57 Fire

57 Fire

Corelli lay beneath his friend for hours, their blood intermingling in the soil, in their uniforms, and in their flesh. It was not until the evening that Velisarios

came across that tangled heap of tragic remains, and recognised the man as big as himself who had once reached a hand across the barriers of hostility and offered him a cigarette. He looked down into the vacant and staring eyes, shuddered at the smashed and dislocated jaw, reached down a hand, and tried to close the lids. He failed, and was struck by the indecency of leaving such, a brother to the fees and birds. He knelt down and reached his arms beneath that massive torso and those treelike legs. With a mighty effort he lifted Carlo from the ground, nearly toppled with the strain, and looked down. He saw the mad captain who was staying at the doctor's, the one whose secret and elaborately surreptitious love for Pelagia was known and discussed by everyone on the island. The eyes were not vacant, and they flickered. The lips moved; 'Aiutarmi,' they said.

Velisarios propped Carlo against the pink and bullet-pitted wall, and returned to kneel beside the captain. He looked at the hideous wounds and the dark lake of blood that was already turning black, and wondered whether it might not be a kindness just to kill him.

The strongman carefully picked him up, felt how light he was, and set off across the stony fields to save his life.

Nobody knows the exact number of the Italian dead that lay upon the earth of Cephallonia. At least four thousand were massacred and probably nine thousand. Was it 288,000 kilos of butchered human meat, or 648,000? Was it 18,752 litres of bright young blood, or 42,192? The evidence was lost in flame.

At the summit of Mt Aenos, Alekos looked down over his native land and wondered for one wild moment whether it was June 24th. Was St John's Day in September? Had somebody moved it? Enormous fires were springing up at regular intervals, at places where the fires were never held for the saint. He smelt olive wood and pine, kerosene, dry thorn, resin, oil, and charring flesh; he sniffed with disgust. The Italians never could cook meat. He smelt the vile odour of burning hair and bone, even at that enormous height, and watched with dismay as dirty smoke blacked out the stars. Perhaps it was the end of the world.

Down in the valleys the Germans competed with historical truth, destroying the evidence, displaying abundant knowledge of their guilt by converting flesh to smoke. They ran truckload after truckload of fuel. Soldiers hacked down olives a thousand years old and stacked them about heaps of lolling corpses so high that it became impossible to stack them higher. Contemptuously they pointed to individual dead, saying, `This one pissed himself,' or 'This one stinks of shit,' but few could laugh. Abdominal slime and blood found their way onto their hands and uniforms, a sweet and sticky smell of fresh meat affected their heads like drink, and sweat poured down their temples as they slung one defunct boy after another across their shoulders, and tipped them upon the pyres. They worked until their legs weakened and the flames became too hot to approach, but there seemed to be no ending to the work. More cadavers arrived, frozen in reproach and ghoulish in that flickering fight. They came in on trucks, in jeeps, slung across armoured cars and mules, once or twice on stretchers.

There was no priest but Arsenios. He had prophesied for months that these very boys would finish in the flames, and was felled by horror when it happened. Indeed, he felt responsible. On that evening when all the Greeks were hiding in their homes behind their shutters, peeping out into the night, Father Arsenios arrived with his little dog at the fire at Troianata, the largest one of all, not far from the monastery of the saint, and beheld a scene from Armageddon. As though invisible he walked amongst the pallid faces of the dead, reminded of Catholic depictions of the last day. All around him the dark and frantic silhouettes of German soldiers laboured and grunted like pigs as they hurled one corpse after another upon the flames. Not far away he heard a strangled and heart-stopping scream as a boy who was not yet entirely dead thrashed and struggled in the sharp agony of his cremation.

Father Arsenios felt the spirit move within him, and he spread his arms wide and cried out, his voice competing with the shouts of the soldiers and the hissing and crackling of the flames. Brandishing his crozier of olivewood he threw back his head: `I have considered the days of old, the years of ancient times. I call to remembrance my song in the night: I commune with mine own heart.

`Will the Lord cast off forever? and will he be favourable no more? Is his mercy clean gone forever? doth his promise fail for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies? `Woe to thee that spoilest, when thou wast not spoiled! Woe to thee that dealest treachery, and they dealt not treachery to thee! When thou hast ceased to spoil, then shalt thou be spoiled! `Woe unto thee, for the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations, and his fury

upon their armies; he hath utterly destroyed them, he hath delivered them to the slaughter! The slain also shall be cast out, and their stink shall come out of their carcasses, and the mountains shall be melted with their blood! `Woe unto thee, for the streams of the land shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch! It shall not be quenched night or day, the smoke thereof shall go up forever; from generation unto generation it shall lie waste, and none shall pass it through!' , Unaware that no one had heard him, fired by apocalyptic rage, Father Arsenios grasped his staff in both hands, roared, 'I shall uncover thy nakedness, yea, thy shame shall be seen. I will take vengeance, and I will not meet thee as a man. Thou hast polluted mine inheritance,' and flung himself into battle.

Swinging the crozier he set about the shoulders and heads of the German soldiers. A helmet clanged, tired shoulders jolted with determined blows, hands were raised to protect heads, only to have their fingers crushed. The men who had efficiently slaughtered thousands seemed at a loss as to what to do. There were cries of, `Shit, for God's sake get him off!' and from the bystanders who had with relief stopped to watch, comments such as, `Look at that crazy priest!' They prodded each other and laughed, enjoying the discomfiture of the afflicted. In that orange glow Arsenios looked like some cadaverous bat, his voluminous black robes fluttering; and his prophetic beard, wildly glittering eyes, and tall and tattered hat with its flat top merely served to increase the impression of a madness percolated from another world. His small dog danced and skipped about him, barking senselessly with excitement and snapping at the calves of his chosen victims.

It ended only when one soldier was on the ground and in danger of a fractured skull and broken hands. An officer of the Grenadiers drew his automatic pistol, came up behind Arsenios, and feed a single shot upwards through the nape of his neck, exploding his brains and the plates of his skull outwards through the front of his head. Arsenios died in a brilliant flash of white light that he took to be the revelation of the face of God, and his emaciated and skeletal remains were flung on the pyre, along with the young boys whose fare he had foreseen, but which he had not known that he would share.

His dog whimpered, frightened of the flames and the strange men, attempting to approach its burning master, but having repeatedly to withdraw. It expressed its incomprehension by raising first one paw and then another, and remained there until the soldiers left and the sickened Greeks arrived, to find it singed and howling.

Men and women and the few Italian soldiers who had escaped approached the fires as closely as the heat permitted. Without consulting each other they began to pull away the bodies they could reach at the periphery as the changing wind allowed. There were many of them still lying in distorted and toy-like postures in places where no flames had reached. All of the toiling people thought the same things: is this what it will be like under the Germans? How many of these boys could there have been? How many of these boys did I know? Can I imagine the horror of their death? Can I conceive how it is to die of bleeding, slowly? Is it, as they say, like the kick of a horse when a bullet smashes bone? It seemed that everyone had trembling hands and tear-filled eyes. People spoke as little as possible because it was hard to speak when choking either from the vile smoke of sizzling flesh or with such tormenting grief. In pairs and threes they carried bodies away to caves and crannies, to hastily dug but massive graves, to holes where in the past one hid one's goods and money from taxmen and the customs. Parties went out to places where there had been battle, and recovered those that the Nazis had not found. Orthodox prayers were said hastily over Catholic souls, and it was noted that none of them wore rings or carried cash. The bodies had been looted, their forgers hacked away, their gold teeth pulled, their silver chains with crucifix removed.

At dawn a black and viscous cloud hung over the land and blotted out the sun, and the people returned to their houses and locked the doors till dark. General Gandin's smoke had mingled with that of his boys in the Cephallonian sky, one of the first to die, an honourable, chivalrous old soldier of the ancient school, who trusted his enemies and had tried to save his men. He died straight-backed and unflinching, in the knowledge that his frequent changes of mind and his conscientious delays had killed them as surely as the fusillades that now splashed his blood upon the rocks. Soon the remainder of his officers would be taken away from the Mussolini barracks in Argostoli, and they too would spit and shrivel in the flames.

That night the Greeks emerged once more, pulling bodies from the seawells and sinks, noting once again that no one had a watch, a pen, a single coin. They found photographs of laughing girls, love letters, pictures of families standing in a line and smiling. They found that many of the soldiers, acknowledging the imminence of extinction but determined to speak even from the far side of the grave, had scribbled addresses upon the backs of cards and photographs, in the poignant hope that there might be someone who would write a letter, someone to convey the news. On many letters the ink had run as though a few large drops

of rain had caught the reader in the open air.

They did not know that, having quickly learned the lesson of the previous night, the Germans were now economising on physical effort by forcing the officers to carry their own dead to the trucks, and shooting them only when the work was done. They did not know that there was a Leutnant Weber who was not the only Nazi maddened and broken by his own dutiful atrocities. But again they saw the same fires, shook their heads as the same foul concoction of stenches impregnated their houses and clothes, and once more they did their best to salvage the dead amid a night that was made 330 sepulchral by the attenuated and dancing shadows of trees and men that were cast out by the leaping orange pyres.

On the following day a rumour began, to the effect that St Gerasimos had wandered out in the darkness and then returned to his catafalque, the nuns purportedly finding him in the morning with the traces of tears upon the black leather of his shrivelled cheeks, and crimson blood upon the gilt and satin of his shoes.