The Ariadne Objective
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39 “Black, white and red”: Ibid., 36–37.
40 “They looked less fierce”: Ibid., 41.
41 “It was charming”: Ibid.
42 “She was very pretty”: Ibid., 50.
43 “Adolf Hitler will change”: Ibid., 70.
44 “They were amusingly dressed”: Ibid., 75.
45 “How do you do”: Ibid.
46 “Halfway up the vaulted stairs”: Ibid., 103.
47 “in those minutes”: Ibid., 114.
48 “It was the Odes”: Ibid.
49 “long winters, early nightfall”: Ibid., 123. See also Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 196.
50 “I used to punch the heads”: Fermor, A Time of Gifts, 133.
51 “a thimble full of the cold”: Ibid., 146.
52 “lapping whiskey and soda”: Ibid., 189.
53 “Wildish nights and late mornings”: Ibid., 218.
54 Nazi who was badmouthing the Church: For Heydte’s biography, see James Lucas, Hitler’s Enforcers (London: Cassell, 1996), 26–39.
55 “how the progress”: Friedrich August, Freiherr von der Heydte,. Daedalus Returned, trans. W. Stanley Moss (London: Hutchinson, 1958), 15.
56 “perhaps as a scholar”: Ibid.
57 “It seemed to hit the nail”: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 197.
58 When the conversation turned: Ibid., 198.
59 “A promise of the Aegean”: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Words of Mercury, ed. Artemis Cooper (London: John Murray, 2004), 30.
60 he glimpsed a cluster of beehive huts: See Fermor, Roumeli, 7–9.
61 “Jarred and shaken”: Fermor, Words of Mercury, 30.
62 “Good evening, Good evening!”: Ibid., 30.
63 “They were wild looking men”: Ibid., 32.
64 “Lordos Veeron!”: Ibid., 38.
65 “There was much to think about”: Ibid.
66 “For though it was possible”: Henry Cary, Herodotus: A New and Literal Version from the Text of Baehr, with a Geographical and General Index (New York: Harper, 1889), 421.
67 “all women, all female animals”: Jacques Valentin, The Monks of Mount Athos, trans. Diano Athill (London: A. Deutsch, 1960), 87.
68 “of a faith where all the years have stopped”: Robert Byron, The Station (London: Century Publishing, 1984), 256.
69 “fierce-whiskered, brigand-faces”: Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), 13–14.
70 “so that even Calypso’s isle”: Leigh Fermor quotes from Basil’s letter in A Time to Keep Silence at page 96.
71 “ ‘Light,’ ‘peace’ and ‘happiness’ ”: Ibid., 95.
72 The first job, he knew: Fermor, Roumeli, 55–56.
73 “It was the most extraordinary thing”: Quoted in James Owen, “Rotterdam to Istanbul by Foot,” Daily Telegraph, February 19, 2000.
74 Once the shooting stopped: Fermor, Roumeli, 54.
75 “the nearest any of us”: Ibid.
76 “watched them jingle away”: Ibid., 55.
77 “reached the windowsills”: Fermor, Words of Mercury, 44.
78 “It had been a happy day”: Ibid., 53.
79 “Recruit Leigh-Fermor!”: William Stanley Moss, A War of Shadows (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 64.
80 “it was the obsolete choice”: Fermor, A Time of Gifts, 5.
CHAPTER 2: SWORD STICK
1 “the most bogus Vice-Consul”: Dilys Powell, The Villa Ariadne (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), 113.
2 “the heir apparent”: S. R. K. Glanville, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 28 (December 1942): 63.
3 “a wonderful country—much richer”: Powell, Villa Ariadne, 68.
4 “It was a soft darkish blue”: Mary Chubb, Nefertiti Lived Here (London: Libri, 1998), 65.
5 “Have just got a Cretan costume”: Powell, Villa Ariadne, 81.
6 “Greece behaving grandly”: Imogen Grundon, The Rash Adventurer: A Life of John Pendlebury (London: Libri Publications, 2007), 253. Leigh Fermor was captivated by the leather-bound sword stick. See Patrick Leigh Fermor, Words of Mercury (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 188.
7 “Send everything as quick”: Grundon, Rash Adventurer, 3.
8 “I went up to town on Monday”: John Pendlebury to Herbert Pendlebury, quoted in ibid., 238.
9 “I think it is going to be great fun”: John Pendlebury to Hilda Pendlebury, quoted in ibid., 239.
10 “I’ve forgotten all about being an archaeologist”: Powell, Villa Ariadne, 109.
11 “an especially resolute traveller”: Ibid., 110.
12 “hocuspocus”: Nicholas Hammond, quoted in Grundon, Rash Adventurer, 240.
13 hop the Orient Express: The train Pendlebury and his friends hoped to catch was the Simplon Orient Express that ran from Paris to Istanbul in the 1920s and included a spur line to Thessaloníki and Athens.
14 “fresh as a daisy”: Quoted in Grundon, Rash Adventurer, 120.
15 “learning the tricks of the trade”: Powell, Villa Ariadne, 111.
16 “poring over the latest maps”: Grundon, Rash Adventurer, 240.
17 “would be the ideal weapon”: Powell, Villa Ariadne, 111–12.
18 “could hardly wait”: Hilda Pendlebury to Dilys Powell, quoted in ibid., 110.
19 “He is a very dignified old gentleman”: John Pendlebury to Herbert Pendlebury, quoted in Grundon, Rash Adventurer, 248.
20 “Bandouvas is a good man”: Ibid., 266.
21 When the corporal called Pendlebury “un-Captainlike”: Ibid., 257. The corporal was Maxwell Tasker-Brown.
22 “a somewhat rickety wardrobe”: Mike Cumberlege to Herbert Pendlebury, undated, quoted in ibid., 298.
23 “pente dodeka, 512”: Grundon, Rash Adventurer, 257.
24 “It took a few visits”: Ibid., 258.
25 “Pendlebury would sometimes saunter in”: Patrick Savage, quoted in ibid., 259.
26 “He told me about his hill men”: Maxwell Tasker-Brown to Imogen Grundon, quoted in ibid., 258.
27 “We also checked out look-out points”: Tasker-Brown, quoted in ibid., 269.
28 “It worked quite well”: Tasker-Brown to Imogen Grundon, quoted in ibid.
29 “nothing to the savages”: John Pendlebury to Hilda Pendlebury, quoted in ibid., 269–70.
30 “The Uncrowned King of Crete”: Tasker-Brown, quoted in ibid., 279.
31 “At present we seem as safe”: John Pendlebury to Hilda Pendlebury, quoted in Powell, Villa Ariadne, 119.
32 “Love,” the messaged concluded: John Pendlebury, cable to Hilda Pendlebury, quoted in ibid., 120.
33 “Keen as mustard”: Grundon, Rash Adventurer, 287.
34 “May be against rules of war”: John Pendlebury, private notebook, quoted in ibid. (The notebook was later captured by the Germans.)
35 “under more or less perpetual”: Alan Clark, The Fall of Crete (London: Cassell, 1962), 22.
36 Corpses floating in the water: See ibid.
37 One of his students: Antony Beevor, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (London: John Murray, 1991), 27.
38 “havoc of a spectacular and enjoyable kind”: Peter Fleming, quoted in ibid., 34.
39 “a bald-headed giant”: Grundon, Rash Adventurer, 299.
40 “He breathed blood and slaughter”: Ibid.
41 “He had already driven”: Nick Hammond, quoted in ibid.
42 “like the roof of the world”: Lawrence Durrell, The Greek Islands (New York: Viking, 1978), 86.
43 “an amazing buccaneerish figure”: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Three Letters from the Andes (London: John Murray, 2005), 105.
44 “It was going to be a terrific party”: Grundon, Rash Adventurer, 298.
45 “Pendlebury was confident”: Ibid., 303.
46 “like bees in a bee-garden”: George Psychoundakis, The Cretan Runner, trans. Patrick Leigh Fermor (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 42.
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47 “We’ve eaten them up”: Ibid.
48 “For the villagers had kept”: Ibid., 41.
49 “Stand still, Turk”: Ibid., 43.
50 One New Zealand soldier: D. M. Davin, Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War, “Crete” (Department of Internal Affairs, War History Branch, 1953), 235; reproduced in Clark, Fall of Crete, 138.
51 “You cuckolds!”: Psychoundakis, Cretan Runner, 42.
52 women took to the fields: Ioannis Spanakis, in Costas N. Hadjipateras and Maria S. Falios, Crete 1941 Eyewitnessed (Athens: Efstathiadis Group, 2007), 107.
53 “He too wanted to go and fight”: Theoharis Mylonakis, in ibid., 94.
54 “The first German I bandaged”: Theoharis Mylonakis, in ibid., 95.
55 “Let them go and see the fighting”: Winston Churchill to Chief of the Imperial General Staff, October 30, 1940, quoted in Winston Churchill, Their Finest Hour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 473.
56 Paddy was still in the hospital: Beevor, Crete, 9–10.
57 “an astonishing repertoire”: Ibid., 10.
58 atmosphere at the Grand Bretagne: Ibid., 12.
59 “a country within sight of Italy”: Gibbon is quoted in Patrick Leigh Fermor, “Foreword,” in David Smiley, Albanian Assignment (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), x.
60 “It was a fierce mountain state”: Ibid.
61 “hardy and courageously independent”: Ibid.
62 “When the roar of our guns”: Fermor, Words of Mercury, 189.
63 “The short May night was illuminated”: Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (New York: New York Review Books, 2005), 220.
64 “He had a Cretan guerilla”: Leigh Fermor, personal communication, quoted in Grundon, Rash Adventurer, 307.
65 “smiled obligingly, drew it”: Fermor, Words of Mercury, 188.
66 “I could not see the adjutant’s face”: Friedrich August, Freiherr von der Heydte, Daedalus Returned, trans. W. Stanley Moss (London: Hutchinson, 1958), 145.
67 “What was the point”: Ibid., 146.
68 “You ought to be with Bob”: Evelyn Waugh, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 490.
69 “He was wearing shorts”: Ibid., 499. This story is told from a different perspective in Beevor, Crete, 195.
70 “Just below us was”: Waugh, The Diaries of Eveyln Waugh, 502.
71 “that he wished to surrender the town”: Heydte, Daedalus Returned, 167.
72 “He was the last British soldier”: Ibid., 170.
73 “In a monastery one should”: Ibid., 178.
74 “Only a few days later”: Ibid., 180.
75 “we had encountered for the first time”: Ibid., 181.
76 “the Black Watch leaves Crete”: Major Alastair Hamilton, quoted in Beevor, Crete, 207.
77 “All at once”: Fermor, Words of Mercury, 190–91.
78 “My child,” the old andarte: Ibid., 191.
79 “stench of decomposing dead”: Captain Tomlinson, quoted in Maria Hill, Diggers and Greeks (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010), 227.
80 “just as Daedalus had done”: Heydte, Daedalus Returned, 186.
81 “the western edge of the town”: Captain Gerhard Schirmer, quoted in Grundon, Rash Adventurer, 309. Schirmer was at least partly wrong in crediting the strong defenses to the English.
82 “We saw that machine-guns”: Nick Hammond, quoted in ibid., 311.
83 “The great thing was”: Patrick Leigh Fermor, quoted in ibid., 307.
84 “We also tried to drop a wireless”: Beevor, Crete, 142.
CHAPTER 3: OAK APPLE DAY
1 “a silent sad-eyed man”: Xan Fielding, Hide and Seek (London: Secker & Warburg, 1954), 54.
2 “an electric torch, a small automatic”: Ibid., 28.
3 “only succeeded in making me look”: Ibid.
4 “an absurdly pejorative term”: Ibid., 13.
5 “I had little money”: Ibid., 14.
6 “I might have made a decent escape”: Ibid.
7 a frail Oxford-trained anthropologist: Fielding’s friend was Francis Turville-Petre. He had spent most of the 1930s living the life of an eccentric, largely nocturnal, hermit on this tiny Greek island. His peculiar habits had attracted the attention of the poet W. H. Auden, who wrote a play about him. Auden’s friend and sometime collaborator Christopher Isherwood was the previous occupant of the room Fielding moved into at the end of September 1939.
8 “I was not afraid”: Ibid.
9 “But what good do”: Ibid., 16.
10 “Now, for the first time”: Ibid., 12.
11 “Bearded men wielding breach-loading muskets”: Ibid., 12–13.
12 “Have you any personal objection”: Ibid., 23.
13 “For three days I was initiated into the mysteries”: Ibid., 27.
14 “We were in enemy country”: Ibid., 112.
15 “I lost count of them”: Ibid., 65.
16 “to talk to people”: Details are derived from HS 5/728, National Archives of the UK.
17 “To say that we were old friends”: Fielding, Hide and Seek, 87.
18 “Though we all wore”: Ibid.
19 “wishing success to the mission”: Ibid., 88.
20 “By the time the raki”: Ibid.
21 Fielding’s zone was known to be the more difficult: HS 5/728, Field report, April 1943, National Archives of the UK.
22 “a holiday between … areas”: HS 5/732, National Archives of the UK.
23 “a motley rabble”: This and other details are derived from HS 5/732.
24 “a dark burly man”: Fielding, Hide and Seek, 194. Fielding had said the same thing in one of his reports from the field: “ ‘The struggle needs blood’ is Bo-Peep’s favourite catch-phrase” (HS 5/725, National Archives of the UK).
25 “any coast you can ‘smell out’ ”: HS 9/458/1, National Archives of the UK.
26 “A very keen and penetrating mind”: Ibid.
27 “He has an excellent knowledge of Greek”: Ibid.
28 “When I arrived the food”: HS 5/728.
29 “His memory turned all”: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Words of Mercury, ed. Artemis Cooper (London: John Murray, 2004), 190.
30 “Little in these crags”: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 137.
31 “Onions, garlic and tomatoes hung”: Ibid., 137–38.
32 “was a sequence of insurrections, massacres”: Ibid., 134.
33 “the moonlit jigsaw of roofs”: Ibid., 137.
34 “changed what was before”: David Roessel, In Byron’s Shadow (New York: Oxford Univerity Press, 2002), 110.
35 “goat-folds and abandoned”: Fermor, Roumeli, 139.
36 “active, lean, spare, hawk-eyed men”: Ibid., 53.
37 “They are virtually weaned”: Ibid., 135.
38 “Never fear, my child”: Ibid., 140.
39 “seeing as much of the Huns”: HS 5/728.
40 “I feel that if I had managed”: Ibid.
41 “We want to go home”: Ibid.
42 “of royal blue broadcloth lined”: Fielding, Hide and Seek, 126.
43 “I, for example, affected”: Ibid.
44 “Though it was now too cold”: Ibid., 127.
45 “Since I was in full view”: Ibid., 127–28.
46 “You come with us”: Ibid., 128.
47 “It was easy for me”: Ibid., 129.
48 “With a final unconvincing cry”: Ibid.
49 “They seemed so gullible”: Ibid., 129–30.
50 “I am a poor man”: Ibid., 132. The Vicar was Father John Alevizakis.
51 “What is it?”: George Psychoundakis, The Cretan Runner, trans. Patrick Leigh Fermor (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 135.
52 “who escaped,” Dunbabin reported: HS 5/723; National Archives of the UK.
53 “came streaming down again”: HS 5/728.
54 “The Changebug did not reappear”: Ibid.
55 “I am now in an elfin grotto”: Ibid.
56 “Sancho … and Changebug … have been”: Ibid.
57 “The Vicar has been loyal”: Ibid.
CHAPTER 4: THE FISHPOND
1 “squareheads”: HS 5/728, Field report, April 1943, National Archives of the UK.
2 “heavily armed as pirates”: Ibid.
3 “The result was perfect”: Ibid.
4 “loyally and unwearyingly”: HS 5/723, National Archives of the UK.
5 He was admired for his discretion: HS 8/657, SOE liquidation reports, National Archives of the UK.
6 “He is a grand chap”: HS 5/728, April 1943.
7 “Man Friday”: W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight (London: Folio Society, 2001), 27.
8 “Working in this area”: Ibid.
9 “Work in my present area”: Ibid.
10 German morale had fallen to a low point: HS 5/723, February 1943, p. 9. The number of troops comes from appendix D.
11 As Dunbabin told headquarters: HS 5/723, February 1943, p. 18.
12 “I think the chance of success”: Ibid.
13 “The larger vessels withdraw”: HS 5/728, April 1943.
14 code-named Tweedledee: The SOE agent who bore this code name was Konstantinos Kastrinogiannes.
15 “Once inside, we all heaved a sigh”: HS 5/728, April 1943.
16 “When the time came to go”: Ibid.
17 “I do not want to discuss”: Ibid.
18 “Chief of Francs-Tireurs”: Ibid.
19 “Crete must be set free”: Ibid.
20 “He is the most admired”: HS 5/728, May–June 1943.
21 “of an imaginary Cretan”: Ibid.
22 “could drink everyone under the table”: Leigh Fermor recalls Micky Akoumianakis’s (Minoan Mike’s) remark in “John Pendlebury,” Words of Mercury, ed. Artemis Cooper (London: John Murray, 2004), 186.
23 “a splendid chap”: HS 5/728, May–June 1943.
24 “over under or through”: Ibid.
25 “The cop and I”: Ibid.
26 “Shooting … started next day”: Ibid.
27 Lamonby sent one of his men: The man was Lance Corporal Richard Holmes.
28 “The fact that he could not”: Quoted in David Sutherland, He Who Dares (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1999), 109. It would come out later that Lieutenant Lamonby had indeed been wounded and died in the Heraklion hospital.