The Ariadne Objective

by Wes Davis

  Wherever he went for the next two years—all over Romania, then home for a spell in 1937—Baleni was where he returned. He would always remember the meals eaten in the shade of oak trees, the food and jugs of wine spread on trestle tables. It was here, after the idyllic summer of 1939, that he got word that Germany had invaded Poland. On September 2 the whole household assembled for a picnic in the forest. They gathered mushrooms under the oaks. They ate and drank and talked. At the end of the afternoon they made their way—some in carriages, others on horseback—home to the estate. “It had been a happy day, as we had hoped,” Leigh Fermor thought, “and it had to last us for a long time, for the next day’s news scattered this little society for ever.” On September 3 Britain and France declared war on Germany.

  Not long after, he said good-bye at the train station in Bucharest. He was on his way back to England to join the army.

  ALTHOUGH LEIGH FERMOR had once set his mind against the life of a peacetime soldier, the war changed things. Soon after his arrival in England, he enlisted in the Irish Guards and reported to the Guards’ Depot at Caterham for training. The depot was only a twenty-mile train ride south of London in the hilly Surrey countryside, but it might have been another world. When Leigh Fermor passed through the entrance gate, he knew he was in for a change from the freewheeling life he had enjoyed in the castles and cowsheds that had been his home for the last few years. The spit-and-polish discipline the camp was known for earned it the name “Little Sparta.”

  Leigh Fermor did not make an immediate splash with the guards, among whom he cut an eccentric figure. One day the drill sergeant pinpointed the trouble. “Recruit Leigh-Fermor!” the flinty old soldier growled. “Why’re you walkin’ about like some strange bird? Where d’you get them bird-like ways?”

  The young recruit might have replied that this bird walk had carried him all the way to Constantinople. But before he had a chance, the sergeant major as much as threw up his hands. “Put ’im in the book, Corporal Driscoll. For walkin’ about like some strange birrrd!”

  AS IT TURNED OUT, the strange, birdlike recruit did not remain a guard for long. His experience in Greece before the war soon drew the interest of the War Office, and before long he wound up in intelligence and was on his way to the Mediterranean. As Leigh Fermor saw things, “it was the obsolete choice of Greek at school which had really deposited us on the limestone.” Modern Greek was a difficult language to learn in a hurry, but even a schoolboy familiarity with ancient Greek lightened the load considerably. The shortcut to fluency, he thought, accounted for the “sudden sprinkling of many strange figures among the mainland and island crags.” By the next fall he was in Egypt. Soon he would find himself once again in Greece.

  2

  Sword Stick

  AT THE END of October 1940, when news reached Crete that Greece had entered the war, John Pendlebury took a British army captain’s uniform out of the box it was hidden in and pulled it on. Until this moment he had been, publicly at least, nothing more than a civilian employed by the British consulate. But as he admitted to a friend, he was undoubtedly “the most bogus Vice-Consul in the world.”

  A Cambridge-trained archaeologist, Pendlebury had been living in Crete off and on since 1928. His book about the island’s ancient past was on its way to becoming the standard guide for anyone interested in Cretan archaeology. For a number of years in the early thirties, he worked as the curator of Arthur Evans’s excavations at Knossos. Evans, the celebrated pioneer of Minoan archaeology who had unearthed the Palace of Minos at the turn of the century, came to think of Pendlebury as “the heir apparent to the archaeological kingdom of Crete.” Given his choice of inheritances, this was just what Pendlebury would have selected. From the beginning he loved the island. To his mind everything about Crete, even the dialect of Greek he heard here—its aspirated k and x sounds reminding him of Italian—was a notch above the mainland. It struck him as “a wonderful country—much richer than Greece—the peasants finer men.”

  During his first season of excavation at Knossos in 1930, he had gone so far as to begin dressing in traditional Cretan clothing. He got himself up in a high-collared white shirt, dark blue vest, and matching breeches—their balloon legs tucked into tall boots made of white leather. The fine Cretan cloak he wore was particularly impressive. “It was a soft darkish blue on the outside,” a friend recalled, “embroidered in black braid with a hood folded back and all lined with scarlet.” A tasseled black kerchief wound into a squat turban topped off the outfit. Pendlebury was thrilled with it. “Have just got a Cretan costume,” he wrote to his father; “perfectly gorgeous, a great show.”

  Even in Egypt, where he excavated later that year, the sumptuous cloak remained his regular evening dress. For Pendlebury the costume was more than simply appropriate clothing for the climate—it was a kind of uniform, a symbol of the affinity he felt for Crete and its people.

  Dressed now in the drab pea green trousers and tunic of the British army, he cut a less striking figure, but he appeared capable and confident. At thirty-six, he was tall and lean, with broad, athletic shoulders and a keen, weather-roughened face. His brown hair fell to the right, and you could see, if you looked closely, that his left eye was made of glass, the token of a childhood misadventure involving—he said family stories differed—either a pen or a thorn bush. Whenever Pendlebury left the consular offices in Heraklion for long treks through the mountains, often on business he was not at liberty to disclose, he favored an eye patch. The unusual accessory only added to the romantic aura that seemed to hang over him. Rumor had it that on such occasions he left the glass eye on his desk as a signal of his whereabouts.

  Never one to be constrained by regulations, even if there was a war looming, Pendlebury took a few poetic liberties with his British uniform. He tucked a silver Cretan dagger into the government-issue Sam Browne belt and added a leather-covered sword stick to season the ensemble. On October 31 he sent a telegram to his wife, Hilda, that read, “Greece behaving grandly. Very proud of Crete. Reverted to my proper rank.”

  A YEAR EARLIER Pendlebury had taken his family on a vacation to the Isle of Wight. Hilda had settled for the time being in Cambridge with the couple’s two children, so the excursion gave the family a rare chance to be together. But the news reports that reached them on the island cast a shadow over the holiday. On the way home on September 3, they stopped at a pub for lunch. As he was settling the account after the meal, Pendlebury heard that Britain and Germany were now at war. When the Pendleburys reached Cambridge that night, John handed each member of the family a gas mask and they retreated to a room that had been turned into a makeshift bomb shelter. Pendlebury and his son passed the first evening of the war rolling a tennis ball back and forth across the floor of the shelter.

  The next day Pendlebury began searching for a way to join the war effort. He had already been in touch with naval intelligence, but now he cast his net wider. He would sign up with any department that might benefit from his unique knowledge of Crete. On October 14 he got word that the War Office could use him in intelligence. By January he had been ordered to report to Weedon in Northamptonshire for a cavalry-officer training course, which would give him a basic military education.

  When time for the course rolled around, Pendlebury felt anxious about the welfare of his family while he was away, but he was also exhilarated. As a boy he had relished pretend war. Even as an undergraduate at Cambridge, whenever his attention wandered, he was known to fill the margins of his notebooks and letters with sketches of crusading knights and Muslim warriors. Years earlier, at the height of the First World War, he had written an urgent letter from boarding school asking his mother to make toy pistols and tomahawks for him. “Send everything as quick as you can,” the letter had implored her, “as we want to raid the other dormitory.” Now that the war was real, he sounded equally enthusiastic. “I went up to town on Monday to get a few things at the Army and Navy including a gigantic sword,” he told his father. �
��I am taking Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’ with me. It seems a good opportunity to read it right through which I have never done.”

  On January 19, he reported to the 110th Officer Cadet Training Unit in Weedon. The conditions when he arrived were atrocious, even for Northamptonshire in winter. A cold, pounding rain had already turned the training ground into a mud pit, and there was more wet weather on the way. But Pendlebury was pleased with his prospects. “I think it is going to be great fun,” he wrote to Hilda. By the end of the month the intensive training in horsemanship and soldiering already had him feeling like a military officer. It was as if his life had taken a new direction. He soon told his father, “I’ve forgotten all about being an archaeologist.”

  In May, with the cavalry course behind him, Pendlebury was ordered to London. The war was now heating up, after months of escalating tension but little actual combat. There were reports of heavy fighting in France, and German forces were known to be barreling through Belgium and the Netherlands. When Pendlebury arrived at the stubby, turreted building in Whitehall that housed the War Office, he learned that he was being put to work immediately.

  He found his way to a room he had been directed to in the basement. As he entered, he recognized an old friend from the British School of Archaeology in Athens. Like Pendlebury, Nick Hammond had studied classics at Cambridge. Later, at the British School, where both young men held fellowships in the 1920s, Hammond had developed a reputation as “an especially resolute traveller.” His work on the archaeology of the Greek world’s northern fringe had sent him on long journeys through parts of Albania and Epirus where travel was notoriously demanding.

  Seeing Pendlebury stride into the dreary basement office, Hammond brightened. He was disillusioned with the “hocuspocus” he had encountered so far in military intelligence, and seeing the familiar face of another hobnailed adventurer like Pendlebury promised to dispel the “mists of unreality” that hung over the War Office operations.

  Not only was Pendlebury good at cooking up schemes, Hammond remembered; he also could pull them off. In December 1929 he and Hammond and two other students at the British School had decided to walk to Thebes, some forty miles away. They got started around three o’clock in the morning and followed moonlit roads from the peaceful Kolonaki neighborhood, where the school was located, skirting the coast of the Saronic Gulf and then heading northeast across the mountains. The plan was to reach Thebes in time to hop the Orient Express on a spur off its long-distance run that would carry them back to Athens. But none of the young men could match Pendlebury’s pace. At Cambridge he had broken track and field records that had stood for half a century, and he had once won a race against hurdler David Burghley—the future gold medalist whose exploits would later inspire the film Chariots of Fire. A comfortable pace for an athlete like Pendlebury was deadly for anyone else. Hammond kept him in sight until the last miles, when Pendlebury dashed ahead to hold the train. By the time the others finally reached the station, they found him waiting patiently, looking “fresh as a daisy,” Hammond recalled. He had already “consumed most of the beer in sight.”

  Reunited now in London, the two old friends spent the next several days preparing for the missions they had been assigned by the military-intelligence branch of the War Office—“learning the tricks of the trade” of covert operations, Hammond called it. They were given a whirlwind course in explosives that left a quantity of mangled angle iron in its wake. Hammond soon saw that Pendlebury, more than the other intelligence officers he had met, had a practical sense of what a resistance movement in Crete required. But there was also a romantic streak in his zeal for the mission. “He talked to me of swordsticks, daggers, pistols, maps,” Hammond remembered; “of hide-outs in the mountains and of coves and caves on the south coast.” It was clear, however, that there was more to Pendlebury’s talk than leftover schoolboy excitement. Hammond was convinced that much of what Pendlebury had learned in Crete could be put to practical use.

  He knew the island’s geography as well as anyone and he was comfortable with the peculiar modes of travel—he mentioned “mules and caïques”—that the topography necessitated. From experience he could identify the twists and turns in the island’s mountain roads where outsiders would expose themselves to attack. Most important, he had forged relationships in far-flung villages that would be invaluable once the war put a premium on trust. As Hammond watched his friend “poring over the latest maps of Crete,” he began to sense the hard reality of the work ahead of them.

  Near the end of the month the War Office arranged for Pendlebury to fly over France. The carnage he witnessed there firsthand—as a pathetic wave of refugees fled the advancing German army—fired his commitment to Crete. When he returned, he wrote to Hilda asking her to bring his luggage to London. He asked her in particular to pack the sword stick, which he had concluded “would be the ideal weapon against parachute troops.” Hilda arrived the first week of June. When they were at last together again, she was moved to see her husband’s face harden as he told her what he had observed in France. He “could hardly wait,” he told her, “to take his personal vengeance.” They ate dinner together at the Oxford and Cambridge Club and then, on the street outside, they said good-bye.

  BY JUNE 12 Pendlebury was back on Crete. He took up residence in the guesthouse of the Villa Ariadne, the estate Arthur Evans had built for himself at Knossos just south of Heraklion. Posing as the vice-consul for the island, he set about accumulating lists of allies and potential traitors. He called on old friends from his earlier expeditions for help. Kronis Bardakis, who had often supplied the archaeologists with mules, became his first lieutenant. With the help of the “Old Krone,” as the grizzled Bardakis was called, Pendlebury enlisted the leaders, or kapetans, of key clans around Heraklion. They made an imposing crew. Antonis Grigorakis from Krousonas was a compact man with a determined face and a white Vandyke beard. He was known as Satanas, more for the tenacity he had shown against the Turks in 1897 and more recently during the same Venizelist uprising in 1935 that had swept up Leigh Fermor on the mainland than for his day-to-day demeanor. But he was violent enough in outbursts to have shot off his own finger for rolling a losing number in a game of dice. “He is a very dignified old gentleman who looks like an Elizabethan pirate,” Pendlebury told his father.

  Pendlebury next recruited Manoli Bandouvas, a hardheaded ruffian from Asites, in the middle of the Heraklion region, with an impressive black handlebar mustache, a deep, dramatic voice, and a short temper. He had made his fortune on sheep and had “the restless furtive eyes of the rich peasant,” one British officer thought. “Bandouvas is a good man,” Pendlebury confided to Satanas, “but judgement and discretion he does not possess.” Most dependable was the black-bearded Giorgos Petrakogiorgos, a successful olive oil merchant whose loyalty to the British never wavered. Together these three men would come to be known as “Pendlebury’s Thugs.”

  In October, when Greece declared war on Italy, Pendlebury—now Captain Pendlebury—put aside his cover as vice-consul, but he remained secretive about preparations he was making. In November, with elements of the British army landing on the island, he acquired an assistant, a corporal in the commandos, who was impressed by his new boss’s relaxed attitude. He was surprised to be presented with clean sheets for the camp bed the Old Krone set up for him—unheard-of luxury to a soldier—and even a Cretan cloak like the captain’s own. When the corporal called Pendlebury “un-Captainlike,” it was a compliment.

  There was nothing regimented about the office either—a disheveled room, one visitor observed, furnished with “a somewhat rickety wardrobe filled with guns of all sorts, piles of paper money bundled in with every sort of other paper.” Pendlebury gave the corporal the job of answering the office phone. Years later the number would remain etched in the man’s memory—“pente dodeka, 512.” He was also put in charge of monitoring shipping at the harbor in Heraklion. The hardest part, the corporal soon discovered, was fending off t
he harbormaster’s hospitality—a slug of raki to get the day started. “It took a few visits,” he found, “before I managed to explain that coffee was preferable at nine o’clock in the morning.”

  With his new assistant managing the office, Pendlebury was free to roam the island. Because he spoke Greek he was sometimes pressed into service by the army. On one occasion the medical officer of the commando unit based in Heraklion asked Pendlebury to translate for him while he conducted examinations for venereal diseases in the city’s brothels. For the most part, though, Pendlebury was on his own, tramping through the mountains to survey and map spots that might be defended in the event of a German invasion. It was brutal work. One officer posted to the British headquarters in Heraklion noticed, “Pendlebury would sometimes saunter in, exhausted and bedraggled, and after a chat and a drink he would go fast asleep on the floor. He would have disappeared by the time I woke up in the morning.”

  At first Pendlebury told his new assistant little about the work he was doing in the hills. Gradually, though, he took the young man into his confidence. “He told me about his hill men,” the corporal recalled, “how he was trying to organise them into fighting groups and train them, explaining that since the Cretan Division was in Albania, the island’s defenses were pretty thin on the ground.”

  In December Pendlebury enlisted a sailor known as Agios Georgios—Holy George—to help him survey coast defenses. Sailing from Heraklion on George’s caïque with a crew of three fishermen, Pendlebury inspected the shoreline to the east and west of the harbor. “We also checked out look-out points,” his assistant, the commando corporal, recalled. “They were supposed to be manned and most of them were fairly alert. On some occasions Holy George insisted that they were drunk and asleep and wanted to borrow my rifle to wake them up.”