Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  The most exciting moment of his convalescence at Redhill was when he received a surprise visit from Anne-Marie Callimachi and Costa. Anne-Marie was dressed in black satin and sparkling with diamonds, while Costa was wearing an emerald green polo-neck sweater and a coat with a huge astrakhan collar. They had arrived by taxi with a lot of luggage stamped with princely coronets, which made a deep impression – ‘the hospital hasn’t recovered yet, and my glamour-value among the nurses is at fever-pitch.’7

  On release from hospital in early February, Paddy went to stay with his sister Vanessa. He had high hopes of joining the Karelian campaign, in which the Finns were fighting off a Soviet invasion. He had heard about a unit that was going to support the Finns and he was keen to join, but was still too weak; Finland was then forced to concede to Russia’s demands. The Intelligence Corps, on the other hand, were very interested in the fact that Paddy spoke French, German, Rumanian and Greek, and with the situation in the Balkans developing fast they offered him a commission. If he took it, he would be spared any more training at the Guards Depot, but he still clung to the hope of a commission in the Irish Guards.

  He had an interview with the regiment’s commander. There was no opening for him in the Irish Guards at present, Lieutenant Colonel Vesey told him; indeed, he might have to wait for months before the opportunity arose. Although most regiments at this time were desperate for young officers, Vesey was in no hurry to commission this particular cadet: one of Paddy’s reports had described his progress as ‘below average’. The Intelligence Corps, on the other hand, were offering immediate employment and the opportunity to return to Greece.

  The Intelligence Corps uniform was not very romantic, and he disliked the cap badge – a pansy resting on its laurels, as it was disparagingly known. But the lure of Greece was strong, and financially he could not afford to wait for a place in the Irish Guards. Paddy began his officer training in the Corps in early May, stationed at the 168th Officer Cadet Training Unit at Ramillies Barracks, Aldershot. Here he learned how to keep records of enemy movements, how to read and make maps, and how to assemble and coordinate intelligence. There was also much to absorb about the formation of the German army, and he tried to learn the Gothic deutsche Schrift. One of his fellow trainees was Laurens van der Post. Years later, on a television show with Paddy, van der Post recalled the moment they heard about the fall of France. The news left everyone shocked and aghast, van der Post recounted, except for Paddy ‘who was writing a poem about a fish pond in the Carpathians, and he didn’t really take it in until he had finished the poem’. Slightly embarrassed, Paddy added, ‘Well, I was pretty smitten after that.’8

  Soon Free French soldiers who wanted to continue fighting began to appear at Ramillies Barracks, and word went round that the Corps was looking for people who would be willing to be parachuted into occupied France. Paddy volunteered, and was rather offended when they rejected him. He spoke the language fluently and was widely read in French literature: why was he passed over? That the selectors were looking for quiet, inconspicuous people seems not to have crossed his mind. His training finished on 12 August. The final, prophetic remarks on Paddy’s report were written by his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel R. C. Bingham: ‘Quite useless as a regimental officer,’ he wrote, ‘but in other capacities will serve the army well.’9 Paddy himself had very mixed feelings about his future. ‘I looked forward to my new life with interest and misgiving. It was rather like going to a new school.’10

  Second Lieutenant Fermor was ordered to proceed to the Intelligence Training Centre in Matlock, Derbyshire, where he was to take two month-long courses: one on war intelligence, and another on interrogation. The training centre, filled with polyglot officers, was housed in Smelton’s Hydro – ‘a castellated, bleak and blacked-out Victorian pile perched high above the rushing Derwent’.11 His initial reaction to the place was ‘Bedlam in a Morte d’Arthur setting’,12 made more depressing by the fact that all the windows were blacked out; but there were compensations. One of the perks of being an officer was that Paddy now had a batman, Geoffrey Olivier – ‘my first soldier-servant. It was peculiar to think that I would probably never shine a button or spit and polish a toe-cap again.’13

  The war intelligence course was hard work. Lectures were interspersed by long spells ‘scrambling over the Derbyshire hills … making out strategical and technical plans for advancing to, holding, or withdrawing from various features, holding improvised conferences … which invariably ended with the Major saying: “Now Leigh Fermor … What information have we about the enemy in the sector 22314567 to 4678?”’14

  In between one course and the next, there was a week’s break which Paddy spent in blitz-torn London. He saw three fires blazing in Piccadilly, while in Berkeley Square, ‘the blaze of an explosion revealed two sides of that sentimental quadrangle in a disordered wreckage of wood and stone. Only one thing remained standing. Perched three stories high on a tottering pinnacle was a white marble privy, glowing shyly in this unaccustomed radiance.’15

  Thanks to the services of anti-Nazi and Jewish volunteers, much of the interrogation course was conducted in German. One of the secrets of a good interrogation, he learned, was to conduct it while the prisoner had an empty stomach and a full bladder. With friends such as Gerry Wellesley and Osbert Sitwell at Renishaw close by, the high point of this happy time came when someone decided to organize a ball. One of the instructors, Henry Howard, brought over a spectacular couple from nearby Chatsworth: a tall young ensign in the Coldstream Guards, and an incredibly beautiful girl. He was Andrew Cavendish, who in 1950 was to become the 11th Duke of Devonshire; while she was Deborah Mitford, whose sister Diana and her husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, were in prison as pro-Nazi sympathizers. ‘Funny, Howard bringing that Mitford girl,’ said someone when they had gone. ‘After all, this is meant to be the Intelligence Training Centre, and there is a war on.’16

  Another of the Matlock instructors was Stanley Casson, ‘donnish, witty and slightly disreputable’,17 a Greek scholar and archaeologist who had had a lot to do with the British School of Archaeology in Athens. Casson, who always spoke to Paddy in Greek, was one of the moving spirits of what was to become the Greek Military Mission.

  The Italians had invaded Greece on 28 October 1940, and Paddy followed their rapid advance with anxiety. When the Greek army began to turn the Italian tide a few weeks later, ‘It was joy and agony mixed’, as he put it:18 joy that Greece was acquitting herself so well, agony because he was not there. Stanley Casson went to London, and soon after Paddy was told to join Casson’s Greek Military Mission.

  Paddy reported to the War Office. Ordered to sail from Glasgow the following day, he was instructed to pick up two service revolvers before catching the train – one for himself, and one for another member of the mission, C. M. (‘Monty’) Woodhouse. He spent that evening in Bruton Mews with Eileen and Matyla Ghyka. Also there was the sad figure of Prue Branch: Guy had been shot down in the Battle of Britain that August, and his family had had to wait for months before his death was confirmed. Prue noticed the service revolvers that Paddy had in his pocket; they had no holsters, since Paddy had been unable to produce the separate forms required. ‘I wish I could have one of those,’ she said.19

  Monty Woodhouse was a Greek scholar with an austere cast of mind, who admitted that he was slow to appreciate Paddy’s qualities. ‘I first saw him on the platform at Glasgow, with an Irish Guards [sic] cap pulled so low over his eyes he had to lean over backwards to look at you.’20 The bone of contention between them was Greece. Woodhouse, who had a double first in Classics from Oxford and had studied in Athens, was an academic. Paddy, on the other hand, had lived among the Greeks, meeting Vlachs and Sarakatsans, soldiers, monks and shepherds. As Paddy put it, ‘This was always the real root of the friction, a constant jealous, unarmed struggle as to who had the greater proprietory rights to Greece.’21

  At Gibraltar, they were transferred to the cruiser HMS Ajax, and went on to
Alexandria where he saw Aleko Matsas. Then, on the final stretch to Athens, they stopped at Suda Bay in Crete to refuel. The ship would not leave for another three hours, so Paddy suggested to Woodhouse that they visit the island’s western capital, Chania. After a few rounds of coffee and sikoudia (a spirit made from mulberries) in the waterfront bars, they found it was getting late. A soldier of the Black Watch gave them a ride back to Suda in a truck full of oranges. Very drunk, he lost control of the truck and it overturned, sending an avalanche of oranges bouncing into the dust.

  Woodhouse and the driver were unhurt but Paddy, who had been thrown out of the back with the oranges, was covered in blood from a gash to the head. Woodhouse was obliged to rejoin the ship without him, while Paddy was taken to a doctor in Halepa who insisted on his staying a night or two since the wound was serious. This was Paddy’s first time among Cretans, and he claimed an instant empathy: ‘they were like the Greeks, only more so.’22

  The failure of the Venizelist coup of 1935 had paved the way for the return of King George II, and a period of royalist dominance. The King wanted to reunite the country, but all political energy was focused on power struggles in Athens, while the poverty and hardship afflicting the rest of the country was ignored. The only people who seemed to care were the Communists. When the prime minister Konstantinos Demertzis died of a heart attack in April 1936, King George appointed General Ioannis Metaxas to succeed him. Over the coming months, widespread industrial unrest and major electoral gains by the Communists alarmed the King, the army and the prime minister. Metaxas established a state of emergency, followed on 4 August by a dictatorship. He dissolved parliament, banned all political parties including the Communists, and muzzled the press. Greece does not like dictators, but Metaxas had one moment of glory. It was said that his rejection of the arrogant Italian ultimatum of October 1940 was couched in a single defiant word, No – and Oxi Day is still celebrated every year in Greece.

  The Italian invasion of Greece was an ill-conceived shambles, but it united the Greeks in a way the politicians never could. Thousands of young men volunteered immediately, and were sent on their way to the front in the mountains of Epirus through cheering crowds waving flags and flowers. The role of the British Military Mission was to offer advice on mountain warfare. The Greeks had considerable experience of this, but tended to treat it as a series of guerrilla engagements. Michael Forrester, who was to become one of the most celebrated leaders of Cretan irregulars, described it as ‘like one of the Balkan wars with somewhat updated weapons’.23

  In Athens Paddy found a room at the Hotel Grande Bretagne, most of which had been requisitioned by the Greek government as its General Headquarters. He was still supposed to be resting, but he could never resist the gravitational pull of the bright lights and threw himself happily into a round of parties. One evening found him at the Argentina nightclub, where the heroic-looking bandage round his head produced a great many pats on the back and free drinks. The next drink was offered by ‘a tall, interesting-looking man in a Greek artillery captain’s uniform’.24 The captain asked where he had been wounded, and was very amused when he heard that Paddy had merely been overturned in a truck full of oranges. ‘Splendid, but not so loud! You’re only getting the drinks because they think you’ve been fighting alongside us against the Italians!’25 The Greek captain turned out to be George Katsimbalis: a patron of poets, editor, translator, and Olympic-class raconteur. Katsimbalis was a hugely influential figure in modern Greek letters, and the hero of Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi.

  It was a curious moment to be in Athens because, while Greece was at war with Italy, it was not yet at war with Germany, so there was still a German military mission. Paddy was in uniform in the bar at Zonar’s when he saw his old friend Hans Dyckhoff. They greeted each other, slightly bewildered; but once the greetings were over, Paddy said, ‘We can’t really go on, you know, until after this war is over.’26

  The Italian advance into Greece collapsed in November, and soon the Greeks were pushing them back into Albania. The weather turned bitterly cold. In thin coats and tattered boots, the Greek troops – including the Cretan 5th Division – were ill-equipped to deal with sub-zero temperatures in the wind and snow that lashed the mountains. Greek optimism began to falter and the front stabilized at Koritza, where Paddy was sent to report on the situation.

  Arriving in a big car with a driver, followed by a wireless truck, he was billeted in a hotel where he was the only guest, and attached to the headquarters of the Greek III Army Corps whose chief was General Giorgios Tsolakoglou: a stiff, formal man who later surrendered his army to the invading Germans and led the puppet government put in place by the invaders. For the moment, however, the Germans were still beyond Greek borders and there was very little to do. Paddy joined up with two old friends from Athens: Nico Baltazzi Mavrocordato, a cavalry officer who had a job on the staff, and Nicky Melas, the town commandant. ‘We roared around in the car I’d been given like the three Musketeers.’27

  Another friend he met then was Panayiotis Canellopoulos, a professor of sociology at the University of Athens who later became prime minister. Appalled by the Metaxas dictatorship, Canellopoulos had refused to accept a commission in the army and was serving as a private soldier. He was also a fine poet, and published a literary journal called Achris. Paddy contributed an article to the journal about Lemonodassos, which Canellopoulos translated: thus becoming one of Paddy’s earliest translators and publishers.

  Soon after Christmas, Paddy and Canellopoulos went by car to visit Pogrodetz, the northernmost point of the front. Conditions were bleak, with random firing muffled by the snow; but at least the troops here had enough to eat, and morale was good. With Nicky Melas, Paddy explored southern Albania, visiting Agrilokastro (Gjirokastër) and Lescovic, and going as far as Tepeleni. The Albanians seemed more suspicious than friendly, rarely responding to their greetings and watching warily till they were out of sight.

  Metaxas died of throat cancer at the end of January 1941, and within days the artificial unity he had forced on Greek political life began to split along the usual royalist-republican fault line. In late February, the British committed themselves to sending an expeditionary force to Greece, but it was far smaller and weaker than the Greeks had expected. Known as W Force, it was made up of the New Zealand Division, the 1st British Armoured Brigade and the 6th Australian Division, all under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Henry (‘Jumbo’) Maitland Wilson.

  On 1 March Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact, making them part of the Axis with Germany, Italy and Japan. The Germans crossed the Danube and began massing on the Bulgarian border with Greece. Three weeks later under heavy pressure from Hitler, the regent of Yugoslavia, Prince Paul, also signed the Tripartite Pact. The Yugoslavs were outraged, and the German Ambassador was booed and spat at in the streets. They paid heavily for their defiance: on 6 April the Germans launched their double invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia, and Belgrade was smashed by Luftwaffe bombers.

  The Greek commander-in-chief, General Alexandros Papagos, had always counted on the Yugoslavs for help in the event of a German invasion, but the Yugoslavs were fighting for survival and the Greeks had only W Force for support. The Germans broke through to capture Salonika on 9 April, and a few days later they were streaming in from Yugoslavia, through the Monastir Gap.

  Paddy, who had returned to Athens from the Greek-Albanian border, was now ordered north towards Kozani. His orders were to keep in touch with British units, act as liaison to the Greeks, and report on the build-up of German troops. His superior was a man called Peter Smith-Dorrien, ‘who was great fun and a bit of a bounder’.28

  In an effort to hold up the German advance, the commander of 1st Armoured Brigade, Brigadier Harold ‘Rollie’ Charrington, had tanks stationed across the road at Ptolemais just north of Kozani. A troop of the Northumberland Hussars were providing support with anti-tank guns mounted on the back of lorries. Paddy and Smith-Dorrien drove to Kozani a
nd from there Paddy started to walk northwards, to talk to the Allied troops who were already pulling back across the fields.

  One man he stopped to talk to was a Northumberland Hussar with an Afghan coat to the ground. ‘The Germans will be here soon,’ he said. Seeing a huge anti-aircraft gun in a nearby field that looked as if it was going to be abandoned, Paddy asked: ‘Shouldn’t we take that, rather than let it be captured?’ The Hussar agreed and they managed to find a truck to help, though it took a long time to dismantle the gun and load it into the truck. When all was done they exchanged names. His new friend was called Brown-Swinburne, who was related to the poet – which gave Paddy almost as much satisfaction as saving the gun from the Germans.29

  The enemy advance was unstoppable. At one moment Paddy was told to stand by a crossroads, to point the way to tattered and exhausted Greek troops who were retreating from Albania. A bridge had been blown up behind them, and he attracted a certain amount of suspicion. Was he a spy? Had he been responsible for blowing up the bridge? Why wasn’t there a Greek officer to supervise the retreat?

  Back in Kozani, Paddy was outraged to see that a white flag had been put up. The townspeople told him that the priest had ordered this sign of surrender: Paddy insisted it be taken down. He had no authority beyond pointing out that ‘I’m an ally, and the Germans aren’t here yet!’30 Two or three defiant voices agreed with him, and the townsfolk reluctantly removed the flag.