THERE IS AN AREA just outside Heracleion, the principal town of Crete, which is strewn for a mile or more with the twisted and rusty shreds from what must have been some gigantic explosion. I did not find out what had happened there. This debris may be part of the remains of the German ammunition ship which the British blew up in the harbor. So many things have been blown up in Crete that you come to take wreckage for granted; and, for that reason, when I look back on the island, this waste always recurs to my mind. It is a place which has been blasted to bits, where people are hardly yet rebuilding but only beginning to pick things up.
When, in the spring of 1941, the Greek and British forces were driven out of Greece proper by the Germans, the latter landed their parachutists in Crete and encountered on the part of the inhabitants a terrific and unexpected resistance. The Cretans have an ancient tradition of pugnacity and independence. In almost every epoch of their history, the history of their last three thousand years, they have had to stand up to invaders: in succession, the Achæans, the Romans, the Saracens, the Venetians and the Turks. And they did not hesitate for a moment, imperfectly equipped though they were, determinedly to attack the Germans. They fought so courageously that they enabled the British to get half their troops away and compelled the Germans to maintain in Crete a relatively enormous garrison of sixty thousand men. The result was a series of reprisals designed finally to crush the Cretans. The Scotch major, who had worked on the island as a secret liaison man, described to me the Nazi method as he had watched it, in hiding, from the hills. The Germans would come into a village at four o’clock in the morning and round up all the people in the public square. Then they would sort out and shoot all the men who seemed capable of bearing arms, give the old people, the women and the children an hour to get away with their animals, and, at the end of that time, one by one, blow up every building in the town. They thus wiped out some sixty villages, and in certain cases they killed the animals, chopped down the olive groves for fuel and took away the fishing boats. They kept the people in extreme poverty by making them exchange at a ruinous rate—demanding the better part of their orange crops in return for a little oil; and, by these means and by cutting Crete off from traffic with the rest of the world, they destroyed the economy of the island, which had lived mainly on its export trade. Out of a population of four hundred and fifty thousand, the Cretans, through the fighting and reprisals, lost something like ten thousand men. In spite of all this, one region boasts that, never subdued by previous aggressors, it succeeded in keeping the Germans at bay. An indomitable Cretan woman, who had become one of the leaders of the resistance and who had been taken by the Germans to Athens in an attempt to make her work for their interests, replied, when they told her they were doing her an honor, that no one could honor a Cretan. When finally, at the end of the war, some twelve thousand Germans were trapped in Crete and set to work digging up mines, the Cretans, in acts of revenge, shot down so many of them that the British took the Germans off this job and allowed them to keep their arms, and later on shipped them to Egypt.
A trip through Crete, as the result of all this, never ceases to be the tour of a battlefield. The sights that are pointed out are razed villages, of which the gray stone walls have relapsed into the gray stony mountainside till they are almost indistinguishable from it; a valley across which the Germans and English fought one of their stiffest battles; a pastoral little white house to which all the ablest men in Heracleion, the officials, the lawyers and the doctors, were brought by the Germans and in which they were shot. The drives that one takes through Crete—there has never been a railroad on the island—contribute to the impression of disorder and disaster. A native driver handles a car with all the superb Cretan carelessness of danger: he will skid around terrible curves on a narrow strip of road that borders a precipice, while you alternate nervously between watching to see whether he will turn sharply enough and gazing off into giddy seascapes, ruggedly framed and of dazzling blue, where the mountain drops away below; and he will suddenly pull up short right on the brink of a broken-off bridge to swerve aside down a steep rocky path and make the crossing on a few wooden boards hardly wide enough to accommodate the car. The jeeps are always spinning off these roads; one of the chief events during my visit was an accident in which an U.N.R.R.A. man had his nose squashed sideways on his cheek. And you move, almost everywhere along the coast, in an atmosphere of scattered explosives which keeps everybody slightly keyed up. The beaches and the water inshore are still studded with hundreds of mines, and when you swim in the small sections that are supposed to have been cleared, you pick your way among air bombs and unburied mines scattered about the sand. The Cretans are not afraid of these devils and, in fact, it seems, have some sort of taste for them. The children get hold of bits of cordite and set them off about the streets like firecrackers; the men and boys who go hunting for mines, being unequipped with mine-detectors, persist—to the dismay of the Americans and British—in practicing an intrepid technique of simply beating the ground with long sticks: if they hit something hard, they investigate; if the mine goes off, so much the worse. One man, on the outskirts of Heracleion, had surrounded his house with a fence built entirely out of very large-sized air bombs, which he has planted on their sharp ends and bound together with wire. The British commander in Crete, hearing about this barricade, decided he had better look into the matter and discovered that, with the hot August weather, the bombs had begun to “bleed”—that is, that the chemicals inside had begun to leak out through the shells—so that he could not have the fence removed: the bombs were dangerous even to touch. In the towns, the mornings of boiling heat and the benumbing muted noons were punctuated, from time to time, by casual booms and bangs to which nobody paid any attention.
There are no hotels open in Crete. You read in the pre-war guidebook about comfortable accommodations afforded by the Hotel Minos, and then find the sign of the Minos hanging on a gutted wreck. At Heracleion and at Canea, I was put up by the U.N.R.R.A. people. I owe the U.N.R.R.A. workers a debt for their kindness both in Greece and in Italy, and it is appropriate to pay them a tribute here, as they are nowhere seen to better advantage than in their efforts to do something for Crete. They have everywhere the same complaints: that they do not get enough supplies (though Greece is better provided than Italy) and that their organization is a bureaucratic nightmare. It is depressing to see offices full of capable personnel in one of the larger cities supervising a trickle of food, inadequate and intermittent, to a great hinterland of ruined towns; or trained sanitary engineers visiting Littoria or the Gulf of Corinth only to find that the sprayers haven’t come, and restricted to inspecting the malarial mosquitoes, establishing the fact that they are present in hordes and going away again. But it is unexpectedly cheerful in Europe to find representatives of the various Allies collaborating in some sort of attempt to get normal life started again. In an American army mess-room, everybody is disgusted with Europe and talks of nothing but going home. But the U.N.R.R.A. people in a place like Crete have really had to settle down to local conditions and problems, and make themselves an existence there. There are places where the professional social worker, with the social worker’s special incapacity for coming to grips with human beings, exercises his dampening effect; but the U.N.R.R.A. house in which I stayed at Canea was presided over by a Connecticut Yankee and his Middle Western wife, who spread good will and inspired confidence. In visiting various centers, I was struck by the differences in tone and morale created by the ranking officials. And this was one of the good Allied spots, where the Americans and the British got on together and where both respected the natives. Yet the U.N.R.R.A. worker never, at best, knows quite what he is doing in Europe. Will he ever get more supplies? Will U.N.R.R.A. simply fade away? Will it somehow be used as an instrument to further somebody’s political designs? Is it already being so used? The field workers for U.N.R.R.A. themselves are instructed to be scrupulously impartial, to keep clear of local politics. In Crete they are surrounded by the tensions of quarrels in which they cannot intervene and which they do not always understand. It is typical of the situation that, a night or two before I arrived, the U.N.R.R.A. people in Canea should have been waked up by the sound of someone’s being pursued and beaten up in the street right outside their headquarters, but should never have inquired what was going on. And the fundamental question always looms whether it is possible, in the world today, for a genuinely non-political organization to obtain from national governments any very large amount of money for disinterested international aid.
One day in Canea, in the afternoon hour when attempting to do anything whatever becomes a plowing through sand, I lay down with a book I had picked up: a paper-backed copy of the text of Arsenic and Old Lace. I had never gone to see this play, about which I had heard so much that I had thought I should not enjoy it. But I found that it read very well, and late that night, when I got back from an evening at the two local restaurants with music, where the foreigners did their best to generate a little gaiety, I sat up and finished the book, and, stimulated by a good deal of retsina, was visited by a revelation of the true meaning of this sinister farce. It was—I saw it quite plainly—a fable about the war. Germany appeared in it as Jonathan, the fiendish homicidal maniac, who has a demoralized man of science to work for him. The two genteel old ladies, who are roused to compete with their nephew—having themselves put away, for their own good, a few old men, whose corpses they keep in the cellar—are England and the United States (the atomic bombs had just been dropped). The policeman who wants to write plays and talks of nothing but his banal plots, while the actual crimes going on under his nose are more sensational than anything he has been able to invent, is contemporary literature, which is incapable of catching up with reality. And the other insane brother, who thinks that he is Teddy Roosevelt, unconscious of the abysses of evil beneath him and always gallantly rushing upstairs under the impression that he is charging at San Juan Hill, represents, of course, Winston Churchill.
I do not seriously mean to suggest that all this was really intended by the authors of Arsenic and Old Lace, but I am sure that this curious piece—like the production of The Duchess of Malfi in London and like the Britten opera, Peter Grimes—is a work characteristic of our time which could never have become popular, which would not have been imagined, at any other time. It is the kind of thing that makes life easier by giving expression to importunate feelings which officially we cannot admit. The war was over; our side had won. One could afford to see the whole thing now as a fantasy of crime and horror on which a curtain must finally fall. Here in Crete, where the atmosphere is still one of fury, the landscape still scarred and disfigured, my only impression that night was of a vengeful and demented humanity tearing itself to pieces.
My identification of Churchill with mad Teddy Brewster may shock the American reader. I learned later from an article by Rebecca West that Churchill’s defeat by Labour had brought him a lot of letters from the United States expressing extreme surprise. She explains that this unpopularity is due, in impoverished England, to the survival in Churchill of an insolence toward the people which is inseparable from the point of view of a well-to-do Edwardian aristocrat, and to the impracticability at the present time of a Prime Minister whose domestic policy is entirely directed to perpetuating the privileges of his class. This is no doubt correct, but I believe there is another element in the eclipse of Churchill in England when he continues to arouse enthusiasm in America. Winston Churchill is half an American, and, though he has often been praised for his revival of the glories of English parliamentary oratory and for his grasp of the great tradition of English history, the truth is that his vision and his eloquence have been both, to a considerable degree, the qualities of a romantic American journalist in love with the achievements of England and with no very realistic sense of what they amount to or what they involve. He has always lived more or less in an historical novel for boys just as Theodore Roosevelt did. There was a moment when this melodrama of history coincided with current events, and then Churchill, of course, was superb. Unlike the typical modern politician, he had courage, he was completely incorruptible and he saw politics as a part of something, melodramatic though that was, larger and nobler than the sequence of expedients of the contemporary political careerist. But, for homeless and foodless Europe, already half-socialized and driven in the direction of equality and international federation, Winston Churchill’s old Henty story, once the Germans have been definitely beaten, appears suddenly the flimsiest of legends. This was especially striking in England when I was there just before the elections: one never found an intelligent person who trusted Churchill to handle post-war conditions. The reversal of feeling toward him has been one of the most curious examples of that law of historical relativity of which Michelet made so much: the man who has functioned effectively and brilliantly in one set of social-political conditions loses his value overnight in another.
I heard several amusing anecdotes which illustrated Churchill’s tendency to conceive the modern world in terms of an old-fashioned novel, and I may well include them here in connection with Greece, which has suffered so from Churchill’s policy. Young Leigh, whom I knew in Rome, had a story about a visit that Churchill had once paid to his mess. “How many Germans have you shot with that?” the Prime Minister had asked in his gruff mumbling voice, nodding toward Leigh’s pistol. The latter, who had been in France and through some of the worst of the fighting, replied that he had never shot a German, that he had hardly even seen one; that, under modern conditions of warfare, you only rarely met the enemy at close range. But Churchill rumbled on: “I shot a man with one of those at Omdurman, and I should think it would take you too long to get your pistol out of that holster.” Leigh said that he realized then that the Prime Minister had never learned to see war in terms of engineering operations, but was still dreaming of man-to-man encounters of the kind that had occurred in the Sudan, where Kitchener’s lancers, with rifles and swords, had fought dervishes armed with spears and sabers. Another story, that I had heard in London, I found that everybody had heard in Athens. At the time of the Greek crisis last winter, when Churchill came on to Athens, he had inquired whom the British could rely on to head a new government in Greece and defend the monarchist interests. Archbishop Damaskinos had been named. “Is he a scheming, ambitious, mediaeval prelate?” Churchill is supposed to have demanded. They told him that Damaskinos more or less answered to this description. “Good!” the great man growled. “We can use him.”
The museum at Heracleion was closed, but people thought that the curator would let me in. On my way there, I was accosted in very bad French by an officious little man, who said, when I asked him, that there was no question at all that the curator, a man named Platon, would be in his office now, and that he would be glad to show me the way, which I perfectly well knew. He rang at various doors and brought out an elderly sub-curator, who spoke much better French. My guide addressed him in Greek and, after a few moments’ interchange, told me briefly that the curator was not there, and immediately disappeared. The assistant turned to me in wonder. “He said some very ugly things about M. Platon,” he explained. “He said that he was un mauvais homme, that he wasn’t attending to his business, and that he’d collaborated with the Germans. Why does he say such things? M. Platon is a professor, a scholar!”
He took me to see M. Platon, who was certainly attending to his business. He was directing the excavations, up the coast, of what was supposed to be a Minoan priest’s house. A frail and tiny man, with pale hair, pale spectacled eyes and a thin neck punctuated by a sharp Adam’s apple, he stood hatless in the heat of the forenoon, directing a couple of men with spades. He showed me a cache of little clay jars that he had just unearthed in one of the walls, and said that, if I would wait till he had finished, he would come back with me and show me the museum. I wanted to stay there and watch him as, assisted by a girl student of archaeology and with a plan of the place in his hand, he bent his efforts on reconstructing this building which had gone to wreck and been buried a thousand years before. But the sun had really cooked me: I was dozing as I stood, and I took shelter in the taxi that had brought us.
When he joined me, we returned to the museum. The Germans had put three bombs through the roof and smashed a good many ancient jars and stone things, of which the fragments were lying around. They had also, M. Platon told me, destroyed one of the royal Minoan tombs, on which a great deal of work had been spent, taking the blocks to build something of their own. But all the most valuable pieces in the museum had been put away underground. He had a few things brought up for me to see, including a piece of fresco which had been hideously warped and charred in one of the great fires that, in ancient times, had burned down the palace of Minos, and he showed me how difficult it was to get the layers of earth and ashes off without scraping the painting away. He was extremely quiet and dry and only once or twice faintly smiled; but he went to a lot of trouble to have me see not only the museum but also a private collection, made by a well-to-do doctor, of Greek and Minoan objects. I don’t believe that M. Platon ever thought about anything but Minoan ruins, and when I remembered the curious incident of the pushing little stranger who had abused him, it occurred to me that one can feel respect for a man who has stuck to his interests and managed to survive and pursue them through the disasters of recent years, and no respect at all for the man who makes a business of being politically on the right side.
I went alone to Knossos to see the ruins of the palace of Minos. This great work of excavation and reconstruction, on which Sir Arthur Evans of Oxford was engaged from 1900 till his death in 1941, is one of the most fascinating exploits in the history of archaeology. It revealed, unexpectedly, an unknown civilization, neither African, Oriental nor Greek, which, in spite of the rich materials unearthed, remains for us rather mysterious. In the houses of Herculaneum and Pompeii, we can easily imagine the lives of people more or less like ourselves. But the Minoans are not only more remote in time (the great palace was probably first built about two thousand years before Christ and destroyed some six hundred years later): though a multitude of images and frescoes, amazingly sophisticated and brilliant, bring us close to the Minoan world, we feel ourselves, at Knossos, in the presence of a unique and an alien people.
The Minoans, at the height of their power, were supreme in the eastern Mediterranean. The Greeks of the mainland were afraid of them and probably paid them tribute—which figures in Greek legend as the boatload of youths and maidens who were supposed to have been sent every year to Crete to be victims of the Minotaur. This bull-headed half-human monster was the child of the Queen Pasiphaë and the bull of which she became enamored, and he was kept in a labyrinth, from which nobody ever escaped. The truth behind the legend, the archaeologists have come to believe, is that the labyrinth is the palace itself, enormous and complicated, of an architecture abhorrent to the Greeks, and that the youths and maidens were killed in a peculiar kind of bull-baiting game, of which the record has been preserved by the Minoan frescoes, seals and bronzes. The Minoan toreador had to face the bull in its charge, to grasp its horns with both hands and allow himself to be tossed in such a way that he could right himself by a somersault over the back of the animal and be caught by another performer standing behind. There were naturally a great many casualties, which are sometimes depicted on Minoan seals. One of the curious features of this rodeo was that the girls wore pseudo-masculine codpieces, perhaps intended to impress the bull. The statue of the Minoan goddess which had the place of honor at these sports wore one of these codpieces, too. The great head and neck of a bull that survives from a ruined bas-relief in one of the porticoes of the northern entrance was probably still to be seen aboveground when the Greeks first came to Knossos and built a village near the buried palace, and it may partly, Evans believes, have inspired the Minotaur myth. The Greeks, it seems, avoided these ruins, regarding them as haunted ground, and to the visitor they are still uncanny.
I went late in the afternoon, and it was twilight before I left. The palace is a maze indeed. You wander up and down stone steps, between raised platforms and underground chambers, among the rows of squat red and black pillars and the flocks of enormous jars that, knobbed with the innumerable handles that were required to lift and move them, give the impression, in subterranean vistas, of rows of palace servants that have been waiting through the centuries for their masters. And you come suddenly here and there upon the marvellous bas-reliefs and frescoes done in the brilliant blues and reds of the Cretan sea, sky and earth: the Cretan ladies—with their curled black coiffures and their pert breasts showing through light chemises, chattering and laughing as they watch the sports—who, by the piquant simplicity of their outlines, queerly suggest drawings by Matisse (one of these women is known as “La Parisienne”); the naked priest-king with his triple-plumed diadem, walking among slim-stemmed irises with elegantly scrolling petals; the cupbearers and saffron-gatherers, the captain with the black slaves; the bluebirds among wild roses, the blue monkeys among crocuses and ivy, the brown partridges with their vivid white throats standing above multicolored eggs against a background of round-leaved dittany: all running to antennae-like foliage, lily-like flower-shapes, ferny fronds and delicate sprays—a liveliness, frivolity and charm which, in spite of some Egyptian influence, is as far from Egyptian stiffness as it is from the chastity of Greece. The Minoan civilization has come and gone without leaving the key to its secrets. There survive over sixteen hundred documents in their half-hieroglyphic script, but their language has not been deciphered. A Czech scholar, just before the war, was supposed to have made a beginning, but since the Germans invaded his country, M. Platon told me, nobody knows what has happened to him.* Says the former curator of Knossos, Mr. J. D. S. Pendlebury, in his handbook to the palace: “With that wild spring day at the beginning of the fourteenth century B.C. [the day when some unknown catastrophe finally destroyed the palace], something went out of the world which the world will never see again; something grotesque perhaps, something fantastic and cruel, but something also very lovely.” How the memory of it lingered in the ancient world I happened, not many days later, to have a chance to see in Pompeii in the House of the Labyrinth. This residence of some rich Pompeian is decorated with Cretan themes: you find the design of a miniature maze, now reproduced in shrubbery, a mosaic of the Minotaur surrounded with human bones, and a fresco—very curious to come on at the end of this war of aircraft—illustrating another legend of Crete: Daedalus and Icarus escaping from Minos with the wings invented by Daedalus, the father making the flight successfully, the son fallen, wrecked, into the water. Daedalus, the great artificer, was supposed to have come to Crete and to have invented, under the patronage of Minos, some of his most unholy devices: the labyrinth, the talking statues and the wooden imitation cow in which the king’s wife, Pasiphaë, bewitched by a god, had succeeded in making an impression on the beautiful white bull which had been presented to them by Poseidon. Minos was so enraged by this last exploit that Daedalus had to flee for his life and hastily invented his wings of wax. Yes, certainly there was something rather strange about Crete, something insolent and exultant, at once refined and barbaric. The Minos of Greek mythology had a great reputation for wisdom and was famous as a giver of laws. Evans believes, on the basis of what he can make out from the lists and accounts on old tablets, that the regime was even rather bureaucratic. But with this there were a recklessness and a richness that a little recall the Italian Renaissance, a way of life unacceptable and frightening to the more moderate and pious Greeks.
And as I stood before the vivacious fresco of an elongated piebald bull over whose back a team of two girls and a boy are performing their extraordinary acrobatics, I had what seemed to me a flash of insight into the symbolism and spirit of Crete. I had been studying, that afternoon, a large wall-map, and I was struck now by the resemblance of the island to the outline of the bull in the fresco. Crete itself is an elongated bull, facing the same way as the fresco, with Capes Busa and Spatha as horns, an eye just below Phalasarna, and a nose and mouth at Cape Krio, genitals at Cape Littino below, and a tail at Cape Sider on the eastern end. Unquestionably the Minoans were preoccupied with bulls. Not only did the Queen Pasiphaë have a love affair with a bull but the first King Minos was supposed to have been the offspring of Zeus, disguised as a bull, and Europa, whom, in this disguise, he had carried away across the sea to Crete; not only, among Minoan antiquities, do we find the innumerable bulls of the paintings and objects of art, but there is the motif of the bull’s crescent horns that stood over the Minoan doorways and that still figures in the architecture of the island. I do not know what the state of mapmaking may have been in Minoan days, but I imagine that it would only have been necessary to ascend the highest mountains of Crete to get a pretty good idea of its shape. The later Cretans saw the outline of Mount Ida as the profile of the sleeping Zeus, and the theory that the ancient Minoans identified their island and themselves with bulls because that was what their country looked like seems as plausible as Evans’ theory, based on very slender evidence, that the Minoan obsession with bulls was connected with the periodic earthquakes, which they attributed to the heaving and roaring of a gigantic bull underground. I tried this notion on M. Platon and on several archaeologists in Athens, none of whom had ever heard it suggested. M. Platon said, “C’est une hypothèse.” In any case, it made me feel a naturalness as well as an appropriateness in the bull that was challenged by man as an emblem for the Cretans themselves; and of the ferocious and bestial bull-man as a bugbear for the outsiders upon whom they preyed. The bull still today in Crete haunts one as the inevitable symbol for their stubbornness, their belligerence and their fierceness.
The town of Anogeia, on the top of a mountain not far from Psiloriti (Mount Ida) is the highest town in Crete, twenty-eight hundred feet above sea-level. It is known to be nine centuries old and is probably a great deal older. It was inhabited, at the beginning of the war, by something like four thousand people. When the British, during the German occupation, kidnapped one of the German generals, he was spirited away to Anogeia and the people concealed him there. In revenge, the Germans blew up the town, but they killed only thirty-three men, because the rest of them had all managed to escape and hide out for months in the mountains.
Today, the anniversary of the destruction of the town, a memorial service is going to be held there, and the British commander, the U.N.R.R.A. heads, the Minister of Social Welfare from Athens, the son of Venizelos and the Archbishop of Crete have all been asked and have promised to be present. An English major has offered to drive me up with a Greek brigadier general he is taking. I go punctually to an appointed place at an early hour in the morning and the major is there on the dot. If we could keep to the British schedule, the whole thing would be over by noon and everybody would be back for a nap. But the British have not counted on the Greeks. All seems ready at the Greek Army headquarters. I meet the Greek brigadier, a lean, dark-eyed and gray-haired man, and his young son, an enthusiastic Boy Scout. The tall and heavy-jawed Scotch general, commander of the British troops in Crete, goes striding up the steps in his kilt and the Greek sentries salute with violence, as if he were a magnetic force that brings their arms up without their volition. The Greek officers follow him in. We wait in the car for a time, then the major disappears inside. Presently he sends somebody out to tell me to come in, too. I am informed that there will be a slight wait while the Greek general has his coffee, and am shown into a room where I am introduced to the British commander and others, who are all standing there waiting for the brigadier’s breakfast. A small cup of Turkish coffee is finally brought, and the general drinks it up in the three or four sips it requires, with a nonchalant air of enjoyment that is at once exasperating and engaging. Then we all go out again.
“There’s half an hour wasted for no good reason,” the English major says to me before the general climbs into the car. I get along well with the Major, a young Yorkshireman who voted for Labour. He tells me a lot of interesting stories—especially about the Germans. He had had to drive a German officer who had just been taken prisoner, and he had become aware that the man was trembling violently and green with fright: “I said, ‘You may well be afraid. There are some villages burned about here.’ ” The man had simply been confined in a prison camp. Another German had said to the Major, “We ought to have won the war.” “I asked him why he thought they ought to have won it. ‘Why, look at these people,’ he said. ‘They’re inferior, they’re contemptible.’ I pointed out that they had been fighting not only the Greeks but the Americans and the Russians and a few other people, but he just kept saying, ‘We ought to have won.’ ” He told me, also, a story about an English officer he knew of who had taken some Greek Boy Scouts on a hike and by mistake had passed the Bulgarian frontier. They had at once been picked up by the Russians, who had sent the boys back to Greece but kept the officer there for days, questioning him as to what he was up to. When they had finally become convinced that he had intended nothing more serious than a picnic, they had decided to let him go but had tried to make him sign a paper affirming that he had not been questioned. He refused, and they had to release him. This puzzles and troubles the Yorkshireman, and his attitude toward the Russians is typical of that of the English, which has been reflected, in a stupid way, by the policy of the Tories in Greece. The traditional English procedure of balancing power in Europe has been up against unfamiliar difficulties in the problem of balancing with Russia, which may promise one thing at Yalta about leaving the Mediterranean to the British, and apparently, through the local Communists, do something quite different in Greece. One cannot ever be certain of anything. In the mind of the Major, the peculiar reception given the Scoutmaster by his Soviet allies is connected with the larger question of how far you can trust the Russians—people who find it natural to hold an Englishman as if he were an enemy and try to make him swear to a lie.
As we pass through the little villages, we are welcomed with handfuls of laurel leaves, which the young girls throw in through the windows. We go as far as we can in the car along a wrecked and precarious road, and then have to get out and walk. It is a steep path up a mountain that hardly threads through the rocks. “The Brigadier,” says the Major to me, “is setting a cracking pace.” We presently fall behind him, as the old man, erect and lively-eyed, strides along in his polished puttees with a rapid and elastic step. These hills are great gray barren mounds where there is nothing to examine or to look at. A curious little plant with a purple stem and pale waxy perfumeless flowers turns out to be asphodel. The path disappears completely, and we have to clamber among jagged stones. But when we have got beyond this, we find men with donkeys waiting. The Brigadier sees politely that we are mounted. You sit sideways and, since there are no stirrups, you hang on to a wooden handle that sticks out of the front of the saddle. You learn to keep your balance while you look along the path ahead rather than into the abysses below.
At the end of an hour of this, you arrive at the village of Anogeia (pronounced as if it were Anóya), where you are perched in the Cretan sky and have everything else underneath you. The difficulty at first is to grasp what the condition of Anogeia is. The town, which had been built out of mountain rock, is now mostly just stones like the other stones. The aim of the Germans was not to leave a wall standing, and where the base of a house still remains, it looks exactly like a Minoan ruin. One thinks with a certain affection of good old King Minos, the bureaucrat, who only threw a few maidens and youths to bulls and gave them a sporting chance. The one building spared is the church, not out of reverence, however, but because it had been the German headquarters and might perhaps still be useful as an outpost. The thin dark-eyed women meet us, all in black, with their shawls over their heads, and shake hands with us as we ride. We come to a halt in the public square, where we sit down and are offered refreshments in the shape of little pieces of watermelon and shots of a crude kind of ouzo which is known in the mountains as raki. We shake hands with the men, who have terrific grips and fingers that seem made of flint. Their faces are bearded, their hands are black, and they have piercing black or hazel eyes. The goatherds of this mountain town are the hardest-bitten people I have ever seen. Life is so rugged up here that many of the children die and only the toughest survive. No wonder they could stand up to the Germans.
We have been told that the service is to take place at eleven, but we learn now that it will have to be deferred till the Minister from Athens arrives, and that it may not be held till six. “Isn’t that like them?” grumbles the Major. “He was invited a month ago.” He does not understand these anniversaries which the Cretans, he says, are always having. “I suppose it makes them feel better,” I suggest. “I should think it would make them feel worse,” he replies. “I should think it would remind them of the person who was dead and bring back a lot of things about him.”
We are shown into a dining room through a smaller room which is strewn with the bones of what has evidently been an earlier repast, and entertained at an Homeric banquet. First they bring on great platters of mutton: simply roast sheep hacked into manageable pieces. You are supposed to eat with your fingers and throw the bones on the floor. And there are also chunks of bread, boiled potatoes and magnificent watermelons. When the melons appear, I assume that we have come to the end of the feast, but they are followed by a delicacy called kokoretsi, which consists of the entrails of the sheep chopped up, stuffed into an intestine, wound around a long skewer and roasted. This fare is a little appalling to some of the British and American guests, but it is very impolite in Greece not to do justice to hospitality, and we are watched by intent eyes looking in on two sides through the windows. “It’s important to drink a lot on these occasions,” says the Major, who is sitting next to me. They keep refilling our glasses from great pitchers of non-resinated raw red wine, which I get to think rather pleasant. The man on my other side is a British Red Cross worker, another Yorkshireman, who has hardly left his county before and talks with a heavy accent. He tells me about the local diseases: scabies, malaria, etc.: “They say that they never had scabies before the Germans came and conditions got so bad, but I don’t know: they’re certainly not very clean.” A young girl had come to him with a swelling on her neck—“a really beautiful girl, you’d say she was a beautiful girl anywhere—with a wonderful lot of hair. But when I lifted up her hair, it was awful—it was all crawling underneath.” We are now becoming talkative and genial. The Greeks are extremely agreeable. There is a handsome old man, a retired official, whose short snowy beard, subtle smile and generous enjoyment of the banquet seem to belong to an heroic age. The brigadier keeps offering us things with his worn but cordial air of a man who has experienced much but has yet remained blithe in spirit.
After the meal, I walk through the town. There are donkeys, chickens and goats, pigs scratching themselves on the ruins, little half-naked keen-eyed kids. I have been warned about Cretan hospitality, but I stop to look at a litter of pigs, which are nursing in a regular rhythm that the mother seems to be directing by an equally rhythmical grunting, as the coxswain sets the stroke for a crew, and I am invited at once into the house beyond, where they offer me bread and wine, and I thus have a chance to see how poor their common nourishment is. After that, I make a point of not looking in the direction of any house, but while I stand gazing out at the dusty hills, a woman in a doorway sends her daughter to give me some watermelon. They are beginning to rebuild the town, but most of the people are living merely between plugged-up and roofed-in ground-floor walls. A little whitewashed cell in a ruin, with grapes growing over the door, seems an attractive and comfortable home.
But I am going to sleep on my feet and I look up the rest of the party. They have retreated into a house to escape the sun and are all sitting together on benches. Some are dozing, with their heads in their hands. The Scotch commander is in this position, and somebody asks him, well, how does he feel? He does not reply for a moment, and then declares, “Bloody awful!” Everybody laughs, then again becomes numb. At intervals they hand us in more watermelon. It seems that a second banquet on the same enormous scale is now taking place in the dining-room in honor of Venizelos’ son.
It is not till I have been some time in the little building in which we are sitting that I recognize it as the village store. There is so little left to sell: a small bin of grain, a few tiles, a few jars, a few bony cuts of meat. There are children with bright clear eyes—some of the girls are pretty but, like everybody else in the town, as lean and fibrous and swarthy as if they had grown out of the soil like some kind of meager mountain tree. I make a jumping mouse out of my handkerchief. This did not go over well in Athens, but in Anogeia it is a mad success. The children—what rarely happens—at once discover how the trick is done and demonstrate the principle with their fingers. Then they go and bring in other children, and keep crying, “Pontikos! pontikos!” But, in the presence of the severe Scotchman, I feel that once is enough.
Of course the Minister of Welfare fails to come. They wait until six, then start. In the square there is a shaft inscribed with the names of their hundred and one men who have been killed in the fighting or reprisals. One sees on it the word hoplitai, which takes one back to Xenophon. Here the widows and bereaved mothers have been standing in mourning all day. They have brought most extraordinary wreaths that are wreath-shaped loaves of bread. Now young girls take their places here, in the traditional costume of the country: black blouses braided with gold, reddish snoods with gold embroidery, silver necklaces and strings of gold coins. In the background hangs the blue Greek flag between poles that are twisted with laurel. A procession marches into an enclosed space: a long row of priests in black, the Archbishop of Crete at their head, a patriarchal and impressive old man with an immense and well-cared-for beard spreading across the breast of his robe; the Scotch general and the British delegation; the U.N.R.R.A. representatives and all the rest. There are litanies, sermons, prayers; anthems by a choir. The sun is still stupefying; it is hard to remain on one’s feet. We keep wondering how soon it will be over, knowing well it will last a long time. At the sound of the church-bells, a donkey brays, interrupting the reverent silence. When the dead sons and fathers are mentioned, the women raise a chanting threnody. It is a traditional song, not a wail, but it seems to make the Major nervous, for he grins faintly as if to indicate that that it not the English way to behave about men who have been lost in a war. The Mayor speaks and the schoolmaster speaks, and the schoolmaster, who is evidently an E.A.M. man, exhorts them with a radical oration, which the Major is able to follow and which makes him more nervous still. “They’re going to boo him in a minute,” he whispers to me, but the crowd shows every sign of sympathy. Venizelos the son makes a speech—the Venizeloses come from Crete. Then innumerable wreaths are presented. The Scotch general brings up a big wreath.
By this time the sun is going down. The Americans and the British are in a hurry to get started for home so that they will not have to drive on those roads in the dark. “Wasn’t that terrific? I warned you,” says the U.N.R.R.A. man from Connecticut. “It wasn’t even a good show for that kind of thing.” Like the Major, he doesn’t understand what they get out of these somber celebrations.
But on our way to the donkeys to carry us back, the Brigadier has to stop for civilities, and we have to drink another round of raki. When we set out in the car again, we are immediately blocked by a row of Greek trucks, which are taking people home from Anogeia but which have for some reason stopped at a small settlement, parking all over the road. No one pays any attention to our efforts to induce the trucks to move, and the Brigadier himself volunteers to get out and see what can be done. He disappears for a long time. The Major by now is frantic. When we start on, it is almost dark and our progress is impeded by the trucks, which are ahead of us and which, on the narrow road, it is impossible for us to pass. And then, just after we have finally escaped, we discover with indignant horror that we are in for another service. In a village at the foot of the mountain, there is a crowd around a lantern-lit catafalque, and the Archbishop is going into action. I am as eager to get on as the Major and I urge him to shoot right through. But he knows that the Brigadier ought to be there and that he ought to be there with him, so we park and join the group. They are standing on the edge of a grave, in which looms a large coffin with trappings. This time the wreaths are made of cake, clumsily molded and decoratively iced. The Major whispers that a man standing near us was the head of the Resistance in that region. He has a small curled and pointed black mustache and holds his hat in his hands. He is clean-shaven and soberly dressed.
But this ceremony is brief and we have come at the end. Glancing about in the inadequate light, I see that the Archbishop’s cheeks are wet and that the leader of the local Resistance has tears starting out of his eyes; nor do they seem to me to be weeping for show. For the first time in that long day’s ordeal and despite my former impatience, the scene takes me unaware and I am suddenly, painfully moved. Perhaps the Major, too, is moved: he does not smile and has ceased to fume. A small band plays the Greek national anthem, and then another, much more martial tune, which, I am told, is the anthem of Crete.
And that is how the burning of Anogeia was commemorated by the Allies—not very solemnly or graciously, but whatever good will we had went into that trip up the mountain.
I lay around dozing at the airport waiting for a plane to take me back to Athens. The American engineers there begged me to give them some publicity. The were irked at having been stranded in Crete, in exile from the main stream of American troops. It was hard for them, they said, to “have any initiative,” because they didn’t know what they were there for and couldn’t see the point of their work. What did we want with an airport in Crete?
This airport was at Heracleion. At Canea there is a British one. I had flown over “British” and was going back “American.” There was as usual a striking contrast. On the British plane, the discipline had been complete. I had been made to wear my Mae West life preserver by a sergeant who called me “sir” and respectfully helped me into it. A security man questioned me politely as to my purpose in visiting Crete and made certain, when I landed there, to whom I was going to report. All the safety restrictions were scrupulously observed. In order to make the trip at all, I had had to get orders from the British. But here, when an American plane came in, I simply went to it and asked to be taken back. The lieutenant who piloted it was sitting on the ground with his crew, his hat pushed back on one side of his head, in the shade of the wing of the plane. He did not ask to see my orders, but simply said, sure: come along. On the flight no one wore a Mae West or strapped himself to the seat; the windows were all left open; and everyone except the pilot lay down right away on the seats or the floor and immediately went sound asleep. There in our bird-body plastered with pin-ups we sailed through the afternoon—delightfully cool in the upper air—over the misty blue summer sea.
The lieutenant had been some time in Athens, but had done nothing about the antiquities and asked me what he ought to see. Some G.I.’s on leave, on the other hand, who drove with me in the truck into the city, had no interest in anything but eating. They asked whether it were really true that you could get ice-cream in Athens “just the same as they have at home,” and that there were doughnuts covered with sugar and honest-to-God beer.
* Linear B has since been deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick. It turned out to be an archaic form of Greek, which also appears in documents of the Mycenaean period found in Pylos on the Peloponnesos, just across the sea from Crete. The documents discovered at Knossos throw little light on Minoan history—they are mostly account books and inventories—but do give some idea of Minoan life.