by Dilys Powell
When the order for evacuation came Myles and his group were in the long line which struggled painfully, only rarely getting a lift, over the pass through the White Mountains to Sphakia. It was a forty-mile march in the almost waterless heat of a Cretan May. With bombing and machine-gunning all day, movement was possible only under cover of darkness. After three nights and four days the exhausted company came stumbling down the last stony track towards the sea. ‘We formed up,’ Myles wrote in his diary – he was to have plenty of time to keep a diary –
about 11 p.m. and with some difficulty and jostling got into our position. But unfortunately about then the rearguard began to arrive and pass through us. We moved slowly down towards the beach, down a steep and stony path, in bursts as a load was taken on board in front, and long halts. It was very slow and the fatal hour when all ships left for the night came closer and closer. We were getting quite near the water when there was a complete stoppage. At last officers were summoned to the front; we were told that the boats had gone and would not return, and that we would be surrendered in the morning.
His account goes on to describe something else which historians would record. By the morning the defenders had surrendered; nevertheless German planes bombed and machine-gunned the beach and the village. Myles went to look for his men. He found that they had climbed back to a valley above Sphakia.
There when it got light they proceeded to cook the little food they had, and they were sitting around doing this, thinking themselves prisoners and perfectly safe, when the German planes came over and machine-gunned them. One of our men was killed outright. The wounded were in a little church, and among them was our sergeant-major Fountain with twelve bullets in him. We heard later that he died. Three Germans who ran out shouting and waving to the planes to clear off were also killed.
That afternoon the surrendered troops began the march under guard, ‘a mile-long column of men, and planes overhead photographing us’; shoes in tatters, feet raw, they trudged back up the ravine, back up the pitiless road over the White Mountains. On the third night – Myles with a cut wrist and a bullet-hole in his leg – they were back at Galatas in a prison camp.
Four days later he and Michael Parish escaped.
As a form of disguise they were carrying buckets and spades. Both were wearing their hospital coats. Myles had blue pyjama trousers, Michael Parish wore a blue pyjama-leg on his head. They had no plan except to profit by the disorder in which victory had left the invaders; they simply climbed through the camp wire and, all innocence, wandered past the guards. In the first village, Myles nonchalantly records, they met two German soldiers.
‘What are you doing here?’ they said in German. ‘Do have a grape,’ we said in English, handing each a bunch of unripe grapes about the size of green peas and devouring them ourselves. ‘How hungry we are. Notice our spades, we are a work party; our clothes too, so striking. And we are so pleased to see you, anyone can see that.’ ‘Where do you come from?’ they said. ‘Where are you going?’ They point, we point, all in the same direction, back to the camp, of course, where else? They walk on up the village, stop, look back at us. We sit, eating the uneatable grapes. They walk on and we leg it.
It was June 7. For two months the fugitives were fed and clothed and sheltered by Cretans who risked their own lives to save them, two months of hiding and waiting, of savage marches and cold nights sleeping in the hills, now and then punctuated by days of resting in the high villages or on the Omalos plain in the White Mountains where life assumed a kind of pastoral peace. Later during the Occupation an escape route was organised, and years afterwards in a village on the slopes of Mount Ida I talked with a schoolmaster who, he said, had helped in smuggling 1,800 soldiers out of Crete. In the June and July of 1941 nothing was organised, everything was improvised, haphazard. Nevertheless in the middle of August Myles Hildyard and Michael Parish with a party of about forty escapers, British, New Zealanders and Greeks, set off in a twenty-foot caïque from the Cape Spatha peninsula west of the bay of Canea. Rowing and sailing, they reached Cythera and Cape Malea, where the majority of the Greeks landed, leaving the rest of the party to a fortnight’s risky voyage via Monemvasia, Milos, Kimolos and Paros to the Turkish coast and Ephesus. And in Turkey Miles’s adventure dovetailed with the adventure of Joanna Stavridi.
When the yacht in which she sailed from Greece was sunk off Kimolos a steel box of papers went down with it. The survivors told a friendly fisherman that if the papers were found they should be somehow conveyed to the British military authorities. The fisherman recovered the box; resisted a Greek policeman who advised him to destroy it; told German interrogators that he had in fact thrown it into the sea; and on the arrival of Myles’s party entrusted them with his find. Since the papers turned out to be secret communications between the British command and the Greek King concerning the evacuation of Greece their discovery in the caïque when it reached Turkey understandably caused local officials some excitement. Myles Hildyard and Michael Parish refused to yield up their steel box. Accompanied everywhere by a Turkish policeman, they made a special journey to Ankara, where they handed it over to the British Military Attaché. They were not prevented from travelling on to Egypt; pleasant to think that both came out of the long adventure with the Military Cross.
iii
From chaos, then, single figures emerge. There are those who survive, and there are those who mourn, among them the two sisters who spent with John Pendlebury the last night of his life.
Aristea Drosoulakis and Theonymphe Manousakis, together with the other women who had been rounded up, were held in what they described as a ‘fortress’ for a week or more. Aristea says eight days, Theonymphe says twelve; tragedy in a peasant country is extensible. When Herakleion was safely under German control they were set free.
The tale of their return is there in the statement about the wounded Pendlebury which the two women swore in 1947. Even about that formal account, typed and witnessed and stamped, there hangs the smell of death. But the typewritten story is without colour, without feeling. ‘You can’t’, Theonymphe said to me, ‘imagine what it was like if you weren’t there.’ When I saw her two decades had gone by since the battle and its aftermath, and it was with difficulty that I had tracked her down in a dusty suburb of Athens. Aristea’s daughter, then living in Athens, gave me her address. A policeman, when I asked for help, stopped a bus for me at green lights. A passenger – I remember he was carrying a huge water-melon – walked with me from the terminus to the road. A woman in the street led me to the house. I say the street, but it was unmade and unnamed; shanty would be a word more precise than house; and there, sharing with neighbours a minuscule yard, living with her son in a room clean, swept and furnished with truckle beds and a single chair, was Theonymphe.
After twenty years the horror was still alive for her. In their prison camp, she said, the women wept despairingly. ‘Where is my husband?’ they cried; some of them scratched their names on the wall. At last the ‘fortress’ was opened and they straggled back to their homes. ‘There was no light,’ said Theonymphe. ‘There was no water. There was no food. Nobody had any money. Everybody was in rags. You could hear nothing but women crying. Human corpses lay on the ground among the bodies of dead mules.’ Perhaps she was luckier than some. Her husband survived, at any rate for a time. After the battle he was in a concentration camp in Crete; he was released. It was later, and of a heart attack, that he died.
The story Aristea had to tell was darker.
Unlike her sister she had not left the neighbourhood of Herakleion. She lived, I was told, near the Canea Gate – that Gate linked by so many stories with the last days of John Pendlebury. I had gone a little way westward down the road out of the town. ‘You can see the house where he was taken,’ Hilda had said, ‘you will know it by the pine trees.’ And there indeed were the pines, there on the left of the road was the cottage, empty now, forlorn. On the right, another cottage: broken roof, dusty walls; here, I thought, Joh
n may have taken cover before he was wounded. Corn was growing on the hillside behind. It was a day of sun with a little cloud, hot; he might have seen the parachutists dropping from just such a sky. Children sitting on a doorstep cried ‘Goodbye!’ as I passed (it was their only English word). But when I spoke to them they fell silent; and when I went back through the Gate nobody recognised the address I asked for. The name, though, that was familiar. ‘Ah, Aristea! Of course – she has gone out, she will be back. That’s where she lives, in that house over there.’
A quiet woman with greying hair, resigned in black, cherishing in her tiny house her extraordinary memories, she took me at first for Hilda, whom she had seen perhaps only once; an Englishwoman enquiring after Pendlebury must surely be his widow. Simply a friend, I said; ‘Mrs Pendlebury told me about you.’ It was enough. There was no need to question her; unasked she told me the appalling tale.
When she and the other women were released she had learned from Calliope of the death of John Pendlebury; she still had no news of her own husband. With her sister she hurried homewards, searching. When they came to the house they found John’s body outside; it was lying in a ditch. Thirty paces away Aristea saw another body. It was her husband. Between the official and the spoken story the distances vary; they shrink, they swell. But I can still see Aristea’s heartbroken gestures: ‘My husband’s body here … the body of Blebbery there.’
George Drosoulakis had indeed been in the service of the British. ‘He was’, Professor Hamson says, ‘Pendlebury’s man – indeed they all were.’ It seems that he had not managed to get through to Krousonas to deliver the message of which John had spoken. Professor Hamson says he is ‘morally sure’ that he did not receive a message in writing from Pendlebury: ‘It would have been invaluable.’ The documents poor Drosoulakis was carrying when he was intercepted by German troops betrayed him. Some time earlier he had been suspicious about the movements of a submarine; John had written to him about the affair (a fiasco, apparently) and he had the letter on him. When the two sisters found his body this and another letter were tucked just inside his jacket. Aristea with the terrible eloquence of Greek hands showed me how the papers peeped out.
‘They lay’, she said, ‘over his heart.’
The letters, when I saw her, were still extant. ‘They are all I have,’ she said. ‘Would you like to see them?’ She unlocked a cupboard and brought out a packet wrapped in paper – John’s letter about the submarine; fragments of an identity card with her husband’s photograph and her own; a torn-up letter promising the dead man ‘a better job’ – all stained with blood from the heart over which they had been lying, the brown stains of blood twenty-one years old. ‘I watered them’, she said – yes, she really used the sad formal phrase – ‘I watered them with my tears.’ And once again in tears, ‘A better job!’ she cried. ‘All he got was death.’
There were other relics. The official testimonials which after the war were given ‘in the name of the Governments of the peoples of the United Nations’ in recognition of ‘services to the struggle for freedom’ – she had two, one for her dead husband, one for herself; the name stamped at the end was Alexander. ‘You must be proud,’ I said. But now the story took on the sombre shape of Greek tragedy. The Cretans were not allowed to move their dead. Aristea and Theonymphe, then, covered the bodies of Pendlebury and George Drosoulakis as best they could; later, one gathers, the two women buried them where they lay or near by. History, however, had not yet done with John Pendlebury. German Intelligence had for months known about his work with the guerillas. But the invaders needed to be sure that he had not escaped; the broadcasts reported by Cumberlege suggest that nobody was sure. Presently the web of myth and fact, hearsay and official testimony was still further complicated by the later accumulation of witnesses and by the element of personal drama with which those inheritors of saga the Cretans would decorate the tale.
Aristea in the statement made jointly with Theonymphe introduces two new characters, her husband’s brother and sister who, she says, under threat were forced to tell the Germans where Pendlebury was buried. Reluctantly they led a party accompanied by Dr Kassapis, a Greek doctor who was in charge of a Herakleion hospital. Some Cretans were inclined at the time to censure Dr Kassapis for collaboration, but later they changed their minds; they say he was an honourable man, and certainly it is difficult to see what would have been achieved if he had refused. The body was exhumed, it was identified by its glass eye and buried again at the same spot. Even in this unadorned form the episode – the invaders’ need to be assured that a dangerous opponent had been scotched, the identification by that famous glass eye – has the ring of some dreadful legend. Telling the story herself, Aristea gave it a savage excitement. The force of the sacred number three must not be overlooked.
‘Three times they dug up the body to make sure. “Yes,” I said, “it is the English captain, it is Blebbery.” “Are you sure?” they said. “If you are not speaking the truth you will be shot.” Three times I was put in the line to be shot … It was lucky for me that the glass eye was there as proof.’
But there is another witness, this time a man not mentioned in the official reports. ‘Michael Vlakhakis,’ somebody said, ‘Michael fought with Blebbery. You’ll find him at Knossos, he may be able to tell you something.’
Long absence from Greece, from Crete, perhaps from a well-remembered village wipes names from one’s memory. But there were still Cretans who had not forgotten the days when Humfry and Alan Blakeway and James Brock dug at Knossos, and Michael was among the first to recognise me when I went back. Thin as a ploughshare, the body twisted by wounds and illness, the skull like a bent axe-head, he had limped to greet me out of the kiosk where by the bus-stop and the café he sold cigarettes. Now we sat over a drink in the shade. Yes, he had been fighting in a field outside Herakleion, he had been near John. He heard the Englishman call ‘I am wounded, can you help me?’ But he could do nothing. The firing was intense, almost immediately he himself was wounded; later he was taken to hospital.
Some days afterwards the Germans came to question him. Was it, they wanted to know, really Pendlebury who had been killed?
‘Then they took me from hospital in a car to the place where Blebbery was buried – he was buried, you know, on the spot – and dug up the body. It was wearing, if you will excuse me, only a shirt. “Yes,” I said, “that is Blebbery.” He had been buried for some time, and you will understand … but I knew; “Yes,” I said, “I am sure.” Then they took the glass eye and they cut a piece from the shirt, from the collar, and they buried him again.’
To all the contradictions and obscurities another obscurity is added. Why the piece from the shirt? Michael could not explain. Perhaps, he said, the Germans wanted to know what kind of shirt the Englishman was wearing. Perhaps the women who nursed him had changed his bloodstained military shirt for a Greek civilian shirt, and the exhumation party were looking not only for identification but for an excuse for his murder. A German doctor who saw Michael Vlakhakis in hospital later on was disturbed. ‘If Pendlebury was shot like that,’ he said, ‘it was a crime.’ Not only a doctor; a parachutist too ‘often said that if Pendlebury was killed in cold blood and not in the fighting it was a great mistake’. But the story of the shirt remains enigmatic. When after the war Hilda went out to Crete to learn for herself the truth about her husband’s death she saw Polybios Markatatos who had fought with John, she saw Aristea and Theonymphe who had nursed him, she saw Calliope who had witnessed his execution; no doubt in her search she saw many others. Michael Vlakhakis says he told her about the piece of the shirt. But he did not tell her about the decomposing body and the removal of the glass eye. ‘It would have been,’ he said to me, and not for the first time I recognised in him an inherent delicacy of feeling, ‘it would have been painful for her.’
The body of George Drosoulakis was presently removed from the place where his widow and her sister had buried it and reinterred in a Greek cemetery
. ‘At the same time,’ Aristea says in her formal statement, ‘I sought a permit to remove the unforgettable Captain but it was not granted.’ Exactly where after the exhumation Pendlebury was first buried it is difficult to discover. A letter from Mike Cumberlege, who speaks of ‘a small vineyard’, at any rate corroborates the report from Pool, who added: ‘… It will comfort and please you to know that the Cretans place fresh flowers on his grave every day.’
But there was still no permanence. According to Tom Dunbabin’s contribution to the Memoir the site ‘became too well known and was a source of inspiration to the men of the hill-villages who came in and out of the Canea Gate’; the body was accordingly moved again. Possibly it was at this time that John was, as Dunbabin records, buried in the British part of the Herakleion cemetery; for Aristea says that when after living for two years in a village she returned to the town she found the grave she had dug empty. In May 1945 a visitor to Crete who went in search was immediately led by attendants to a grave ‘side by side with five others whose names are not known. They described the grave as that of the man with the glass eye, gave his name in a corrupt Cretan form as Pendlebury and quite obviously knew all about him from his past fame amongst them.’