We discussed the possibilities of tracing Daphnis, and as Bulgaria and Greece were still officially at peace, old Nicholas said that he would willingly have gone there, despite the risk of his being caught by a sudden declaration of war, if there had been any reasonable hope of tracing his stepdaughter; but the postcard which he showed me gave no clue whatever to her whereabouts, and it was quite possible that by this time she was no longer in Sofia.
After half an hour we parted with mutua assurances that, if either of us heard anything of her, he would take all possible steps to let the other know.
Outside, in front of the Syntagmatos, I managed to pick up a taxi, and just before one in the morning I was back outside the dock-gates at the Piraeus. I had some difficulty in getting into the dock, but I swore that I had come out of the gate earlier that night and had, unfortunately, lost the special pass I had been given. The fact that I was in the uniform of a British officer was more than half the battle, and being able to speak enough Greek to reason with the officials was a help, so eventually they let me through.
On reaching the ship’s side I found that the first battalion had already disembarked and entrained, and that my own was now in the process of doing so. When the Colonel saw me he asked me where the hell I had been and what was the good of having a interpreter if when you wanted him he wasn’t there to interpret.
I had never seen ‘Long Willie’ angry before, but of course he had every reason, and I felt very guilty indeed about having taken French leave at such a time. The only course was to offer the most plausible excuse and show contrition; so I said that a couple of hours before I had run into a Greek naval officer whom I had known in Athens before the war and that he had insisted on taking me along to the Naval mess for a drink. Once there I had found it absolutely impossible to get away again, and I could only offer my sincerest apologies.
I felt an awful swine at deceiving ‘Long Willie’, but I knew that if I told him that I had been into Athens in flagrant disobedience to the direct orders of the Brigadier, he would obviously have to put me under arrest, and that would not really have done either of us any good or helped to defeat the Nazis.
He took my excuse well, murmuring something about its being difficult not to fraternise with our new Allies, but that I’d find myself in hot water if I disappeared like that again.
The Bren-gun carriers were being hoisted out of the hold and lowered direct on to long flat railway trucks. As each carrier was received by its crew they checked it up then covered it with a great tarpaulin so that when daylight broke anyone observing the train on its journey up-country would see just a goods train which gave no indication of being loaded with military vehicles.
Soon after three the job was completed. The train was shunted out and the men marched to a long, low customs warehouse, where a cooked meal had been prepared for them. Everything was excellently organised, and in spite of my personal worry I ate as heartily as I could, since I knew that once we were in the train it might be many hours, or even days, before we saw hot food again.
By four o’clock we had been led by Greek guides from the customs sheds along the best part of a mile of criss-crossed railway tracks to a siding where our train stood. Half an hour later it chugged slowly away towards the north-east; but after only twenty-five minutes’ run it stopped again, and for hours it remained without moving another yard.
The blinds of every coach were drawn, and the order was that in no circumstances should any officer or man pull them up or show himself by leaving the train; so we had to sit there, hour after hour, in the semi-darkness. I came to the conclusion that we were one of the many trains which had been loaded that night with portions of the British Expeditionary Force disembarking at Piraeus, all of which had been moved up to the main marshalling-yard of Athens, and that we were now having to wait our turn until, one by one, the trains could go up the line from Athens to the north.
In addition to our iron rations we had been issued with biscuits, fruit and chocolate at the dock; so we had no cause to fear hunger; but the twelve hours which followed our leaving Piraeus were boring in the extreme, and everyone was heartily glad when, at about five o’clock in the afternoon, the train gave a sudden jerk and began slowly to move again.
However, as I believe has always been the way with troop trains, this one appeared to be in no hurry to reach its destination. While we dozed through the night it stopped and started, stopped and started, jolting us back into wakefulness with every alteration of its pace and never at any time making more than twenty miles an hour.
Next morning the glimpses we could see by peering round the drawn blinds showed us that we were travelling through wild mountainous country right in the heart of Greece. The sky was much the same blue as we had become so accustomed to on the southern side of the Mediterranean; but the snow-capped peaks and the rugged gorges which often dropped sheer for many hundred feet to stream-washed rocks below were a great tonic after the dead flatness of Egypt. We all wished that we could have seen more of it by pushing up those wretched blinds, but although most of the day was spent in passing through desolate country, inhabited only by occasional shepherds and herdsmen, we were absolutely forbidden to do so.
During the afternoon the train began to wind down from the mountains and entered a fertile plain, through which we were still slowly making our way as night fell, depriving us of any further glimpses of the landscape. It was soon after midnight and we were trying to doze again when, after one of the innumerable stops, the door of the compartment was flung open and a British railway transport officer got in to inquire for the Colonel. Five minutes later we were ordered to detrain, and a Greek captain reported to ‘Long Willie’ as guide and interpreter.
I suppose I should have foreseen that when the Battalion arrived in a foreign country it would naturally have one of the officers of that country’s army attached to it for liaison purposes; yet in my anxiety about Daphnis and my excitement at having managed to get out of Egypt in spite of Major Cozelli it had never occurred to me. Now I was considerably perturbed that the fact that I had no right to be in Greece at all would soon be discovered; but I knew that for the moment I had no need to worry as everybody was far too busy to concern themselves with the question of my superfluity.
I learnt from the Greek captain that the town we had reached was Larissa, and I saw from the map with which I had been issued that it was an important junction where the main line from Athens was joined by a line from Volo, a port on the east coast of Greece, at which he told me Imperial Forces were also disembarking.
As soon as the detraining had been completed we rattled away through the streets of the town. Normally its inhabitants would have been sleeping, but there was no disguising from the people here that British troops were now arriving in large numbers to assist in the defence of Greece, and in spite of their police, who were trying to keep them from showing lights, they could not be restrained from leaning out of their windows and lining the streets to give us a tremendous welcome.
We trekked west across the plain for about twelve miles then turned north towards Tyrnavos; until, on the left side of the road, the cornfields ended, and the ground became more broken as we approached the foothills of a range of mountains. Our guide led us into a shallow valley in which chunky outcrops of grey rock showed here and there through the green of the sloping pastures, and in the lower levels trees became quite numerous. He then indicated a fairly level stretch which he told us had been chosen for us to camp in.
There was a brief conference of company commanders, after which the officers set about choosing sites under trees for each individual vehicle, and selecting positions for the company field-cookers, anti-aircraft guns, latrines, officers’ messes, and so on. By ten o’clock things were beginning to take shape, and by midday we had fully settled in. ‘Long Willie’ gave notice that he intended to carry out an inspection the following morning, so the afternoon was spent in a thorough overhaul of all equipment; then we turned in early
and got our first really good night’s sleep since we had landed in Greece.
There followed ten days of exceptional quiet and rest. We had occupied our camp in the wooded foothills, some miles to the north-west of Larissa on March the 19th, and we did not leave it until March the 28th.
During that time we did practically nothing except sleep and amuse ourselves, as we were not allowed to carry out any military exercises or hold parades in which a group of more than six men could be seen from the air in any formation. We were also forbidden to use the roads or go into the neighbouring villages. The whole idea being to keep both vehicles and men under cover. Our lads played up splendidly, and although we knew that in the neighbouring valleys many other units of the Imperial Expeditionary Force had taken up positions, I doubt very much if a traveller, motoring through that part of the country, would have had any idea that a considerable army lay concealed there.
Actually there is very little motor traffic in Greece. I remembered one spring day three years before, driving along the main road from Athens to the west to put in a night at Delphi and pay a visit to the ruins of the famous temple there. The distance is well over a hundred miles, yet in the whole journey, once I had left the environs of Athens behind, I met only one other car and two motor lorries.
It was then that I had been so impressed with the friendliness and the courtesy of the Greeks. Most continental peoples seem to regard travellers as a natural prey. Every sight of special beauty or interest is converted into a racket in which the local inhabitants get up to all sorts of dodges in order to make the enjoyment of them more expensive to foreigners; but not so the Greeks. Perhaps it is their mountains that have protected them from the modern Philistine licensed-bandit spirit; but they are the one people in Europe that I have ever met who give visitors to their country a really generous deal.
In Greece, instead of taking you to the most expensive shops to make your purchases, so that he can get a double commission on them, your guide will bring you a gift of a bunch of flowers, or a bottle of wine each morning when he calls for you at your hotel; and the most astonishing experience of all for a foreigner is to motor about the country. In order to keep up its stretch of road, every town and village levies a small tax on each vehicle that passes through it; but if the car contains a foreigner the chauffeur simply calls out, “Touristiko, touristiko!” and the toll collector waves the car on with a friendly smile. The Greeks are so proud of their beautiful country and its unique place in the history of civilisation that they would think it quite wrong to charge travellers anything for the privilege of going about freely in it.
In those ten days of inactivity and later we had innumerable examples of the kindness and hospitality of the Greek peasants. Although we were not allowed to go into their villages they sought out our camps not only to stare at us and ask for souvenirs, but to bring us gifts of cheese, vegetables, honey, meat and wine. One often thinks of the Balkan peasant as poorer than his Western counterpart, but I believe that idea only originated in the heads of the economists, who have never travelled outside the great cities.
Perhaps it is because the labourers of the West have to pay away an undue proportion of their earnings for such benefits as electricity, insurance, and houses, motor-cycles and radios, bought on the hire-purchase system, that they have lost the natural gaiety and assumed the appearance of perpetual hard-upness; but the Balkan peasants, who have not yet been affected by modern progress, have retained their boisterous gaiety and a limited but real wealth. The Greek peasants were much better clothed than our men had expected to find them, and if much of the food that they brought, such as goat’s flesh and resin-flavoured wine, appeared strange, there was certainly abundance of it.
Just as in the Western Desert there were no newspapers, and we had to rely entirely on the wireless bulletins for news. On the 16th of March, the Sunday that we had arrived at the Piraeus, Berbera, the capital of British Somaliland, had been recaptured and our columns invading Abyssinia seemed to be making the most remarkable progress.
In Tangier the Mendub, the representative of the Sultan of Morocco, had been ejected by the Spaniards and his residence handed over to the German consul. That indicated pretty clearly that although General Franco was obviously doing his best to keep Spain from being forced into the war on the side of the Axis, he was having to give way to Nazi pressure in this area, which might become of such vital importance to Britain.
As long as the Mendub had remained in Tangier, that important zone at least had the semblance of neutrality which we, taking a leaf out of Hitler’s book if necessary, could have gone in to ‘protect’ had the Germans crossed the Pyrenees. Given proper advance planning there would have been ample time for us to do so before the Nazis reached the Straits of Gibraltar in force. But now that the Mendub had been kicked out, Hitler would be able to go full speed ahead with one of his undeclared wars, and would pump it full of German ‘tourists’, so that if the British ever found it necessary to land there they would be slaughtered by the hundreds before they managed to secure the town, even if they were not ignominiously driven out again.
It made one wonder how many years the war would have to go on before it occurred to the British Government to send a few ‘tourists’ somewhere—as even a few thousand stout-hearted Britons sitting pretty under orders in the ports of North Africa and Syria might make an immense difference to the whole future course of the war.
Our principal interest was, however, much nearer home. We were all on tenterhooks to know if the Yugoslavs would fight or go over to the Axis. On March the 20th four Serbian ministers resigned from the Cabinet as a protest against the suggested pact with the Nazis; but in spite of that on the following Sunday the Yugoslav Government was reported to have sanctioned the passage of Axis troops through the country in sealed trains. On the Tuesday Yugoslav representatives actually signed a pact with Germany in Vienna, and it looked as though yet another country had surrendered to Hitler.
The following day there were patriotic demonstrations in Yugoslavia against the Government’s betrayal. Then on Thursday the 27th there came the startling news of the revolution. In the middle of the night General Simovitch and his trusted corps of Air Force officers had taken over the broadcasting station, the War Office, and a number of other key strategic points in Belgrade. The Regent, Prince Paul, was quietly arrested as he stepped out of a railway train, and his nephew, Peter II, assumed full powers as King, issuing a proclamation which had been accepted by the nation with the greatest possible enthusiasm.
This extraordinary last-minute defeat of Axis machinations in Yugoslavia would, we all knew, mean war. It was not in the bill drawn up by the megalomaniac of Berchtesgaden that any nation should keep its freedom and choose its own rulers. The fact that the pact had already been signed and that another fourteen million slaves were as good as in the bag and had suddenly slipped out of it again as free men must have made him livid with rage. One could well imagine him tearing down the curtains in his fury and grovelling in an epileptic fit upon the floor after the news was brought to him; but when he recovered enough to think coherently he would see to it that the Yugoslavs paid for their temerity. It could only be a matter of days now before the great Balkan blitz started, and we were not surprised when next morning we received orders to break camp and take the road further into Northern Greece.
From our old camp we had been able to see the snow-capped peak of Mount Olympus towering into the blue sky some thirty miles to the north of us. For the next five days we trekked by short stages slowly round it, first up through the desolate mountains to the north-west, then down into the valley of the Aliakamon, where we followed the course of the river to the north-east until Olympus was behind us, and we came out of the foothills in the north to the lower ground, where a great plain with an eight-mile-long lake in its middle forms the basin of the Varda.
Here we halted and learnt with considerable relief that it was not the intention of the Allied High Command that Briti
sh Forces should hold the narrow strip of Thrace with their backs to the sea against any attack which the Germans might launch from Bulgaria. We were to remain where we were and fight with our backs to Mount Olympus.
During the trek we learnt of the Battle of Cape Matapan, in which the Royal Navy and Fleet Air Arm had once more so signally distinguished themselves by sinking three Italian cruisers and two destroyers. The news from Abyssinia was also good. On April the 1st, Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, Italy’s oldest African colony, fell, and to cheer us still further the Air Ministry had disclosed the fact that we were now using a new type of bomb for our air-raids on Germany which had more than four times the explosive power of those previously used.
In the Balkans the game of lies and bluff still went on. Germany was not yet at war with Greece or Yugoslavia but became more threatening every day. Every sort of dirty trick was being used in Yugoslavia to ferment trouble. The Nazis had demanded that the new Government of General Simovitch should ratify the pact already signed and, having played their old game of using Fifth Columnists to provoke riots among the Croat minority, was now warning the Yugoslavs that action would be taken if they could not restore order in their own country.
It was now just on three weeks since I had left Egypt, so for some time past I had been wondering with increasing anxiety how long it would be before someone tumbled to the fact that I had not the least right to be with my old friends, the New Zealanders, or Major Cozelli, having discovered that I had broken my parole, succeeded in tracing me and set the machinery in motion for having me brought back to Egypt.
The Sword of Fate Page 28