The War Widows by Leah Fleming Read Free Book Online Page A

suffered the aggressor?
    ‘Look, Ana…it’s like shooting birds out of the sky…pot shots,’ someone laughed. Parachutes descending like coloured balloons onto the shore, the groves, rooftops. Guns blasting out from Malaxa’s hilltop battery.
    For months they’d been waiting, feeling the tension as British troops built defences-tired men evacuated from the mainland, ill equipped, with sallow-cheeked pale faces, who were wondering just why they were there. Her father was fighting with the Fifth Cretan Brigade far away in Northern Greece. With all their crack troops far from home, now the city was left to boys and old men, who must defend their honour or die in the effort. Freedom or Death! This was their slogan.
    All morning they brought in wounded men. There were tales of Germans butchered on the roofs even as they fell, but this was the Red Cross and they must accept any wounded, whatever the uniform.
    ‘That’ll teach them,’ sighed Dr Mandakis, grim-faced as he covered the sheet over yet another enemy soldier, hacked to pieces by the fury of the mob.
    Now the wounded were piled alongside each other, enemy, defender, stranger and known faces from the city streets. The medical staff worked by lamplight, stitching, sewing flesh together, mopping brows of amputees, giving sips of precious water to the dying.
    I shall recall this day for the rest of my life, thought Ana, seeing sights no decent woman should have to witness, and still they came…
    There were rumours, rumours of street-to-street fighting, children carrying scythes and axes going out to meet the foe and showing them no mercy.
    If they win, we shall pay for this, Ana sighed, with a chill in her heart. There are too many of them.
    Her back ached with weariness. It was looking more like a butcher’s shop than a makeshift hospital. Someone had made a Red Cross flag out of sheets and daubed it with blood to hang over the roof. Perhaps when the bombers returned it might save them.
    The young nurses took it in turn to relieve themselves, sip lemon water, bite on the hard dacos bread, anything to stop the hunger.
    At dusk, Ana found herself by the temporary mortuary, no longer sickened by the stench of blood and death. It was not a place to linger but it was cooland quiet. She sat down, too tired even to pray. How could things happen on such a beautiful May morning, when all the roses and flowers were still in bloom?
    Then she heard a strange moan. Her heart jolted: a groan was coming from under the sheet, then another groan. Someone was alive under that sheet, waiting to be buried alive in a shroud. She thought she was dreaming. Tiredness must be taking its toll. She walked silently towards the sound, stepping over a line of stiff bodies on the floor. There it was again, and she pulled back the sheet.
    Under it was a soldier in olive-green fatigues, fair-haired, his blue eyes flecked with navy blue, staring at her in terror.
    ‘Hilfe…hilfe.’
His eyes cried out to her. Here was the enemy at first hand, a boy no more than her age, lying terrified, at her mercy, mistaken for dead. She saw the deep bruises on his battered cheeks.
    In that moment, Ana knew she could silence him for ever, call for one of the guards to finish him off. But she was transfixed, unable to think. The world stood still. She was a Red Cross nurse, dedicated to taking no sides. But he was the enemy, this bronzed, handsome boy. His eyes were pleading for life. This man had a mother and family far from home. He was serving his country, doing his duty, but on her island.
    ‘Oh no!’
she panicked, pulling the sheet off him. There was a side door where the carts came to collect the bodies. It was dark.
    He staggered to his feet, dazed, wobbling.
    ‘Go!’
She pointed to the door.
    ‘Danke, Fraulein…Mein Name ist Otto…Wie heissen Sie
?’ He towered above her. This boy wanted to know her name?
    ‘Oxi
…no name,’ she croaked in broken English, having no German. ‘Go!’ she