Anoyeia, the largest village in Crete, was too remote and isolated for a permanent garrison. High on the northern slope of Mount Ida, it is the key foothold for crossing the great range. Famous for its independent spirit, its idiosyncrasy of dress and accent, and its tremendous local pride, it had always been a sure hideout.
The year before, Ralph Stockbridge and I had baptised the daughter of a brave and dashing man and local leader, Stephanogiannes Dramountanes. Our god-brother had been killed — shot down while trying to make a break for it by jumping over a wall with his hands tied after a German encirclement of the village — but I knew we could find all the backing we needed from other god-relations and friends, and to spare.
There was no hint of it as we climbed those windy and dawn-lit cobbles. I was still wearing German uniform. For the first time I realised how an isolated German soldier in a Cretan mountain village was treated. All talk and laughter died at the washing troughs, women turned their backs and thumped their laundry with noisy vehemence; cloaked shepherds, in answer to greeting, gazed past us in silence; then stood and watched us out of sight. An old crone spat on the ground. The white-whiskered and bristling elders with jutting beards shorn under the chin were all seated outside the coffee shop; baggy-trousered, high-booted, headkerchiefed men leaning on their gnarled sticks. (I knew a few of them but the German Waffenrock[1] and the missing moustache were an impenetrable disguise.) They stopped talking for a moment, then loudly resumed, pointedly shifting their stools to offer their backs or their elbows in postures of studied hostility. Doors and windows slammed along the lane. In a moment we could hear women’s voices wailing into the hills: ‘The black cattle have strayed into the wheat!’ and ‘Our in-laws have come!’ — island-wide warnings of enemy arrival. We were glad to plunge into a side alley and the friendly shelter of Father Manoli’s house. But Father Chairetis, one of the celebrants of the baptism and a great friend, was out. The kind old priestess, retreating down the corridor in alarm, refused to recognise me; it is amazing what a strange uniform and the removal of a moustache (or of the beards that we all grew at one time or another) would do. ‘It’s me, Pappadia, Mihali!’ ‘What Mihali? I don’t know any Mihali.’ Deadlock.
Alerted by a neighbour, the priest arrived, and at last, amid amazement and then laughter, all was well. The village were told we were harmless scroungers; later, that we had left. The giveaway garments were peeled off. My god-brother George Dramountanes was soon there, and other friends and helpers arrived discreetly. A runner was found in a moment who would carry our news to Sandy — nearly a hundred miles away to the southeast now, in the mountains above Males and Ierapetra, and another for Tom Dunbabin, of whom more later, the other side of Mount Ida. Raki and meze appeared under the great arch of the house and sitting on the cross-beam of her loom plucking a chicken in a cloud of feathers the priestess was all smiles and teasing now. (Nobody had heard of the capture yet. What was happening at Knossos, Archanes, Herakleion? Had the car with the letter been discovered? How were the others getting on?)
Thank heavens for Strati’s police uniform. He soon appeared. The ascent had been laborious — the General’s leg had received a bang during the struggle at the car — but safe. They were now sheltering in a gulley a mile or two away. He and Manoli had found two eager and nimble shepherd boys from a nearby fold; enjoined to speed and secrecy by their fathers they sped south and east with messages from Billy to the same destination as mine; two strings to each bow. (It was a wise measure against the stormy days that we foresaw.) A basket of food and drink was stealthily dispatched and I was to join them after dark with a guide and a mule for the General.
In the late afternoon the noise of an aircraft flying low over the roofs brought us all to our feet. Running up the ladder to the flat roof, we saw a single-winged Fieseler Storch reconnaissance plane circling above the roofs moulting a steady snowfall of leaflets. It wheeled round several times, then whirred its way up and down the foothills, and vanished westwards still trailing its white cloud, then turned back towards Herakleion. Several leaflets landed on the roof. We took them downstairs. ‘To all Cretans’, the text went in smudged type still damp from the press.
Last night the German General Kreipe was abducted by bandits. He is now being concealed in the Cretan mountains and his whereabouts cannot be unknown to the inhabitants. If the General is not returned within three days all rebel villages in the Herakleion district will be razed to the ground and the severest reprisals exacted on the civilian population.
The room was convulsed by incredulity, then excitement and finally by an excess of triumphant hilarity. We could hear running feet in the streets, and shouts and laughter. ‘Just think, they’ve stolen their General!’ ‘The horn-wearers won’t dare to look us in the eyes!’ ‘They came here for wool and we’ll send them away shorn!’ How had it happened? Where? Who had done it?
The priest, who was in the know, and god-brother George, Strati and I lowered our eyes innocently. I told them it was the work of an Anglo-Cretan commando; mostly Cretan; ‘And you’ll see! Those three days will go by and there won’t be any villages burnt or even shooting!’ (I hoped this was true. I seemed to be the only one in the room undisturbed by the German threat and I prayed that urgency would lend wings to the messengers’ heels and scatter our counter leaflets and the BBC news of the General’s departure from the island. Had the Germans found the car yet, and followed our paper chase of clues down to the submarine beach?)
‘Eh!’ one old man said, ‘They’ll burn them all down one day. And what then? My house was burnt down four times by the Turks; let the Germans burn it down for a fifth! And they killed scores of my family, scores of them, my child. Yet here I am! We’re at war, and war has all these things. You can’t have a wedding feast without meat. Fill up the glasses, Pappadia.’
An hour after sunset, our two parties now rejoined, we were winding up a steep and scarcely discernible goat path. On a mule in the centre, muffled against the cold, in Strati’s green gendarme’s greatcoat, with Manoli by his side, rode the General, or rather, Theophilos: the words ‘Kreipe’ or ‘Strategos’ had been forbidden even as far back as Kastamonitza. Billy told me they had had a German alarm during the day and had moved their hideout: Could it have been George and me? They’d even managed to get some sleep. The General, they all said, had been reasonable and co-operative; his most immediate worry, which he repeated to me during our first rest for a smoke among the rocks, was the loss of his Knight’s Cross. I said it had probably come off in the struggle; perhaps it had been picked up during the clean-up, in which case I would see it was returned, and he thanked me. Apropos of the leaflets, which I translated, he said: ‘Well, you surely didn’t expect my colleague Braüer to remain inactive when he learnt of — my rape?’ (Mein Raub).
‘No, but the Germans won’t catch us.’ (I touched a handy ilex trunk here.) ‘The Cretans are all on our side, you know.’ ‘Yes, I see they are. And, of course, you’ve always got me.’ ‘Yes, General, we’ve always got you.’ At another of these halts, he said, after a sigh and almost to himself, ‘Post coitum triste.’ I was astonished at this comment, and had told him that only a few minutes before, and far out of earshot, Billy and I had decided that this phrase exactly suited the brief mood of deflation that had followed the capture. ‘It’s all right for you, Major,’ the General said, ‘military glory, I suppose. But my whole career has come to bits. (Meine ganze Karriere ist kaput gegangen.) The war is over for me, as you said. To think that my promotion from Generalmajor to Generalleutnant has just come through!’ His heavy face — he had a massive jutting chin, grey straight hair cropped at the sides but long enough to fall over his forehead, and blue eyes — looked morose and sad. ‘I wish I’d never come to this accursed island.’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘It was supposed to be a nice change after the Russian front . . .’
We both laughed. It was all rather extraordinary. He was a thickset, massively built man, but not fat. He was wearing, unfortunately for the journey ahead, the same lightweight field grey as we were, with the loose ski trousers of mountain troops, and, thank heavens, thick mountain boots. There were many ribbons over the left breast pocket, the Wehrmacht eagle over the right, the Iron Cross First Class — won at the battle of Verdun, low on the breast, but no shield on the left arm with the map of the Crimea like the rest of the Sebastopol division he had commanded till a few hours ago. The red tabs and the gold oak leaves blazed with newness. No eye-glass, no Mensur[2] scars. He was the thirteenth son of a Lutheran pastor in Hanover and professional soldier to the backbone. He must have had, in surroundings where there was more scope for it, a solid and commanding presence.
In the small hours, we climbed off the track and curled up on the bracken floor of an old shepherd’s hut; the fire in the middle lit up a conical stone igloo, cobwebbed and sooty and lined with tiers of cheeses like minor millstones and dripping bags of whey. George and I, except for an hour interrupted by comings and goings on the divan running round the priest’s living room, hadn’t slept since Skalani.
We all rose again in the dark and continued our journey. As dawn broke, we were hailed from an over-hanging ledge: it was one of Mihali Xylouris’s lookouts, sitting with a gun across his knees. In a moment he was bounding down the hill, he threw his gun aside with a yell and flung his arms round me, Billy, Manoli, and George, only stopping just in time at the astounded General. It was one of my honorary god-brothers, Kosta Kephaloyannis, about nineteen, as lithe and wild looking, with bronze complexion, huge green eyes and flashing teeth, as a young panther.
Other lookouts had joined us from their spurs and soon we were in Xylouris’s cave, surrounded by welcoming guerrillas. Mihali was the Kapetan, or leader of the Anoyeians, in succession to Stephanoyannis, and all the Anoyeian names — Dramountanes, Kephaloyannis, Chairetis, Sbokos, Skoulas, Manouras, Bredzos, Kallergi and many others — were represented there, and all armed to the teeth. Mihali, with his clear eyes, snowy hair and moustache and white goatskin cape, was one of the best and most reliable leaders in Crete. There were formal introductions, and the cat, as far as the General’s whereabouts and the identity of his captors went, was out of the bag.
Here, too taking refuge under Mihali’s wing, were a cheerful trio of English colleagues. John Houseman, a young subaltern in the Bays, John Lewis, heavily booted and bearded, and, miraculously, Tom Dunbabin’s wireless operator and his set. Informed, like all the other stations in the island, via Cairo, of our messages I’d sent to Sandy, Tom had sent his wireless station on to Mount Ida to help us. As though by a miracle, our communications problem was suddenly solved. I joyfully wrote out a signal, breaking the news, urging the BBC and RAF action and asking for a boat in any cove the Navy found convenient south of Mount Ida. Fortunately a time schedule to Cairo was just coming up; we could wait here, arrange things at our ease, cross Ida, slip down to the sea, and away. With any luck the BBC announcement and the RAF leaflets would have convinced the enemy that we’d left and reduce their opposition to a token show of force or even none at all.
It was a day of meetings: four figures were spotted through binoculars coming from the east: the two Anthonys, Grigor and Niko; but no driver. I was filled with misgiving. We all — the reconstituted abduction party that is — went aside among the boulders. ‘It was no good, Kyrie Mihali,’ Antoni Zoidakis explained, handing me a German paybook and some faded family snaps. He was very upset. Alfred, the driver, had been still half stunned, poor devil. He could only walk at the rate of a tortoise. They’d almost carried him across the plain to the eastern foothills; then, during the afternoon, the hunt was up: motorised infantry had detrucked in all the villages round the eastern flanks of the mountains and begun to advance in open order up the hillside. There was nothing for it: if they left the driver behind for the Germans to overtake, the whole plan, and the fiction of non-local participation, was exploded; the entire region would be laid waste with flame and massacre; if they stayed with him, they themselves would have been captured. There was only one thing for it; the enemy were too close to risk a gun’s report: how then? Antoni leant forward urgently, put one hand on the branching ivory hilt of his silver scabbarded dagger and, with the side of the other hand, made a violent slash through the air. ‘By surprise. In one second.’ ‘He didn’t know a thing,’ one of the others said. There was a deep crevasse handy and lots of stones; he would never be found. ‘It was a pity, he seemed quite a nice chap, even if he was a German.’
It was shattering news; the silence of malefactors hung over us, broken at last by Manoli. ‘Don’t fret about it! We did our best. Just remember what those horn-wearers have done to Crete, Greece, Europe, England!’ Predictably, he repeated the proverb about the wedding feast. We all stood up. I told them they’d acted in the only possible way and it was true.
After an hour trying to get the coded message away, the operator discovered that some vital part of the set had gone dud; a part, moreover, irreplaceable in Crete; it was a lack only to be remedied by sea — like our own problem — or by parachute. Both these, of course, could only be arranged by wireless contact. The circle was hopeless.
At this point, our first runner to Tom arrived back with the news that nobody in the south knew where he was; he’d sent us his wireless, and vanished into thin air — up with a bad attack of malaria. There were two other stations in the province of Retimo far away in the north-west; but Tom was our only link with them. Anyway in the present commotion, they would almost certainly be on the move. The messenger also brought news of troop movements at Timbaki, Melabes, Spyli and Armenoi: columns of dust were heading towards Mount Ida, from the heavily garrisoned Bad Lands of the Messara; observation planes were scattering leaflets over the southern foothills. A runner from Anoyeia brought reports of identical enemy doings in the north: lorried infantry disgorging in all the foothills as far west as the great monastery of Arkadi (a notorious haunt of all of ours, until it was blown), where the German troops had bombarded the Pro-Abbot Dionysios and his monks with the same question that they were asking everywhere: Where is General Kreipe? But so far, and most untrue to form, there had been little violence, few arrests, no shooting. There was a glimmer of hope.
Otherwise, the scene was beginning to cloud. Mihali Xylouris and god-brother George picked out an escort for the next stage of our journey; our god-brother would accompany us. ‘Whatever happens,’ Mihali said, ‘we’ll block the way for the Germans. We know all the passes. We can blow them to bits; and if they get on to your tracks, we’ll shoot into the gristle!’ -i.e. to kill. I begged him not to fire a single shot, just to keep cover, watch where the enemy was and let us know if they got anywhere near. (The Germans nearly always stuck to the main paths; when they wandered away from them, they usually got lost; all guides commandeered locally would lead them to the foot of unscaleable cliffs and over landslides and up and down steep torrent beds of shank-smashing boulders.) Everything ahead was a looming wilderness of peaks and canyons, and in the rougher bits it would be impossible for a large party to keep formation, or even contact, except at a slow crawl which could be heard and seen for miles by the mountain’s denizens; there would be plenty of warning. The whole massif was riddled with clefts and grottoes to hide in. We must all vanish into thin air and let the enemy draw a total blank. I explained why and asked Mihali to speak the commando rumour and keep mum about us (a tall order). The General remounted and we left after fond and grateful farewells. The Andartes and the three Anglo-Cretans waved their crooks and their guns in valediction till the track hoisted us out of sight.
For the General, breaking bread with Mihali and his men and us must have seemed rather odd: the many signs of the cross before falling to and then the glasses clashed together with the usual resistance toasts: ‘Victory!’, ‘Freedom!’, ‘Blessed Virgin stand close to us!’, ‘May she scour the rust from our guns!’ and ‘May we die without shame.’
Mihali and his band were scrupulously polite; but they found it hard to wrench their glance from our strange prize. The shaggiest and most unlettered Cretan mountaineers often possess a charm and grace of manner, even if the supper is only goat’s milk and rock-hard, twice-baked shepherd’s bread, amounting to a very high style, which, after the handful of petit-bourgeois collaborators in Herakleion which can have been his only social experience of Greeks, must have come as a surprise to the General.
It was thought wiser tonight to do without a fire. Drinking a lot of raki to keep warm, we sang for a while: the old Cretan insurrectionary song ‘When will skies clear?’, elaborate rhyming couplets, a rizitika — a foothill song — ‘My swift little swallow’, ‘An Eagle was Sitting’ in the minor mode, and ‘Philedem’ — a song with a Turkish tune that I was so fond of that it had become a nickname.
Through lack of covering, Billy, the General and I ended up, not for the last time, by all three sleeping in the wireless cave under the blanket, with Manoli and George on either side, nursing their Marlin guns and taking it in turns to sleep. Verminous as such places always were, it was a greater torment to my bed fellows than to me, already coarsened by nearly two years of onslaught.
A curious moment, dawn, streaming in the cave’s mouth, which framed the white crease of Mount Ida. We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the General, half to himself, slowly said:
— the opening line and a bit of one of the few odes of Horace I know by heart. I was in luck.
‘Nec jam sustineant onus,’ I went on,
‘silvae laborantes geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto’
and continued through the other stanzas to the end of the ode. After a few seconds silence, the General said: ‘Ach so, Herr Major.’ For five minutes the war had evaporated without a trace.
A few hours’ climb brought us within hail of Kapetan Petrakoyeorgi’s outposts, high on the shoulders of Ida. We were soon in the toils of a welcome even more triumphant and demonstrative than Mihali’s. Petrakoyeorgi — tall booted, bandoliered, robust, warmhearted, voluble and, with his sparkling eyes and twirling moustache and beard, full of charm — was one of the three original guerrilla captains of the Occupation; taking to the hills at the invasion, they had all suffered many hardships. The other two were Captain Satan of Krussona: he was evacuated early on, with the Abbot of Preveli, to Cairo because of ill health, where, alas, he died. The other was Manoli Bandouvas at present in Cairo too, where we had evacuated him after his disastrous attack on the Germans in the Viannos mountains. He returned later and remustered a large force.
Heavy and buffalo-moustached Petrakoyeorgi was brave and ruthless, a sort of Tamerlane; I always liked him in spite of his glaring faults, of which the most glaring was a headstrong instability of temperament which made him prone to rash acts: doings which in a moment could bring down in smithereens a year’s careful preparation by the rest of the resistance movement. I think the General was rather impressed by his grand air and hospitable and expansive manner: also, perhaps, by the large quantity of the arms of the men who swarmed the rocks in large numbers, with many familiar and friendly faces among them; the gun-running trips and parachute drops were beginning to bear fruit.
Petrakoyeorgi gave us a new guide and Antoni Z, who came from the Amari, on Ida’s southern flank, left in advance with two more to send back as runners to a rendezvous the other side of the watershed. We’d worked out a system of bonfires to indicate the route if he could find any cunning way between the German concentrations. All said that large numbers were gathering round the southern slopes. If no way existed for the moment, he would send us word to go to ground and stay put.