53 First Blood
The Acqui Division voted to resist the Germans but had no time to set in place an effective leadership to co-ordinate its actions. After battle had already begun, orders finally began to arrive from General Gandin, and some obeyed them and some did not. Of the exact order of events little is known, but two things are certain. One is that the Communist andartes of ELAS took no part, seeing no reason to shake themselves out of their parasitic lethargy, and the other is that the Italian resistance owed nothing to the military hierarchy. It was a spontaneous blossoming of courage and determination in the hearts of individual men who knew obscurely that the time had finally arrived for them to do something right.
Who knows what it was that truly motivated Captain Fienzo Appollonio to open fire without orders on a flotilla of German landing craft? Perhaps he was an honourable man who could no longer bear to play an ignoble and acquiescent part in the history of a half-baked and fallen empire. Perhaps he felt a genuine sympathy for the Greeks with whom he had lived so long, and wanted now to expunge the shame he felt at their subjugation and the deprivation that he had helped to inflict. Perhaps he was ashamed of the dismal military record of the army in which he had served, and now wanted to wrest control of his little portion of it out of the hands of the complacent incompetents and sycophants who, from the safety of their bunkers, had led it to so many sanguine and pointless calamities, who, time and again, had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Perhaps it was merely that he saw only too clearly that there was no choice but to fight for survival.
Whatever the emotions and thoughts that circled upon themselves in the recesses of his mind, his men shared his conclusions. They had already loaded and aimed the howitzers whilst he was still watching the landing craft cutting clumsily through the swell with their cargo of vehicles and pale-faced soldiers. He noted the superfluous but strangely meaningful discipline in the manner that
they bore their weapons exactly alike, slung vertically upon a shoulder so that they bristled together like the spikes arranged in the bottom of a trap. The captain squinted through his binoculars and divided the intervening space of sea into units of a hundred metres. He accounted for the hidden ground between his battery and the sea, and with a confidence that he did not feel, he ordered the gun nearest to him to set the range he had determined and to fire a single shell.
With a metallic crash the gun leapt backwards, its base hopping on its bed like an excited dog jumping for a titbit. After all these years Captain Appollonio had still not adjusted to the painful ringing of metal in his ears, and he winced as he watched that tiny black dot wing at an incredible and incalculable speed, so fast that he wondered whether or not he had really seen it, high into the air. He lost it, and then seconds later saw the plume of water rise up from the sea not fifty metres from the place he had estimated that it would fall. There was a frenzy of activity on the boats that struck him as almost comical, and then he ordered an exact range and gave the command to fire at will.
The men were exhilarated. At last they had a leader, someone whose courage would mysteriously flow into the ground beneath his own feet, travel subterraneously, and spring up as if by miracle in their own hearts, filling them with the wild freedom of men who have at last discovered that they are soldiers after all. The men smiled at each other, their eyes glowing with pleasure, with a pride that they had never felt before, and they watched in wonder as spectacular spouts of water obliterated the regular and somnolent patterns of the waves. The air grew heavy with the sweet stench of cordite and the ineffably virile and infernal smell of red-hot barrels and smoking, aromatic oil. The creases in the palms of their hands filled up with grime, and their faces blackened so that their lips seemed oddly pale and pink where they had wetted them with their tongues. The sweat of their turbulent excitement drenched the hair beneath their caps, and they threw down the half-finished cigarettes that formerly had been a comfort but were now an impediment to action and to breath.
Stunned by their own success, by the incredible and unprecedented efficacy of their bombardment, the men of the battery stopped firing as the last of landing craft disappeared beneath the waves. They clenched their fists in satisfaction as they watched two rescue launches put out from Lixouri and make their way towards the carnage and the flotsam of the dismembered and splinter boats. None of them felt like firing on a rescue operation, and they began to shake each others' hands and embrace. They would always remember this day, they told each other. It had been a rite of passage, like being confirmed or getting wed.
A seaplane flew out over the ridge towards Argostoli, laying an indiscriminate but lethal stick of bombs that blew out the roofs of one humble and innocent house after another in a perfectly straight line. Machine-guns and anti-aircraft guns opened fire as other commanders spontaneously ignored their orders and threw themselves into battle. In the streets of Argostoli Italian infantrymen, some without their officers, advanced behind the shelter of light tanks towards the Panzers, inspired by a heroism that they had never shown when fighting for the Fascists and the ludicrous dictator.
The Panzers opened fire on the battery, and their thunderous noise echoed round and round the confines of the narrow streets, shaking the walls and causing flakes of loose distemper to rain down as dust in the interiors of the houses. Appollonio's gunners retrained their barrels, and not far off the battery of Captain Antonio Corelli also opened fire. The tanks advanced, their feeble and unnecessary camouflage of brushwood falling from their flanks like the clothes of a drunken whore. Their engines roared and whined, they lurched at each change of speed, and black clouds of exhaust belched out of them as though already struck by shells.
Shells fell amongst the Panzers, raising gouts of red earth and white dust, and they all stopped dead, as though their occupants were too amazed at finding themselves opposed, as though it were inconceivable that Italians should resist. Incredibly, a German armoured car appeared on the old British bridge that ran across the shallows of the bay, and above its turret there fluttered a large white flag. The bombardiers of the batteries were triumphant, vindicated; perhaps the Germans were going to go and ask Gandin for the terms of surrender.
The troops waited and smoked in the sunset, the oil of their fingers impregnating itself acridly but somehow appropriately into the paper of their cigarettes. A large flight of Junkets flew overhead, bringing reinforcements for the Nazis, and Captain Appollonio threw his hands into the air with exasperation, `Why don't the anti-aircraft batteries fire? What's wrong with those cretins?'
He had not risked so much, only to lose everything through the vacillation of others. Vainly, but to his own satisfaction, he fired a carbine at the distant and disappearing planes, the crackling of the shots sounding oddly polite and
diffident by comparison with the recent salvoes of the guns.
The field telephone rang. General Gandin, instead of opportunely demanding a surrender, had agreed to a truce. Appollonio rolled his eyes in disbelief, and yelled so loudly at the operator that it was some time before he realised that he was cursing down a closed line. `Mad son of a bitch,' he shouted, as he slammed down the receiver, and he was consoled only a little when a runner arrived bearing a message from Captain Antonio Corelli: `If you are court-martialled, I shall demand the honour of being tried alongside you.'