Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  A surprising lesser gift that went with his narrative genius, manifesting itself in sudden surprising outbursts, was his knack of improvised onomatopoeia: the rattle of machine-gun fire for instance, the cracking whips and the rumble of his battery of field-guns galloping with Theodore Stephanidis along the vile Macedonian roads; the hoof-beats of the stallion-drawn trams clattering up the steep and disreputable mahalás above Smyrna; brief deluges of invented German, Bulgarian, Turkish or Arabic, the calls of muezzins, the rapid labial vernacular of a Senegalese fellow-student at Montpellier; massed ships’ sirens; the cry of a large and mysterious black bird, which flew into his dining-room during a wartime visit of Palamas after curfew, perched on the lampshade, croaked ominously twice, and flew out into the dark . . . And Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell have made his Acropolis reveille to the cocks of Attica ring all round the world.*

  Sometimes a curious peripatetic meal, called a Cappadocian Feast, would change the usual pattern. It had three stages. Mussels and kolios with tzatziki, in the Asia Minor ouzeria in Santarosa Street, were followed by a stroll towards doner kebabs and perhaps peinirli in Omonia, continuing, after yet another walk, with ekmek-kadaif me kaimaki at the end of Emm. Benakis. The list of oriental cakes and sweets on the wall must have pressed a button in George’s memory, for suddenly, as though in a trance, he began to murmur: «Εἶνε τó ἂσπρο στῆθοѕ σον ταζέδικο καϊμáκι / τού ’Aϊντίν–’Iσáρ ɛαλβᾶѕ τóκáθε σον ɛερáκι / μονɛαλεμπί καί γκιούλ-σερμπέτ ὁ ἀναστεναγμóς σον . . .» He went through the whole length of the ‘Kαρá Σεβδαλῆs’ of Orphanides, growing a little less quiet with each line. The few late customers, all from Asia Minor, had fallen silent; and, at the end of the refrain—«κι’ἂν ἐγεννὴθην σεβδαλὴs, ἀσίκηs θ’ ἀποθáνω!»—they broke into applause.

  That prodigious literary memory, rooted in his lifelong passion for books—the Montefeltro side!—was another of his surprising gifts. He was expert in three languages and hardly a Greek, a French, or an English-speaking poet seemed to have existed, however exotic or recondite, of which he couldn’t recite, without a hesitation or a mistake, whole pages by heart. To many, including me, he was a miraculous mine of rare knowledge about Greece. If the answer was not immediate, kind and unerring research in the National or the Gennadius Library always unearthed it in the end. In spite of his narrative genius, he was no monologist; his stories sprang naturally out of the conversation; more often, they were dragged out of him by the rest of us; and they never emerged as set-pieces, in the sense of being frozen in a mould.

  New facets would be revealed each time, because each time it was a live experience being drawn straight from a deep and fresh reservoir of memory. It was impossible to resist the temptation to lead him in the longed-for direction . . . Just for the asking, one could be plunged into the labyrinth of wicked and fascinating intrigues among professors in Provence, or join him in clasping Tombros’s huge bronze Rupert Brooke memorial as it slid loose and lethal about the caique deck in a terrible storm off Skyros; or mingle in the low life of Montmartre and Montparnasse. Following his adventures in the great fire of Salonika in August 1917, one joined him by proxy when he and a fellow-artilleryman prudently filled their pockets among the tumbling debris of the Royal Serbian Bank, and waded into the bay to escape the conflagration; until, driven further out into deep water by flames and heat, they started to swim. Soon, compelled by the dangerous weight of the metal, they had to unload great cataracts of gold dinars into the Aegean mud and swim for their lives . . . It was in Paris that I heard this wonderful story. Purely by chance, we had bumped into each other at noon in the Rue des Canettes near Saint-Sulpice; and we were still together, after fifteen unbroken hours of conversation, gastronomy and noctambulism in the Pied de Cochon, by the now vanished Hailes, eating onion soup an hour or two before dawn. In George’s narrative, too, it was nearly daybreak, but the dark city of Paris and the forts des Hailes who were drinking all round us in their blood-smeared aprons, might not have existed. We were back half a century and up to our necks in the Aegean Sea: ‘. . . Looking back across the scarlet reflections of the water,’ George was saying, ‘we could see the whole town collapsing in sparks, yes, millions of sparks! And behind, high above the leaping flames, all along the skyline, the tops of the minarets of all the mosques of old Salonika were burning like a forest of candles . . .’

  So many places, for all his friends, were singled out by these kaleidoscopic sequences: in our case, all the halts of an unforgettable Peloponnesian journey in buses and trains: Patras, Olympia, Navarino, Methoni, Koroni, Kalamata, Tripoli and Nauplia, ending on the terrace of Niko Ghika’s house in Hydra—vanished too—each of them coloured by comic or remarkable events; for life, places and people, at his contact, always conducted themselves in an unusual way.

  When his bad leg limited his radius of activity to Athens, his midday table at Zonar’s became a magnet for Karandonis, Papanoutsos, Lorenzatos, Synadinos, me; and many more. Then time further shortened that radius to his study in Alexander Soutsos Street, and, in my last memory—luncheon with our old friend two months before he died—there he is, surrounded by thousands of books, sitting in shirt sleeves at his desk with his Palamas documents pushed to one side to make room for the plates and bottles and glasses, recalling for our sake the racy, comic and extremely clever songs of Vincent Hyspa, the French chansonnier who had been such a favourite with George’s generation of students in the Paris of the 1920s. They still sounded hilarious and he sang them with such brio, carefully pointing out all the witty and scandalous word-play with his flourished forefinger, that our laughter soon reached the helplessness of tears.

  Then he left us. The loss of a friend so brilliant and warm-hearted and beloved and so unlike anyone else, was shattering; but now, the very thought of George is a sure remedy against depression or sadness; for the gold cloud of reminiscence, comedy and personal myth that gathered all about him whenever he was at a table with two or three friends—a phenomenon so real that it was hard to think of it blowing away like smoke when the chairs under the leaves were empty again—was not a finite thing: the world that his sentences built was a real and a continuing mythology in which all his friends were enrolled willy-nilly and it still reverberates in our minds. It is this which makes it both difficult to speak of him in the past tense and impossible not to smile when he strides into our thoughts. Each time he does so—and it happens very often—he sets scores of live echoes ringing and the memory of strange and astonishing events springs up all round us like an emanation and a blessing. These pages are full of landmarks that have vanished, but George, in one special sense, is not one of them.

  * See the letter from Lawrence Durrell, which forms the appendix to Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi.

  John Pendlebury

  The Spectator, 20 October 2001

  This article on the scholar and soldier John Pendlebury (1904—41) comes from a speech that Paddy gave at Knossos, Crete, in May 2001, as part of the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Crete.

  John Pendlebury is an almost mythical figure now, and, in some ways, he always was. Everyone connected with ancient or modern Greece, and not only his fellow-archaeologists, knew all about him. He was born in 1904. In addition to his classical triumphs at Winchester and Cambridge, a dazzling athletic fame had sprung up. He broke a fifty-year record at the high jump by clearing the equivalent of his own height of six feet and flew over hurdles with the speed of a cheetah. His classical passion was humanized by a strong romantic bent; he revelled in novels about knights and castles and tournaments. And all suspicion of being a reclusive highbrow was scattered by his love of jokes and his enjoyment of conviviality. A strong vein of humour leavened all.

  The British School of Archaeology was his Athens anchor and wide learning, flair and imagination led him to many finds. He dug for
several Egyptian seasons at Tel-el-Amarna, but Crete became his dominating haunt. He was on excellent but independent terms with Sir Arthur Evans but, when he was away from Knossos and the Villa Ariadne, he was constantly on the move. He got to know the island inside out. No peak was too high or canyon too deep for him to claw his way up it or down. He spent days above the clouds and walked over 1,000 miles in a single archaeological season. His companions were shepherds and mountain villagers. His brand of toughness and style and humour was exactly right for these indestructible men. He knew all their dialects and rhyming couplets. Miki Akoumianakis, the son of Sir Arthur’s overseer, told me he could drink everyone under the table and then stride across three mountain ranges without turning a hair.

  Pendlebury’s knowledge of the island was unique, and when, in the end, he managed to convince the sluggish military authorities, he was sent to England, trained as a cavalryman at Weedon, commissioned as a captain in a branch of military intelligence and then sent back to Crete as the British vice-consul in Heraklion. It was typical that he referred to his military role as ‘trailing the puissant pike,’ like Pistol in Henry V. He didn’t mind that his consular cover story in Heraklion fooled nobody. But his mountain life changed gear: he presciendy saw that the Cretan veterans of the old wars against the Turks would be vital to the eventual defence of the island. These regional kapetanios, natural chiefs—like Satanas, Bandouvas and Petrakogiorgis, and many more with their sweeping moustaches and high boots—had many virtues and some, perhaps, a few faults, but they were all born leaders. They were all brave, they passionately loved their country and they recognized the same qualities in Pendlebury. They trusted his judgement when he began to organize a system of defence, arranging supply lines, pinpointing wells and springs, preparing rocks to encumber possible enemy landing places, storing sabotage gear, seeking out coves and inlets for smuggling arms and men, and permanently badgering the Cairo authorities for arms and ammunition.

  When the Italians invaded Greece from Albania and were flung back by the Greek counter-attacks, the probable sequel became clear at once: Germany would come to the rescue of her halted ally. The whole Wehrmacht was available and so was Germany’s vast Luftwaffe. The implications were plain. Pendlebury and the Cretans made guerrilla strikes on Kasos, the Dodecanesian island 25 miles from the easternmost cape, and there was a far-flung caique operation on Castellorizo, off the south coast of Turkey. Like all Crete, Pendlebury lamented the absence of the 5th Cretan division, which had covered itself with glory in Albania, only to be left behind on the mainland. With them, and the 10,000 rifles Pendlebury longed for, he felt that the island could be held for ever. But, to his exasperation, the arms only came in driblets. Even so, there was hope.

  If the worst happened, Pendlebury was determined to stay and fight on with the guerrillas until Crete was free. His stronghold would have been the Nidha plateau, high on the slopes of Mount Ida. It was grazed by thousands of sheep, inaccessible by roads, riddled with caves—Zeus was born in one of them—and it could only be reached through the key village of Krousonas (the stronghold of Pendlebury’s friend, Kapetan Satanas) and the great resistance village of Anoyeia (the eyrie of Kapetans Stephanoyanni Dramountanes and Mihali Xylouris). During all this time, the knowledge that the rest of Europe was either conquered or neutral and that England and Greece were the only two countries still fighting was a great bond.

  We must skip fast over the German invasion of Greece. Most of the British forces, which had been taken from the battle in the Libyan desert to help the Greeks, got away from the mainland with the Royal Navy’s help and the island was suddenly milling with soldiers who had made it to Crete. I was one. I was sent from Canea to Heraklion as a junior intelligence dogsbody at Brigadier Chappel’s headquarters in a cave between the town and the aerodrome.

  The daily bombings were systematic and sinister. Obviously, something was going to happen. It must have been during a lull in this racket that I saw Pendlebury for the first and only time. ‘One man stood out from all the others that came to the cave,’ I wrote later on. I was enormously impressed by that splendid figure, with a rifle slung like a Cretan mountaineer’s, a cartridge belt round his middle, and armed with a leather-covered swordstick.

  One of his eyes, lost as a child, had been replaced by a glass one. I heard later that, when out of his office, he used to leave it on his table to show that he would be back soon. He had come to see the Brigadier to find out how he and his friends could best contribute, and his presence, with his alternating seriousness and laughter, spread a feeling of optimism and spirit. It shed light in the dark cave and made everything seem possible. When he got up to go, someone (Hope-Morley?) said, ‘Do show us your swordstick!’ He smiled obligingly, drew it with comic drama and flashed it round with a twist of the wrist. Then he slotted it back and climbed up into the sunlight with a cheery wave. I can’t remember a word he said, but one could understand why everyone trusted, revered and loved him.

  We all know a lot about the battle: the heavy bombing every day, followed at last by the drone of hundreds of planes coming in over the sea in a darkening cloud, and the procession of troop-carriers flying so low over the ground they seemed almost at eye-level, suddenly shedding a many-coloured stream of parachutes. When the roar of our guns broke out many invaders were caught in the olive branches and many were killed as they fell; others dropped so close to headquarters that they were picked off at once.

  Heraklion is a great walled Venetian city. The enemy forced an entry through the Canea Gate, and after fierce fighting they were driven out by the British and Greeks with very heavy losses. This was the first astonishing appearance of Cretan civilians, armed only with odds and ends— old men long retired and boys below military age, even women here and there—suddenly fighting by our side, all over the island. In Heraklion the swastika flag, which had briefly been run up over the harbour, was torn down again. The wall was manned by Greek and British riflemen, successful counter-attacks were launched and, apart from this one break-in, the town and the aerodrome remained firmly in our hands until the end.

  After leaving the cave, Pendlebury and Satanas headed for the Kapetan’s high village of Krousonas by different routes. They hoped to launch flank attacks on the steadily growing throng of dropped parachutists west of Heraklion. He got out of the car with a Cretan comrade and climbed a spur to look down on the German position. They were closer than he thought and opened fire. Pendlebury and his friend fired back. Here the fog of battle begins to cloud things. Pendlebury and a Greek platoon were still exchanging fire with the Germans when a new wave of Stukas came over and Pendlebury was wounded in the chest. He was carried into a cottage, which belonged to one of his followers, George Drossoulakis, who was fighting elsewhere and was killed that same day. But his wife Aristeia took him in and he was laid on a bed. The place was overrun with Germans; nevertheless, one of them, who was a doctor, cleaned and bandaged the wound. Another came in later and gave him an injection. He was chivalrously treated. The next morning he told the women of the house to leave him. They refused and were later led away as prisoners. A field gun was set up just outside . . . and a fresh party of parachutists was soon in the house. Here was an English soldier dressed in a Greek shirt and with no identification. A neighbour’s wife saw them take him out and prop him against the wall. Three times they shouted a question at him, which she couldn’t understand. Three times he answered ‘No.’ They ordered him to stand to attention and then opened fire. He fell dead, shot through the head and the body.

  The battle raged on. Heraklion stood firm and we had similar tidings from the Australians and Greeks defending Rethymnon. After the lines of communication had been cut, we had no glimmer of the turn things were taking at Maleme over in the west. We thought we had won. The news became still more bitter later on, when we learnt that enemy casualties had been so heavy that for a time they had considered abandoning the campaign.

  Much later we learnt what happened to Pendlebury.
At first his body was buried near the spot where he fell. Later, the Germans moved him to half a mile outside the Canea Gate beside the Rethymnon road. I remember bicycling past his grave the following year dressed as a cattle-dealer. It was marked with a wooden cross with his name on it, followed by ‘Britischer Hauptmann’. There was a bunch of flowers, and new ones were put there every day until the enemy shifted the grave to somewhere less central. (He now lies in the British war cemetery at Souda Bay.)

  Meanwhile legends were springing up. For the Cretans, it was the loss of an ally and a friend with a status close to that of Ares or Apollo. For the enemy, he was a baleful and sinister figure, a darker T. E. Lawrence, and perhaps he was still lurking in the dreaded mountains. Many bodies were exhumed until a skull with a glass eye was dug up and sent to Berlin—or so they said. According to island gossip, Hitler had been unable to sleep at night for fear of this terrible incubus, and kept the trophy on his desk. To the SOE officers who were sent to Crete to help the Resistance, he was an inspiration. His memory turned all his old companions into immediate allies. We were among friends, Pendebury—Pedeboor—Pembury—however it was pronounced, eyes kindled at the sound.