Small Wars Page 12

  ‘Fall back,’ he said. ‘Mines.’

  Chapter Three

  The garrison was almost empty. The buildings of the barracks and NAAFI were quiet through the long afternoon, the flags lying still and just the sound of birds singing.

  The troops descended on Limassol. At the beginning, some officers tried to control them but many did not. Perhaps they were relieved to have their own distress avenged.

  The orders from Colonel Burroughs, such as they were, were for the questioning of men between fifteen and fifty and the rounding up of suspects.

  The soldiers put up barbed-wire pens in the streets and squares, and herded people into them. There was a pen outside the cinema, opposite the church, others in other squares, near bars and grocers, outside shops that sold cotton dresses and trousers on hangers around the door. Where there was not enough space to erect the cages in the narrow streets, the soldiers lined the men up, faces to the wall, and kept them standing with their hands above them, leaning.

  Suspects were loaded into trucks, and in heat and increasing chaos, rules were forgotten. The people were made to lie down on the floor of the trucks, because there were so many of them, and if the soldiers made them lie down, they could be layered, to make room. There were reports of suffocation, from this stacking of live bodies, but later, the British, investigating, found no bodies.

  Each company took a section of the town to search. They cordoned off their area – from the port to Anexartisias Street and back as far as Gladstonos – and then the soldiers not involved in manning the barricades divided into sections for the business of searching.

  The knot at the end of the horse’s lead-rope had pulped the flesh over Hal’s cheekbone. A nurse saw to it while he waited in the medical centre to hear about the wounded men. The rest of the garrison was mobilising to go into Limassol, with Mark Innes commanding. Hal, responsible to these men first, waited.

  The man he hadn’t recognised on the beach was a private called Jenson. Hal hadn’t known who he was because he couldn’t see his face properly for blood. The MO, Dr Godwin, tried to help him, to find some way of patching up his head, but it was beyond anybody’s skill; he was dying. Hal went to him in the operating theatre. He wouldn’t be moved out onto the ward.

  It was just the two of them in the room, and Hal took Jenson’s hand, because he couldn’t see and was frightened. Jenson did not die easily, there was nothing gentle in it; his senses were taken from him one by one. Still, when Hal held his hand, the fingers closed tightly, and his breathing changed; it slowed.

  Hal sat with him, he didn’t know how long, and was there when he died, and briefly afterwards, not risking the abandonment of him while any shred of life might be left. Then he went in to Taylor, who had woken up.

  Taylor had been under anaesthetic for them to work on the remains of his leg and since then had been given morphine. He didn’t understand what had happened to him most of the time, then did understand for long moments. He kept arguing, and saying, ‘No, I feel it, I feel it,’ trying to reach down to touch his leg.

  Hal, calm in his care for him, would look him in the eye and say very steadily, ‘Don’t think about it now, Taylor. Rest now. Just don’t think about it,’ and Taylor would recede again into sleep or unconsciousness.

  Hal lost his sense of time. His only experience was the thickened bloody sand on his own skin and clothes, the anaesthetic smell of the sun-warm room in the medical centre and the two men, close to him. Distress presented itself to him – it tried him out – but he denied it. The damage hadn’t been done to him but to the two men whose need he served. It would be an indulgence to dwell upon anything else now, and probable weakness to dwell on it later.

  Tony Grieves should not have been in Limassol. In the urgency after the beach explosion, no one thought to stop him going. He wasn’t injured, after all.

  Immediately the casualties had been taken care of, Grieves was expected to take orders and to give them. He was to get back to his quarter and cleaned up, take command of his platoon, secure vehicles, become part of the military reaction to a personal crisis he had barely begun to absorb.

  Changing his bloodied clothes with shaking hands, steeped in the horror of what had just happened, he felt as if he were stumbling in the wake of other men. He had been crippled by fear and revulsion on the beach, the nonsensical pieces of bodies on the blazing sand around him, God only knew how many other mines hidden from sight, and Hal yelling at him for help, as he nearly pissed himself in his terror. Now he was expected to take command and be an officer. It was a concept that meant little to him, and now he was appalled by it.

  As a lieutenant, Grieves gave orders to his men in an ironic tone that at best approached chumminess and at worst was insulting, revealing his belief that they were stupid to have enlisted, unlucky to have been called up and he would rather be anywhere but there. He always tried not to speak to the men directly but through an NCO, fearing insubordination.

  He hadn’t known either of the injured men on the beach, or wondered who they were, but with Taylor’s blood barely wiped from his skin, and the sting of his own cowardice fresh in his mind, he went with the others to Limassol.

  At first he acted blindly, barely conscious of himself, but the violence and chaos of the troops, the hot current of vengeance that flowed through them began to flow through him, too. He was infected, gratefully replacing weakness with rage and the illusion of control. He allowed, encouraged, guided what became little more than a riot in places, and as the town began to look like a backdrop for chaos and calamity, so more chaos and calamity were heaped upon it. As Grieves, and others like him, lost their identity, so Limassol lost its identity, too. It wasn’t a town any more, but an assortment of places for beatings and concealment, just hundreds of windows, chairs, news-stands and shelves to be overturned and broken. It was a fast degradation. The outrage of the collective frees the individual to commit terrible acts.

  Grieves had brought Davis with him from the port, and tried not to lose sight of him as his platoon patrolled. He was comforted to have him there, another officer, and one who could communicate for him. Davis didn’t seem to appreciate the attention, and was very quiet.

  The job was to get the men and boys into the pens for questioning. One of Grieves’s sections had come off the main street after some stragglers and he’d gone after them. The section broke up as he lost control of it, soldiers scattering out of his reach; some returned to the main road and Grieves was reduced to a follower.

  The street they were in was long and very narrow. It had been blocked off at one end to stop it being a rat-run from the main road, but the stragglers had gone up it anyway, and the soldiers after them, running away from the crowd. They were only four men, now, including Francke and Miller, with Davis tagging along next to Grieves at a run-hop walk.

  Some people stayed locked in their houses as the running feet passed, but others came out into the grey evening to watch or interfere, thinking they could argue with the soldiers or help the escaping men. The youngest got away fastest. Francke and Miller went after them, sprinting, then skidding to a stop to shout, ‘Halt! Stamata! Dur!’ but shooting as they said it, and chasing again, as the bullets went into air.

  The slowest man was caught. Giving chase had got their blood up, which was heated anyway from the skirmishes of the day, and they cornered him against the doorway of a locked house. The soldiers laid into him, kicking him, keeping him down, hunched up into the corner of the door and the stone step.

  Grieves skidded into the group, just as the door was opened wide.

  A girl of about seventeen and her mother were in front of the soldiers, screaming for them to get out and trying to drag the man into the house with them. The soldiers, interrupted in their orgy of kicking and blinded by it, panicked at the suddenness of the door opening, and pushed the women backwards, inside, with the butts of their guns and flat hands. They got the man into the kitchen as well, checking it quickly, kicking open doors,
making sure nobody else was there. The women’s clothes and bodies were much more yielding than men’s to push against.

  Davis was hanging back in the street, and Grieves yelled at him to follow.

  It had happened fast, the whole group crushed into the tiny room suddenly, and the rest of the section outside somewhere.

  They began to question the women, search the house, breaking things up, accusing them all of knowing one another, having some plan and being involved with EOKA. Davis, by turns protesting and translating, eventually backed into another room and stayed there, silent.

  Grieves lost his temper with Davis when he wouldn’t obey him, and his anger was blind screaming, but once he couldn’t see him he forgot him. He turned his attention to the Greek man and the women sheltering him, and felt the power of his rank.

  ‘Get them to stay still,’ he ordered Francke. ‘Shut them up.’

  Grieves, who had never felt like a real soldier before, felt like one now. He had found a strength, greater than the distress of the morning; it wiped everything clean from his head – the maimed man, Hal pulling him down into the sand and blood. His rage comforted him. He could back it up: he was finding the guilty and punishing them.

  Francke questioned the women, made them sit and slapped them – their faces – and Miller stood over the man, bending down to shout questions close into his face. Realising that responses were elicited when they hit the women, Grieves – according to his rank – encouraged the two soldiers to hurt the women and to touch them under their blouses and the long skirts covering their legs. It became a game, the mocking of the women and the teasing of the man, who was restrained and could do nothing. Each of the soldiers was exquisitely liberated by the others, the officer encouraging them was absolution, and they were anonymous in the group, and entitled.

  The moment demanded completion: the rape of the women was inevitable. It was both celebration and rite – more about each other than the women themselves. They couldn’t have recognised them afterwards, it was just the raping them, one after the other, the specific act, and hurting them. The women’s foreignness made it easy: they didn’t smell like English girls, but like the prostitutes they were entitled to anyway.

  Grieves did not rape the women. He watched. He restrained the Greek man, who was barely conscious, with his foot on his chest. Francke, after he had buttoned his fly again, looked across at Grieves, then at the man on the ground.

  Grieves looked down at him, too. They had both been watching Francke and Miller with the women, but they were not together.

  With purpose and clarity, he nodded to Francke. Francke took one clean step towards him. He put his Sten on to single shot; the bolt was stiff, and his fingers slipped, doing it. The man, seeing what he was doing, began to struggle, and Grieves kept him still with his foot. Francke fought with the stiffly sprung bolt, and it clicked into place. He bent down slightly, put the nose of the gun against the centre of the man’s moving forehead, and shot him, with Grieves’s boot still on his chest. The only sound afterwards was the uneven breath of the women.

  Miller was the first to get to the door, the other two following, with one last casual glance at the women, who did not look up. No one would believe them anyway. No Englishman, at least.

  As they left, Grieves looked around for Davis, but could not see him.

  Davis stood in the dark of the room he had hidden in. There was no door on the opening: he had seen everything. The moment Miller, Francke and Grieves had gone, the women, unaware of him or their own injury, went to the body of the man on the floor. The younger one fell at his side, pulling at his hand, while the older grabbed the body, lifting the lolling head to her, revealing, on the wall behind, the grey and red contents of his skull. She did not recoil: she clutched him. Davis took his opportunity, and blindly passed them. They were oblivious to him, and he left the house and ran away, as far from them as he could, taking gulps of air into himself, as if he were drowning in what he had seen.

  The daylight faded from that small house, from the narrow street, the bigger streets and from the wire pens of caged men; the light dimmed over the roaming groups of soldiers, left the windows of the bars that had been smashed open, stopped shining on the broken windows and all the other varied scenes of destruction.

  At Episkopi, an orderly came to tell Hal that Colonel Burroughs was there for him. He went to the entrance, where Burroughs was waiting. He was silhouetted against the evening light, which poured smoothly into the hallway and onto the wooden desk where a nurse sat, writing up notes nearby.

  ‘Are you all right, Hal?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  Burroughs placed a firm hand, briefly, on Hal’s arm, then withdrew it. ‘Managing all right, then?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good man.’

  Burroughs told him the troops in Limassol had been what he called ‘understandably overzealous’ in places. Now some restraint was needed. ‘You’d better get down there. Let’s hope they’ve got some of those EOKA bastards,’ he said. ‘Clean up first, though, Hal.’

  He hadn’t thought of it until now. ‘Yes, of course, sir.’

  Burroughs left him, and Hal waited in front of the medical centre for Kirby. It was after five. He was surprised that so much time had gone by, thinking that the mine on the beach had exploded some time after nine. That meant he’d been with Jenson and Taylor for something close to six hours. He saw a car driving towards him. Clara was sitting in front, next to Evelyn Burroughs.

  They pulled up and Clara got out. She had on a tiered Greek-style skirt in bright colours – the skirt was the main thing he noticed because the colours were so intense: his eye kept being drawn to it. It was as if everything else was bleached out, just Clara’s skirt drawing attention to itself. She ran towards him. ‘They told me you weren’t hurt!’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I’ve been with Evelyn. I’ve been at her house all day. Everybody is – nobody can believe it,’ she said. She fluttered her hand up to her face, shrinking away from him, it seemed.

  Hal remembered he needed to get cleaned up. He was aware of his blood-stiff clothes, and the feel of his skin. His eye was dragged to her skirt again. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Those men, the horses – how could anybody do that? How did they put it there?’

  ‘During the night, I should imagine.’

  There was a pause.

  Hal heard an engine gunning up the hill in the sleepy quiet and then, over Clara’s shoulder, he saw Kirby turning in. ‘I’d better get going.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Limassol. Will you be all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Good.’

  Hal walked past her and got into the Land Rover.

  Clara, watching it drive away, wiped her sweating palms on the bright skirt. The sound of the engine faded.

  Evelyn leaned out of the car. ‘I told you!’ she said to Clara, but not harshly. ‘Come along now.’

  Kirby drove him home without speaking to him or looking at him, leaving him his privacy. Hal changed his clothes quickly – fast enough not to notice the scrubbing of his skin and the smell – made sure everything was in order and went back down.

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  Even at Kolossi, the tiny village nearest the garrison, there were signs of crisis. Land Rovers parked crookedly at the roadside, men with their hands up, held with guns by soldiers, the women looking on. Hal caught glimpses but didn’t stop, and Cypriots, out of their houses, followed his vehicle with their eyes.

  In the orange groves the sharp smell of citrus leaves filled his head.

  The first checkpoint looked to be completely abandoned. There was nobody around at all, just low concrete houses with looped electricity cables between them and rubbish smelling in the heat. A three-tonner and two Land Rovers were parked, and left there, one with the keys in it still.

  ‘Well, that’s fucking marvellous,’ said Hal.

  They heard
distant orders being given, in a house, or behind one, then a woman shouting and the banging of furniture going over, and more orders, in English.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Hal, beginning to wonder what they’d find in Limassol. ‘Let’s get on.’ Kirby pulled the Land Rover wide around the other vehicles and they drove on into town towards the port.

  There was a curious exhausted tension now, as late afternoon set in. There was never any sunset in Limassol – it faced the wrong way – just more shadows. At the port, the big ships were moored out on the flat silver sea. The area between the Customs House and the water had become a yard for a holding pen and men were being loaded from that into a truck.

  As the Land Rover stopped, Hal could see that the soldiers, as well as loading the men, were facing a small knot of boys and young men who were goading them and throwing sticks and bottles. Other soldiers were milling about, in pairs, with startling vagueness, and there was a lazy, sporadic violence that was too unfocused to be a stand-off, too dangerous to be nothing.

  Hal stood up in the front of the Land Rover as Kirby cut the engine and scanned the crowd for Mark Innes. He couldn’t see him. He looked for McKinney, Grieves, Trask or Fry – anyone who could have been said to be controlling the situation. There was nobody.

  ‘There,’ he said, pointing, and Kirby started up the Land Rover again, and crawled towards the road out of the port, to the east, where the waterfront of the town began, and the sea lapped up against the wall.

  They stopped again, between the crowd of boys – now staring and quiet – and a soldier, brought to quick attention by their arrival. Hal addressed the soldier: ‘Clark, is it?’

  ‘Maplin, sir.’

  ‘Who’s your section commander?’

  ‘Corporal Trask, sir.’

  Hal asked quietly, ‘The whereabouts of Corporal Trask. Any idea?’

  ‘He was over there a minute ago, sir.’