wishing he’d done a better job, made a proper Noah’s Ark for him with giraffes and lions and monkeys, all the animals known to man.

  They played with the animals for a time, O’Malley pecking the ground with the chicken, Stefanos braying and heehawing with the donkey. Hearing them, Leonidas got down on the ground and joined in, snuffling and snorting with the pig and pretending to gobble up the boy. “Fage, gourounaki, fage.” Eat, little pig, eat.

  Another difference from Ireland, O’Malley thought, where two grown men would be taking a risk if they played with a child like this. Get bloodied, if not killed, if one of them tried it alone.

  The following day, O’Malley organized another soccer game, using the ball he’d made, thinking it’d give Stefanos a leg up in his village if he mastered the game, lessen the child’s terrible awkwardness.

  Lining up the ball, he demonstrated how to lift it with his foot and bounce it up and down; then he drove the ball forward and kicked it over to Stefanos, who went down after it on his hands and knees.

  “Aw, Jesus. What’s up with you? I told you, you can only use your feet. You’re not a goalie. You can’t pick it up with your hands.” He passed it to him again, shouting for him to kick it, to try and score.

  They were using clay jugs the cook had given them as goal posts. The ball went careening and took out the first jug, smashing it to smithereens.

  Stefanos jumped up and down. “Kai ti ekana!” Look what I did.

  O’Malley snatched the ball away. “Are you mad? ’Tis no cause for laughter, destroying a goal post. Get you banned for life, that will.”

  He set it down between them. “Here now. Try it again.”

  This time the boy shot it directly where he was supposed to.

  “Fair play to you. Well done.”

  They continued to play until Roumelis shouted it was time for dinner. The kid was getting good at it, O’Malley thought, developing a keen sense of when to feint and when to brazen it out. Another week and he’d have it down.

  Starved for activity, the men in the camp quickly took over the game, assigning O’Malley and Stefanos and nine others to the first team, which they dubbed the ‘dungdogs,’ and Leonidas, Fotis and others to the second, called the ‘Greeks.’

  O’Malley objected. “ ‘Dungdogs’ is an insult. You can’t call us that.”

  “How about ‘whore’s sons’? Is better?”

  The game helped break up the tedium, the hours of waiting that seemed to be an intrinsic part of war.

  Unhappy with the frivolity, Haralambos insisted the soccer playing be restricted to two hours a day, the rest of the time to be used for education. He volunteered to teach anyone who wanted to learn how to read. O’Malley thought he’d use this opportunity to brainwash the men. But it was Greek grammar he taught them, alpha and omega and all the rest.

  Stefanos never asked where his father was or when he’d be back. He accepted his absence without complaint as he did most things—sleeping out in the open, the grammar lessons, the games. Laughing with O’Malley and the others. Laughing as if nothing was wrong.

  His front tooth had come loose and he fussed with it, wiggling it back and forth with his finger, saliva wetting his chin.

  O’Malley slapped his hand away. “Stop that. It’ll come out when it’s ready.”

  And so it did. Sometime after two a.m., about three hours after O’Malley had fallen asleep. Squealing, the boy woke him up and handed him the wet tooth, a gift of sorts. It was a foul thing, none too clean, and slick with blood. O’Malley tried his best to act pleased. “Ah, bless you. Now go to sleep.”

  But Stefanos refused to settle down. Absurdly pleased with himself, he kept grinning at O’Malley, pointing at the place the tooth had been, holding his lip back with a bloody finger so O’Malley could see the gaping hole in his gums.

  “To donti vyike, to donti vyike,” he kept saying. Tooth gone, tooth gone.

  O’Malley wanted to eat him alive. “For the love of God, will you not hush? ’Tis only a tooth fell from your mouth. Not the Holy Grail.”

  Chapter 12

  Three days later, a convoy of German soldiers rolled into the gorge. They rode in on three trucks, the sound of their engines echoing against the rockbound cliffs, the gears grinding as the vehicles fought for purchase. Eighty to a hundred men, O’Malley estimated, heading in the direction of the old monastery.

  “Someone betrayed us,” Haralambos said, watching the soldiers approach through binoculars. “Probably Papadakis. He was the last one here.”

  The others argued with him. “He’d never give up our location, not with his son here.”

  They continued to bicker, Haralambos eventually acquiescing. But O’Malley knew the teacher had made a note, added the name ‘Papadakis’ to the list he kept of people who bore watching—scores to be settled after the war.

  He’d have to warn Danae’s father and urge him to get out of these mountains before the teacher and his comrades took over.

  The Germans had taken them by surprise that morning. The antartes had been sitting around the campfire, drinking coffee, when the sentry came running in, yelling a German patrol was in the area.

  Grabbing their guns, the Greeks wasted no time. “Take out the first truck,” Leonidas shouted. “After that, blow up the other two.”

  O’Malley held back, worried about Stefanos.

  No good, having the boy out in the open with a battle raging. Especially that one, who’d try and shoot back with the branch of a tree. Call the Germans names and jump up and down.

  O’Malley looked around for a place to hide him and spied a wooden barrel near the fire. He tipped it upside down and emptied the wine inside out on the ground, then rolled it through the makeshift latrine on the far side of the camp, back and forth through the stinking piles of waste.

  “In you go,” he told the boy.

  “Mirizei skata!” It smells like shit.

  “Off with ya! Get in there!”

  “Oxi!”

  Swearing, O’Malley grabbed him by the
scruff of his neck and threw him in. “Don’t you go brickin’ about and shitting yourself, Stefanos, you hear? I don’t care how scared you are, you stay quiet.”

  The boy shoved an open hand in his face, giving him the mountza, the Greek equivalent of the finger. “Malaka!” Jerk.

  The little maggot.

  Laughing in spite of himself, O’Malley put the lid back on the barrel, taking care to leave a slit open for air. He thumped it three times, two long raps and one short. “That’s the signal, Stefanos. Don’t come out until you hear me do that.”

  Kid should be all right. Barrel was well hidden and reeked of shit. Even if the Germans succeeded in overrunning the camp they wouldn’t touch it. No, they’d think it was a primitive Greek privy and leave it be. Stefanos would be well out of it, safe once the fighting started.

  He grabbed Elektra by the reins and led her into the same thicket of trees. The horse might draw the Germans if they came busting in and lead them to the barrel where the boy was hiding, but he felt like he had to try and protect her. As a precautionary measure, he gathered up piles of loose brush and built a little fort around her, then gave her some feed to keep her quiet.

  “Mind yourself, horse,” he said.

  Taking a last look around, he sprinted to the place where Leonidas was waiting. He was excited in spite of himself, a little tremor running up and down his spine.

  * * *

  Leonidas tossed a submachine gun to O’Malley.

  O’Malley’s face fell when he saw it. “Bloody hell.” The damned thing was a Sten.

  ‘Stench guns,’ the Australians had called the weapon, claiming they were best used as clubs; they always jammed in battle. On Crete, they’d thrown them away, preferring the German MP 38s they took off dead paratroopers.

  Leonidas was carefully doling out the ammunition. Like the gun, it, too, didn’t amount to much.

  “Aim carefully, my friend,” he said.

  Fotis and Lakis were readying a mortar on the ridge, assembling it and locking the mechanism in place. Others were manning a second mortar at the entrance to the gorge. They were laboring silently, and so far the Germans were unaware of their presence.

  The convoy halted suddenly about midway through the ravine. It had been moving at a steady pace when the engine of the lead truck apparently overheated and quit. O’Malley could see steam pouring out of it. The strip of land along the river was too narrow for the other two trucks to maneuver around the stalled vehicle; and they stayed where they were, waiting with their engines idling.

  O’Malley watched the convoy through his binoculars. Whoever their commanding officer was, he’d violated every rule of war coming into the gorge. He should have dispatched a smaller group first to make sure it was safe before driving the trucks in. O’Malley doubted General von Le Suire was with these men. Also the soldiers never should have stopped, even when the truck broke down. They should have kept going no matter what, on foot if necessary, doing everything in their power to get to safety, out of the canyon. Aye, a veteran like von Le Suire would have known better.

  Two of the soldiers were bent over the engine of the stalled truck, trying to fix it, while the rest of the men began fooling around. Calling to his friends, one man was teetering on the rocks, while another beat the bushes with a stick like a gamekeeper, rousting a man shitting there. Like their commanding officer, they were inexperienced and grew ever more boisterous, clowning around and shouting loudly in German. Finally, an older man emerged from the first truck and set about restoring order.

  He moved with a kind of debilitating weariness, his skin pasty and damp. He was sweating profusely, his hair soaking wet and plastered to his forehead. At one point, he put his hand on the fender of one of the trucks to steady himself.

  “Shit,” O’Malley muttered. “Bastard’s got malaria.”

  The sick officer spoke to the other men, evidently ordering them to get back in the trucks. They ignored him and continued to horse around, if anything growing even louder.

  So much for German discipline.

  “Officer in charge has malaria,” O’Malley whispered to Leonidas. “He blundered into the gorge by mistake.”

  The two of them were lying on a shelf of rock about fifty feet above the riverbed on the eastern side of the gorge. Fotis and Lakis had climbed up the western side and secreted themselves there, while two other groups moved into place on the north and south, effectively sealing the Germans in.

  “Into the valley of death rode the six hundred,” O’Malley said under his breath. That’s what the gorge would be in another minute or so. A fucking valley of death.

  Poem had made no sense to him in school, made even less to him now. Why celebrate a group of men who’d blundered into a valley like this one, ridden to their awful deaths? All that ‘doing and dying’ the British loved so much, it didn’t amount to much that he could see. He’d been given a manual when he first enlisted, a sort of military textbook that stated the ‘courtesy of a salute was to be dispensed with in battle.’ He always thought that about summed up what was wrong with the British.

  He looked around, wondering how the Greeks would do. Hidden high in the rocks, they were nearly invisible, holding their guns at the ready. Been at it since 1940—three long years—they knew what they were about. Warriors true.

  Leonidas reached for the rifle. “First this, then the mortar.”

  O’Malley nodded. Mortars might be effective, but they were loud and you could hear them coming from a long way off, follow their trajectory and get out of the way. A sniper’s bullet was different. It gave no warning and was far more terrifying.

  Taking careful aim, Leonidas fired at the German in the river. The bullet hit him square in the chest and he pitched forward into the water.

  The other soldiers immediately began to scream, pointing to the cliff and trying to gauge where the shot had come from, if it was one man or many. The officer again urged them to take cover.

  “Macht schnell!” he kept yelling. “Macht schnell!” Hurry.

  “Now, Leonidas!” O’Malley made a chopping motion. “Hit ’em with the mortar!”

  Nodding, Leonidas slid a shell into place in the mortar and took aim at the soldiers, his finger on the trigger.

  The shell hit the first truck in a blinding flash and exploded against the door, spewing flames and oily black smoke high in the air. A group of soldiers got caught in the blast and began scrambling away on their hands and knees, beating at their burning clothes with their hands. A second explosion followed when the truck’s gas tank went up, showering flaming chunks of metal down on the fleeing men. The metal sizzled when it hit the river.

  The driver of the truck staggered out of the cab, his entire body aflame. The other soldiers pulled him down and rolled him back and forth in the sand, babbling hysterically in German. The driver kept screaming. Even from where he was, O’Malley could hear him, hear the other men still trapped inside the burning vehicle.

  Gagging, he buried a fist in his mouth, willing the men to stop, praying he’d be spared, not have to listen to them die.

  A few seconds later, Leonidas fired off another round. The mortar hit the third truck in line, effectively trapping the Germans in the gorge. The middle truck went up immediately after. O’Malley could hear men shrieking and crying as the fireball engulfed them. A few ran into the river and began wading upstream. The Greeks there opened fire on them and they tumbled headfirst into the shallows, bloody water pooling and eddying around their bodies.

  The diesel fuel continued to burn, black smoke gusting around the trucks and slowly filling the ravine, turning the sky dark, day into night.

  Anchoring himself against the rocks, O’Malley raised the submachine gun and fired off a round. He couldn’t see through the smoke, so he focused instead on the inhuman cries he heard coming from the trucks. Be an act of mercy, killing whoever was making those sounds. Put an end to their suffering.

  The German officer in charge just stood there and wa
tched it all come apart. He made no move to call for reinforcements. The poor fool didn’t even have a radio. The barrage continued for another fifteen minutes, the air heavy with burning fuel, the cloying stench of burning flesh.

  One of the soldiers in the gorge raised his weapon and let loose a volley in O’Malley’s direction. Quickly retaliating, O’Malley stood up and letting out a blast from the machine gun. Shrieking, the man dropped back and grabbed at his neck. Seconds later he dropped to his knees, soaked in his own blood, his gray uniform wet with it.

  A group of Germans were wrestling a piece of artillery free from the wreckage of one of the trucks—an LG 42 or one of its kin. Seeing it, O’Malley dropped back down behind the rocks. He had come up against the LG 42 in Crete and seen the destruction it caused.

  “We got to get it away from them,” he shouted to Leonidas. “Take down the mountain, they will, they fire that thing.”

  The force of the explosion threw him flat, the blast from the LG42 tearing up the ledge he was on and clipping the trees behind. Hoping to get out of range, O’Malley began crawling backward as fast as he could. He’d gone about ten feet when the Germans fired again. Although the ledge absorbed most of the impact, the noise of the blast nearly crippled him. His head hurt and his field of vision was suddenly awash with bright scarlet light. He felt his face with his hands, afraid his eyes were gone, that he’d been blinded.

  Another round whistled through the air and exploded nearby. O’Malley could feel the ground vibrating beneath him and feared it would set off a landslide. Blast after blast followed in rapid succession as the Germans adjusted their sights and began focusing on where he and Leonidas were hiding. O’Malley felt like he was being flayed alive, guts and bones and pounding heart out in the open. Chips of rock grazed the flesh of his face, his wounded eyes.

  O’Malley banged at the ledge with the butt of his gun, desperately trying to dig a fox hole, knowing all the while it was hopeless. If either he or Leonidas tried to return fire, the Germans would instantly know their position and blow them apart.