The Golden Step Read online

  The German airborne invasion launched at dawn on 20 May 1941 met with enormous numbers of casualties. Thousands of elite young paratroopers died before they even reached the ground, shot in their harnesses by Allied and Cretan defenders as they drifted down. The ensuing battle for Crete took 12 days and cost between 5,500 and 7,500 young lives. The Germans, like the Turks 300 years before, rolled things up from the west. There were uncounted acts of heroism, numberless miserable and desperate actions. Cretan civilians fought with great skill and ferocity alongside the troops of the British Commonwealth. When the dust settled, the Allies had been driven out. Some were evacuated by ships of the Royal Navy from Iraklion, but most were snatched to safety from the little south-western port of Chora Sfakion to which the retreating soldiers of Britain, Australia and New Zealand struggled as best they could over the high passes of the White Mountains. Over 10,000 were evacuated, amid scenes both disgraceful and honourable, during four nights of very brave activity by the Royal Navy, whose ships had to be back in Alexandria by dawn or risk being sunk by torpedo or bomb. More than 12,000 Commonwealth and 5,000 Greek troops were left behind to be captured and spend the next four years as prisoners-of-war. Thousands more took to the hills, to the caves and remote sheepfolds, or entered villages to throw themselves on the mercy of the local people, who risked death if they dared to help the fugitives. Many of these abandoned soldiers were captured; the lucky ones got away by boat or by submarine.

  Bandouvas

  Bandouvas stares over ox-horn

  moustaches, under black brows, a blank

  peasant face stony with intransigence.

  Two brandishing andartes flank him

  on the sidelines; but it is the deep sunk

  power of Kapetan Bandouvas we sense.

  The photograph does justice to his feared

  authority: high boots crossed,

  slab fingers resting on the knees

  that prop his rifle. Shirtsleeved judge and jury,

  prisoners up before him must have guessed

  his one-word sentences for blond-haired boys

  dropped from the sky into such capable hands.

  Scuffed toetips tell of some moonlit march.

  Seated while others stand, he underlines

  who calls the shots: Bandouvas the chief,

  sly old wolf still hiding from the search

  to find the living man among the stones.

  The Cretan population, left to face the music, acted characteristically. A local resistance movement took shape even as the Battle of Crete was going on, and was continued with great resolution against the occupying forces for the remainder of the war, helped by Allied organisers and material landed in the island by caique, by submarine, by parachute and rowing boat. The Cretans soon learned that to poke the German hornet’s nest usually resulted in some deadly stings. The occupiers did not scruple to burn houses, imprison and very often kill wholesale if they had been hurt and wished to make an example. On the Cretans’ side, the bands of andartes or freedom fighters who formed around charismatic local leaders proved themselves on occasion every bit as ruthless as their ancestors who had resisted in turn the Romans, Byzantines, Saracens, Venetians and Turks. When Pantelis and I reached the Taverna Aravanes in the village of Thronos at the head of the Amari Valley, the day after meeting the old shepherd on the Nida plain, among the first things I saw was a photograph of Manoli Bandouvas, one of the most potent and most feared wartime kapetans or andarte leaders. Bandouvas and his men killed a lot of Germans. His headstrong aggression also brought a lot of death and terror by way of reprisal to the people of Crete. Sitting with one leg cocked over the other, a rifle laid across his lap, flanked by two gallant boys with machine guns, the Bandouvas of the photo looked inexorable, powerful, timeless and unknowable.

  One of the worst of many incidents of German reprisal in wartime Crete took place in Anogia. If the old shepherd of Nida was the age he looked – between seventy and eighty – he would have been a young man of about twenty at the time; maybe involved in cheese-making and sheep-minding, or perhaps, as he seemed to be hinting, hiding out on the mountain in the brave and often quarrelsome brotherhood of an andarte band. Certainly he must have been away from Anogia on 15 August 1944, when several truckloads of German soldiers arrived. They had orders to shoot every male inhabitant found in or near the village, and to burn the whole place to the ground.

  There had been provocation: there usually was. Anogia, a large village of independent-minded mountain people with a long history of ferocious resistance to invaders, had become one of the chief centres of guerrilla activity against the German occupying forces. The Germans knew that several well-organised andarte groups were operating from caves in the Psiloritis massif, with Anogia as their re-supply, planning and storage base. The village priest, Fr Iannis Skoulas, typified the enthusiastic resistance-mindedness of the Anogians. He obtained permission from his bishop to disguise his calling by cutting off his priestly knot of hair and bushy beard, and earned himself the nickname of the Parachute Priest by leaving the island clandestinely to qualify as a parachuting saboteur. Anogians had helped one of the resistance’s most colourful Allied colleagues, Patrick Leigh Fermor, when he was based in a cave above the village. And they had been only too ready to provide food, shelter and concealment when Leigh Fermor and others embarked on their famous trek across Crete in April 1944 in the company of the German Commander of the Fortress of Crete, General Heinrich Kreipe, whom they had just ambushed and captured in one of the war’s most daring and Boys-Own-Paperesque operations. The kidnap, staged at night on the road between Knossos and Archanes, was carried out with breathtaking coolness by Leigh Fermor and his fellow-officer Captain Billy Moss, dressed in hastily altered German uniforms, along with picked Cretan colleagues. They stole the General and his staff car as well, abandoned the vehicle with a note throwing all the blame on British special forces, and then hustled the wretched captive over the snowbound top of Psiloritis and sneaked him through tight German cordons before spiriting him away from the island by launch.

  Opinions in Crete vary as to whether this particular game turned out eventually to be worth the candle. Certainly the propaganda value of the kidnap was enormous. Another benefit was intended to be the sowing of seeds of insecurity amongst the Germans: if this can happen to the most important officer in Crete, no German can sleep safely in his bed. Whether that effect was actually achieved is open to doubt. What is certain is that the reasonable and mild-natured man whom the conspirators removed was succeeded by the hated and feared General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, a former Commander in Crete whom Kreipe had himself replaced only a few weeks before his abduction. Müller was ruthless in his analysis of which villages must have assisted the resistance during the operation, and determined to make an example of as many as possible.

  The fact that it took three months for reprisals to get under way suggests that Müller was looking to reap a double reward. By August 1944, two months after the D-Day landings in Normandy, it was obvious to everyone, Germans included, that the Axis powers were going to lose the war. The Germans in Crete were making plans to withdraw from most of the island and barricade themselves into an enclave in the north-west around the old Venetian city of Chania, at that time the capital of Crete. By the end of October 1944 this withdrawal had been completed, but not before General Müller had taken the opportunity to leave behind him a violent illustration of what the Germans could and would do if provoked. If the hornets were left peaceably alone in their new nest, all well and good. If not – well, take a look at the blackened ruins and blood-stained village squares of Gerakari, Kardaki, Smiles, Ano Meros, Dryes, Vryses, Saktouria, Anogia …

  Down in Anogia a little two-storey museum is filled with the primitive-style wooden sculptures and naïve paintings of local artist Alkibiades Skoulas, works of art striking in their directness and uncluttered clarity of vision. One of the paintings shows graphically what happened in Anogia on 15 August 1944. G
reen-clad German mountain troops roam among burning houses; guard dogs snarl and tear the corpses of executed partisans; villagers wait in line to be gunned down.

  The painting is a record of complete destruction. Today scarcely one house in Anogia predates 1944. Only the village church survived the burning. Altogether forty-five men were shot dead, thirty of them villagers of Anogia. Nowadays a large marble plaque stands in the village square, incised with the words of General Müller’s proclamation of 13 August 1944. It lists various resistance activities carried out by the villagers, and ends: ‘Whereas General Kreipe’s kidnappers passed through Anogia and stopped here, we order it to be levelled with the ground and every male Anogian found in the village or within one kilometre of it to be executed.’ The plaque is an object of pride, against which elderly Anogians with a claim to having been an andarte will consent to be photographed. But it also stands as a piece of defiance, a warning to any potential oppressor, who has only to look around at the present-day thriving village that has sprung from the smoking ruins of 1944 to know how futile such an act of repression would be. You can’t keep good Anogians down, it says, so don’t even think of trying.

  This kind of robust self-confidence underpinned the decision of the Anogians to accept the German artist Karen Raeck when she came to live in Anogia in the early 1980s. Raeck wanted to make a tangible expression of sorrow, admiration and reconciliation on behalf of her countrymen. Up on the Nida Plain she created a work of art she named Andartis, a huge recumbent sculpture of a freedom fighter a hundred feet long and thirty broad, using large rough rocks from the surrounding slopes. The Nida shepherds gave their seal of approval for what she was trying to do by helping her shift the boulders into place. There might still be a few anti-German growlers and grumblers in Anogia, but most of the younger generation seemed to agree it was time to move on.

  Pantelis and I bid the old shepherd goodbye and walked across the cropped green sward of Nida, tired out but unwilling to come to an anchor. Great flocks of sheep moved slowly across the plain. A male and a female shepherd approached each other from opposite sides of the plateau, dwarfed by the backdrop of Psiloritis 3,000 feet overhead, taking their time, yet drawn magnetically to the same midway spot. A couple of minutes’ chat; then the two cloaked figures separated, each beginning the long geometrical journey to where the other had come from.

  We climbed the slopes above the plain until we could look down on Karen Raeck’s Andartis. It lay sprawled across one corner of Nida, a freedom fighter with legs bent ready to spring, one bouldery arm pointing at full stretch into the hills, the other weighed down by a tear-drop shape that might have been a battle shield, the furled wing of an angel, or simply a tear for the pity of war. Interpretation seemed redundant up here in the buttery evening light.

  The big modern taverna at the northern edge of the plain stood empty at this early season of the year. The woman in charge was packing up for the night when we walked in, but she delayed her departure for Anogia long enough to dish up lamb chops and salad, the Cretan staple. Entrusted with the keys, we found a couple of beds in a bare little room upstairs and enough cold water for a splash.

  We were sitting in the restaurant when a creak of boots in the doorway announced a luxuriantly moustached shepherd, one of Anogia’s numerous Stavrakakis clan, attracted from his mitato on the far side of the plain by the taverna lights. Pantelis brewed thick sweet Greek coffee. The shepherd eyed the plate of cheese pies that the woman had left for us. ‘Go ahead,’ said Pantelis. Stavrakakis picked up a pie in blunt fingers blackened with wool grease and posted it whole under his moustache. Then another. His gooseberry green eyes flickered here and there, never resting on one object for more than a second or two, a little unfocused as if more used to staring into distances. The cheese pies continued to vanish, one by one, under the fringe of the drooping moustache.

  Sheep rustling was the biggest problem on Psiloritis, the shepherd told us between mouthfuls. There were more sheep and goats on the hills than ever before, thanks to European Community subsidies, and some people evidently saw that as an opportunity to put together their own flock out of what they could steal from their neighbours. They came across the mountain at night, from somewhere south. It was easy enough to take twenty sheep out of a flock, if you knew what you were doing. Couple of good quiet dogs, a moonless night. Personally, Stavrakakis wouldn’t be surprised if men from Zoniana were behind it. There had been bad blood for generations between Anogia and Zoniana, a kind of rolling feud down the years. Violence? The shepherd grinned. Yes, I myself have been shot at. But I have a good gun back in the mitato, and a couple of nasty dogs. Also some brothers. We haven’t lost a sheep yet. They’d better not try.

  ‘Do you know my brother-in-law, George Aphordakos?’ Pantelis asked. Aphordakos the runner? Oh yes, everyone knew Aphordakos. Hadn’t he stayed sixty days by himself on the plain, training, running up and down the mountains like a champion? That was a man who could run from Nida to Anogia and back in one hour: a man, in fact, who could catch blackbirds in his hands. So legends start.

  It was a beautiful evening on Nida, with the music of sheep bells filling the plain. Behind the taverna the central bulk of Psiloritis loomed, sending an inky shadow creeping out to swallow the hills in the east, one by one. Pantelis yawned and stretched, looking across to the still sunlit tip of Skinakas. ‘Christopher … I think I will go for a little run, to relax the muscles. Just up Skinakas and back – just one-two hours. We must sleep well tonight.’

  Off ran the iron man. We had climbed and descended some 8,000 feet today, and covered perhaps 15 miles in eight hours on the hoof, but Pantelis was still on fire. I watched him spring away down the road, as light and energetic as a whippet. Then I slumped over a beer, sleepily watching the shadow of Psiloritis snuff out the foothills and scribbling ideas for poems.

  In the night I woke from a tangled dream. Slow quiet breathing came from the bed where Pantelis slept, head pillowed on hand, goatee beard making a neat dark circle on his moonlit face. I slipped out of bed and crept downstairs to stand at the taverna door and scour out my head. Sheep bells tinkled from the unseen slopes. The moon gave out a frosty light. Psiloritis rose like a white whale against a black starry sky, with a spume of cloud streaming eastward from the crest. Leaning shivering against a pillar, I experienced a sense of release. The mountain that had weighed on my mind all these months was lifting clear; no longer a hydra-headed monster eating away at the imagination, but simply a presence of great beauty, a calm shape anchored to the plain, faintly radiating snow light into the night.

  A superb blue morning dawned over the mountains, and we were way up high to greet it. The wind had swung round and was pushing hard from the north-east, exhilaratingly cold. Nida lay spread a thousand feet below, its flocks drifting like lemon yellow clouds in the sunlight. None of this was registering with me at the moment, however, as I snotted and sweated through the pain barrier. The only realities half an hour into the climb were the dusty trainers of Pantelis ticking ahead like metronomes on a level with my face, the clatter of loose rocks squirming underfoot, and the urgent need to reach the zen plateau of kalo tempo.

  Another hour, another thousand feet of climb. Heart, blood, lungs and thoughts had slowed to a smooth interdependent flow. It came as a shock to find the first snow crunching under my boots at 6,000 ft. I looked up. Snow in a blinding white sheet, rising steeply to meet a dark blue sky. Pantelis a couple of hundred yards ahead, putting on sunshades against the glare. Next thing, my nose was in the snow and my boot soles in the air.

  I had walked on mountain snow before, but never on snow like this. The Inuit would have a word for it: snow up to five feet deep in the hollows and perhaps a foot thick on the mountainside as a whole, snow with a coarse crystalline crust over a slippery, icy subcutaneous layer. Nine footsteps out of ten sank an inch into the crust and were held there; the tenth would break through and skid backwards on the skating pan below. Bit of a problem. Eventually, afte
r a couple of knee-jerking falls, I worked it out. Kick in the boot toes with each step, jab the katsouna down, and lever upwards. An effective way to make progress, but a tiring one against the strengthening mountain wind. Soon a whole chorus of leg muscles was backing the solos of complaint from my toes, already blistered from their prolonged pounding on Cretan limestone rubble. Why hadn’t I nipped up and down a few Welsh mountains for practice last winter, my body wanted to know. How could I have been so casual in my preparation for this adventure? Didn’t I understand it was hurting?

  ‘Christopher!’

  Pantelis’s shout from above broke the surface of this sea of self-absorption. The wind had snatched off his black and yellow cap and thrown it playfully down the mountainside. As the cap came spinning past I let go of the katsouna and launched myself sideways in a goalkeeper’s slide across the snow. The recklessness of the dive amazed me. Whoever it was, skidding down the slope on his back, it certainly was not the timorous fellow who had quavered his way into the Valley of the Dead a fortnight before.

  Only those who share my lifelong inability to make bat, racquet or hand connect with an oncoming ball will understand the pure thrill of pleasure I got when I came to a stop a few seconds later, opened my eyes and found the cap wrapped round my skinned fingers. ‘Manchester United!’ was Pantelis’s one-liner as he resettled his headgear and handed me my stick.

  Now there was time to look around as the climb went steadily on. The snow surface was not the unblemished white sheet I had taken it to be at first. The storm winds of winter and the warm sunshine of early spring had powdered it with rock dust and smeared it with meltwater mud. Under overhanging ledges, and at the rim of corries such as the one we were now inching up, the snow had been sculpted into quiffs and waves by wind flow. Where it had melted, pale mauve mountain crocuses were already pushing up among the spiky cushions of astivitha. Cretan sage grew there, too, its whitish flowers set among pale furry leaves. ‘With these we make mountain tea,’ said Pantelis, ‘mix with honey, make you strong for walking and not to be sick.’ Somewhere up here the herb-seekers find dictamos or dittany, the famous cure-all marjoram plant endemic to Crete which the islanders used to say was eaten by wounded deer and wild aegagros to expel the hunter’s arrows and heal the wounds. Dictamos keeps out the cold, cures headaches and fevers, increases a man’s stamina on the hill and in the marriage bed. You should not trust the dried stuff they sell in cellophane packets down in the town markets, Pantelis had advised me. Better to use dictamos freshly picked from the mountains. But there was none to be seen around the snowbound slopes we were traversing.