Small Wars by Sadie Jones Page B

photograph with all of it in focus for him to study. He saw the wooden beams disappear into the shadows of the roof. He saw the bones inside the children’s hands where they gripped their mother’s nightdress. He saw the men’s boots lined up against the wall near the stove and little pieces of bread on the table by the lamp, the crumbling walls around him and heard the breathing of each of the people in the house.
    He knew the woman was screaming before the sound left her, saw the movement of the man on the floor reaching up for his child and felt Francke panicking beside him. The woman rushed at Hal, throwing her children behind her, before she saw Francke’s Sten raised to her chest, and Hal caught Francke up short with a word and put his own pistol to the head of the man who was trying to get to his child and told him to be still.
    He held his hand up to the woman and looked at her. ‘Calm,’ he said, in Greek, and for a moment they were all motionless.

    Amery and another soldier came back in with the prisoner in front of them. They turned him to face Hal. He knew immediately that they had found their man.
    ‘Are you Loulla Kollias?’ he asked, and when the man didn’t answer, he sent for the interpreter.
    When Davis came in, Hal had the woman taken into the other room. There was some screaming and panic as the men tried to fight, as if they thought there was something to protect the family from. Hal kept it brief and attempted to establish names and who owned the house, the broadest of connections between them all, but the prisoners weren’t in the mood to assist him, so he had them dress themselves under guard and stood them outside to wait.
    Outside, the sky was pearly and only black in the west, where there were still stars. The captured men were secured and the outhouses searched while the dogs resumed their helpless barking. The woman and her children sat in the kitchen with a rather embarrassed Leonard to watch them. Once most of the soldiers had left the house, the children cried very loudly and their wailing was a background sound to the searching.
    It did not prove fruitless. There were guns in the main house – not a farmer’s hunting rifles but two Brens and a rich stock of ammunition. Hal’s men found pipe bombs in the well nearby and some dynamite stashed in a wooden crate under some grain sacks in a half-wrecked barn away from the house. With each discovery the mood took a step towards triumphant.
    Searching the farm buildings took a long time; the sun was up over the high hill, hitting the mountainside and the loops of road opposite. The three prisoners were bound and marched under escort with Two Platoon, to keep them away from Andreas, who was exhausted and guilty and had been crying.
    It took an hour to reach the vehicles, then they loaded up the prisoners and the weapons and headed down towards Episkopi. The engines whined and rattled over the dirt roads, grinding metal on metal in low gear, and Hal went over the things that had happened, thought about what had gone well and what he might have done differently. His plan had been sound, although it was unfortunate that in cordoning the house the soldiers were effectively disarmed, for fear of casualties amongst their own.
    He was concerned for the woman and her children and, recognising humanity in himself, felt untroubled.
    Hal had a boyish habit he’d never lost. He would score the outcome of things in his mind as if they were sporting results. It made him smile to do it. At school, getting news of the war in assembly or chapel, he would say in his head, England three, Germany one, or RAF, four hundred for four, Luftwaffe, all out for thirty-five. As he grew up, he knew it was absurd, wrong, even, but he still had to do it. Now, at thirty years old in a Land Rover in Cyprus he did it automatically: EOKA, out for a duck.
    Looking around him, and above, he noticed that the sky was blue all over, with nothing in it but light. It was the