him. She smiled reassuringly. He sank down on the bed and went to sleep.
It was still dark, and he could not have been asleep for much more than two hours, when he awoke in response to a violent shaking of his arm and a blow in the back.
He rolled over and opened his eyes.
Two men with pistols in their hands were standing looking down at him. They wore the elementary kind of uniform which he had seen on the andartes rioting about in the streets a few hours earlier. Those, however, had all been very drunk; these were very sober and businesslike. They were lean, sour-looking young men with smart belts and brassards on their arms. He guessed that they were andarte officers. One of them spoke sharply in German.
“Get up.”
He obeyed slowly, overcoming a longing for sleep more desperate than any sensation of fear. He hoped that they would kill him quickly so that he could rest.
“Your name?”
“Schirmer.”
“Rank?”
“Sergeant. Who are you?”
“You’ll find out. She says you were a paratrooper and an instructor. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you win your Iron Cross?”
The Sergeant was sufficiently awake now to appreciate the necessity of lying. “In Belgium,” he said.
“Do you want to live?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Fascists don’t. They are death-lovers, so we kill them. True democrats want to live. They prove their desire by fighting with their class comrades against the Fascists and the capitalist-imperialist aggressors.”
“Who are these aggressors?”
“Reactionaries and their Anglo-American bosses.”
“I don’t know anything about politics.”
“Naturally. You have had no chance of learning about them. They are simple enough, however. Fascists die, true democrats live. You can, of course, choose freely which you are to be, but as time is short and there is much work to be done, you can have only twenty seconds to make up your mind. The usual time allowed is ten seconds, but you are an N.C.O., a skilled soldier, and a valuable instructor. Also you are not a deserter. You are entitled to think carefully before you accept the sacred responsibility which is offered to you.”
“If I claim the rights of a prisoner of war?”
“You are no prisoner, Schirmer. You have not surrendered. You are still in the thick of the fight. At present you are an enemy of Greece, and”-the andarte raised his pistol-“we have much to avenge.”
“And if I accept?”
“You will be given an early opportunity of demonstrating your political reliability, your loyalty, and your skill. The twenty seconds have long ago departed. What do you wish to say?”
The Sergeant shrugged. “I accept.”
“Then salute,” the andarte said sharply.
For an instant the Sergeant’s right arm started to move, and in that instant he saw the andarte’s finger tighten on the trigger. He clenched the fist of his left hand and raised it above his head.
The andarte smiled thinly. “Very good. You may come with us in a moment.” He went to the bedroom door and opened it. “But first there is another matter to attend to.”
He beckoned Kyra into the room. She walked stiffly, her face a tear-stained mask of fear. She did not look at the Sergeant.
“This woman,” the andarte said with a smile, “was good enough to inform us that you were here. Her brother was a Fascist-collaborationist spy. Her object in betraying you was to convince us that she has a true democratic spirit. What do you think about that, Comrade Schirmer?”
“I think she is a Fascist bitch,” said the Sergeant shortly.
“Excellent. That was my own thought. You will learn fast.”
The andarte glanced at his companion and nodded.
The companion’s gun jerked up. Before Kyra could scream or the Sergeant could even think of protesting, three shots had crashed out. The shock waves brought down a small piece of plaster from the ceiling. The Sergeant felt it tap his shoulder as he saw the girl, her mouth still open, slammed against the wall by the force of the heavy bullets. Then she sank to the floor without a sound.
The andarte officer looked at her intently for a moment, then nodded again and walked out of the room.
The Sergeant followed. He knew that sometime when he was not so tired and confused he would feel horror at what had just happened. He had liked Kyra.
Sergeant Schirmer served in the Democratic Army of General Markos for just over four years.
After the December rebellion of ’44 and the promotion of Markos to the command of the army, he had been sent to Albania. There, he had been an instructor in a training camp set up to discipline the guerrilla bands then being organized in larger formations, in preparation for the campaign of ’46. It was in this camp that he met Arthur.
Arthur had been in a British Commando force which had raided a German headquarters in North Africa. He had been wounded and captured. The German officer in charge had chosen to ignore the standing order about shooting captured Commando men and had put Arthur in with a batch of other British prisoners who were being sent to Germany via Greece and Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, Arthur had escaped and spent the rest of the war fighting with the Tito Partisans. He had not troubled to return to England when the war ended, and had been one of the instructors provided by Tito to assist Markos.
In Arthur the Sergeant found a kindred spirit. They were both professional soldiers and had both served in corps d’elite as N.C.O.’s Neither had any emotional ties with his native land. Both loved soldiering for its own sake. Above all, they shared the same outlook on matters of politics.
During his service with the Partisans, Arthur had listened to so much Marxist patter that he knew a great deal of it by heart. At moments of stress or boredom he would recite it at length and at lightning speed. It had disconcerted the Sergeant when he had heard it for the first time, and he had approached Arthur privately on the subject.
“I was not aware, Corporal,” he had said in the clumsy mixture of Greek, English, and German they used in order to converse; “I did not think that you were a Red.”
Arthur had grinned. “No? I’m one of the most politically reliable men in the outfit.”
“So?”
“So. Don’t I prove it? Look how many slogans I know. I can talk like the book.”
“I see.”
“Of course, I don’t know what this dialectical-materialism stuff means, but then I could never understand what the Bible was all about either. At school we had to say bits of the Bible. I always used to get top marks for Scripture. Here I’m politically reliable.”
“You do not believe in the cause for which we fight?”
“No more than you do, Sergeant. I leave that to the amateurs. Soldiering’s my job. What do I want with causes?”
The Sergeant had nodded thoughtfully and glanced at the medal ribbons on Arthur’s shirt. “Do you think, Corporal, that there is any possibility of our General’s plans succeeding?” he had asked. Although they both held commissions in the Markos forces, they had chosen to ignore the fact in private. They had been N.C.O.’s in proper armies.
“Could be,” Arthur said. “Depends on how many mistakes the other lot make, same as always. Why? What are you thinking about, Sarge? Promotion?”
The Sergeant had nodded. “Yes, promotion. If this revolution were to succeed, there might be big opportunities for men able to take them. I think that I, too, must take steps to become politically reliable.”
The steps he had taken had proved effective, and his qualities as a natural leader had soon been recognized. By 1947 he was commanding a brigade, with Arthur as his second-in-command. When, in 1949, the Markos forces
