War under the Olive Trees

By Gene Thomas

‘War under the Olive Trees’ follows four friends who return home from World War II believing they were heroes only to find the people in their small Village of Majorca had moved on with their lives – especially the young women who had promised to wait for them.

Quill Barbaros was the leader of the four returning friends but his family history – particularly that of his grandfather - made him somewhat of an outcast in the village. He wasn’t looking forward to returning to the quiet little Mediterranean village after seeing most of Europe during the War. In fact, he wasn’t even sure about what to do about the woman he had left behind.

Mensa Galliano was considered the prettiest, most eligible young woman in the village, and she made it clear she was eagerly waiting for Quill’s return – at least that’s what Quill thought. There were other suitors beating down Mensa’s door hoping to cash in on Quill’s absence, and she was weakening. One of them, Tuco Marko who was the Olive plant manager and son of the richest family in Majorca had very aggressively staked his claim to Mensa’s hand and was not eager to give it up.

The four friends’ return creates a volatile new mix in the village as they try to pick up the lives they left to go off to War – one they didn’t actually have to fight in to begin with.

‘War under the Olive Trees’ weaves a tale of love and deceit, class envy, murder and redemption all swirling around Quill and his friends. Quill’s escape to the sea to clear his head only adds to his confusion when he meets someone else who wants to enter his life for good.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gene Thomas
• Release date: Oct 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311880246

Gene Thomas

About the Author Gene Thomas has had several major careers. His first career was in air traffic control. Another was a Defense Contractor during the Reagan era. After a career in Education and extensive travels to different countries, Gene now devotes the majority of his time to pursuing his first love, writing. You will find that Gene’s writing style has always been characterized an easy read. His books in print (Amazon, Barnes & Noble) “Tales from the Tree House, 2010”, “Tree House to Palm Trees, 2011” mark the start of a prolific writing career that includes a collection of short stories, poems and novels already posted on sites like http://www.readwave.com/doceft/ . “Rock Hands” – a Depression Era saga reminiscent of John Steinbeck will be coming out later this year. The rights to that book are currently under contract with Quattro Media Publications. Gene has finished six 26 mile marathons and thousands of shorter races and still maintains an active exercise routine that includes walking no less than four miles a day. Gene currently lives in Belize, Central America, but was born in Brooklyn New York.

Book preview

Prologue

It had been nearly twenty-five years since Payton and Angelina Marko were married. Two of their three sons and the sons of other villagers had marched off to War on the Continent, leaving behind many panting young females eager to marry and start families – much as their own mothers had done.

Mensa Galliano, in particular, was left to pine after Quill Barbaros the handsome grandson of a much despised former Spanos Family employee. But even before Quill had left with his friends to join the war effort, Tuco Marko — the eldest Marko son, had already decided Mensa would be his — and his alone.

Quill’s troubled family legacy would catch up with him almost as soon as he and his three comrades returned from the War and tried to settle back into the lives they had left behind.

While most of the young men in the village were off fighting a war they could easily have avoided, the older men in the village were busy consolidating their hold on the village’s resources — including the Olive trade and nearly all of the eligible women.

Quill, and the other Marko brothers; Stavros and Silvio, and Collette Guindaño would find the going hard — harder than the darkest hours on the many battlefields they’d survived.

The Spanos Family Olive Farm was still the largest employer in the small village of Alcudia, Majorca. But the power struggle for control of the farm outside of family and even outside of the country had already started before the four friends ever got back.

Once they put down the few possessions they had brought back from the War, the four young men found themselves embroiled in one warlike situation after another, including one pitting the two younger Marko brothers against their older brother Tuco.

And while few shots were ever fired, several innocents would not live to see the next decade or some of their children grow into adulthood.

No, War and Olives is just that — a War for the most profitable crop and most secure positions in the Alcudia village community. It surely wasn’t a war anyone wanted, but no one was running away from it either, least of all Quill Barbaros.

The War is lost, are we?

Quill woke with a start. The noise of a large, muffled explosion taking place only a few hundred yards from him forced him back to consciousness even though he hadn’t slept for nearly two days.

Southern Italy in the spring and early summer was a beautiful place. The vineyards bloomed and began to bring forth their fruit whether their caretakers were busy shooting each other or not.

Quill Barbaros was very familiar with the care and nurturing of many hundreds of individual plants, even though his familiarity was with Olive trees — not grapes. Yet, the area he and the remnants of his platoon were forced to retreat through was indeed grape vineyards.

Once past the vineyards, the bombed out buildings would offer small comfort to Quill, Stavros and Silvio Marko or Collette Guindaño, since they had been instructed to dig fox holes in front of those very same buildings a few days before by one of the last ranking enlisted men they would ever see — outside of captivity.

At twenty-three, Quill had spent half of his formative years tending plants and half trying to figure out whether he should be killing Germans or helping them.

The Germans he had come in contact with in the War were arrogant and openly disdainful of anyone who wasn’t Arian. Quill was particularly upset when German enlisted men refused to salute one of his Italian officers while carefully snapping two whenever any of their own officers came within their field of vision.

But one thing Quill and the other men in his small platoon were sure of; someday soon the War would be over and their so-called allies — the Germans, would either be dead or gone — back to the Father land.

Quill and three other men; Stavros and Silvio Marko and Collette Guindaño were all from the tiny fishing village of Alcudia located in the Northeast corner of Majorca.

Even though they were all Spaniards with a good dose of Greek blood in their collective family trees, all the men in the village felt strongly aligned with the charismatic Benito Mussolini and the Italian Army.

Mussolini’s Army frequently occupied Majorca to — as they would say; to protect it from the Bolshevik hordes invading from the north.

The problem with that little device was no one in the Italian Army had ever seen a Bolshevik in the flesh and surely couldn’t pick one out of a crowd of their own people.

But it was — according to the Italian Constabulary (better known as Vichy occupiers to everyone else) purely a coincidence that Majorca just happened to be across the Mediterranean from the real fighting in southern Italy and further north in France and middle Europe.

Quill had seen these freedom fighters up close in his hometown, and from what he had seen the only fighting they did was over the next meal, bottle of local wine, or one of the local women.

But Quill and his compatriots had enlisted and run off to southern France to fight in a real war. By the time the fighting got really serious, the four friends found themselves in Italy, giving ground daily on their way through some of the best wine country in the world.

The reality of war was more than disappointing, it was demoralizing. It was one thing to be able to see and defeat the enemy with superior numbers and fire power, but quite another to be on the other end of that equation.

Before they knew it, nearly all of the Italian Volunteer battalion Quill, Stavros, Silvio and Collette had been assigned to had been killed, wounded or simply run away.

Once they actually had to fight the well-armed Allied forces that had invaded Western Europe and were slowly, methodically pushing across Europe to Russia and later to the Mediterranean, resistance seemed not only futile, but foolhardy. Especially since what was left of the once mighty German army was running away faster than they, the much despised Italian army, were.

For the moment, Quill was trying to gather his senses and come to grips with the real war that had just interrupted his first real sleep in days.

"Get up, fool, do you want to die in that tiny shithole of a foxhole you fell asleep digging? Move! I don’t want to be the one to tell your mamma you died a hero; when in truth, the Bolsheviks caught you holdin’ your crotch and suckin’ your thumb while you slept through the real action!"

Stavros Marko was one of the sons of Payton and Angelina Marko from the Spanos Family Olive farm that had all joined the war effort together — and would be eternally sorry they did. Stavros was also Quill’s best friend.

If you looked at the four of them standing side by side, you would swear they were all brothers; tall, darkly handsome and each gifted with a muscular body crafted from hard work at an early age.

Quill was the tallest of the four, standing well over two meters. While Stavros was less than two meters, he outweighed the other three men by at least fifteen pounds, the result being more of a big appetite than family genes.

Stavros never met a plate of pasta or a roast chicken he didn’t like. If it came on a plate or could be consumed on the run — stolen from a farmhouse window for example, Stavros was usually the guy who found and consumed the food before others even knew it was there.

Silvio was more like his namesake grandfather; solidly built and a born fisherman. His broad shoulders were the result of long hours spent pulling fish laden nets out of the water. He came by his rich tan naturally, but spending most of his time on the warm waters of the Mediterranean didn’t hurt. While he was the quiet one of the bunch, it was agreed that Silvio was also the most observant — and had the quickest temper.

Collette was the joker and by his own description, the lover of the quartet. Wherever the four men were posted during the war, Collette usually found a warm bed and usually left a broken heart in his wake when the platoon moved on.

The surprising thing about Collette was he was by no means the handsomest of the four. That honor clearly belonged to Quill.

Collette was born with a horribly deformed left ear — one that was not noticeable if you were standing on his right side. But you couldn’t help but notice the slight shoulder distortion on his right side, a result of a minor bout with scoliosis. His tanned face was marred by serious acne that he, fortunately, was growing out of.

Collette, despite his physical shortcomings, was a charmer and an engaging young man who stood out wherever he went, more for his personality than his looks.

The four men were only a few years apart in age, but worlds apart in maturity. Stavros and Quill seemed to constantly find themselves bailing the other two out of trouble that their lack of maturity got them into. Silvio, being the hot head of the four, was usually getting into fights with a larger man, or more than one at a time.

Collette, on the other hand, usually found the prettiest girl in the town they were in, and almost always she was the one who was already spoken for. None of that stopped Collette, who was as flighty with his affections as the local bees were when gathering nectar for honey.

So while the war forced these friends from one battlefield to another, first across Southern France, then most of Central and Southern Italy, the only injuries any of them suffered was a torn thigh muscle Stavros received climbing through a barbed wire fence.

As the war was ending, the four young men began to worry a lot about returning home in one piece. The lack of organized leadership in the ranks only served to heighten their fear of being caught in a firefight by accident and for no specific reason. That was the reason for their caution when entering bombed out buildings.

The last thing anyone in authority told them was …Avoid booby traps in bombed out buildings at all costs — if you want to stay alive and return home in one piece!

That warning was given to them by their platoon leader, a thin, nervous man, nearly ten years older than the men in his platoon. The day Quill dug the foxhole he fell asleep in; the platoon leader disappeared, never to be seen again.

"Ok, OK! Where is my gun and ammo belt? Did you take my belt again—?" Stavros’ finger across his own lips silenced Quill immediately. In the distance, Quill could hear approaching boot steps — the foot falls of several men, many more than the few stragglers left in his company.

Stavros began backing sideways away from Quill and silently motioned him to follow — quietly.

Stavros was making for the open doorway of one of the abandoned buildings the company had until now stayed out of. More than once, a welcome roof over their head turned into a booby trap set by their retreating allies, the Germans. While those traps never snared any of them, the four friends all managed to see the grisly results of the Germans' handiwork.

Discretion being the better part of valor, Quill’s company chose to dig foxholes just outside the buildings, but use the buildings as a last resort, fallback position. With the approaching troops, the fallback option was now the only option.

Just behind him, and no more than a hundred feet away, Quill could see the silhouettes of several men advancing in the dusk of the early evening. But these men didn’t seem too interested in remaining under cover. They actually seemed to be rather casual in how they approached the bombed out buildings and hastily dug foxholes Quill and his rag tag company had recently abandoned.

Quill followed Stavros into the doorway of the closest building, and they quickly made their way to the back of the building to look for an escape route.

Finally together, the two men made their way to the back door and from a crouching position; Stavros slowly opened the door and peered out.

Looks clear, stay down. We’ll crawl out and over to those oil drums. Maybe the others are over there, Stavros said in a whisper.

Quill looked out the door and then back at his friend, whose face was slightly silhouetted from small fires still burning all around the war torn village.

"Are you crazy? Why don’t we just stay here and wait the Americans out? All that can happen if they find us is we will be taken prisoner and held in one of their camps until the war is over. How bad can that be?"

Quill’s whisper was closer to his normal speaking voice, which sent Stavros into spasms of Shush and Quiet, but the damage was done. Before they could reach for their weapons, four M-1 rifles were trained on the two men; each from a different direction.

What Quill and Stavros hadn’t realized was the day before, they had moved into a four mile square area that had already been secured by Allied troops and those troops were already in the process of picking up stragglers — remnants of the rag tag volunteer Army left behind by the Germans and what was left of Mussolini’s high command.

Since none of Quill’s small company had seen or been contacted by any officer or even a high ranking enlisted man, they were — and had been for several days, on their own.

Rising slowly to their feet, Quill and Stavros raised their hands in surrender. The Allied soldiers began motioning the two men towards the very oil drums they had planned to seek cover next to.

As they got closer, they saw Silvio and Collette had already been captured and were standing sheepishly near four other men who had been captured and rounded up the way they were.

When the four friends were close enough to silently greet each other with nods and glances, they all turned their attention to their captors.

From what Quill could determine, they had been captured by a small platoon of U.S. army regulars who were supplementing the British troops in the area. At most, the total opposing force consisted of a dozen men. But by this stage of the war, the size of the Allied troop force really didn’t matter.

Both the Italian and German forces had been thoroughly routed and were in full retreat. The German soldiers in some cases had abandoned their weapons and vehicles and were lining the roads heading back to their country — in disgrace.

In all, there would be thirty-one members of the Italian Volunteer force captured with Quill and his friends, who had been abandoned by the retreating Axis forces and left to fend for themselves.

As it turned out, the Allied forces were in no mood to inflict any more casualties on this demoralized group than was necessary to protect themselves.

Nearly all of the stragglers captured from September 1945 up to the start of winter that year were repatriated before Christmas. This coincided with the time all combat operations in Europe and the Mediterranean had ceased.

Quill and his young friends were released from the internment camp they had been held in since they were captured, and together they slowly made their way back home to their quiet village in the northeast corner of Majorca.

Once there, they believed they would resume their quiet, slightly interrupted lives as fisherman and Olive pickers, blended carefully into the neatly structured life of warm sunny days and cool, moonlit nights.

Quill, for one, believed the only thing he would ever have to worry about once he got home was which wife to choose. He knew his job and those of his friends in the olive vineyards were waiting for them.

What he didn’t know was he was in no way prepared for the civilian battles he was about to find himself and his friends involved in. Each man had left behind a sweetheart, or someone with whom they planned on connecting with, only to find the older men in the village had different ideas.

Quill had always assumed he and Mensa Galliano would get together once he returned. But he had not figured on Tuco Marko being interested in her as well.

Tuco wasn’t simply interested in Mensa, he was obsessed with her. And Mensa, for her part, had not tried to discourage Tuco’s obsession in any way.

Tuco’s Chaser

Mensa Galliano really didn’t know what she wanted.

The tug-o-war in her mind that began between Tuco and Quill for her affections started as soon as Quill returned from the war. And it stimulated her in ways she had only recently become aware of.

Mensa was tall and statuesque. Her sun and ocean bleached hair stopped just short of her rear end, but she usually wore it up, wrapped in a bathing cap or braided.

She had the graceful, muscular body of a swimmer, and there was a reason for that; Mensa was the best swimmer in the village — man or woman. And she proved it every day, swimming the five kilometer distance to the mouth of the reef that sheltered the village cove from the open sea.

Mensa’s return lap sometimes lasted for quite a while. When she wasn’t free diving to thirty feet looking for abalone or spider lobsters, Mensa would carry a makeshift spear gun with her and catch her family’s dinner. It was not uncommon for Mensa to be out in the water for three or four hours at a time.

Tuco Marko had been hot after Mensa since he first laid eyes on her — when she was fourteen. Even back in school as a teenager, Mensa was as tall as some of the boys and could (but rarely did) out play them in football.

But her main passion was the water.

Even though Mensa was barely out of her teens now, the prospect of the twenty-four year old Tuco panting after her made her feel like she was being pursued by an old man. And that old man’s head barely came up to Mensa’s shoulders.

On the other hand, Tuco was still very much a young man from a good family. And there were no shortage of girls in the village who would give a great deal to be in Mensa’s shoes.

Then there was Quill.

Quill the handsome; Quill the tall, Quill the war hero, Quill — the most sought after young man in the village.

But Quill had come back from the war a different person. Mensa was still very attractive, and he had come back looking to renew his budding romance with her with the thought of them marrying and raising a family together. For whatever reason, he found himself to be in no rush to reconnect with her, at least for the time being.

It wasn’t until the morning of his second day back that Quill decided to pay Mensa and her family a visit.

The warm Mediterranean sun and cloudless sky had enticed many of the young women in the village out of their modest little cottages and into the market place.

The pretext they all used was to shop for groceries and maybe some wine, but the women, and the young men, knew their presence there was really for one reason; to get noticed and make a connection with the opposite sex.

It wasn’t long before the young people in the village began to separate themselves from the older folk by migrating to the seashore.

There were no non-swimmers in the village, so it was not surprising that by midday just about every young person in the village could be found in the water or in a boat on the water.

Quill’s mother and sister had been living in a ramshackle cottage not far from the main market since before he was born.

Their poverty was no greater than any one of their neighbors, but unlike their neighbors, very few people were inclined to help them get over some of the many rough spots they had to deal with when the elder Barbaros suddenly left town for good.

The circumstances of Quill’s grandfather Barbaros’ departure had always been kept from him. The only thing Quill was aware of was it had something to do with the Spanos family — and that something was not good.

Mensa’s family had a small pottery shop in the market place. Behind the shop was a small cottage where she, her parents and two sisters; Marta and Lorraine lived.

All the girls were excellent swimmers, but the two younger ones preferred to stay ashore and find ways to get noticed by the local boys, which wasn’t hard to do. Each girl possessed a strong swimmer’s body that was accentuated by, for the younger two, more eating than exercise.

No one would classify either Marta or Lorraine as fat or even overweight. But one look at their large bosomed, wide hipped mother and there was little doubt what their bodies would look like a few years from now.

Mensa looked at her mother, too, and promised herself to never get as big as that — even after she had children.

On the day Quill set out to visit Mensa, the route to her house would have taken him away from the beach. So, as he would later regret, Quill changed his route, deciding instead to take a more picturesque path.

Like the others around his age, Quill had made his way to the beach and was in the process of snaking his way through the crowd of beach goers, when he saw Mensa, walking hand in hand — with Tuco.

Tuco Marko looked exactly like his grandfather and namesake; a relatively small man with a large head and sturdy but slender frame. His dark hair never seemed to be combed, but for some reason, the women in the village all wanted to run their fingers through it.

When Tuco was born, his namesake grandfather had already died in disgrace trying to keep his father and mother from marrying.

That proved to be an impossible task, given that Tuco’s father had worked himself up through the ranks of olive pickers to foreman all the while courting Tuco’s mother, Angelina.

There was also something Tuco had heard about his father facing down a tiger and killing it with only a few rocks. While many of the older people in the village still talked about it, his father did not.

At the time, very few people knew that the older Tuco was Angelina’s real father, having had a long secret romance with Angelina’s mother, Anna Spanos.

But Angelina’s mother knew who the father was, and shortly after her husband Nickolas died, she penned a letter to her youngest daughter, making her aware of the real love of her life.

The letter and its contents were sealed in a dowry chest that was traditionally locked and bound with lace and satin before it was given to the bride the night before her wedding day.

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