The Ariadne Objective

by Wes Davis

  Leaving the car and clues behind, they struck out overland toward Anogeia. It was hard going. With no trail to follow, they bushwhacked their way through thickets and across rock-strewn ravines. “The only people who saw us all night were two boys with pine torches hunting for eels in a brook,” Leigh Fermor recalled. “Every hour or so we lay down for a smoke. The snow on Mount Ida glimmered in the sky and neither of us could quite believe, in this peaceful and empty region, that the night’s doings had happened.”

  Just before dawn they began to hear the clanking of goat bells and knew that they were nearing Anogeia. They entered the village as the sun was coming up, and as they walked along the main street, Leigh Fermor noticed that the villagers were behaving strangely, falling silent as they passed or turning their backs. Anogeia was a Resistance stronghold, so the cold shoulder took him by surprise. Then it dawned on him that he was still wearing his German uniform. This, he told himself, must be what it feels like to be a German soldier serving in the occupation.

  When he and George stopped off at the house of a friend, there was a tense moment before the man recognized them, but this quickly dissolved in laughter and a warm welcome. As word got out that “Major Livermore” had arrived, old friends dropped by to say hello and laugh at the “German soldier” in their midst. Leigh Fermor was able to recruit two runners to carry letters explaining the current situation to Sandy Rendel at his hideout in Males, some sixty miles to the southeast, and to Tom Dunbabin, who had a wireless station set up on the far side of Mount Ida.

  That afternoon a German Fieseler Storch airplane flew low over the village dropping bundles of leaflets. “To All Cretans,” the hastily printed notice read in Greek. “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.”

  10

  Bricklayer

  AFTER A DIFFICULT march of some four and a half hours, Moss and the others were closing in on the dry riverbed outside Anogeia where they were to rendezvous with Leigh Fermor. Without the nervous young guide who had suffered a breakdown before the ambush, they now had a hard time finding their way. For much of the distance there was no trail to follow, only more or less impassable stretches of overgrown and steeply undulating terrain. General Kreipe, in particular, found the walking difficult. His experience of the Cretan countryside up to this point had been gained largely from the passenger seat of his Opel as his driver chauffeured him to and from his headquarters. To make matters worse, his leg had been injured in the melee at the intersection and he was now walking with a pronounced limp. Moss and Manoli were forced to carry him over the most difficult portions of the route, ferrying his stout form over rivers and across ravines.

  A little before dawn they stopped not far outside the village to sleep. When the sun came up, Stratis, finding the area more familiar in the daylight, led them to a stream where they settled in to wait for Leigh Fermor while the policeman walked into Anogeia to look for food and add messages from Moss to the letters bound for Dunbabin and Rendel. Moss was especially anxious that Rendel should take care of Ivan and Vassily, whom he had come to think of as “my Russians.” Around lunchtime a villager arrived carrying a sturdy basket filled with food and wine. When they had eaten, Moss and the general both fell asleep.

  Shortly after three o’clock, Manoli, his eyes wide with anxiety, shook Moss awake. A German search party was swarming up the hillside toward their position. The villager who had brought their lunch led the fugitives to a cave farther up the mountainside, where they hid for the next two hours as enemy soldiers searched all around them. General Kreipe, who seemed at first to think his deliverance was at hand, eventually resigned himself to a bit more time in captivity and once again fell asleep. Around five thirty Moss began to hear another drone above the sound of the general’s snoring. When he crept to the cave entrance and looked out, he spotted a German plane and watched as copies of the leaflets that had already fallen on Anogeia fluttered to the ground.

  LEIGH FERMOR AND George Tyrakis lay low in Anogeia until the Germans, who had swept into the village while they were eating lunch, finally left at six. When they were able to move about again, they secured supplies for the long march over Mount Ida and hired a mule and muleteer. Not long after dark, Manoli arrived with word that Moss and the others were now waiting just outside the village.

  That night, after a supper of bread, cheese, and eggs, they struck out toward the south, with General Kreipe now perched atop the mule. The route followed a narrow, steep goat trail that climbed the mountainside in a seemingly endless series of switchbacks. Around two in the morning they paused at the hut of a toothless old shepherd, who fed them cheese and dried bread rusks called paximadi and kept a lookout while they rested. Two hours later they pressed on.

  By dawn they had reached their first way station, the cave headquarters of the Anogeian andarte band. Here they were met by John Houseman, the SOE officer who had come ashore with Moss a few weeks earlier, and John Lewis, Tom Dunbabin’s assistant. Dunbabin himself was holed up in the Amari district fighting a bout of malaria under the care of a local doctor. Word of the successful abduction had not yet reached him.

  Houseman had the day before traveled over Ida along the route Leigh Fermor’s band would now follow, and he had seen an unsettling amount of German aircraft activity. Fortunately, Houseman was on his way to set up a new wireless station near Heraklion and had a radio set and operator with him. The set was a godsend, since Leigh Fermor desperately needed to make contact with Cairo to arrange a rendezvous with the boat. But when the operator attempted to transmit the message, he found that the generator that charged the set was broken. The only way to get a message out was through the wireless sets at Sandy Rendel’s headquarters farther east in the Lasithi district and at Fielding’s old hideout in the west, where a major named Dick Barnes was now in charge. Once again Leigh Fermor sent runners scurrying in both directions.

  That afternoon the veterans Wallace Beery and Grigori came bounding into the cave with Nikos and Zoidakis, after a long climb up from the plain below. They were full of news—German search parties were moving about all over the area. A motorized infantry detachment had nearly caught them in the foothills to the east. It was not until their excited voices finally paused for a breath that Leigh Fermor realized that there was no sign of General Kreipe’s driver, who had been in their custody.

  When he asked where the man was, none of them seemed to want to speak. The driver had grown unable to walk, they finally explained, perhaps because of the injuries he had received on the night of the ambush. When they encountered the German infantry patrol, they feared they might be overtaken, and the discovery of the driver would mean reprisals for all the villages on the slopes of Ida. Slowed down by the injured man, they had no chance of getting away, but they also could not leave him behind. It was Zoidakis, the accomplished throat slitter, who at last spelled out what had happened. They had done away with him as humanely as they knew how. “By surprise,” he emphasized. “In one second.”

  Leigh Fermor consoled the men, telling them they had had no other choice, given the circumstances. But privately he regretted the blot on what was meant to be a bloodless operation. He and Moss made the decision to keep the information from the general.

  That night, with the temperature in the mountainside cave dropping steeply after sundown, Leigh Fermor, Moss, and General Kreipe slept huddled together under the one blanket they had among them, pooling their feeble heat. Shortly after noon the next day, they set off on the steep climb over the top of Ida. At the point where the grade pitched up toward the summit, they found a band of andartes waiting to escort them. Leigh Fermor recognized their leader. It was none other than “Selfridge”—Giorgos Petrakogiorgos, the andarte kapetan
who had been one of John Pendlebury’s original henchmen.

  By this time the gradient was growing too steep for the mule General Kreipe had been riding. There was no choice but to proceed with the general traveling on foot. It was slow going, and the Cretans, in particular, found the sluggish pace exasperating. When they reached the snow line, a freezing rain began to fall. It was near nightfall when they realized they must have crossed the summit without recognizing it. The south coast stretched out beneath the clouds somewhere below them. They took shelter in a dilapidated shepherd hut to wait for dark before moving on.

  Tom Dunbabin arrived at the cave a few days after their departure, worn ragged by the malaria and the long march and annoyed that he had missed Leigh Fermor and Moss. The news he had to give them was all bad. German troops were surrounding Mount Ida. His own headquarters had been ransacked and all the stores captured, he told Houseman, “and the Germans were threatening fearful reprisals.”

  AFTER DARK ON April 29, Zoidakis set a match to the signal fire he had laid some distance down the southern slope of Mount Ida. The night before, Leigh Fermor had sent the fiery guerrilla ahead to scout the route down the mountain. The signal fire told the party lagging behind with the general that it was safe, for the moment, to proceed.

  That evening the remainder of Leigh Fermor’s band left the shelter of the hut and began their descent of the mountain. The night was pitch black and the air thin and cold. Despite the high altitude, the stumbling forced march that night marked a low point in their journey so far. “It took us two hours to reach the bottom of the snow-belt, and then we found ourselves groping between the wind-curved branches of stunted trees,” Moss recorded. “Twigs would snap back into your face, and brambles would tear at your clothes and hands. The oaths and curses on all sides were a fitting mirror to the ugly mood of our companions, and there were times when Paddy and I felt seriously for the safety of the wretched German in our midst.”

  Once again they rested at a sheepfold in the middle of the night, and an hour or two before dawn a shepherd led them to a cave where they could spend the daylight hours. Although the mouth of the cave was on the small side, it opened into an extensive underground network of passages and stalactite-bristling chambers. Island legend had made it the birthplace of Zeus, but its more recent history was in line with Leigh Fermor’s mission—the cave had housed a rebel army in the time of Turkish rule. It served the same purpose adequately now, and most of the men fell quickly asleep.

  When dawn broke on the morning of April 30, Leigh Fermor woke and went to the mouth of the cave to take in their new surroundings. He watched quietly as the morning sun began to glint off the snowcapped summit of Ida, which now lay behind them. General Kreipe was looking at it too, he noticed, and Leigh Fermor heard him saying something softly to himself. It took him a moment to realize that the general was speaking not German but Latin. “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte,” he had said.

  It was with a thrill of recognition that Paddy became aware of what he was hearing. Do you see how Mount Soracte stands out white under deep snow?—General Kreipe was reciting one of the odes of Horace! It was one he himself knew well.

  His mother had given him a collection of Horace’s odes when he struck out on his walk across Europe. And when that copy had been stolen, it had been thanks to one of his German hosts that the book had been replaced by a beautiful old duodecimo edition.

  When the general’s voice trailed off, Leigh Fermor picked up the verse and continued, also speaking in Latin. The poem called for dispelling the cold with logs on the fire, wine, and warmer thoughts. Leave off asking what tomorrow will bring and count the days that fortune gives you as profit.

  General Kreipe turned toward him as he spoke, and their eyes met. When Leigh Fermor had finished, there was a lengthy pause, suffused with the silence of the mountain morning. At last the general spoke. “Ach so, Herr Major,” he said. Just right.

  “It was very strange,” Paddy thought. “As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before.”

  It was a reminder that the war itself was the aberration, interrupting something far more important and lasting. The moment of connection he and the general had just shared had sprung from a deep-running current of literature, art, and civility. It occurred to Leigh Fermor that what mattered was the history they shared, a story that transcended both time and national borders, which he had begun to detect signs of in the overlap of languages as he walked across Europe before the war.

  Heinrich Kreipe was not a butcher like Müller, the predecessor who had ordered the massacres around Viannos the year before. Nor was he an aristocrat. By now Leigh Fermor had learned his story. The younger son of a Lutheran minister, Kreipe had come to the army not out of a sense of tradition but because the pay was good. Yet here was a German who, like Einer Heydte, the young baron Paddy had met in Vienna before the war, shared his interest in literature and history. Under other circumstances they might well have become friends. Perhaps they still would.

  WHEN WORD REACHED SOE headquarters in Cairo that the Germans had launched a leaflet campaign pinning blame for the kidnapping on the Cretans, Jack Smith-Hughes, the commander of the Crete Department, quickly set the gears in motion for an intelligence counterpunch. He had leaflets printed up that announced, in German and Greek: “Colonel General Heinrich Kreipe was captured by a party of British officers with no Cretan assistance whatsoever. Colonel General Heinrich Kreipe is safe and is no longer in Crete.”

  But leaflets on their own would not be enough. To Smith-Hughes it appeared that only one measure would have a chance of convincing the Germans that the British had already spirited Kreipe off the island. SOE would have to make contact with the BBC. If Smith-Hughes could somehow persuade the network to broadcast an announcement that independently confirmed the message of the leaflets, the ploy might pull the Germans off Leigh Fermor’s trail. On the evening of April 30, the following coded telegram was transmitted from Cairo: “Essential, repeat, essential fullest possible broadcast all stations be made by midday tomorrow first, repeat, first May to effect that Kreipe captured by British, repeat, British party and already, repeat, already arrived in Cairo, repeat, Cairo. Matter most urgent as Cretan party report situation ugly, repeat, ugly.”

  When the request had finally wound its way through the twists and turns of bureaucratic machinery, it hit a snag. The powers that be at the BBC were squeamish about making a false report, even in the service of wartime strategy. In the end the broadcasters announced that news outlets in Cairo were reporting that the general had reached that city. Smith-Hughes hoped that would be enough to drain off some of the German zeal for the hunt.

  LEIGH FERMOR WAS not the only one who was growing fond of the general. He noticed that Manoli had also taken an interest in Kreipe. Moss had seen this too. Although neither man spoke the other’s language, Manoli and Kreipe could often be found near each other, cheerfully managing to converse in some makeshift fashion. They were a study in contrasts, the general a bullnecked, thickset man, Manoli hawk-faced and lanky. What’s more, they came from completely different worlds. Yet they found something to talk about. “This attachment is a welcome event,” Moss believed, “because hitherto the General has always grown anxious whenever Paddy and I have left him alone with the Cretans. I think he is slowly coming to realize that the island folk are not the barbarians he imagined them to be.”

  The general was content to be alone with Manoli while Leigh Fermor and Moss explored the deeper recesses of the cave later that morning. They might have hoped to find an escape route but instead found a labyrinth of interconnected tunnels worthy of the Minotaur. Before they turned back, Moss found himself recalling the story of Theseus, the Greek hero who had slain the monster. As he and Leigh Fermor fumbled their way back through the cave, Moss thought it would have been handy to have the thread Ariadne had given Theseus to keep him from losing his way in King Minos’s labyrinth.<
br />
  Just after lunch, a runner arrived with a message from Zoidakis, who was still some distance ahead scouting their route forward, and Manoli read the letter aloud. It warned that the Germans had all but surrounded Ida, with troops now massing in villages that ringed its foothills. Leigh Fermor’s group was in danger of being trapped as the units closed ranks and swept up the lower slopes of the mountain, perhaps as soon as the following day. Zoidakis seemed to think their only chance was to slip through the German lines that same night. They would need to move as quickly and quietly as possible.

  Just after dark, they struck camp once more and set out toward the southwest, in the direction of a village called Saktouria, near the point on the southern coast where Leigh Fermor’s messages had asked Cairo to send a boat. With the grade beginning to slacken, the general was again to travel by mule, and the party made better headway than on the previous leg of their journey.

  A little after ten o’clock they reached the spot where they expected to rendezvous with Zoidakis. But there was no sign of him. Thinking they might have misjudged the location, Manoli and George went out in search of him but eventually returned empty-handed. By midnight he had still not shown. As Leigh Fermor began to grow concerned, it occurred to him to confirm the location in the message Zoidakis had sent. Concealing the glow of the flashlight under his coat, he opened the letter and began to read. It quickly dawned on him that there had been a terrible mistake. The letter said that under no circumstances should they try to make the journey that night.