The Schirmer Inheritance

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.