The Ariadne Objective

by Wes Davis

  The potentially touchy work of making contacts among the Cretans—to Leigh Fermor the most important requirement if he was to gather useful intelligence about the island—was made easier by his forerunner, John Pendlebury. When, one day that first year, he rode a bicycle past Pendlebury’s grave disguised as a cattle dealer, he noticed that fresh flowers had been placed there, and as time went on, he saw that this was a daily occurrence. Wherever Leigh Fermor went, Cretans welcomed him as a comrade of Pendlebury’s. “His memory turned all his old companions into immediate allies,” Leigh Fermor sensed. “We were among friends, Pendlebury—Pedeboor—Penbury—however it was pronounced, eyes kindled at the sound.”

  The rugged landscape of the island presented challenges of its own. But Leigh Fermor was enthralled by what he saw around him. “Little in these crags and ravines had changed for centuries,” he imagined. “One felt that each village must have existed in Minoan times.” In the houses of the villagers he could discern the pattern of the lives they led. It was woven of subsistence and violence. “Onions, garlic and tomatoes hung from the cobwebbed beams; faded pictures of Venizelos”—the rebel whose uprising Leigh Fermor’s cavalry friends had put down in 1935—“looked down from the walls and enlarged sepia photographs of turbaned grandsires armed to the teeth.” Rifles and cartridge belts were as natural a part of the mountain villager’s household as the hens scratching in the doorway.

  The history of Crete under Turkish rule, Leigh Fermor came to learn, “was a sequence of insurrections, massacres, raids, pursuits and wars almost without break.” But the tumultuous events of the past had only fortified the people’s resolve. “However often these villages had been sacked and burned they were always built again,” he reminded himself. One night Paddy found himself sitting on the flat roof of a small house, or spiti, in the mountain village of Anogeia. As he looked out at “the moonlit jigsaw of roofs and houses all around,” he thought of Aristotle’s notion that the capital city in a democracy should be no bigger than this—“cities small enough to hear the voice of one herald.”

  During the Turkish occupation Anogeia had been a center of rebellion. It had been destroyed in 1822, then rebuilt. When the Turkish army trapped a band of insurgents in the nearby monastery in 1866, the abbot ordered the rebels to set fire to the powder magazine, causing an explosion that, as the American consul at the time put it, “changed what was before but profitless slaughter into a deed of heroism,” killing some 450 of the assailing Turks in the explosion. Leigh Fermor could recall the story from a Swinburne poem. Now, though, he knew there was more to it than that. Incensed at having victory snatched away, the Turkish pasha had next turned on Anogeia and attacked the village. But this time the villagers had fought the Turks off, and here the village stood, he saw, on a pattern that Aristotle himself would have recognized. At the time, Leigh Fermor could not guess that before the end of the war, the village would be utterly destroyed once again.

  For the most part the SOE officers kept to the mountains to avoid endangering the villages that would gladly have sheltered them. The accommodations were Spartan at best—“goat-folds and abandoned conical cheese-makers’ huts and above all, in the myriad caverns that mercifully riddled the island’s stiff spine.” Even the caves came in different grades, however. “Some were too shallow to keep out the snow, others could house a Cyclops and all his flocks.”

  In this setting their only real companions were shepherds. These men were nothing like the pastoral figures in poetry, Leigh Fermor thought. They reminded him of wolves or eagles—“active, lean, spare, hawk-eyed men, with features scooped and chiselled by sun, wind, rain, snow and hail.” Most of their lives were lived beyond the reach of the law, and some were outlaws in the more literal sense. Sheep rustling was not only common; it was looked on with a kind of pride. But however they might run afoul of the law, these were the best possible companions when the shooting started. “They are virtually weaned on powder and shot; every shepherd goes armed, and a worship of guns and great skill in handling them dominate the highlands.” When it came to the Germans they were wary of reprisals aimed at their families, but they showed no fear whatsoever on their own account. Their long memory of earlier struggles turned the occupation into just another, if more terrible, battle they would eventually win. In one firelit cave after another he heard the same sentiment repeated. “Never fear, my child,” he would catch some grizzled old mountaineer saying. “With Christ and the Virgin’s help, we’ll eat them.”

  LEIGH FERMOR SAW this fierce spirit in action on more than one occasion. Near the end of January 1943 it was to prove especially welcome. By this time he had been on the island for nearly seven months, largely on the move. He spent a good deal of his time accumulating intelligence about such matters as German troop movements and numbers, shipping traffic in the ports, and activity at the airfields, all of which offered clues about the enemy’s plans on Crete as well as elsewhere in the Mediterranean. As he told headquarters, he was intent on “seeing as much of the Huns as I could, listening to their conversations, etc.”

  When the fighting in North Africa was at its peak, he had been eager to launch sabotage attacks against shipping in Suda Bay. “I feel that if I had managed to sink a few tankers last autumn it would have had tremendous point, and a strong influence on the desert battle,” he wrote to Cairo. One impediment to that plan was the reluctance of the Cretan guerrillas to cooperate in sabotage. “Their hair stands on end the moment the word is pronounced,” he reported. The Germans exacted too high a price in reprisals. “They won’t play.” Lack of time was another factor, since there were also airdrops to manage. These operations were usually at inconvenient locations that took days to reach, given the difficulty of traveling on foot through the mountains, and their timing was unpredictable due to the weather.

  With outright sabotage off the table, Leigh Fermor put a subtler plan into action. Early in December he and Dunbabin began training a few of their Greek friends to chalk short slogans in German on the walls of garrison towns. The idea was to make it look like graffiti scrawled by disgruntled soldiers: “We want to go home. Down with Hitler! Where is our airforce? The Führer is swine!” Paddy himself laid it on thicker whenever the opportunity arose. “I always write up elaborate slogans in bold gothic type when I get a suitable place, and nobody is watching.” He thought it might have done some good, and he proposed a similar campaign using leaflets that could be airdropped over the island. “Play on their homesickness and sentimentality,” he advised headquarters.

  So far, evading the enemy in the course of all these covert routines had not proved difficult.

  By the end of December, the SOE operatives on the island felt relaxed enough to gather for a Christmas celebration at Gerakari. Before Leigh Fermor met up with Xan Fielding so they could travel together to the friendly village in Lotus Land, he spruced up for the occasion. When Fielding arrived with George Psychoundakis, the young villager from Asi Gonia who was now his guide and runner, he noticed the debonair twirl Paddy had given his mustache and the jaunty set of his black turban. He was especially envious of the new Cretan vest his friend wore—“of royal blue broadcloth lined with scarlet shot-silk and embroidered with arabesques of black braid.” Leigh Fermor’s panache seemed to be a symbol of the romantic attitude they both had toward their mission. “I, for example, affected to regard myself as the Master Spy,” Fielding reflected, “the sinister figure behind the scenes controlling a vast network of minor agents who did all the dirty work. Paddy, obviously, scorned such an unobtrusive and unattractive part. He was the Man of Action, the gallant swashbuckler and giant-slayer, a figure who would be immortalized in marble busts and photogravure plates.”

  At Gerakari the festive mood gave the impression that caution was unnecessary. “Though it was now too cold to sing and dance out of doors,” Fielding recalled, “the revelry was still of a peripatetic nature and we reeled happily from house to house eating and drinking with hosts who seemed as carefree as
though no German had ever been heard of in Crete.” When the party was over, he and Leigh Fermor set out for a village in the Rethymnon district, where they were to spend New Year’s Eve. Drunk and ebullient, they felt little concern for the enemy.

  Then, a few miles short of their destination, they encountered two German soldiers. Or Fielding did; Leigh Fermor had stepped behind a rock near the road to relieve himself. “Since I was in full view of them there was no question of avoiding an encounter,” Fielding saw at once, “so I slowly continued on my way, hoping to get past them with a conventional Christmas greeting and a cheerful nod of the head.”

  But the two Germans, who had also been celebrating the holiday, were in the mood for sport. They prodded Fielding with questions. Where was he coming from and where was he headed? As he responded, Fielding was conscious of the weight of the Colt pistol he carried under his cloak. The Germans were not satisfied with his answers.

  “You come with us—schnell, schnell,” one replied. “You no come, you kaput.”

  Despite what the man said, Fielding could see by their grins that the threat was not entirely serious. He thought he could defuse the crisis with humor. “It was easy for me to return their grin,” he recalled, “for I was genuinely amused by their harmless behaviour, and my merriment increased at the thought of Paddy listening to this conversation as he squatted behind his rock, and at the sight of an old woman outside the nearest house repeatedly crossing herself as she witnessed the scene.” Smiling all the while, he began sidling farther along the road. Finally the two men heaved a few rocks at him and turned aside. “With a final unconvincing cry of ‘You kaput!’ they proceeded on their way chortling with satisfaction, leaving me, also chortling, to continue on mine.”

  When Fielding and Leigh Fermor reached their host’s house, they found it filled with German officers and NCOs from the garrison based nearby. After their encounter with the two bumbling soldiers on the road, they were feeling unassailable. They greeted their host, who was “sitting back contentedly puffing at a narghile.” The man introduced Leigh Fermor and Fielding to his German guests as “my young friends from Sphakia” and encouraged the two disguised British agents to mingle with the gray-uniformed crowd. “They seemed so gullible and incapable of doing any harm,” Fielding thought, “that we were almost tempted to drop our inhibitous disguise and enjoy the party openly under our own proper identity.”

  The next day, sad-eyed Yianni Tzangarakis, who was now Leigh Fermor’s runner, showed up with a message from the nearby village where Paddy’s radio station was set up. A German patrol of two or three hundred men had surrounded the village. Yianni, who was there at the time, had crept through the enemy cordon and made his way up to the SOE station to warn Leigh Fermor’s radio operators. Together they managed to conceal the set and its batteries. Then Yianni kept a lookout while the operators escaped into the mountains. The villagers later hid the equipment in a deep cave, along with the set’s bulky charging engine. But the radio operators were still missing. Even worse, the Germans had arrested the son of the village priest, a man code-named the Vicar, who had been steadfast in his assistance to the SOE agents. In the son’s pockets the Germans had discovered two letters written by Leigh Fermor. It was a terrible outcome but one the priest had foreseen. “I am a poor man,” the Vicar had said to Fielding on an earlier occasion, “so I can offer you little material assistance. But I have three sons, and all three will be sacrificed, if necessary, to the cause of Cretan liberty.” A German column returned to the village in search of the Vicar the next day, only to find that he had disappeared into the hills.

  The raid turned out to be the beginning of a concentrated effort on the part of the Germans to eliminate the British operation on Crete. Just days later they carried out a similar operation against Asi Gonia in an attempt to capture George Psychoundakis. The young runner—whose code name at the time was “Changebug,” which had evolved from “Changeling,” for his elfin agility and good humor—had been given leave to spend Christmas in his home village, and an informer tipped off the Germans to his presence there. He had left soon after the new year but returned after injuring his ankle and so happened to be at home on the day of the raid. Early in the morning his mother shook him awake.

  “What is it?” he asked her.

  “Germans, my child,” she told him.

  “Never mind, mother,” the unflappable Psychoundakis said. “Don’t you be afraid. You mustn’t look frightened.” He dressed quickly but found that he could not force a shoe onto the injured foot. The Germans entered the houses and forced the villagers into a line. George managed to get near the front, some forty yards ahead of the soldiers, and he slipped away. Two days later a party of twenty Gestapo arrived at the village asking for him.

  Another German patrol swept through the villages in Lotus Land, including Gerakari, on the fifteenth. At each village they asked for members of Tom Dunbabin’s crew by name. They managed to arrest his assistant, George Tyrakis, “who escaped,” Dunbabin reported, “but was foolish enough to go straight home, where a German detachment was waiting for him. He is now under arrest in hospital.” Tyrakis was quick to learn from his mistake. In the coming months he would transform himself into one of the most important members of the SOE force on Crete.

  On January 25 Leigh Fermor was at the hideout called the Beehive near the village of Kyriakosellia, southeast of Chania, when three German columns totaling more than a hundred men swept up the valley toward his position. One of Paddy’s men caught two bullets in the leg while fighting his way through the cordon. The man’s cousin shot his way out with a pistol. The distraction gave Leigh Fermor and another SOE officer named Arthur Reade time to dash up the mountainside, but the radio set remained exposed if the Germans found the hut. As the patrol drew closer, Leigh Fermor and Reade were forced to climb into a cypress tree, from where they observed the proceedings. The Germans had compelled a Cretan to guide them to the hideout, but Leigh Fermor recognized the man as a friend and was relieved to see that he was leading the search party in the wrong direction. Finally the soldiers gave up, and Leigh Fermor watched as they “came streaming down again, all their disappointed comments, and grumbling at the rock climbing being music to us.” Recounting the incident to headquarters in Cairo, he was reminded of the day in 1660 when the future Charles II of England had been forced to hide in an oak tree following the Battle of Worcester. In the diary of his movements for January, he gave the twenty-fifth the name by which Charles’s escape had come to be known, “Oak Apple Day.”

  When the men regrouped after the German withdrawal, George Psychoundakis was nowhere to be found. “The Changebug did not reappear—it was snowing hard now—and after a day I took out a search party, without result,” Leigh Fermor reported to headquarters. A few days later Psychoundakis turned up and Paddy learned what had happened. After slipping through the German noose, Psychoundakis had scrambled down the mountain but found the village he fled to in the foothills occupied by Germans. With night coming on, he finally fell asleep under his cloak. The next morning he awoke to find himself covered by the snow that had fallen in the hours before dawn. He stashed his submachine gun and binoculars in a crevice, pocketed his false identity card, and walked toward Suda and Chania with the idea of warning Xan Fielding of the German operations. After spending the next night in a cave, he reached the lowland village where Fielding had holed up with an injured foot earlier in the week.

  Meanwhile, on February 4, Leigh Fermor and the others transferred the wireless set to a more secure location, because all the tramping they had done in the snow had made a visible path to their hideout. With a boat due to arrive soon, Paddy hurried to the Heraklion district to prepare for the landing. He told Fielding and Reade good-bye on February 6 and headed east with Yianni, Psychoundakis, and the priest whose son had been captured. Paddy had decided it was time to evacuate the Vicar and Changebug. The next day they were in Psychoundakis’s village of Asi Gonia, which the agents called Stubbo
rn Corner. On the ninth they rested in Gerakari. By February 10, a mild day that felt like spring, they had taken refuge in a cave above the sea, where they made contact with Tom Dunbabin, who was due to return to Cairo. “I am now in an elfin grotto in the Messara, Tom sleeping beside me,” Leigh Fermor wrote sometime after midnight. “We were all soaked through last night in the hellish march through the dark. Odds and ends of Bo-Peep’s and Selfridge’s gangs are fondling their guns as useful. It is very much the same atmosphere as when I arrived.” Then, realizing it was now the eleventh, he added, “It is my twenty-eighth birthday.”

  BEFORE THE BOAT arrived on the fifteenth, Leigh Fermor added a note of commendation for the stalwart allies now departing for the Middle East. “Sancho,” he wrote, referring to Yianni Tzangarakis, “and Changebug”—Psychoundakis—“have been the most indefatigable and loyal collaborators in their different spheres, all the months I have been on Crete. They have been on the jobs all the time without rest and deserve all the reward or consideration that can be shown them.” The priest whose son had been captured by the Germans was also going home. “The Vicar has been loyal beyond praise,” Leigh Fermor’s message continued. “Housing, feeding and hiding the set, and backing us in every way he can for months. His son is in prison with a possibility of being shot on account of this, and half the village is in jail or on suspicion. The Huns beat up his wife and he has been living in the hills. He wanted to remain and see the thing out, but I got him out as he is too old for life in the hills. He is full of guts and as undaunted now as ever.”

  There was one more thing to mention before he closed his report, though Leigh Fermor did not yet know what to make of it. From the eastern end of the island he had heard rumblings to the effect that the commander of the Italian Siena Division based in the Lasithi district, General Angelo Carta, might be willing to surrender to the British. Lasithi, which lay over the mountains east of Heraklion and stretched to the eastern tip of the island, had seen relatively little action during the Battle of Crete. The occupation of the region by Italian troops had also been milder than that of the Germans elsewhere on the island. As a result the Lasithiots had thus far taken relatively little part in the Resistance. It was hard to know whether this information about General Carta, which had come through the Communist guerrilla organization the SOE agents called the Lollards, was credible. For now, Paddy labeled this information “Snappy Bit” and signed off.