Villa Ariadne

by Dilys Powell

  The writer is one of John’s devoted followers. He had fought in the Battle of Crete. According to Mike Cumberlege, he claimed to have killed Hitler’s cousin, a Major Hitler; in support of this proud boast he would display a revolver and cap badge. Like many Cretans he had been a hunted man. After the Allied withdrawal there was a price on his head; however, he was brought safely out of the island by Cumberlege, and the letter – flamboyant, self-felicitating, composed perhaps by one of the professional letter-writers sometimes called in by the Cretans – was sent from Cairo. It was dated September 1942. John was killed in May 1941. But though by the autumn Hilda knew he was dead a year went by before his death was officially announced.

  The account I have given of his last days was elicited through searching enquiry by the Squire and by Hilda herself when in 1947 they interviewed the witnesses. It is accepted by responsible British officers who were in Crete during and after the war; it has been checked and rechecked. But fact often has gaps in it. Fact may be an outline round which twine details contradictory, extravagant, difficulty to verify – and yet imperious in their demand to be counted. Fact on its own tells only part of the story. It gives you the young archaeologist killed in war, it fails to give you the scholar-traveller driven all his life by some obscure passion to prove himself, to walk farther and drink deeper than the Cretans themselves, to show the world a man. The stories, fanciful or not, which have gathered help to show, reflected in other people’s eyes, the image of John Pendlebury.

  A fragment of fact to begin with. When the Dolphin crew put out to sea under fire from Herakleion harbour they were not at the end of their adventure. Back in Souda Bay, the engine gave out altogether. They transferred to another caïque, and with the evacuation of Crete at an end were on their way to North Africa when they were attacked by a Messerschmitt; Cumberlege was wounded and both his cousin and Saunders were killed. The survivors knew nothing about the fate of Pendlebury; nobody outside Crete could know. They refused to give him up for lost. After all he had from the beginning said that he would stay and fight in the island. Probably he was somewhere in the mountains. There was still a chance of getting help and supplies to him. And they tried. Later on, Cumberlege went back to look for him; others did the same. In vain; but there is something touching about the obstinate faith of John’s friends.

  There seemed to be reason for hope. An officer who escaped from Crete reported that John had been offered a place in a caïque which was taking a party out, but he had refused, saying that he must stay with his guerillas. There were persistent tales of an Englishman who had been seen at Hagia Galini, a village on the south coast near Tymbaki; what was more it was an officer who had lost an eye.

  German propaganda strengthened the belief that John was leading a Resistance group. From Alexandria Cumberlege reported two enemy broadcasts: ‘The bandit Pendlebury’, they said, ‘will be caught and he can expect short shrift when he is found.’ Nearly three weeks after the fall of Crete a newspaper spoke of small forces of British, New Zealand and Australian troops who had evaded capture and were carrying on guerilla warfare under the command of a British officer ‘well known to the islanders. He moves freely about organising raids on German posts, depots and aerodromes, and spurring the islanders to continue their resistance.’ A friend of Hilda’s in the Foreign Office declared that she had every reason for believing the story. ‘It will’, she wrote, ‘be the greatest saga of the war, when it can be told.’ With every Cretan who escaped to join the British in Egypt the rumours, cruelly raising hopes, multiplied and fantasticated.

  By the autumn of 1941 the stories were taking another form. There had been a British officer in the mountains, but he had long since been taken prisoner; anyway it was not John. Friends were reluctant to give up hope, and fresh arrivals from Crete were stringently questioned. The shadow of the truth fell gradually. ‘Missing, believed killed’ – there were those who still refused to believe. But by the time John’s death had come to be accepted as fact a new sort of rumour had spread. The mode of death it was which now became a painful uncertainty. Brilliant weavers of myth, the Cretans, not all of them unwilling to claim a share in possible glory, were apt to cloud still further the darkness of the final days.

  Again a fragment of fact. The car in which John had driven out of Herakleion was found by Allied officers. It was abandoned and the door had been wrenched off. But there were no signs of a struggle. His cap was on the front seat, but not his tin hat. Again the confused reports. He had stopped at the Canea Gate, one story said, to speak to a group of his guerillas who had come to draw arms; he told them to make for a rendezvous in the hills, then drove on alone – to be intercepted by the next parachute-drop. His Cretan followers, said another account, had begged him not to attempt to break through the parachutists who were even then landing in force west of Herakleion, but he insisted and went ahead, accompanied by one Greek machine-gunner and by a Greek civilian whom he had come across on the road. And from what a friend described as ‘a hundred conflicting stories’ a third version emerges. Realising that the Dolphin raid on Kasos was now out of the question, John had collected a group of his followers to fight under the orders of Brigadier Chappel, who for a short time before the evacuation of the mainland had been in control of all Cretan defences but was now in command at Herakleion; he then ‘volunteered to clean up a farmhouse where some parachutists were hidden’. And now the weapon which in the enthusiastic days of planning John had thought appropriate reappeared. In this story it is with the famous swordstick in his hand that he leads the attack.

  A battle is not to be read as if it were a balance-sheet, and if an extra two or three figures slip into some corner of the fight one need not begin to talk about inaccuracy. The tally of those who were with John or who saw him fall on that May afternoon is obscured by the smoke of war. Polybios Markatatos we know about, and one or two others had their own stories to tell. Some who might have heard the tale first-hand did not survive the war. One of John’s agents – it was a man whom Mike Cumberlege, hoping for news, sailed to the south coast to find – was killed in what one must call domestic circumstances. Even during a war the normal exchanges of life continue, and he was murdered ‘in a fit of rage’ by another Cretan.

  Nevertheless stories of John’s death began to come out of Crete, and in October 1941 a friend at the War Office wrote to Hilda: ‘I am afraid the original report … is authentic.’ There were still no details. But early in the following year Lieutenant-Commander Pool, who had been in charge of the Imperial Airways yacht at Spinalonga in the 1930s and who had often befriended and entertained the Pendleburys during their expeditions in East Crete, sent Hilda an apparently definite account.

  I have made the most searching enquiries about his death, and for a long time I believed that there was still hope. He was wounded outside the Canea Gate at Herakleion, and managed to reach the house of one of his men at Stavromenos [the crossroads on the way to Krousonas] where he was looked after by the man’s wife until he died. He is buried in a little vineyard on the left of the road leading into Stavromenos, and his grave was marked by a small cross. This information was given to me by a mutual friend of ours, who saw the grave …

  It sounded convincing enough. But then every month brought confused reports. Not long after Pool’s letter to Hilda, Cumberlege wrote to John’s father with a sinister tale. It came from the author of the high-flying phrases quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Messengers, it said, sent to enquire about John had come back with a terrible report. A fresh wave of parachutists had broken into the house where the Englishman was lying unable to move; he was unarmed, he was helpless; they shot him where he lay.

  Cautiously Cumberlege hinted at an imaginative quality in local reporting. Some of the Cretans, he wrote, were given to ‘highly coloured accounts of their experiences’. Looking back now, one recognises in the story passed on to Mr Pendlebury details which later writers would take as probably accurate: that the newly arrived parachut
ists searched the house where John lay alone, took his identity disc, perhaps noted his glass eye; that they left him and went away, to return an hour later on a deathly errand. But of the death itself, as Cumberlege emphasised, no eye-witness had yet appeared. He himself, one suspects, was not convinced. Nevertheless for some time this was the generally accepted version; and Hilda had to live with it. Another fragment had been added to the Pendlebury legend; and not until after the war, when Aristea and Theonymphe could repeat their story and Calliope could at last come forward and tell in public what she had seen, was the truth established.

  ii

  In the disorder of that summer, after all, it was hardly to be expected that there would be any immediate certainty. Crete at the end of May 1941 was the scene of a Dunkirk which, for all its heroism, nobody could interpret as anything but a disaster the more appalling since so many of those involved could not believe in their own defeat.

  Italy’s attack on Greece in October 1940 had enabled the Greek Government to call for help from the British. Air support at first, later on troops from Britain, New Zealand and Australia – such forces as were available in those stringent times were despatched from Egypt to the Greek mainland. A small contingent arrived in Crete, the defence of which the Greeks, anxious to send Greek reinforcements to Albania, asked the British to take the main responsibility. Defence was difficult enough in all conscience. There was one major road; it ran along the north coast and connected the three ports, Herakleion, Rethymnon and Canea. There was one airfield – at Herakleion. In the months before April 1941, when Germany attacked Greece, airfields at Maleme, west of Canea, and at Rethymnon were being constructed. Whether in Crete there was enough sense of urgency that spring one cannot say. Certainly the proper means were lacking, and one can see why John Pendlebury never got the ten thousand rifles he had asked for. When at the end of April the last of the British and Commonwealth troops evacuated from the Greek mainland reached Crete some pretty strenuous improvisation was called for.

  For the British, the Greeks, the New Zealanders and the Australians the tragedy was that improvisation, no matter how rapid and brilliant, and no matter how courageously it was supported, was not enough. Ten days after the beginning of the airborne attack the Allied troops, most of whom had already experienced defeat on the mainland, were once again retreating before the victorious Germans. They had no air cover. At best there had been fewer than forty British planes available; finally only six were left, and since so tiny a force could be of little help these were withdrawn on the day before the airborne assault began. The Navy, though it suffered heavy losses, protected the retreating troops from a seaborne invasion. And the Navy was there to carry them to Egypt, some from Herakleion, most from the little harbour of Sphakia on the south coast. But not all of them. There were the dead and the wounded and those with no choice but to surrender; there were those who, with the enemy closing in, had to be left behind.

  Later on military historians would find a major source for the Battle of Crete in the recollections of hundreds of individual soldiers. To the story of the fighting and the aftermath the contribution of single human beings was a record of courage indeed, but also of frustration and hideous confusion – frustration because in spite of failures in preparation and deficiencies in equipment the battle was so close-run; confusion because it left such a trail of mortal havoc.

  Here and there in that human detritus one recognises the features of a friend: Joanna Stavridi, for instance, earliest heroine of the disaster. She was the daughter of Sir John Stavridi, a British banker of Greek origin. In 1939 she was a tall, dark, deep-voiced girl in her early thirties who had not yet found her path in life. She lived in London with her parents, hoped to be an artist, studied at an art school. When war broke out she volunteered as a nurse, and two months later she was on her way to Athens, where she trained at the Red Cross Hospital. Suddenly she understood what she had to do; she could not think why she had not been doing it all her life. Throughout the Albanian campaign she nursed in Arta. When the Allies evacuated the mainland she left with Embassy staff and a party of other British civilians in a yacht which was bombed and sunk. The survivors reached a deserted island off Kimolos in the Cyclades, then Kimolos itself, where with cool resource Joanna looked after those of her companions who had been injured. From Kimolos a caïque took the party south-east to the craggy volcanic island of Thera; from there the final crossing was made to Crete.

  Boatloads of troops were arriving from the mainland without arms or equipment. Still, there was a breathing-space, almost three weeks before the next assault. The defenders collected themselves. Joanna reported to the British Consul; she was assigned to the Seventh General Hospital between Canea and Maleme. Her Greek brother-in-law was with her at the interview. With horror he learned that there would be no other women nurses, only orderlies; the evidence was clear that desperate perils were ahead. But there was nothing he could do. Joanna went off to her job.

  An ironic touch. The orderlies had their own mess, but on arrival she was told that King’s Regulations forbade her as a nurse to have meals with the rest of the hospital staff. She could have a drink at the bar with them but she could not eat with them; instead a tray with food was brought to her bedroom. Events, however, soon put an end to such formalities. The hospital, she says, was absurdly placed between the sea and the main Maleme road, precisely in the track of any hostile bombers, and sure enough when the airborne attack came the wounded had to be moved to the caves on the beach, three caves for the patients, one for the doctors and orderlies off duty. Soon there were five hundred stretcher cases, British, New Zealand, Australian, Cypriot – and German; the casualty rate among the parachutists was appalling. And the staff, flattening themselves against the cliff as in their lethal situation they moved from cave to cave, worked twenty-four hours on and twenty-four hours off.

  Perhaps a week later – time was hardly calculable, and she can no longer remember the dates – the hospital received orders to move inland with all the walking wounded to a place called Neochorio. In this crisis Joanna was given a special task. She was put in charge of two patients, two doctors who were sick but not stretcher cases. Transport would be provided; she was to take the hospital gear, the instruments, and she was to get her charges and the material and herself to Neochorio. But it was too late. The final retreat of the British and Commonwealth troops had started, and the hospital was never moved to its new quarters. It was expected that Joanna would be taken instead to Sphakia, where the defenders from the Canea and Maleme area were headed.

  Years afterwards she met the New Zealand colonel who was to have seen to it that she embarked for Egypt. ‘What happened to you? We waited,’ he said, ‘as long as we could.’

  But she was out of luck. In the frantic mêlée the promised transport failed. The little group were left behind, and Joanna, taking her two patients and the hospital gear, with fantastic courage went back to her post in the caves. The only wounded left were stretcher cases; she went on nursing. Two days later she had her first close view of the Germans in action as they came, fighting, through the caves. Fighting whom? I asked her once. She did not know. Lying face down on a stretcher and waiting, as the wounded and the hospital staff lay and waited, she could see nothing but German boots.

  When the battle was over the invaders found five doctors who had volunteered to stay. They found a dozen or so orderlies. And they found Joanna. She was not merely the only nurse. She was the only woman left in the whole area. Presently news began to seep out of Crete. Every English paper carried the story of the dedicated young nurse in the Cretan caves. But when they found her the Germans could not make out who she was or what she was doing in the middle of a battle. During the worst of the action she had been wearing battledress, but on the approach of the enemy she had hastily changed into her Greek nurse’s uniform. Do you belong, they asked, to a religious order? When they learned the facts they behaved correctly. Where, they enquired, do you want to go? To Athe
ns, she said. When do you want to go? And her answer, too, is heroic. ‘I will go’, she said, ‘on the last plane with the doctors when my men have been taken off.’

  At last she was flown to Athens, and there she was deposited in the heart of the German-occupied city, in Constitution Square. She was carrying a suitcase and a British warm [a military overcoat]. She had no money and nowhere to go.

  The rest – the kindness of the American Embassy; nursing for two more years; then, when nursing came to an end, keeping alive under the Occupation by teaching English (and risking death by helping to hide two British officers who had escaped) is another story. The fate which left her behind in the evacuation of Crete was a fate she shared, though only temporarily, with thousands of the troops who in that minor Dunkirk crossed mountains to embark for Egypt – and failed to be taken on board. History, drawing on their memories, has recorded many of their names. But again it is from a name one knows, from the voice of a friend, that one receives the sharpest impression.

  Myles Hildyard went to Crete from Palestine in February 1941; he was an officer in the Sherwood Rangers. He was stationed at Kheleris in an old prison overlooking Souda Bay. With a friend, Michael Parish, he shared a motor-bike, and on a trip to Herakleion they met John Pendlebury. A man of aesthetic interests both refined and far-reaching, ‘I have always,’ Myles says, ‘been curious about archaeology.’ Indeed at Eton, where the boys were allowed to choose an ‘extra study’ for one hour a week, he chose Minoan civilisation – never thinking that he would one day go to Crete. Now John Pendlebury showed him round Knossos. The acquaintance stopped there, and of the encounter he remembers nothing much more than a cheerful confident figure, John in the mood which characterised his last days. Presently Knossos would see fighting. But by then John, most likely, was dead; and Myles was at Souda with guns which, he says, were never used; like some of the fortress guns at Singapore, they would fire only seawards.