Villa Ariadne

by Dilys Powell

  Micky Akoumianakis has sometimes argued that the burning of villages in that summer of 1944 was done not so much in reprisal as to cover the German retreat from the west and centre of Crete. But perhaps vengeance may have come into it as well. General Müller, whom Kreipe had replaced, after the abduction was brought back as Military Commander of the Fortress of Crete. It is difficult to believe that the hideous massacres which he authorised (and for which after the war he was executed) were a matter of mere tactics.

  Official error combined with accident to hinder the kidnappers. The arrangement had been for radio stations to say that the General was ‘already on his way to Cairo’. Instead, all broadcasts, including those from the BBC, announced that he ‘was being taken off the island’ – a different matter and one which failed to discourage a massive search. Three days after the abduction, with Moss and Paddy reunited and welcomed by a guerilla group under the command of one of the most respected of Cretan leaders, Michael Xylouris, the mishaps began. Tom, who was to have got in touch with Cairo, was nowhere to be found; only later was it learned that he was very ill with malaria. His wireless operator appeared – but suddenly the set packed up. It would take two days for a runner to reach Sandy Rendel in Lasithi or, in the west, another agent with a wireless set. Hastily the runners were despatched.

  But now news came that the Germans were preparing a huge man hunt. The British and their Cretan friends had to get to the south coast if they were to escape with their prisoner, and if they were to avoid the hunt they had to move fast and by difficult paths. With guides from another guerilla group (it was commanded by Petrakogiorgis, one of the leaders who had entertained Tom on his first trip into the hills) they set off to cross the barrier of Mount Ida: up the stony foothills, up the fierce naked heights to where in May the snow still lingers, down the merciless southern flank. It rained and they shivered. They took refuge in a shepherd’s hut, in a waterlogged ditch, in a cave on the slopes above Nithavris, in a sheepfold near Yerakari. The Germans drew a cordon round the base of Ida, the kidnappers slipped through. Alarms multiplied. Another cordon had been drawn; there is a story (I have it from Doreen Dunbabin) that as the troops searched they hallooed and cried ‘Kreipe! Kreipe!’ into the unresponsive air. There were more halts in freezing hide-outs, more night marches. With the beach from which they had hoped to embark enemy-occupied the party were driven inland and westward.

  General Kreipe had been seized on his way to the Villa on April 26. His captors brought him sometimes on foot, sometimes on mule-back, from the Rethymnon road via Anoyia and Mount Ida, via the Amari country and a group of villages – Patsos, Photinou, Vilandredo – south of Rethymnon to a beach at Rodhakino about fifteen miles east of Sphakia; and from there on the night of May 14 they were taken off by motor-launch. They had been on the run for eighteen days.

  iii

  Elation at the coup of the kidnappers is apt to make one forget the feelings of their prisoner. Sandy Rendel says in his book Appointment in Crete that, though he was a party to the exploit, like Tom he never saw Kreipe, but he refers to a message from Paddy during the escape across the island. ‘I had’, he writes, ‘one gay letter telling me that the General was a charmer.’ The General was being a charmer under painful handicaps. His leg had been injured when he was violently snatched from his car. Twice during the eighteen-day trek he had fallen heavily, once from rocks, once, badly hurting his shoulder, from mule-back. Under normal conditions the long marches, as anybody who has walked in Crete must know, would have been tough. In his situation they must have been appalling. But one had never heard his side of the story.

  Not that when I went to see him I learned a great deal. Over a quarter of a century had passed since the adventure. No doubt parts of the experience still rankled. But he had put it behind him. He was living in retirement. In agreeing to talk about it at all he showed a kind of stoic generosity.

  The house was in a leafy suburb of Hanover. A solid, plum-coloured house in a well-to-do street of solid, plum-coloured houses; a small garden in front, neatly hedged; steps leading up to the front door. I had flown from Berlin, I was early for my appointment; to pass the time I walked down the road, then, misreading the numbers, looked at the wrong house; to my embarrassment I found General Kreipe was standing on the steps of the right one, waiting for me. An elderly man with the look of compact strength; stockily built; the close-cut hair grizzling; the face severe, rectangular, clean-shaven; the expression politely puzzled by my errand. In the room upstairs with its soberly comfortable heavy furnishings Frau Kreipe waited, middle-aged but with a certain elegance; good manners and the well-bred confidence of social position almost but not quite concealed her curiosity. Would I like tea or coffee? And I must certainly not refuse some cake; why, it had been bought specially for me. No, neither of them spoke English. If with his captors, as Stanley Moss wrote, the General had talked French he had abjured the language since. Now it was German or nothing.

  But it was not entirely due to the paucity of my German that the details I elicited were scanty. General Kreipe was a professional soldier who by 1944 had been for two years on the Russian front. In Crete he spent only five weeks. He had never been in Greece before; he spoke no Greek. The Villa Ariadne when he was there did not employ Cretan servants, and he had no contact with the local people. The names of villages meant nothing to him. Until that comfortless trek across the island he knew the terrain only from occasional hunting trips. Of the Villa he remembered sleeping in a downstairs bedroom; he remembered that archaeological finds from Knossos were stored, strictly untouched, in a cupboard. Naturally he had visited the Palace of Minos. Did he, I asked, thinking of the measures taken to preserve the site, ever meet Platon?

  ‘Ah, Plato,’ he said, for the first time relaxing into pleasurable reminiscence, ‘Plato, the Greek Goethe!’ With disappointment I realised that he was referring not to the Cretan archaeologist but to a happy acquaintance with the classics.

  Recalled to memories of war, he stiffened. I knew that both Stanley Moss’s book and a film it had inspired had brought protests from German solicitors. From a friend in the firm of lawyers representing the British film company at this end I knew that the General had complained of errors. The account of his capture, he had said, was inaccurate; he had been beaten up with a rifle butt; and he had certainly never, contrary to the account in the book, given his word of honour not to try to escape. The book, he told me now, had been prevented from appearing in Germany; and naturally, he added curtly, the film had never been allowed in. His resentment at Moss’s account extended to Moss himself.

  ‘Paddy,’ he said, ‘I liked Paddy. But Moss, always with his pistol’ (he made a gesture indicative of excessive enthusiasm in a guard addicted to prodding) ‘it was childish.’ Understandably there was an undercurrent of resentment over his later experiences too. He had spent part of his captivity at Sheffield, then had been sent to Canada; he was not released until 1947, three years after his abduction.

  ‘No, don’t say that,’ he murmured, warning, to Frau Kreipe. I had not caught what she was saying, but I recognised the indignation of a wife on her husband’s behalf and respected it. There was a diversionary move to show me a picture, a view of the Rockies given him by a Canadian officer at the camp. Then I remembered that Moss in his account of the trans-Cretan journey had mentioned an incipient friendship between the prisoner and one of the Cretan guards, Manoli Paterakis. Yes, the General said – there was a shade of gratification in his voice – he remembered Paterakis well. ‘In fact he has asked for my address. If he comes to Germany he may come to see me.’

  At least, I thought, some tiny element of human warmth has survived from the painful episode.

  ‘It was not worth your journey,’ the Kreipes said with solicitous courtesy as I stood up to leave. ‘You are flying back to Berlin? Ah, BEA of course; Lufthansa is not allowed.’ German planes might not operate from Berlin; once more I recognised, and with sympathy, a legitimate grievance.
r />   The General came to the door with me and pointed to the trees lining the road. ‘They are Japanese cherry trees, beautiful when they come out – the whole street is in blossom.’ He limped slightly; he had not had an easy war. And, he told me, he had diabetes. But perhaps, I said, you have been fortunate all the same. If you had stayed on the Russian front, even if you had been left at the Villa Ariadne to the end, you might not have been alive today.

  Somehow I do not think he felt lucky.

  iv

  Twice again the Villa Ariadne was caught up in the current of the war; once before the finale.

  Dr Yamalakis, who had spoken so warmly to me about the respect in which Evans had been held, was himself both during and after the war revered in Herakleion. He had a private collection of Minoan and other antiquities which he presented to the Museum. He was a generous and beneficent physician. But his reputation was especially based on his record in the Resistance. He had never failed in help to the British. He had constituted himself their doctor; one heard that if he was needed he would go up to the hills at night – and by day be treating his patients in the Herakleion clinic. Once – it was the Squire who gave me the story – he was among hostages threatened with execution. He was asked whose side he was on. First, he said, the Greeks; second, the British; third, the French. Startled at such effrontery, the Germans let him go.

  But when one day in 1960 I found him in his clinic (the waiting-room held a poorly dressed, ferociously crippled patient who spoke of him with gratitude) he could not be persuaded to talk about himself. It was Tom Dunbabin he talked about – ‘the best’ he said ‘of all the British in Crete’. And his own share? Oh, he said, his job had been simply to collect information and pass it on to Tom. At last I elicited something more.

  Throughout the Occupation and particularly at the end when the defeat of Germany was certain Tom had made it his aim to prevent the murderous struggles between guerilla bands which had split the mainland. Especially he had fought to avert an extreme left-wing coup. I have been told that it was due more to Tom than to anybody else that Crete did not turn to Communism. When the Germans were evacuating Herakleion in 1944 he had been joined in action by Dr Yamalakis. By this time the Communist bands – and perhaps some of the other groups as well – were more concerned to take over power than to rid the island of enemy troops. It was decided to forestall them in at any rate one area. Yamalakis and Tom with a party of about twenty-five Cretans occupied the Villa Ariadne.

  And that, perhaps, made the finale possible.

  Herakleion fell to the Allies in October. But the Germans were not done with yet, and in the Canea region, where three and a half years earlier they had first struck, they still held out. They held out for another seven months, in fact to the end of the war. Not until May 1945 did their commander fly to Herakleion to sign the surrender.

  It was to Knossos that he was taken, to the Villa Ariadne, then the headquarters of the British. The Allied officers gathered in a room familiar to me from scores of July middays languid with heat when the archaeologists came in to discuss the morning’s excavation, when Kosti or Manoli served lunch and Maria flitted noiselessly underground in her black weeds. It was the room where Evans had once held court, where poor Duncan Mackenzie had succumbed at last to infirmity, where generations of British School students had dined and argued and planned the exploration of remote sites.

  And there that May evening the German surrender of the Fortress of Crete was signed.

  i

  ONE WANTS, of course, to find out for oneself. One is curious to know what the terrain is really like – how desperate the distances, how steep the ascents and descents. Imagination alone can never conjure up the sensation of the mountains; you need the aching thighs, the thinning air, the stones under your feet.

  Certainly I had a desire to see what ranges Kreipe had crossed. All the same it was less with the idea of tracing the path of the kidnappers than with a fancy to visit one or two places with names which had haunted me that I began an expedition to the Mount Ida district. It was in 1959, the year after my first return to Knossos and the Villa Ariadne. Yerakari, I said to Micky, where your father was born – I should like to see Yerakari; and how do I get to Anoyia, that famous village burned in the war? Almost before I knew what was happening my map was out, a route was planned, and Micky was preparing to write letters of introduction to his relatives and his friends in villages around Mount Ida. Not until I was well on my way did I discover that to one recipient he had written: Never mind about her getting tired, she is used to it.

  There was something else I learned later. The Cyprus settlement was still only three months old, and the Cretans, islanders with a long struggle for freedom behind them, were still fiercely pro-Makarios and anti-British. I was probably the first Englishwoman, Micky told me when I got back to Herakleion, who had travelled in the Amari district since the Cyprus problem had been at its gravest. I have always hoped that in sending me on this trial expedition he was relying not only on the generosity of the Cretans but on my unmistakable attachment to his country.

  I had a strict timetable. In one day I was to cross Ida, not in the way taken by Paddy and Stanley Moss but in the opposite direction, from Nithavris in Amari, the district so much loved by Tom Dunbabin, to Anoyia, where the abduction party had begun their mountain passage. Innocently I embraced the plan.

  First, then, to Rethymnon. I had caught cold: physically I felt wretched; but there was nothing for it but to go ahead. I took the early bus from Herakleion. Before midday I was in Rethymnon with time to spare before the next bus to Yerakari. I strolled through narrow streets, bought food for my trip. In one shop some kind of small private celebration was going on. ‘Do you drink?’ asked one of the women, and gave me a glass of the local spirits called tsikoudhiá. I never found out what we were toasting, but I left in a glow of friendship. Later, lunching in what a stranger whom I consulted described as the best restaurant in the place, I ate grilled red mullet, hot, with the customary cold oil-and-lemon dressing, and watched a magnificent hawk-faced Cretan in patched riding breeches and black headscarf wandering into the kitchen to choose his fish, then sitting down to eat it from his fingers. The man in town clothes at his table smiled at me conspiratorially.

  Finally I delivered one of Micky’s letters. It was to the director of an orphanage, Theocharis Saridhakis. I crossed a hall dense with the curiosity of little boys in dark blue school uniforms. ‘Ah, my dear!’ cried Mr Saridhakis, greeting me enthusiastically in English. Smiling gaily, he left his lunch to congeal while I was served with cake and the traditional spoonful of preserve in a glass of water. He had been a journalist before the war. When the invasion of Crete began he was at his desk.

  ‘I left it, I never went back. Except during my military service I had never held a gun before. But now I was asked to carry some arms to a certain position, so I took a rifle and joined in the battle. I was lucky in the war, three times captured, three times I escaped, once without my shoes. Yes, I was lucky. See this amulet? I am never without it …’

  Somebody, I said, ought to write the story of Crete in the war; it is a great story.

  ‘I have written it,’ cried Saridhakis, ‘thousands of pages of it, but it isn’t published yet.’ Familiar names echoed through his talk, Paddy, Tom, Pendlebury. We walked together to the bus station.

  ‘She is a foreigner,’ I heard him saying, ‘you must look after her.’ And though I have often been embarrassed by the hospitality which offers a stranger this courtesy, for once I was glad enough to sit by the driver. The inland roads in those years could be excruciating, and in a front seat one suffered less from the jagged chunks of unrolled stone.

  You must be tired, I said to the driver as we bounced round huge potholes. Not really, he said philosophically; he knew villages with worse roads. There had been rain. The valley dipped southward between glittering banks of broom and bell-flower and mallow. The hillsides were still bright, though dark rays of shadow l
ay across precipices and gorges. But when we reached Yerakari the sun had gone. The passengers got out of the bus, collected their luggage and dispersed towards their homes. I waited. I had Micky’s letter to a cousin; the driver volunteered to find him while I sat outside a café in the darkening, deserted little square. Moss and his prisoner, I remembered, had sheltered for the night in a sheepfold above Yerakari. Now the village, burned and rebuilt, had a bleak, naked, new-born look. In the dusk it was cold; I began to shiver. Presently a figure in riding breeches, boots and dark jacket approached: black hair and moustache, the face long, melancholy – George Akoumianakis, Micky’s cousin, president of the village. He took my letters (I had one from Saridhakis too). Standing, he read them impassively. Then gravely, ‘Let us go,’ he said, ‘I will show you the village.’

  Up steep paths, past the wreck of the church, past the house, rebuilt now, where Manolaki had been born. A woman rushed out of a doorway to greet me in English. She and her husband had been in the Middle East, they loved the British, would I sleep in her house? Awkwardly, for I did not yet know what was planned for me, I thanked her; but as her welcome gained impetus George Akoumianakis interrupted.

  ‘You are making a show for us,’ he said ironically.

  We moved on. At a café the schoolmaster – white hair, white pointed beard, humorous falcon face – came out to talk of Paddy and Tom and the organisation of the escape route after the British surrender; it was Tom’s friend Kokonas. At last I was shown a blank open space, grey in the vanishing light, with a memorial. It was the place of execution.

  ‘When the Germans burned a village,’ said Akoumianakis (he had been a policeman during the Occupation, had heard he was about to be arrested and had fled to the mountains), ‘they took twenty men and shot them. Once a man escaped and reached another village in Amari. But the Germans came and burned that one too – only they couldn’t find twenty men. Anyway they took him to make up the number. Somehow he wasn’t killed. When he came to himself he was wounded and buried under a pile of dead bodies. But he was alive, he dragged himself away, he survived. The women? The women were usually taken to Rethymnon and kept there for a fortnight, then released. But some were killed. In Yerakari two women were killed. People who were blind or ill died in their houses.’