Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance

by Christopher McDougall

  So this time the Butcher went to the maps and began thinking like a bandit. If General Kreipe were dead, they’d know it by now. His corpse was too valuable as a shock tactic, and attacking German morale was a key Resistance tactic; the Butcher couldn’t prove it, but he had to suspect it was bandits, not German soldiers, who were chalking walls with graffiti-like scheisse Hitler (“Hitler is a shit”) and Wir wollen nach haus! (“We want to go home!”).

  So where do you hide a German officer on an island full of Germans? The general’s car was definitely spotted in Heraklion; it never arrived in Chania; the northern shore was too exposed for boats; the coastal villages had too many turncoats. That left…

  Anogia. High in the hills, bristling with patriotic fever, gateway to Mount Ida and a single night’s hike from the road to Heraklion. That had to be it. They’d kidnapped him and fled to Anogia. The Butcher sent out the order: by first light he wanted thirty thousand troops on the march and plane crews ready to scramble. Search the hills around Heraklion, he commanded. Get aerial photos of all the footpaths leading out of Heraklion. But our priority is Anogia.

  By dawn, the Butcher had seized back the advantage. The kidnappers wouldn’t expect anyone to confirm the general’s disappearance until morning. By then, they’d be surrounded.

  —

  Paddy expected a pretty hot response at Father Charetis’s house when they discovered what kind of a jam he’d gotten them into, and he was right. “The room was convulsed with incredulity, then excitement and finally by an excess of triumphant hilarity,” Paddy observed. “We could hear feet running in the street, and shouts and laughter.” The entire village was facing destruction, but instead of cowering, they were erupting with joy.

  “Eh!” Paddy heard one old man say. “They’ll burn them all down one day. And what then? My house was burnt down four times by the Turks; let the Germans burn it down for a fifth! And they killed scores of my family, scores of them, my child. Yet here I am! We’re at war, and war has all these things. You can’t have a wedding feast without meat. Fill up the glasses, Pappadia.”

  They loved Paddy’s plot because it was more than an act of war: it was a tribute to them, personally, as Cretans. Nothing is more Cretan—or more Greek—than pulling off an impossible hustle. Greek heroes were always stealing stuff, the bigger and weirder and more impossible the better. Sticky fingers are so important to Greek theology, it’s hard to find a myth that doesn’t involve someone pulling a fast one. Half of Hercules’ Twelve Labors were heists, including snatching an Amazon’s girdle and a team of man-eating horses. Prometheus made off with the gods’ fire; Jason grabbed the Golden Fleece; Theseus was constantly dragging off women who caught his eye, namely a warrior queen and a Cretan princess. The Iliad and the Odyssey are a pair of true-crime classics; nothing gets done in either one until someone gets sneaky.

  And that someone is usually Odysseus, whose rogue’s eye made him the greatest of the Greek heroes. Breaking into Troy by hiding inside a hollow horse was Odysseus’s idea, and he warmed up for it by first sneaking behind enemy lines and making off with a rival king’s armor and prized warhorses. Odysseus was a born thief, the descendant of a long line of light-fingers: his dad was Laertes, one of the Fleece-seizing Argonauts, although his true biological father was rumored to be Sisyphus, famous for robbing houseguests. His granddad was the Thief Lord, Autolycus, and his great-granddad was Hermes, god of thieves.

  But for all their shenanigans, you don’t see the heroes piling up a mountain of loot. They’re not in it for gold; given a choice, Odysseus would be happier farming at home with his wife. Stealing wasn’t his job; it was a calling, an art, a way of making the impossible possible and the imaginary real. Pulling off a clever heist is as close as humans can come to magic, allowing something in your mind’s eye to suddenly appear in your hand. Other religions condemn thieves as sinners and outcasts, but the ancient Greeks shrugged and decided, Eh, let’s give ’em their own god. Because who else will teach us that our stuff doesn’t really matter? That our possessions are fleeting, forgettable, and that anything you have someone else can take? What you’ll be remembered for isn’t your wealth and power, but your creative imagination—your mêtis.

  The brazen mêtis of a thief—that was the animating spirit of ancient Greek, and it sparked an explosion of creativity unrivaled in intellectual history. The Olympics, the Acropolis, democratic government, trial by jury, the dramatic rules of comedy and tragedy, Pythagorean and Archimedean geometry, Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, the predictive cycles of astronomy and the humanitarian principles of medicine—it all came careening out of a tiny island nation so small and thinly populated, it was as if the dominant force on Western thought for more than three thousand years was the state of Alabama.

  What fueled it all was a kind of Outlaw Outlook: Instead of relying on laws passed down from some god or a king, let’s think like outlaws. Let’s think for ourselves. An outlaw outlook calls on every citizen to create, not conform; to decide what is right and wrong and act on it, not just baa along with the rest of the herd. Outlaws have to be poised, smart, and independent; they have to cultivate allies, assess risk, and keep their antennae fine-tuned to everyone and everything around them. Outlaws focus on what people can do, not what they shouldn’t. In Athens, the outlaw outlook worked so beautifully, it became a civic responsibility. The Athenians still had laws, but they were proposed by average citizens, not imperial rulers. Anyone who started acting too bossy—who thought he knew what was best for everyone else—was marched to the border and sent into exile under Athens’s steely “No Tyrants” policy.

  Not even gods had the final say: instead of one Almighty there were a dozen, all divvying up the work and jockeying for position. Zeus was the big dog, but he was constantly being one-upped and second-guessed. One of his biggest worries was being outsmarted by his first wife—whose name, of course, was Mêtis. She was an alluring Titan known for her “magical cunning” and close friendship with that master thief Prometheus. Zeus managed to muster a little cunning of his own and con Mêtis into briefly transforming herself into a fly, giving him a chance to grab and swallow her—forever uniting, in the eyes of the ancient Greeks, the bond between imagination and immortality: the spirit of resourcefulness was now buzzing inside a god who would never die.

  Not that everyone was on board. An outlaw outlook meant freedom, which put it at odds with biê—“brute force.” Biê was for kings and conquerors, the mighty and the muscle-bound; mêtis was power to the people, especially the weak and poor who had no other options. Achilles was bursting with biê and sneered at the schemes of Odysseus, who was “equal to Zeus in mêtis.” Too late, Achilles discovered that even a golden warrior can be taken out by a nobody with a good idea; an idea like, say, infuriating your enemy so much he forgets to cover his vulnerable heel. Achilles’ cousin, Ajax, was just as much of a raging bull and learned the same lesson: when he wrestled Odysseus, he was twisted around and thumped down on his back before he saw it coming.

  “It is with mêtis rather than biê that a woodcutter is better,” the ancient warrior Nestor coaches his son in the Iliad. “It is mêtis that lets a pilot on the wine-dark sea keep a swift ship on course when a gale strikes. And mêtis makes one charioteer better than another.”

  For young Brits like Xan and Paddy, brute force was everything they were trying to escape. Biê was boarding school beatings, Victorian prudishness, the blind obedience to the dogma of “Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die” that sent their fathers and brothers marching into machine-gun fire during the Great War. Weirdly, religion had a lot to do with it. Once the Greek myths were replaced by Christianity, the raucous tribe of Olympians were replaced by just one God. Instead of becoming our own heroes, we were given a list of commandments and told to follow the rules, bend our knees, and wait for a savior.

  Not on Crete, though. The Island of Heroes still followed the ancient code, and when Xan and
Paddy and Billy Moss arrived, they discovered a whole new level of outlaw thinking.

  “Klepsi-klepsi—translatable into English as ‘swiping’ or ‘pinching’ but hardly stealing—is something of a Cretan sport,” Billy learned after being awakened with a cold splash of outlaw thinking when his bedroll and warm clothes were nicked by a fellow rebel. “Sympathy is usually on the side of the ‘pincher’ rather than of the loser. If you allow someone to steal from you, it is you who are the mug, he the clever fellow.” Crete had been under the heel of invaders for so long that stealing had become the job of patriots. Sheep rustling was the only way for Resistance fighters to survive during the Turkish occupation, so heroic struggle became synonymous with banditry. They’re even the same word: in Cretan dialect, rebels and robbers are both klephts. “It’s one of the most important Greek lessons you could learn,” George Psychoundakis told a new SOE recruit, urging him to steal some grapes. “As your teacher, I insist on it!” To survive on Crete, you had to think and act like an old-time hero.

  Which is exactly what Paddy had done. He’d gone into the Minotaur’s lair and not only defeated the monster but snuck it out on a leash.

  —

  The roar of trucks brought an end to the merriment. A German convoy was grinding up the mountain road and pouring into the Anogia town square. Within minutes, soldiers were hopping down and scurrying into formation.

  Up, up, the Cretans told Paddy. You’ve got to get out of here. The Germans could surround the village at any moment and begin the house-to-house ransack. Paddy and George scrambled their gear and headed toward the door. Could someone guide them to Billy’s hideout? And was there a donkey they could bring along for the general?

  Yes, yes, their host replied. Whatever you need. But hurry.

  “You’ll see!” Paddy promised as he went out the door. “Those three days will go by and there won’t be any villages burnt or even shooting!” Privately, however, he wasn’t feeling so bully. “I prayed that urgency would lend wings to the messengers’ heels,” he thought to himself, “and scatter our counter leaflets and the BBC News of the General’s departure from the island.”

  The town square was teeming with troops as Paddy and George cautiously worked their way through the streets. Paddy couldn’t figure out how the Butcher got his men to Anogia so quickly, but he was even more perplexed by why they were still standing around. The Butcher had the drop on them, so why didn’t he snap shut the trap? If the Germans had circled Anogia as soon as they arrived, Paddy and Billy might be in chains by now. So what were they waiting for?

  —

  The Butcher was frozen by a chilling thought: What if it’s a feint?

  The bandits were smart, so smart that the Butcher hadn’t managed to lay his hands on a single Brit the entire time he’d been on Crete. Every time he got close, they were one jump ahead. So could trapping them really be so easy this time? Or did they want to be chased? The bandits had to know that nothing would outrage the Germans more than kidnapping a general from right under the nose of the Gestapo. Thousands of German foot soldiers would be hot on their trail, racing into the mountains and drawing fleets of fighter planes into the backcountry…leaving Fortress Crete and the capital exposed!

  So that was their game. Maybe, the Butcher thought, Kreipe’s abduction was an Allied ploy to make him move large forces towards the mountains, thereby allowing them to land on the plains while the andartes and commandos attacked from the rear. He wasn’t going to fall for it. The Butcher sent word to Anogia: Bring one company back to Heraklion immediately. He ordered the reconnaissance planes back to base and the leafleting postponed till further notice. Before scattering his troops all over the mountains, the Butcher needed to be ready for invasion.

  By nightfall, the coast was secure. The hunt for General Kreipe was ready to resume at full force—but Paddy and his crew had already slipped back into the wilderness.

  CHAPTER 30

  Where danger is, Deliverance also beckons.

  —FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN, “Patmos”

  CHRIS WHITE AND I began hunting Paddy’s trail as soon as the sun rose high enough for us to see the ground. We’d set off before daybreak from Heraklion, hopping a bus to the exact spot along the shore where, according to Chris’ calculations, Paddy had ditched the general’s car. Chris checked his bearings: Mount Ida straight ahead, rocky thumbnail of beach dead behind. Yup, we’d found the right meadow. But there was no hint of a path, nothing except a snarl of brambles leading straight to an unclimbable cliff.

  “Brilliant, isn’t it?” Chris said. “It would have been just as wild when Paddy came through. You can just imagine the Germans looking at this and thinking, Well, they certainly didn’t go that way.”

  Chris had been exploring on foot over the past two years with his brother, Pete, and exchanging notes with his fellow escape sleuths, Alun Davies and Christopher Paul and Tim Todd, so he was pretty sure he could now connect all the dots of the escape route. Except, that is, Dot #1. Pete would have been a huge help; his years of work in the New Forest had given him a flair for backcountry navigation, as I’d learned on our previous expedition, but he couldn’t make it this time. It was just Chris and I, and we were lost before we began.

  Chris was unfazed. He scanned the thorny mess slowly, walking as far into the brambles as he could and dropping to a crawl when he couldn’t, working his way back and forth until his hand shot into the air and we were on our way. We followed the faint goat track high into the hills, climbing in and out of gullies until we emerged, just before noon, on a bluff overlooking a weird oasis: far below was a small cluster of stone buildings surrounded by tidy gardens.

  We picked our way down and entered a silent cobblestone courtyard. Chris reached for the bell rope over the entrance, but before he could pull, a little Hobbit’s door creaked open.

  “Kalos orisate,” we heard from somewhere in the darkness. “Welcome.”

  We ducked inside the low door and found ourselves in a small, stone-floored kitchen. A monk with a chest-length black beard pressed a hand over his heart and gave a slight bow. He was Father Timothy Stavros, curator of the tiny Vossakou Monastery. How, he asked in halting English, could he be of service? Chris pulled out his letter, the one in Greek and English that explained our interest in the Kreipe kidnapping.

  Father Timothy nodded. “Yes. They were here.”

  He led us through the kitchen and outside to a porch overlooking the valley. Clay bowls full of foraged greens and spinach covered a shelf along the wall; hanging from nails in the beams overhead were mesh bags full of snails, airing for a few days as they purged themselves for cooking. Snails were freedom fighters’ food; you could harvest them on the run and they’d go dormant and keep fresh in your pockets until you were in the clear to cook. The Germans didn’t eat them, so villagers could gather them by the bushel without worrying they’d be seized and sneak them to guerrillas without fearing their food supplies would look suspiciously low. Kohli me stari has become one of my favorite meals on Crete—snails stewed in a broth of garlic and tomatoes and olive oil, with maybe an onion and some torn mint thrown in and a fistful of coarse cracked wheat added to thicken it into a paella-like porridge.

  We sat down as another monk silently appeared with a pitcher of cold water and a plate of small, hard biscuits sprinkled with sesame seeds. Vossakou was built more than four hundred years ago, Father Timothy explained, but had been repeatedly destroyed by generations of invaders. “Eighteen of us were killed by the Turks,” he said. “Two of us were executed here”—he pointed a few yards away to a spot in the garden—“by the Germans. People who needed food came for help, so we helped. The Germans didn’t like that.” Father Timothy wasn’t here at the time; he’s only about fifty and had originally been a florist in Rethymno. For the past eight years, he’s been mostly alone at Vossakou. The older members of the order have all died off, leaving Father Timothy as one of the last living custodians of the monastery’s stormy history.

&
nbsp; “The general spent about an hour here that night,” Father Timothy said, which baffled us until suddenly it made perfect sense. Billy and his prisoner had gotten out of the car past Vossakou, not behind, so it must have been Paddy in his German uniform the monks had seen. Paddy and George Tyrakis would have been parched and ravenous when they arrived here long after midnight; they’d had nothing to eat or drink since early in the evening and had been on a roller coaster of fighting and fleeing ever since. Their best hope for a place to refill their tanks was the monastery, so George would have banged on the door while Paddy lurked in the shadows. An hour was a long time to linger, but Paddy and George had to play it smart. They needed to gather their strength for the long climb to Anogia, and they wouldn’t want to carry anything that could be traced back to the monks if they were caught. They’d have taken the time to finish their biscuits and mutton. Then they were off.

  Father Timothy pushed a bag of his hard, homemade biscuits into our hands as we got up to go. Chris and I trundled down the long slope into the valley, then followed a creek that knifed through a gorge with rolling foothills along both banks. By late afternoon, the monk’s biscuits were gone, my water pack had an ominously empty-sounding swish, and the foothills on our side of the gorge had sharpened into a sheer cliff. Across the creek, we faced a choice: pull ourselves up a long staircase of crop terraces carved into the mountain face, or gamble on a dirt road that might spiral all the way to Anogia if it didn’t dead-end in a pasture. The sun had sunk behind the mountain, leaving us only an hour of good light, but the terraces and dirt road were good signs that Anogia was right above us.