Free The Brides of Solomon by Geoffrey Household Page A

the Greeks fought only Italians, and the base had been free to pour in the seaborne supplies from Egypt. Coulter did not think the Germans were likely to bomb Athens. Their pedantic minds
would conceive that, at least, as sheer barbarism. But they were bound to have a shot, instantly, at knocking out the Piraeus.
    He was still in his dockside office when the stroke came, alone with the sergeant-major who never objected—especially when they had first had an informal meal together and some
drinks—to staying at leisurely work up to any hour of night. There was very little warning. When the sirens screamed, Sergeant-Major Wrist at once enjoined his Captain to take refuge in the
concrete shelter beneath the quay. Those, he said, were the Orders. A minute later, when they were at the door of the shelter, the raid began.
    Coulter let the sergeant-major pop into the burrow, and himself stayed above ground and watched. This then was war. Flame. Noise. Space geometry of searchlights and tracer. The upward flowering
of explosions. The hammering and tinkling and whining of bits of metal. A mind quite arbitrarily prepared to lay long odds that its body stood in empty air between flying objects.
    He was fascinated both by the scene and by the fact that his curiosity seemed to be greater than his fear. He had been just too young for the first war, and all his life had been envious of that
experience which had destroyed a fifth of his near contemporaries at school. At the age of seventeen he had been conditioned to the prospect of death. Three weeks was the average fighting life of a
British infantry subaltern on the western front, and he had been disappointed that he was just too young to take the gamble.
    He knew all right that he had been a young fool—it had seemed to him in peace utterly incredible, this desire to immolate oneself for the sake of excitement—and yet, when a second
war came along, it appeared that he was merely an older fool. He could perfectly well have been running barges in the unraided Severn instead of a port which—if there were anything in all the
military theories he had read—was doomed to absolute destruction.
    So this was all. Well, but to endure it for three weeks needed, no doubt, such sustained courage that one might welcome the end foretold by the military actuaries. All the same, it was
exhilarating to find—after twenty years of wondering about it—that one wasn’t particularly afraid. Coulter was annoyed at himself for this sudden vanity. What were a few bombs
compared to forcing oneself to jump out of a trench into the steady, calculated fire of 1917. No. No, this wasn’t the real thing.
    It was over in ten minutes. A lucky string of bombs had erased the northern block of sheds and set the s.s.
City of Syracuse
on fire. Her crew—those few of them who were on
board—had tumbled down the ship’s brow and bolted for the dock gates as soon as she was hit. It wasn’t surprising. In her holds were two hundred tons of explosives and ammunition.
The ship’s officers of course would know it, though it was possible that the crew, up to the moment they were ordered to clear out, did not. For the sake of security and to avoid the risk of
devastating sabotage in a port where there had been German agents at large till the previous night, her cargo was officially described as mere military stores.
    The
City of Syracuse
did not directly concern Coulter’s office since she was discharging into the railway trucks alongside, not into lighters; but he had heard of the nature of
her cargo and assumed that all the British working in the port were equally well informed. Security seemed to him to limit discussion rather than knowledge.
    A naval launch was desperately trying to shift the ship into the outer harbour, but neither man nor rope could exist on her flaming bows, and the launch had not the power to tow her stern
foremost. When the stern cable charred and broke, the Navy gave up. Very