Small Wars (8 page)
The sun rose pinkly, touching the tops of the mountains above Hal and the white walls of Clara’s bedroom, moving down slowly to light them both. Clara checked the rash that now clearly marked the girls’ skin and found their fevers had cooled.
They had breakfast and now Hal and everybody with him focused on the dark bottom of the crevasse.
A loud-hailer was brought for Hal. Grieves – with Davis’s help – stated the situation to Pappas, in English and Greek, and told him to surrender. The response was a volley of shots, which did nothing but reveal his whereabouts more specifically and Davis was sent back to the R—N—line to be out of the way.
During the night, patrols had found a track, almost a line, or a ledge, that goats might use with impunity but soldiers with less confidence. Still, it was a way down, and angled behind the sight-lines of the caves, so it was conceivable they might get a small unit down there. Once they’d done that, they could draw Pappas out, or else send more troops down and storm the place. The problem was, unless Pappas and whoever was with him came out, they would have to go in, and they didn’t know how deep the cave went, how many men were in it, or how long their supplies might last.
At seven o’clock a section of ten soldiers made the first descent down the cliff. They were covered by fire from the edges on both sides. The moment they gained the crevasse floor they poured fire into the cave too: a heavy rain of bullets, followed by burning oil-soaked rags to smoke the enemy out. There was no response from inside. Another section began the descent.
There was, however, another entrance to the cave that the patrols had failed to find. It was a hole, barely the width of a man’s shoulders at the surface, but opening out as it went down. The shaft was at forty-five degrees to the inside of the caves, making it a good hundred paces east of the scattered rocks at the cliff-top, a clump of bushes concealing it with hazy shadows.
Pappas had eight men with him in the cave. If they had all tried to get out that way they would certainly have been killed, but one man, easing head and shoulders out of the opening, under the cloud of thorny brush, could pull his .303 out after him, be very close to the British and still be hidden.
The man they chose was the best marksman they had, but the gun was an old one: it had been loaded and unloaded from crates, stacked against rocks, in bundles and on the floors of boats for fifteen years, and bore the scars of that. The soldier he pointed it at was fifty yards away, crouched over his mess tin, with a roll-up behind his ear for later, eating his breakfast and talking to another soldier.
The first bullet, aimed perfectly at his chest, went into his thigh instead and the bullet broke up on hitting the bone and made an explosion of flesh. Metal fragments flew, bloodied, into his face as well. He went over instantly, backwards to the ground, the other soldier jumping up and away while the men nearby took cover or hit the ground.
‘Down!’ and the second shot hit the same man in the soft part of his stomach, and the shooter slipped back into the shaft, pulling the thick stiff sacking that was the same colour as the ground over the shadow made by the hole.
The bush, only slightly disturbed by his movement, ceased to tremble.
The soldier who’d been hit was making deep, breathy sounds and convulsing. He was losing blood fast as it surged out of the wound, thick and pulsing. The man who’d been with him, who was very young and shaking too much to move well, ran back to him and tried to drag him to cover and keep his hand over the wound at the same time. Another ran to help.
The shooter pushed back the stiff sacking once more and the light dazzled him. His eyes adjusted, and he could see soldiers, all looking around and frightened, aiming into the middle distance. He could see the body of his first hit, sideways to the ground, hunched up. He felt a curious delight that even in the face of terrible defeat he could have this triumph. He took careful aim, aware of his risk, and shot one more British soldier clean through his head – although not so clean as the soft bullet acted like a small explosion in the skull – and the man fell immediately.
Then he really did retreat and slithered backwards down the shaft as fast as he could, keeping his gun up behind him and pointed at the opening as he descended. No light poured in after him, though; the ground made small tremors where booted feet tramped over it unknowingly.
At the other end of the crevasse the two shots weren’t heard at all because of the blanket of fire as soldiers came down the cliff. Everybody was waiting for a reaction at the front of the cave.
Once news of the soldiers being shot reached Hal – about fifteen minutes after their deaths – there was an hour and a half of reassessment, an avoidance of confusion, more searches and the eventual finding of the tiny shaft opening. Nobody could be proud when the thing was found; there was no excuse for it not having been discovered at any time in the last sixteen hours and two lives would have been saved.
As well as the forty men they had now at the bottom of the crevasse there was a second force, an ambush group, led by Mark Innes, at the eastern end, surrounding the shaft opening. Lee-Enfields, a Bren gun on its tripod, Stens and even a couple of .38s were all trained on the little clump of gorse-like bushes that were putting forth a few spring flowers.
The sun made the sky a deeper and deeper blue above the hard ground, heating the rocks and the soldiers waiting on the surface and down in the deep crevasse too. They had radio communication between the two groups now, with a signaller near Hal at the top and another with the ambush group, but there was nothing further to communicate.
The morning went by. It was hard for Hal, with nothing to do, not to dwell on the killing of the two soldiers and remember things about them. Their faces, which before their deaths he would have been hard pressed to put names to, were now clear in his mind. It wasn’t anger or outrage he tasted, it was the dark knowledge of his responsibility.
He began to dread the afternoon going by, the loss of light and another night, where in darkness the smallest defiant act could extinguish another British life. He felt them around him, each man moving and breathing amongst the dead rocks, subject to risk weighed and assessed by him, lives depending on choices taken or not taken by him. He needed to move forward.
Earlier in the day the sun had thrown the rockface into deep shadow but now the sun was directly above them. Another afternoon was beginning. He didn’t want another night.
After he had eaten something, and stared at the ground while doing it, Hal walked away from the small group he was with. He stood with his back to them, facing the grey-brown paleness of the wide land. Ahead of him, small whorls of dust blew up from the plain; he watched them. Two of his men were dead. His soldiers had been taken by surprise twice now. They were a massive force, held up and halted by this tiny group, whose resistance was maniacal and hopeless.
Hal, alone in his command, could feel the shifting mood around him. It was like being in a ship, with full sails, set fair towards a point, then seeing the moving sky, feeling the canvas lose tautness, the sheets slacken as the weather changes. He felt the flat unease before a bad wind springs up. There had been the clarity of purpose; now there was division and grief. He didn’t want to go into another night with those terrorists still under the ground, hidden, and no resolution brought. He needed to act.
‘Kirby.’
‘Sir?’
‘Get hold of the CQMS.’
‘Sir.’
‘Tell him to move forward a hundred and fifty gallons of benz. As soon as he likes. We’ll need cotton waste, too, for burning.’
‘Yes, sir.’
It took four hours to bring twenty jerry-cans of petrol brought from the forward operating base. The terrain, the moonscape of it, dry and cut through with gullies, that the men had crossed chasing Pappas, was covered by mules this time, and the petrol arrived at four, in the deepest heat of the afternoon.
Twenty-five hours after the siege had begun, Hal gave the order for the ambush group to pour the petrol down the exit shaft of the cave. They followed it with grenades. The explosion caused a cloud of fire to blow downwards, filling the back of the cave with flame at the same time as the tunnel collapsed halfway down its length.
Outside in the bright sun, small showers of rocks fell from the cliffs around the soldiers with a smattering sound, and there was the deep rumble of imploding rock. A blast of hot air came from the cave, but not fire, and they couldn’t see fire either, because it must have been very deep inside. Then there was the screaming of men.
At the sound of the explosions, and at the high screams, a sort of hotness went through each of the men watching and Hal felt it, too.
The screaming inside the cave was drowned by more explosions, much louder and echoing, which must have been the weapons stores inside.
All eyes and weapons were on the cave mouth. A first man could be seen coming out, blackened and either burned or bleeding. He didn’t have any fight to put up at all, but was like an animal rushing for the light and air. He was shot down, and another behind was shot down too – the soldiers, in the first effective cleanness of the assault getting down and clear, positioning themselves carefully, even in the heat of it. Another man came out, wandering drunkenly, but was dead before any bullet reached him.
Then there was a very short wait.
Hal was at the top of the crevasse on one knee, looking downwards, with the runner back and forth from the radio telling him what was happening with the second group. He was holding binoculars but not using them. His eyes could find every detail they needed to. He was unaware of himself physically, just the ecstasy of watching.
A huge black curving billow of smoke issued from the cave mouth. Another, smaller puff, like a dragon’s breath, came from the smaller cave above. The soldiers were forced back, turning away from the smoke and wiping their eyes with their forearms, coughing, and checking and reloading their weapons when they could.
The black cloud appeared to throb, then dissipated, mistily, filling the crevasse, until the rich bitter smell of burned flesh and hair and the sharper, celebration smell of dynamite were everywhere. The smell reached Hal, and he breathed it, curiously, deep into him.
There were still screams from the cave, and shouting, but no one else came out. It was time to go in. A section prepared to go forward. They could see about twenty feet into the cave, then nothing.
Led by their corporal, the ten men went into the cave, slowly, weapons pointing into the blackness.
The light went quickly once they were inside, and the smell of burned bodies was stronger. One soldier’s foot nudged something soft in the darkness and, kicking it away, he realised it was a leg, mostly torn off the trunk of the man it had been attached to, whose head was not to be seen. He felt himself go liquid inside, then went on, forgetting.
Very soon they reached the darkness, and there were gunshots, from a deeper cavern, ricocheting viciously off the cave walls and sending up sparks. The soldiers went flat to the sides of the cave, firing back into increasing resistance, until above the sound of the bullets, their own corporal gave them, ‘On me now!’ and they backed off and got out of the mouth of the cave, back to bright daylight and cover.
Hal watched the ten soldiers hastily scrabble backwards out of the cave and swore. ‘Don’t know when they’re beaten,’ he said to Kirby. ‘Can we safely drag those bodies clear and try to identify them?’ It was done. Then, ‘Send word to B Company to get some more benz down there from the back. It can’t be a tight seal – we could pump it in. If we can get a couple of hundred gallons down there we could get a real fire. We could light it from some other point. Get on to it.’
It was discovered that there was indeed a way to get more petrol in, fresh cracks being found in the rock above the caves, and when it was done, the burning was intensified, as Hal had wanted.
There weren’t any screams now, and another section was sent forward to try to get into the cave.
Grenades had caused rock falls and the sweet roasting smell wasn’t any better for the heat. The hundred men on the crevasse floor, and on the ledges surrounding, kept their positions and watched as the first section was sent into the cave mouth again. Grieves preceded their advance with more, largely unintelligible, announcements over the loud-hailer as the ten men disappeared into the shadow.
Now there was virtual silence, except for the wind that had picked up and made low organ-like sounds through the ridges and caverns. There were just the dissonant chords of air through rock, the men watching and the small streams of smoke blowing across the ground; everything under the wide sky was part of the pursuit of a conclusion.
Then, from deep inside the cave, there were shots – they could have been British or Greek – then more silence, then two separate pistol shots, a few seconds apart.
The soldiers emerged from the dim cave, dragging a prisoner. Everybody made a small move forward, as if to greet him, then stopped. The crevasse had become like an amphitheatre, and the soldiers entered the brightest lit part of it, letting the prisoner fall to his knees, but not letting the nose of the rifle detach from his soft temple.
Crouching under sacks drenched in water, in the smallest of hollows in the honeycombed rock, the last survivors had escaped burning with the others, but when the soldiers had entered the cave at last, there had been no more ammunition left to fight with.
The pistol shots had been from Pappas who, with his last bullets, had killed his remaining comrade and then shot himself. The prisoner, as it turned out, was his son, whom he had apparently been unable to shoot, when it came to the end, so the pistol still had one cold bullet left in the chamber.
Lance Corporal Scott was an amateur photographer. It would have been distasteful, especially in the presence of officers, to photograph the heap of five burned and shot-up Greek corpses – there were only five as two did not invite reassembly. He did, however, in the fading light of the evening, photograph the prisoner, and circulated the picture all over the barracks before sending it home. It showed the section of ten men who’d made the final entry into the cave, standing over Pappas’s son, who was seated on the ground. Scott had held the Coronet straight, and still enough, too, to get a good clear picture. The soldiers looked proud, holding their weapons, or leaning on them, with one foot stuck out and some of them grinning.