Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Meanwhile the General, escorted by Billy Moss and Manoli Paterakis, was being guided by Stratis to a cave outside Anoyeia. Here Paddy (known as ‘Mihali’ to the Cretans) and Tyrakis would join them next day.

  from ‘Abducting a General,’ a personal report of the Kreipe Operation written at the request of the Imperial War Museum, 1969

  Anoyeia, the largest village in Crete, was too remote and isolated for a permanent garrison. High on the northern slopes of Mount Ida, it is the key foothold for crossing that great mass. Famous for its independent spirit, its idiosyncrasy of dress and accent, it had always been a great hideout of ours. The year before, Mike Stockbridge and I had baptized the daughter of brave local Kapetan, Stephanoyanni Dramountanes, and thus became his god-brothers. He had been killed—shot down while trying to make a break for it, by jumping over a wall with his hands tied—after the German encirclement of the village. But I knew we could find all the backing we needed from his relations and followers, and from his successor in command, Kapetan Mihali Xylouris. We, George Tyrakis and I, climbed uphill all night to Anoyeia, and when we reached those windy and dawn-lit cobbles, I was still wearing German uniform. For the first time I realized how an isolated German soldier in a Cretan village was treated. 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, turbaned men leaning on their gnarled sticks. (I knew all of them.) 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 Skoulas’s house. (We had sent him to the Middle East for SOE and parachute training; when he got back he was known as ‘the flying priest.’) His wife, retreating down the corridor in alarm, refused to recognize 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 laughter, all was well.* The village were told we were harmless scroungers; later, that we had left. The give-away garments were peeled off. Raki and mezze 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 . . .

  Thank heavens for Stratis’s police uniform. He soon appeared. The ascent had been laborious—the General’s leg had received a bad bang during the struggle at the car—but safe. They were now sheltering in a gulley a mile or two away. A basket of food and drink was stealthily despatched, 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 Feiseler-Storck reconnaissance plane circling above, moulting a steady snowfall of leaflets. It wheeled round several times, whirring its way up and down the foothills, vanished westwards still trailing its white cloud; then turned back towards Heraklion. Several leaflets had landed on the roof.

  ‘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 Heraklion 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 triumphant hilarity. We could hear running feet in the streets, and shouts and laughter.

  ‘Just think, we’ve stolen their General!’—‘The horn-wearers won’t dare look us in the eyes!’ —‘The horn-wearers came here looking 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, winked at us and Stratis and I lowered our eyes innocently. I told them it was the work of an Anglo-Cretan commando; mostly Cretan; ‘And you’ll see! Three days will pass 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 disturbed 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, with my letter pinned on the upholstery? Had they followed our paperchase of clues down to the submarine beach?)

  ‘Eh!’ one old man said, ‘They’ll burn down all the houses one day And what then? My house was burnt down four times by the Turks; let the Germans burn it down for the fifth time! 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 had rejoined, and we were winding up a steep and scarcely discernible goat path. On a mule in our midst, muffled against the cold in Stratis’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. Perhaps the alarm had been raised by the distant glimpse, from above Anoyeia, of me in German uniform, and George openly armed and in battledress, but not too obvious with his black beret stuffed into his pocket. The General, they all said, had been reasonable and cooperative; 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 of the Iron Cross, a decoration worn around the neck. I said it had probably come off in the struggle; perhaps it had been found during the cleanup in which case I would see that it was returned, and he thanked me. A propos of the leaflets, which I translated, he said: ‘Well, you surely didn’t expect my colleague Bräuer to remain inactive when he learnt of—my rape (mein Raub)?’—‘No, General, but the Germans won’t catch us’ (I prudently 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.’ Astonished at this comment, I told him that only a few minutes before, and far out of earshot, Billy and I had decided that the same phrase exactly suited the 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 kaputt gegangen.) The war is over for me, as you said. And to think that my promotion from Generalmajor to Generalleutnant has just come through!’ His heavy face—he had a jutting chin, straight hair cropped at the sides but long enough to fall over his brow, and clear 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 . . .’ Here, we both laughed. It was all rather extraordinary. Unfortunately for the journey ahead, he was wearing the same light field grey as we were, and the loose ski trousers of mountain troops. Thank heavens he had thick mountain boots. There were many ribbons over the left breast, the Wehrmacht eagle over the right, the Iron Cross First Class—won at the battle of Verdun, low on the left breast, but no small emblem of the Crimea on his left arm like the rest of the Bremen-Se
bastopol division he had commanded until a few hours before. The red tabs and the gold oak-leaves blazed with newness. No eye-glass, no mensur scars. He was the thirteenth son of a Lutheran pastor in Hanover and had been brought up in the Classics (‘die humanitäten’). For ‘zwei’ he always said which must be a Hanoverian foible. He was a professional soldier to the backbone and must have had, in surroundings where there was more scope, 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. The others had had some sleep, but George and I hadn’t slept since Skalani. We rose again in the dark and continued our journey. As dawn broke, we were hailed from an overhanging ledge by 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 Kosta Kephaloyannis, one of my honorary god-brothers. He was about nineteen, lithe and wildlooking, with bronze complexion, huge green eyes and flashing teeth like a young panther. Other lookouts had joined us from their spurs and soon we were in Xilouris’s cave, surrounded by welcoming guerrillas. Mihali, with his clear eyes, snowy hair and moustache and white goats-hair 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.

  There, too, 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. He had been informed, via Cairo, of our messages to Sandy, and Tom had sent his wireless station on to Mount Ida to help us. Our communications problem was solved. I joyfully wrote out a signal, breaking the news, urging BBC and RAF action and asking for a boat in any cove the Navy found convenient south of Mount Ida, but preferably at Sachtouria. Fortunately a timely schedule to Cairo was just coming up; we could wait there, arrange things at our ease, cross Ida, slip down to the sea, and then away to Egypt. With any luck, the BBC 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. Our binoculars spotted three figures coming from the east: the two Anthonys (Zoidakis and Papaleonidas) and Gregori Khanarakis, 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. Hans, the driver, had been 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: motorized infantry had de-trucked in all the villages round the eastern flanks of the mountains and begun to advance up the hillside in open order. 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 forwards urgently, put one hand on the branching ivory hilt of his silver-scabbarded dagger and, with the side of his other hand, made a violent slash through the air. ‘By surprise. In one second.’ ‘He didn’t know a thing,’ said one of the others. 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 though he was a German.’*

  The turn things had taken was deeply upsetting. I had planned that there should be no bloodshed on the operation, and that the driver, Corporal Frunze, would leave with the rest of the party. It was shattering news; the silence of malefactors hung over us, broken at last by Manoli Paterakis. ‘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 grim Cretan proverb about the wedding feast (quoted above). We all stood up. I told them they’d acted in the only possible way and so it seemed.

  After an hour trying to get the message to Cairo, the operator discovered that some vital part of the set had broken down; a part, moreover, that was unreplaceable 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 prospect was dark.

  Our first runner to Tom arrived back with the news that nobody in the south knew exactly where he was. He’d sent us his wireless, then gone to ground with a bad attack of malaria. There were two other stations in the province of Redmno, far away in the north-west; but as there had been a lot of moving about, Tom was our only link with them. Anyway in the present commotion, they would almost certainly be shifting too. The messenger also brought news of troop movements at Timbaki, Melabes, Spyli and Armenioi; columns of dust were heading towards Mount Ida from the heavily garrisoned Bad Lands of the Messara; observation planes were scattering over the southern foothills. A runner from Anoyeia brought reports of identical enemy doings in the north: lorried infantry unloading in all the foothills as far west as the great monastery of Arkadi (a notorious haunt of all of our friends 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, attributed to the letter I had left for the German authorities stating that this British Commando was guided by Greek regular soldiers serving in the Middle East.

  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 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. 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.

  For the General, breaking bread with Kapetan Mihali and his men and us must have seemed very 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.

  Two days later, through lack of covering, Billy, the General and I ended up, not for the last time, all three sleeping under the same blanket, with Manoli and George on either side, nursing their Marlin guns and taking it in turns to sleep.

  We woke up among the rocks, just as a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida which we had been struggling across for two days. We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the General, half to himself, slowly said:

  ‘Vides ut alta stet nive candidum

  Soracte . . .’

  I was in luck. It is the opening line of one of the few o
des of Horace I know by heart (Ad Thaliarchum, I. IX). I went on reciting where he had broken off:

  ‘. . . Nec iam sustineant onus

  Silvae laborantes, geluque

  Flumina constiterint acuto’

  and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end.

  The General’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine—and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: ‘Ach so, Herr Major!’ It was very strange. ‘Ja, Herr General.’ As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.

  * William Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE (St Ermin’s Press, 2000), p. 483.

  * Patrick Leigh Fermor, Afterword to W. Stanley Moss, III Met by Moonlight (Folio Society, 2001).

  * Years later, the son of Father Skoulas told me that what convinced his mother that the young German soldier in front of her was indeed Mihali was the gap between his front teeth.

  * A different, and perhaps more exact account of the driver’s end may be found in Antony Beevor, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (john Murray, 1991), p. 306 which I strongly recommend. There were a number of details about the operation that I only learnt later on. For all the rest, the reader is referred to Billy Moss’s III Met by Moonlight.

  The Island of Leventeiá

  from Roumeli

  The part that Paddy and his colleagues played in the Cretan resistance, and the way that the Cretans protected and sheltered them while putting themselves at terrible risk, made an unbreakable bond, one strengthened by mutual empathy, complicity and companionship. In this passage from Roumeli, Paddy describes the island, and its indomitable inhabitants.