Ill Met by Moonlight by W.Stanley Moss

Author:W.Stanley Moss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Part Three: Going

April 29

SOON after I had made my last entry in this diary and fallen asleep in the sunlight I was awakened by somebody shaking me. I heard agitated voices, and when I opened my eyes I saw Manoli crouching over me, his face all excitement.

“Germans coming!” he said. “Plenty Germans in village!”

I was glad to see that the General had also been roused and was already putting on his boots. He was being quite quick about it.

Paddy’s friend from Anoyia said that he knew of a good cave close at hand, so we hurriedly threw our kit on to our backs and made off along the bank of the stream. The General, though never ceasing to complain about the pain in his leg, walked well and kept up a good pace. We had not gone far before our guide led us across the stream and up a narrow gorge. Five minutes later we reached a steep cliff-face, and up it we scrambled, heaving the General from foothold to foothold, until we found ourselves at the entrance of a tiny cave. Somehow we managed to clamber inside, all four of us squeezing into a space which would not comfortably have housed two men. We filled up the entrance of the cave with bracken, leaving ourselves peepholes through which we should be able to see up and down the gorge.

The General had been rather amused by our haste to conceal ourselves, and his face wore an I-toId-you-so expression. But now, with his knees tucked under his chin, he somehow contrived to go to sleep, and it was not long before the whistle of his heavy breathing filled the corners of the cave.

For two hours we watched and waited, but no one—not even a shepherd—passed up or down the gorge.

It was at half-past five that we heard an aeroplane flying very low above us. I poked out my head to have a look at it and saw a Fieseler-Storch—the German equivalent of our own ‘Shufti’ ’plane—hovering at an altitude of no more than a hundred feet immediately over our heads. It was travelling so slowly that I was easily able to see the occupant of the back seat surveying the countryside through a pair of binoculars. (Later, when I met Paddy, he told me that numbers of these ’planes had patrolled the entire area for over three hours.)

Suddenly the air was full of bits of paper, which came fluttering down in a thick cloud, and some of them landed within a few yards of our hideout. We felt certain that the messages on these pamphlets must be referring to us, but, much as we wanted to read them, we did not dare to leave the cave for fear of being seen.

Presently, however, when the sky was growing dark and there appeared to be no one in the immediate vicinity, we crawled out of our hiding-place, stretched our limbs to get rid of cramp, then scrambled down the cliff-face. We collected a number of the pamphlets.

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