The Schirmer Inheritance (20 page)

The German withdrawal from Thrace was an ignominious affair. The depot soldiers responsible for the staff work had had little experience of moving troops in the field and still less of supplying them while they were on the move. Units like the Ninety-fourth Garrison Regiment, and there was more than one, could do little to make good the deficiencies. The knowledge that British raiding forces were advancing rapidly from
the south in order to harass the retreat, and that
andarte
bands were already hovering aggressively on the flanks, may have lent urgency to the withdrawal, but, in doing so, it had also added to the confusion. It was traffic congestion rather than any brilliant planning by Phengaros that led to the ambushing of Sergeant Schirmer’s convoy.

He was one of the last of his regiment to leave the Salonika area. Contempt for his regiment he might have, but that did not prevent his doing his utmost to see that the fraction of it that he controlled carried out its orders properly. As headquarters weapons-instructor, he had no platoon responsibilities and came under the command of an engineer officer in charge of a special rear-guard party. This officer was Lieutenant Leubner, and he had been detailed to carry out a series of important demolitions in the wake of the retreat.

The Sergeant liked Lieutenant Leubner, who had lost a hand in Italy; he felt that the Lieutenant understood him. Between them they organized the party in two detachments, and the Sergeant was given command of one of them.

He drove his men and himself unmercifully and succeeded in completing his part of the work in accordance with the time-table issued with the movement order. During the night of the 23rd of October his detachment loaded the trucks they were to take with them and moved out of Salonika. They were exactly on schedule.

His orders were to go through Vodena, deal with the gasoline dump on the Apsalos road, and then rendezvous with Lieutenant Leubner at the bridge by Vodena. It had been anticipated that the laying of the demolition charges for the bridge would call for the united efforts of the two detachments if it were to be done to schedule. The time of the rendezvous had been fixed for dawn.

At first light that day Sergeant Schirmer was at Yiannitsa, only a little over halfway along the road to Vodena, and trying
desperately to force a way for his detachment past a column of tank transporters. The transporters should have been fifty miles further on, but had themselves been held up by a column of horse-drawn wagons which had debouched from the Naoussa road twelve hours behind schedule. The Sergeant was two hours late when he passed through Vodena. Had he been on time, Phengaros’s men would have missed him by an hour.

It had rained during the night, and with the rising sun the air became stiflingly humid; moreover, the Sergeant had had no sleep for thirty hours. Yet, as he sat beside the driver of the leading truck, he had little difficulty in staying awake. The machine-pistol lying across his knees reminded him of the need for vigilance, and the dull pain of his overworked hip prevented his settling into too comfortable a position. But his fatigue manifested itself in other ways. His eyes, scouring an area of hillside above the bend in the road towards which they were climbing, kept shifting focus suddenly, so that he had to shake his head before he could see properly; and his thoughts wandered with dreamlike inconsequence from the problems of the task in hand, and the possible plight of Lieutenant Leubner’s detachment, to the attack on Eben-Emael, to a girl he had had in Hanover, and then, uneasily, to the moment in Salonika forty-eight hours earlier when Kyra had wept as he had said good-bye to her.

The weeping of women always made the Sergeant feel uneasy. It was not that he was sentimental where women were concerned; it was simply that the sound of weeping always seemed to presage his own misfortunes. There had been the time in Belgium, for instance, when that old woman had stood bleating because they had killed her cow. Two days after that he had been wounded. There had been the time in Crete when it had been necessary for discipline to put some of the married men up against a wall and shoot them. A month later, in Benghazi, he had gone down with dysentery. There had been
the time in Italy when some of the lads had fooled about with a young girl. Two days before his jumping accident,
that
had been. He would never admit to such an unreasoning and childish superstition, of course; but if he ever married, it would be to some girl who would not weep even if he beat the living daylights out of her. Let her scream as much as she liked, let her try and kill him if she wanted to, and dared, but let there be no weeping. It meant bad luck.

It was the off-side front wheel of the truck that exploded the mine. The Sergeant felt the lift of it a split second before his head hit the canopy of the driver’s cab.

Then, there was something wet on his face and a thin, high singing in his ears. He was lying face-downwards and everything was dark except for one winking disk of light. Something gave him a violent blow in the side, but he was too tired to cry out or even to feel pain. He could hear men’s voices and knew that they were speaking Greek. Then the sounds of their voices faded and he began to fall through the air towards the trees below, defending himself against the cruel branches by locking his ankles tightly and pointing his toes, as he had been taught in the parachute jumping school. The trees engulfed him with a sigh that seemed to come from his own lips.

When he regained consciousness for the second time, there seemed to be nothing wet on his face, but something stretching the skin of it. The disk of light was still there, but it no longer winked. He became aware now of his arms stretched out above his head, as if he were going to dive into water. He could feel his heart beating, sending pain from all over his body into his head. His legs felt warm. He moved his fingers and they dug into grit and pebbles. Consciousness began to flood back. There was something the matter with his eyelids and he could not see properly, but he kept looking at the disk of light and moved his head slightly. Suddenly, he realized that the disk was a small white pebble lying in a patch of sunlight.
Then he remembered that he was in Greece and had been in a truck that had been hit. With an effort, he rolled on to his side.

The force of the explosion had overturned the truck and smashed the floor of it to matchwood, but the main blast had missed the driver’s cab. The Sergeant had been lying in an oil-drenched litter of empty gasoline cans and debris, with his face in the mess of blood which had poured from his head wound. The blood had congealed now on his cheeks and in his eyes. The wreckage of the truck hung over him, shading all but his legs from the sun. There was no sound except the chirping of cicadas and faint dripping noises from the truck.

He began to move his limbs. Though he knew that he had hurt his head, he did not as yet know the extent of his injuries. His great fear was that his hip had been broken again. For several long seconds all he could think of was the X-Ray picture the surgeon had shown him of the thick metal pin which had been inserted to strengthen the neck of the damaged bone. If that had been torn away, he was finished. He moved the leg carefully. The hip was very painful, but it had been painful before the mine had exploded. Fatigue always made it painful. He became bolder and, drawing the leg up under him, began to sit up. It was then that he noticed that all his equipment had gone. He remembered the Greek voices and the blow he had felt and began to realize what had happened.

His head was throbbing horribly, but the hip seemed to be all right. He dragged himself to his knees. A moment later he vomited. The effort exhausted him and he lay down again to rest. He knew that the head wound might be serious. It was not the amount of the bleeding that concerned him—he had seen plenty of scalp wounds and knew that they bled profusely—but the possibility of there being internal bleeding from the concussion. However, he would know soon enough if there were, and there was, in any case, nothing he could do about it.
His immediate task was to find out what had happened to the rest of the detachment and, if possible, take steps to deal with the situation. He made another effort to get to his feet and, after a bit, succeeded.

He looked about him. His watch had gone, but the position of the sun told him that less than an hour had elapsed since the crash. The wreckage of the truck lay across the road, completely blocking it. The body of the driver was nowhere to be seen. He moved out cautiously into the middle of the road and looked down the hill.

The second truck had stopped slewed across the road a hundred yards away. Three German soldiers lay in the road by it. Beyond he could just see the canopy of the driver’s cab belonging to the third truck. He set off slowly down the hill, pausing every now and then to get his strength back. The sun beat down and the flies buzzed round his head. It seemed an enormous distance to the second truck. He began to feel that he was going to vomit again, and lay down in the shade of a bush to recover. Then he went on.

The soldiers in the road were quite dead. One of them, who looked as if he had first been wounded by a grenade burst, had his throat cut. All the arms and equipment had been taken, but the contents of two haversacks were strewn on the ground. The truck had some bullet holes in it and was scarred by grenade bursts, but it seemed all right otherwise. For several wild moments he considered turning it round and driving back to Vodena, but the road was not wide enough to turn in and he knew that, even if it had been, he would not have had the strength to do the job.

He could see the third truck plainly now, and with it more dead men. One of them was hanging over the side of it, his arms dangling grotesquely. It seemed probable that the whole of his detachment had become casualties. In any case, there was little point in investigating further. Militarily speaking, it
had certainly ceased to exist. It would be in order for him, then, to look to his own safety.

He leaned against the side of the truck to rest again and caught sight of his face in the driving mirror. The blood had congealed all over his hair as well as in his eyes and on his face; his whole head looked as inhuman as if it had been smashed to a pulp; it was easy to see why the
andartes
had taken him for dead.

His heart leaped suddenly with fear and sent a shaft of pain to the top of his head. The
andartes
had gone for the moment, but there was more than a possibility that they would return with drivers for the two serviceable trucks. It was even possible that they had left a sentry, and that, somewhere on the hillside above, the sights of a rifle were being steadied on him at that very moment. But at the same moment reason told him that there was very probably no sentry, and that, even if there were, the man had already had more than enough time to shoot if he had intended to do so.

Nevertheless, the place was dangerous. Whether the
andartes
returned or whether they did not, it would not be very long before the local inhabitants ventured on the scene. There were still plenty of pickings for them; the boots of the dead, the gasoline cans, the tires on the trucks, the tool kits. The
andartes
had taken scarcely anything. He would have to get away quickly.

For a moment or two he thought of trying to go ahead on foot in the hope of reaching the fuel dump, but he soon abandoned the idea. Even if he had had enough strength to walk that distance, the chance of his being able to do so in broad daylight unseen by the local inhabitants would be remote. In that area and at that time, a solitary German soldier, wounded and unarmed, would be lucky if he were not tortured before he was stoned to death by the women. The road back to Vodena would be even more dangerous. He must wait for
darkness, therefore; and that might give him time to recover his strength too. His immediate course of action, then, was plain enough; he must find water, food, and a place to hide. Later on, if he were still alive, he would decide what to do next.

The water bottles had all been taken. He dragged an empty gasoline can out of the truck and began to drain the radiator into it. When it was half full he realized that he would not have the strength to carry more. There was still plenty left in the radiator, and it was not too hot to drink now. When he had slaked his thirst, he soaked his handkerchief in the water and sponged the blood from his face and eyes. His head he did not touch for fear of starting the bleeding again.

Next he looked for food. The
andartes
had taken the sack with the supplies in it, but he knew the ways of army truck-drivers and went to the tool-box. There were two emergency rations there, some sticks of chocolate, and the driver’s greatcoat. He put the rations and the chocolate in the greatcoat pocket and slung it over his shoulder. Then he picked up the can of water and limped back slowly up the road.

He had already decided on his hiding-place. He remembered how innocent the hillside above had looked when he had been coming up the road in the truck, and how well it had concealed the attackers. It would conceal him in the same way. He left the road and started to climb.

It took him half an hour to climb a hundred yards. Once he lay for nearly ten minutes, too exhausted to move, before he could bring himself to crawl painfully on. The hillside was very steep and he had to drag the heavy water can behind him. Several times he thought of leaving it and returning later to pick it up, but some instinct warned him that water was more necessary to him now than food and that he could not risk losing it. He crawled on until at last he could go no farther and lay for a time retching helplessly, unable even to crawl out of
the sun. Flies began to settle on his face without his being able to brush them away. After a while, tortured by the flies, he opened his eyes to see where he was.

There was a clump of thorn bushes a yard or so away, with a tamarisk growing among them. With a tremendous effort he dragged the can of water into the shade of the tree and crawled in among the thorn bushes with the greatcoat. The last thing he saw was a column of dense black smoke rising from somewhere beyond the hill in the direction of the fuel dump. Then, realizing that one at least of his decisions had been made for him, he lay face-downwards on the coat and slept.