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A New Kind Of War
Anthony Price
Copyright © Anthony Price 1987
PART ONE
Eve of Scobiemas
Greece, February 2, 1945
The eagle continued its effortless wheeling and gliding far above them, like a spotter-plane safely out of range, as the last echoes of gunfire finished knocking from peak to peak below it. Obviously, the bloody bird had heard a machine-gun before, and possibly from the same godforsaken hillside. In fact, it was probably just biding its time, waiting for its supper.
‘Do eagles eat dead bodies?’ As Fred watched, another eagle swept into view. So that meant they bloody did, for sure, and years of war had taught them to steer towards the sound of the guns, with the prospect of succulent glazed eyeballs for an hors d’oeuvre.
‘Eh?’ Kyriakos had been busy studying the tree-line on the crest of dummy4
the ridge above the path. ‘What was that?’
‘I said “So much for your bloody truce”, Captain Michaelides.’
Fred was conscious of his own as yet unglazed eyeballs as he stared reproachfully at Kyriakos.
‘You didn’t say that.’ The Greek transferred his attention to the track below them. ‘But . . . not my truce, old boy – your bloody truce.’
The track was empty, and the mountains were as silent as they had been before that sudden burst of machine-gun fire had startled them. And even allowing for acoustic tricks the sound had come from over the ridge, certainly; and from far away, hopefully; and possibly even accidentally? Some peasant lad shooting his foot off? Or impressing his girl-friend?
‘Not my bloody truce.’ A tiny green shoot of hope poked through the arid crust of Fred’s experience: when things were not as bad as they seemed that was usually because they were preparing to be worse. But this returning silence was encouraging. ‘I’m just a tourist passing through – remember?’
Kyriakos chuckled, and then coughed his smoker’s cough. ‘A tourist?’
‘You were going to show me Delphi, as I recall.’ As Kyriakos himself began to relax, Fred’s miraculous green shoot flowered.
Back in Athens they had said that there’d be eagles over Delphi, so maybe it was just a welcoming party up there. ‘That makes me a tourist.’
‘If that’s what you wish to be . . .’ The Greek shrugged. ‘But I was dummy4
actually going to introduce you to Mother as one of our liberators.
Just like Lord Byron, I would have told her –
Fill high the cup with Samian wine!
Our virgins dance beneath the shade
– although I can’t guarantee any virgins locally, after having been away so long. But I do know that Father bricked up some good wine at the far end of the old cellar in the winter of ‘40. He knew what was coming, by God!’
‘I’ll settle for the wine.’ And this blissful silence! ‘What do you think it was, Kyri?
‘What for?’ Ever cautious, Kyriakos was scanning the ridge again.
‘Christmas Eve?’ To his shame Fred found the prospect of the temple of Apollo at Delphi insignificant compared with that of good wine and a soft bed, with or without an attendant virgin. But then almost anything would be an improvement on his Levadhia billet.
‘Christmas Eve? On February the second?’ Suddenly there was something not quite right in the Greek’s voice. ‘No – don’t look!
Keep talking, old man – just keep talking – look at me!’
‘Yes?’ It hurt his neck not to look up the hillside. ‘What did you see?’
‘Perhaps nothing. I am not sure. But it is better that we do not both stare, I think. So ... you were saying?’
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Fear crawled up Fred’s back like a centipede. “There’s an outcrop of rock about twenty yards ahead, Kyri. We’d be a lot safer behind it.‘
‘Yes – I know. But we’re having a conversation, and we haven’t seen anything yet.’ Kyriakos brushed his moustache with heavily nicotine-stained fingers. Fred remembered that when he’d first seen that moustache in Italy it had been a well-groomed Ronald Colman growth, along the road beyond Tombe di Pesaro, on the Canadian Corps boundary. But now it had bushed out and run riot, perhaps symbolizing its owner’s own reversion to the traditional banditry of his native land.
‘It was a Spandau that fired just now.’ When he didn’t speak Kyriakos occupied his silence. ‘That’s an
‘Yes.’ But words failed Fred, even as he raised a ridiculous finger.
