by Dilys Powell
The defenders had made one last effort. On the afternoon of May 28 a party of Greeks, led by Manolaki as guide, attempted to storm the enemy position; simultaneously a British group attacked from another direction. Both attempts failed, and disastrously. In any case by May 28 the Battle of Crete was nearly over, and the evacuation of British and Commonwealth troops was already under way. Perhaps Micky was hardened in his resolve to fight on by the pointless sacrifice of his father’s life. But first the funeral rites must be observed. Secretly, then, the body was moved; only the family and the priest of Knossos were a party to the exhumation. Half-way down the slope from the plateau there were the ruins of the little Byzantine chapel where Manolaki had dug. The tiny cortege took the body from its shallow grave; carried it down to the chapel; and there reburied it.
Once or twice in Crete I have passed a solitary tomb, the lonely memorial of a fighter, a guerilla. Nearly two decades after the death of Manolaki I was taken to visit his grave by Micky and Spiro Vasilakis. I asked if I might see also the place where he had been killed. We crossed the valley below the Palace, climbed a path through olive trees, and at the top of the ridge turned left along the edge of the plateau. The morning – it was May, but cooler by all accounts than the May of 1941 – had been showery, but now the sun shone on the grass of early summer; a field of oats through which to my dismay we boldly marched stood tall, up to my thighs. We passed an S-shaped hollow where German parachutists had posted themselves. If you searched, Micky said, you might find spent bullets and rusty arms. But now flowering shrubs sprawled on the lip of the hollow and on the hillside below.
A little farther on Micky paused. ‘It must have been here,’ he said to Spiro.
The two men looked around them. At the extreme verge of the ridge on which we stood a tiny slope interrupted the level ground.
‘Here it was,’ they agreed, ‘exactly here.’
Beyond the valley the complex of the Palace of Minos, courtyards and stairways and walls, stood out nobly in the relief of sun and shadow. Manolaki had fallen where he could have looked across to the monument he had helped to recover. And his body, that lay at Hagia Paraskevi, amidst the foundations he had himself excavated. We went down the hillside to the ruins of the little church. At our feet a ravine plunged to the valley; searching for snails after the rain, a child crawled insect-like on the precipitous slopes. There were Byzantine arches of brick in the cliff-face behind us; a slab of stone and a wooden cross marked the grave. The place was enclosed, a temenos with a low wall; and as is proper to a sanctuary it had a spring.
While we stood there in silence Micky offered me some water to drink. Before I handed back the cup I scattered the last drops on the earth. I had the sense of pouring a libation.
i
FOLDED IN ITS TREES, the Villa Ariadne has from the beginning been a haven. Cross the road which skirts the garden wall beyond the Taverna, walk a hundred yards down the hill to where the Palace of Minos offers its subterranean halls and walled pits; there, even on the sunniest day, even amidst the cheerful uncomprehending crowds from the cruise ships berthed at Herakleion, you are aware of violent death. Scores of ancient shrines in Greece are more ferociously situated – clamped to cliffs, shadowed by mountains. Knossos, disposed on its modest shelf of hill, seems pacifically set in a valley beneath bare mild slopes; but you can still smell the blood of the past. Scarcely more than a stone’s throw away, the Villa Adriadne has translated the refined savagery of Minos into the stuff of scholarly domestic repose. The Villa means quiet, the Villa means a retreat.
A few miles to the south in a district famed for its dessert grapes there is the big village called Arkhanes; and here in 1941 the German occupying forces established their divisional headquarters. The commander needed living quarters too. No wonder that once the noise of battle had died down, once the house had resigned its place as hospital and let the wounded go, the Villa Ariadne with its reminders of peace should have been chosen.
In this leafy cocoon the German command experienced a certain comfort. Perhaps amidst the constant signs of Cretan hostility they did not feel absolutely safe. Even so it is improbable that they knew what secret tunnels ran beneath the routine of their lives. General Müller, now, Commander from August 1942 to March 1944 of Germany’s 22nd Infantry Division, during his occupation of the Villa had a driver whom Micky Akoumianakis knew well. ‘I hated the Germans because they killed my father. But then I thought to myself that perhaps all Germans weren’t bad – and anyhow why shouldn’t I make use of knowing one or two of them?’
Micky was chief British agent in Herakleion. While collecting information about German movements he made friends with the general’s driver to such good purpose that he once, while Müller was actually in the house, stayed a night there, ate a hearty meal, drank champagne and slept in one of the basement bedrooms which Evans had thoughtfully provided for himself and his guests. Did the driver, I asked, know what you were up to? He may, Micky said, have had some faint suspicion. But he never betrayed his Cretan acquaintance. He survived the war, went back to Germany and married; for some years he used to write to Micky; once he revisited Crete.
The two men were in fact genuinely friendly. Nevertheless the episode illustrates the traps which surrounded the occupying forces. Sometimes the invaders would be seized by alarm. Nicolas Platon, later the discoverer of the Zakros Palace site, was responsible for the antiquities of the Herakleion district. Fearing, he told me long afterwards, for the Palace of Minos, he covered its precious surfaces with earth, thus preserving the floors and steps from the eroding effect of the 300,000 pairs of German boots which tramped over them during the war.
He also packed away in cellars the treasures of the Museum – but this he was allowed to do only on condition that the contents could at any time be inspected. One day the Germans insisted on opening the cases; it was suspected that arms had been hidden inside. They found nothing; unlikely indeed that Platon would have jeopardised the Minoan inheritance. Still, one can understand the psychological pressures behind the search. Speaking their strange soft dialect, wearing their cloaks and high boots and menacing black headscarves, the Cretans watched with almond-shaped eyes, the eyes of some Minoan fresco. Everybody knew that the villages of the foothills held bands of guerillas. In the far interior the mountains leaned on the intruders. Splitting itself into caves, into ravines, into encircled high plains, the island was mysterious, beautiful – and desperate. There can be something appalling about Crete.
But the island is always ready to welcome its friends. Already in 1941 British officers were being secretly landed; their mission was to organise a resistant fifth column. They came in by the beaches and the inhospitable cliffs of the south coast, progressed to the mountain areas, in the beginning lived for the most part off the country.
One of the first in was C. M. Woodhouse, who afterwards commanded the Allied Military Mission to the Greek guerillas on the mainland. An early arrival was Patrick Leigh Fermor, who in the days of the defence of Crete had been so much impressed by the robust confidence of John Pendlebury. Another was Xan Fielding; another was Tom Dunbabin, who just after the Easter of 1942 came in by the same motor-launch which took Monty Woodhouse out.
Thomas James Dunbabin, the brilliant young Tasmanian-born scholar whom John had seen as a rival for the School Directorship, had indeed settled before the war into a promising position; after Humfry’s death and Alan Blakeway’s, and on Gerard Mackworth-Young’s appointment as Director he had been made Assistant Director. A Fellow of All Souls, in 1937 he married Doreen de Labillière, daughter of the Dean of Westminster. She had been a student in Athens with Tom, she shared his archaeological interests and his enthusiasm for Greek travel; and it was in fact at Knossos, standing on the terrace roof of the Villa Ariadne, that the pair became engaged.
In manner quiet but authoritative, physically he was among the toughest of the tough explorers I met in Athens. One would watch the powerful figure with its cap of shinin
g dark hair bounding up a hillside, not walking; the scholars of that vintage were made for endurance – one might say for heroism. As an archaeologist he knew Sicily, and when I saw him in 1941 he was working in the Italian department of the War Office. But it was to be expected that like Pendlebury, like Nicholas Hammond, like so many other young men from the School he should presently be embroiled in the savage adventure of war in Greece.
After he landed in Crete he spent his first days in a cave overlooking the sea; then he set off with his local guides towards the Mount Ida district, where he was to collect information for despatch to Cairo. Presently he saw to it that a wireless set was installed in a cave entered, he says, by ‘a hole in the ground just large enough to wriggle through’ high on one of the foothills of the mountain; and here or in the shelter of nearby rocks a tenacious British wireless operator lived for months on end. Tom meanwhile, searching for information or establishing contact with colleagues, undertook journeys which even he thought killing; when reinforcements arrived they found at the start, though they were Commando-trained, that the local hill-climbing pace was too much for them. He records one march which lasted for twenty-three hours. Exhausting detours were necessary in order to avoid villages where there were Germans. The alien travellers had to move at night or by difficult mountain tracks. And they had anyway to look like Cretans.
Clothes were an initial problem. Tom had come in dress which ‘suggested a dock-labourer rather than a hillman’. However at a village where he spent a week, hiding by day in a kind of eyrie on the hillside and coming down at dusk to a friend’s house (it was originally, he says, a Turkish harem), he was fitted out anew. A local tailor equipped with a tape-measure met him privily in a field by a stream and called out the necessary measurements to a friend who wrote them down in a little book; the result made the foreigner, who by now had grown the moustache indispensable to a hill-dweller, inconspicuous at any rate to German eyes, though the Cretans said they could always distinguish the English by the way they walked.
From Doreen Dunbabin I have a story that one day when he was in the Akoumianakis house a German called (it was Micky’s friend from the Villa) and of course had to be admitted. Micky showed his usual presence of mind. ‘Just sit in the corner,’ he said to Tom, ‘and don’t say anything.’ The German came in, sat at the table, had a drink. ‘Don’t mind that man in the corner,’ Micky told him reassuringly, ‘he’s my cousin, he’s not quite right in the head.’
But in the early days Tom and I daresay his colleagues – when possible avoiding the plains, moving secretly along precipitous paths, sometimes sleeping on naked hillsides or under scrub – scarcely caught sight of the enemy.
The Germans garrisoned the ports, the beaches, the plains, the roads. In the mountains which form the greater part of Crete they came seldom and unwillingly.
Anyhow by now one of their first reasons for sallying into the hills had gone. In the first draft of an account of his experiences – an account which he left unfinished – Tom writes that in the beginning the mountains of the south held
… well over a thousand men left behind by our evacuation or escaped from the German prison camps. At first they lived in the villages, sharing the scanty fare of their Greek friends, or in the monasteries. They moved down to the beaches in companies a hundred strong under their officers and NCOs, a ragged and footsore army, for few boots stood up for long to the stony Cretan hillsides. These easy conditions did not survive the first winter, for the Germans soon heard of the arrival of submarines (magnified and multiplied by popular rumour) and sent out patrols and posts to the coast and mountains. They made it a capital offence to harbour stragglers, and those who remained had to move out of houses and cafés into caves and holes. A few of them were picked up by accident or treachery. Two or three died and were reverently buried. One Army doctor who died … was buried by the Bishop with half the clergy of the diocese and a crowd of two or three thousand people, and a year later a song about his life and death was being sung …
Myles Hildyard and Michael Parish, born individualists, had managed their escape by personal initiative, resource and courage – and the benevolence of the Cretans. The assembly, rescue and transport to Egypt of the large numbers of which Tom writes – and to judge from witnesses in Crete there must have been many more than a thousand stragglers and escapers – were achieved by co-operation between the Royal Navy, the first arrivals among the British Intelligence officers, and the undaunted local helpers. Tom writes of a tiny village in the south, no more than a dozen houses, said to have fed and sheltered in its olive groves a hundred British and Commonwealth troops. The Amari district beneath the fierce slopes of Ida was heroically hospitable from the start. Hospitable and leafy too; Tom, using one of the code-names adopted by the British, calls it Lotus-Land. Kokonas, schoolmaster at one of the villages, Manolaki’s birthplace Yerakari, was a leader in organising an escape route for refugees after the evacuation. Tom writes of him fondly, as he does of friends in other villages of the area – Ano Meros for instance, or Kardhaki where the cobbler kept open house.
There were always in the early days a few of the wandering English sitting in his big kitchen and being served by his lively sisters, or patching their boots in his workshop … or even putting in a few days’ work in his garden and fields.
Though by the time Tom arrived in 1942 the majority of the stragglers had been taken off they had not all gone, not at any rate according to a story about his first visit to Yerakari. Explaining himself, ‘I am an Englishman,’ he said. His audience received the information without surprise. ‘Ah yes,’ they said, ‘we have plenty of those… .’
Soon he was travelling to make contact with supporters. There was still snow on the high spurs when he went up to Mount Ida and, from the top of a ridge with a shepherd’s stone hut and a sheep-pen, ‘looked down on to the plain of Nidha, brilliant green and dotted with thousands of sheep’ – and saw the sea to both the north and the south. Nidha – the name shortens a Greek phrase meaning ‘at Ida’ – is one of the big plateaux miraculously cupped in the mountain ranges of Greece and especially Crete; it lies on the track from Anoyia to the summit and a little below the Idaean Cave, the reputed nursery of Zeus, which was first explored by archaeologists nearly a century ago. On this first visit Tom found it choked with snow. Even later its archaeological interest (it had produced some magnificent bronze shields) was not enough to persuade him that the place was more than ‘a big comfortless cave, with bats inside it’. But then a cave in occupied Crete was regarded primarily as a refuge, a life-saver. He spent much of his time in caves.
On this occasion, however, he was welcomed in the hills on the other side of the plain. It was an area which from the early days of battle had been the haunt of guerillas. Captain Hamson, Pendlebury’s colleague, to whom according to Aristea’s statement poor George Drosoulakis had been taking a message before he was killed, had been up in Nidha with an armed band. Now Tom met a party of about forty guerillas, among them such locally famous leaders as Bandouvas, Petrakogiorgis and Satanas – the third, rumour said, at the age of sixteen had carried off his bride; before that had led his village in the last revolt against the Turks; and once in a Herakleion café after a heavy gambling loss had drawn his revolver and shot off the first finger of his right hand, saying, ‘You will never roll the dice again.’ This initial campaign conference was celebrated by a feast of sheep roasted on the spit and ‘the titbits, the liver and the kokoretsi (a long sausage-shape consisting of the entrails wound round on themselves and grilled) handed round on a knife-point to the visitors and the leaders’.
Tom came to know both the group and the area ‘in which’ he says ‘we were later encamped for months’. He came to know also the life of the Cretan shepherds (the salt of the earth, he called them) and to recognise that to hide anything from them, no matter how strict the precautions, was impossible. But they never betrayed him.
I do not remember a shepherd giving us away to t
he enemy from fear of torture or bribery, and we had them always with us. They would bring us a lamb or a kid, bring up a flask of wine from the village, see what they could get from us in the way of food or boots or pistols (and some of them were not above taking it without asking us).
One can see from these unfinished reminiscences of his, scribbled in pencil which the passage of time has made barely legible, how readily he accepted the way of life of the hill-people. He lived for months in the cheese-houses, the round limestone buildings in the mountains where sheep’s cheese is made in the traditional fashion; he ate and drank with the shepherds, sang with them, wore the clothes they wore. Sometimes he was exasperated, as all of us brought up in orderly British ways might have been exasperated, with the country habits of gossip, so dangerous in time of war. But impatience rarely shows itself. Instead there is respect for the people, admiration for their independence, gratitude for their help; there is real liking. The attitude is different from John Pendlebury’s. John in his joking paternalistic manner was proud of the Cretans. Tom felt deep affection as well.
But in the summer of 1942 the friendship was only beginning. Rommel in North Africa was driving towards Egypt, and in Crete the members of the tiny British mission found their sea communications broken. Resources were almost non-existent; the problems of movement and organisation were acute. Cretan helpers there certainly were. But with the war going, as it seemed, so badly for the Allies some people were afraid, naturally enough, to see and be seen with the British. All the more credit, as Tom says, for those who from the start never doubted. There was always, he adds, the tradition of Cretan hospitality triumphing over danger; always somebody who would take the strangers into his house and provide a meal.