When we had retreated in France, we knew where we were most of the time. You could hear and feel Jerry advancing as all round us our own soldiers were grouping and regrouping, fighting a rearguard action. This, now, was a bit eerie, just four cyclists in uniform looking as if they were out for a ride.
“Where’s our mob?” I wondered.
Billy said, “They haven’t passed us, and I don’t hear them in the distance. I reckon there’s been an order to cease fire and no one has told us.”
I thought Billy had probably guessed right. “Shall we chuck it in, then? Wait for them?” I pointed to the cyclists in the distance. “Standing orders says we have to destroy our weapons.”
Our Lee Enfield rifles leaned against the wall of the hut we were sleeping in. “That’s easy,” Billy said. He slid the bolts out of the rifles and threw them into the irrigation ditch. “What about the ammo?”
We gathered together the few hundred rounds of ammunition and the hand grenades and dropped them into the field latrine.
“Bayonets?” Billy asked.
I shook my head. “We might need a tin-opener. Bloody hell! Get your head down!”
One of the cyclists had returned and was now no more than fifty yards away. But it wasn’t us he was looking for, and he got back on his bike and rode off.
“I gather we’re not surrendering,” Billy said. “So what did we destroy the rifles for?”
“Makes us lighter on our feet,” I said. “No. This could go on for years with us in a Jerry prison camp living on black bread and potatoes, if we’re lucky. I’m for trying to get out of here. On our own.”
Billy nodded. “One last go.”
Two more helmets appeared across the field. “Now,” I said.
We made a run for it through the olive trees and then across a stony field, past a dead goat still tied to a post, running until we couldn’t see the cyclists, and then started to walk, south to the sea, we hoped.
We had water — it was standing orders to keep our bottles full at all times — and I’d hung on to my small pack with its bandages and iodine and an issue of biscuits. Billy had left his small pack behind when we ran, so I divided the biscuits between us. We stuffed the field dressings and the iodine into our pockets, and I threw away my pack and we started to walk.
At first, once we were well out of sight of the cyclists, it looked like plain sailing. We knew enough to go south, and it was easy to find footpaths. During that first morning, while we were still moving in daylight, we picked up one or two stragglers like ourselves, pairs of men, often one limping, leaning on the other, and the landscape started to fill up with us, all heading south. There are lots of stones in Crete and I was glad when we found ourselves on a paved road going our way, but now Billy said, “Let’s go round those olive trees.” He pulled me towards the grove on our right.
Normally our relationship was such that I was the leader and spokesman if one was necessary, so I was surprised at him asserting himself, but I let him lead us through the trees on a parallel course with the crowd on the road. Half an hour later we watched from a distance as a staff car appeared on the road, driven by a major. The truck stopped and the major jumped down to stand in the road. He had red hair and one of those little bristly moustaches. “We’re making a stand here,” he shouted. “We’ve got to create a diversion to give the regiment a chance to regroup. N.C.O.’s to the front.” It was an order.
We were N.C.O.’s. We’d got our lance-corporal’s stripes by surviving Le Havre.
A sergeant stepped forward. “Sir,” he said. “This mob couldn’t make a stand against a boy-scout troop and you are a bleeding lunatic who wants to die. I don’t.”
The major looked around for someone to arrest the sergeant, but just then three Stukas came out of the sky and raked the crowd with machine-gun fire; back and forth they went as we watched from the trees. The planes stayed in the sky, hovering like carrion birds, using anything that moved for target practice. We found an orchard to wait in until dark, when we could move unseen. That first day we ate the biscuit and drank some of the water.
That night we walked forward, avoiding the groups of stragglers who had started to reappear. We had nothing to eat the second day, and on the third day we tore out the linings of our pockets to suck out the biscuit crumbs. In the early hours we ran out of water and stopped to fill up the canteen at a well, but the water was putrid. At that point I didn’t want to go on. I’ve had varicose veins all my life and my legs wouldn’t stop hurting, and now my foot was paining me, too, and we had to have water soon. We sat down by the well, and Billy told me to stay there while he went for water. I never saw him again, until now.
While I waited for him to come back, I took off my boot, slid it off, rather, because it was full of blood. I dried it up as best I could with a field dressing. Once I’d got it tidied up, it wasn’t as bad as it looked, but a stone had got wedged under the ankle bone and cut a little hole where the blood was draining out. At the same time, an insect the size of a cockroach had got into my boot below the laces, and, as I surmised, tried to bite its way out. There were five or six marks where it had stung or bitten me, now all swollen up. I don’t know what kind of insect it was — a Greek insect — but I decided it wasn’t a scorpion or anything like that or I would be dead. Then, as I was dabbing at the bites, I must have pulled off a scab because a thin jet of blood shot out, strong enough to travel a yard before it hit the ground. I got frightened because I thought I’d opened an artery. I’ve found out since that with an artery you get a pumping action, but all I could think of was how to make a tourniquet. While I was panicking it stopped just with the pressure of my thumb and I found I could keep it stopped with a field dressing.
The next bit is hazy. I must have passed out or just fallen asleep and when I came round Billy had evidently been and gone. There was a small sheet of Greek newspaper beside me with a piece of grey bread and a lump of cheese, that soft white stuff. I ate a couple of mouthfuls, and then I passed out again. When I came round the second time, it had been more than an hour since Billy first went off and I tried to think what that meant. There wasn’t much I could do but wait. I knew the beach wasn’t far away, but I couldn’t get my boot back on, my foot had swollen up so. I sat there, not knowing what to prepare myself for, and along came a German motorcycle and sidecar. I stood up and put my hands on my head to show I was unarmed, but as they got close, even by moonlight I could see that the helmets weren’t German; in fact, these blokes were bareheaded.
“This the road to Sphakia?” the bloke in the sidecar shouted, in an accent that I knew but couldn’t place. One of ours, anyway.
“It is,” I said. “Want me to show you? I know the road well. I’m a transport driver. Been over it a dozen times.”
They looked at each other. “What happened to you?”
I identified the accent now. Australians, or New Zealanders. “Caught one in the foot,” I said. “Stuka. Shot up my engine. The rest of our patrol bought it. I was lucky.”
The driver twisted the grip, revving the engine. “We’ve lost our unit,” he said. “Seen any New Zealanders come by?”