The Girl Under the Olive Tree by Leah Fleming

Author:Leah Fleming [Fleming, Leah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Next
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2015-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

1941

The late summer campaign into the hills was to flush out the stragglers, knowing many were being sheltered in the villages higher up in the White Mountains. How shocked Rainer was to discover the primitive conditions in which these proud Cretans lived: often in one room with an earth floor, cooking over an open fire, drawing water from deep stone wells underground. His men assumed they were ignorant peasants and treated them with contempt.

Yet these people were handsome, strong and hardworking, with rich traditions and deep superstitions. The gangs of men and women they rounded up for road work bent their backs without complaint in the arid heat of the day, at least to their faces. They had a proud stare, often singing at their work, strange rhymes and folk songs; mantinades that defeated his basic Greek, words that changed from day to day. Judging by the looks and laughs in their direction, his men were the butt of their words, though he couldn’t prove anything.

The further into the hills they pushed, the less he felt secure among the overhanging rocks and narrow gullies, slipping on gravel sharp as razors. The threat of an ambush was ever present, making sun-soaked men tetchy, ready to shoot anything that moved.

Spotter planes swept over the mountains and plains, while armed patrols scoured the bridleways, searching for fugitives. They had secured the services of dubious local men who knew the best hiding places and the tricks of secreting stores against the order not to hoard goods. But there must be places known only to goatherds and shepherds that defied anyone discovering. Rainer didn’t trust the turncoats, willing to sell their fellow neighbours for a few drachmas, but in war you took help where you could.

It was on the Askifou plain that they scented out a trail leading up impossible scree. Dogs and troops scrambling up gave a warning and a flurry of men in rough costume began to run for cover. The grim fight that followed left two of Rainer’s men dead, and wounded some ragged soldiers. Schiller, one of his patrol leaders, wiry and short-tempered at the best of times, was incensed by the resistance and took his men up into the caves, flushing out at gun point some pathetic remnants of the British Army, dressed in rags, half starved, with wounds and on crutches. They surrendered without any fight left in them.

At the back was a bearded soldier covered in mosquito bites, dragging a wounded leg. Rainer examined them. Some had made pathetic attempts to pass themselves off as locals. This lot would be better off in a camp. The food they had left was little more than water bottles and a bag of snails. They wouldn’t survive much longer in this condition. How could you not feel sorry for proud soldiers who had come to this sorry state?

The Cretan sun showed no mercy on any of them as they slid their way down to the track, to march them on to base for further questioning.

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