So—no Ng Mui? No Five Elders, no cat-whomping crane?
Nope.
There’s no evidence that the origin myth of Wing Chun is any more real than the Minotaur. But just because it’s make-believe doesn’t mean it’s not true. Wing Chun took the crucial elements of pankration and improved the backstory: if you’re really out to prove that natural movement and elasticity can make anyone a fearsome fighter, don’t use a couple of monster-killing heroes to make your case; use a fightin’ nun on the run from an evil dynasty. Ng Mui wasn’t dreamed up just to repackage Greek fashion for a Chinese audience; rather, it took pankration off the battlefield and away from the oiled-and-naked manly Games and steered it back to its original message: that when it comes to real strength and self-defense, muscle power isn’t the path.
Despite the revamp, the art that could help everyone was taught to almost no one. Dynasty warfare and clan secrecy kept it underground in China, while for everyone else it was ruined by the Romans. Under the Caesars, pankration was degraded into a gladiatorial spectacle and became so savage it was eventually banned by the Christian emperors. No one really had the stomach after that to revive something so closely associated with the blood-crazed Colosseum. “It may be suggested that the Pancratium is too terrible to serve any useful purpose in these modern times,” conceded a British sportsman who failed to bring pankration back to life in 1898.
And so the greatest Olympic sport faded away and vanished….
Except on the island where it was born. In the mountains of Crete, pankration was passed down between generations of rebels who never forgot what it could do and why it was created. After the German invasion, an odd photo made its way back to British Intelligence: it showed three German soldiers being ambushed by a trio of Cretan freedom fighters, one of whom has his legs scissored around a German’s back. It’s classic pankration, and exactly the message the Twins were trying to get across to their students back in the dirty-trickster training camps:
All the strength, speed, and suppleness you need, you already have. You just need to release it.
CHAPTER 13
The name of Crete is for me—the man who conquered it—a bitter memory.
—LUFTWAFFE GENERAL KURT STUDENT
CRETE was the perfect test. The mountains were honeycombed with caves, and with all those German supply planes transiting through on their way to Russia, the targets were ripe. But the Firm couldn’t go in blind; someone first had to find out whether George Psychoundakis and the rest of the Cretans really wanted to take a bunch of amateurs under their wings. If not, the Brits wouldn’t last a week.
So within days of his escape from Crete, Jack Smith-Hughes was asked to head back. Returning a man to the same island he’d spent seven months trying to get off was harsh, but what choice was there? The Battle of Crete had lasted ten days, but the battle for Crete was just getting started. Hitler needed to lock the Cretans down, but he couldn’t … quite … stop them. The Russian attack was already months behind schedule, but instead of speeding every available man to the Eastern Front, five entire divisions were still chasing shepherds around that gottverdammten island.
Brilliant. This was exactly what Churchill had been hoping for: that somewhere, a band of irregulars would catch the giant off guard and make it stumble. Before the British even had a chance to get the Firm off the ground and spread its own Resistance operation, one had suddenly burst into existence by itself. “The Cretan Resistance, unlike those underground movements in the rest of Europe which did not start to develop until a year or so after the German occupation, began literally in the first hour of the invasion,” noted Antony Beevor, who would write the definitive history of the Battle of Crete. As if they’d been rehearsing it for years, the Cretans quickly assembled armed militias, mountain-running messengers, and a folk-song emergency alert system: anytime a German patrol was spotted, a warbling tune would pass from villager to villager across the valley and up to where their men were hiding in the hills.
But realistically, how long could the Cretans withstand the fury of General Kurt Student, who for once was even more enraged than Hitler? The Führer had ordered his troops to terrorize the upstarts, but Student wanted more than just fear; he wanted blood. The Germans had lost more troops in the Battle of Crete than in France, Yugoslavia, and Poland combined. Student himself had almost committed suicide and all because of those savages. The Cretans were “beasts and assassins,” Student decreed, who should be treated like all dangerous animals. Anywhere a hint of rebellion was detected, Student ordered “extermination of the male population of the territory in question” and “total destruction of villages by burning.” There wouldn’t even be the pretense of a trial. “All these measures,” Student commanded, “must be taken rapidly and omitting formalities.”
Freed from any restraint, the Germans on Crete erupted in a rampage of revenge. In the town of Kastelli Kissamou, two hundred men were selected at random and slaughtered. In tiny Fournés, 140 more. Entire villages were surrounded by tanks and put to the torch, with women and children running for their lives into the mountains. Not that every woman escaped; many had their dresses torn down, and if a shoulder bruise was spotted that could have come from a rifle recoil, they joined their brothers and husbands in the death pit. The manhunt was pitiless and relentless; German foot soldiers ransacked farms and towns while recon planes growled low over the mountains, machine-gunning anyone who looked suspicious and snapping aerial photos of every visible cave and goat trail.
So one night in October, Jack boarded a camouflaged trawler and returned to Crete with a promise. He slipped into a black blouse and pantaloons to disguise himself as a shepherd—well, sort of. “Anyone could pick him out as an Englishman from a mile away, especially when he was dressed in those clothes!” grimaced George Psychoundakis, who once again stepped in to sneak Jack past German patrols. Together they trekked up the cliff to see Abbot Lagouvardos, the three-hundred-pound, fire-breathing, Friar Tuck–like head of the Preveli monastery. From there, they visited the hideouts of local Resistance fighters Beowulf and old Uncle Petrakas and “Satan” Grigorakis, so nicknamed because only the devil could have survived all the bullets in him.
If the Cretan fighters could hang on a little longer, Jack told them, they wouldn’t be alone. Britain’s new masters of mayhem were just about ready for action.
Jack had just returned from this recon mission to Crete when a penniless young painter named Alexander Fielding was brought to meet him. Call me Xan, the fellow said, pronouncing it “Chan.” Xan’s father was a major in the 50th Sikh Regiment, so as the son of a career soldier, Xan had known exactly what to do when the war broke out:
Run and hide.
“My first reaction,” Xan would admit, “was flight.” He’d done a pretty good job of it, too. Before the war, he’d tried making a living by sketching diners in fancy London cafés, then he pushed east to study German classics and take up painting. When Hitler invaded Poland and most of Xan’s university friends stepped forward to enlist, Xan stayed put in Cyprus, where he’d landed a nice gig as a bar manager. “I was not afraid of fighting,” Xan recalled, “but I was appalled by the prospect of the army.” Did anyone seriously expect him to shove into an officers’ mess three times a day and make small talk with a guest list not of his choosing? “I could not bear the idea of an enforced and artificial relationship with a set of strangers chosen to be my comrades not by myself but by chance,” he complained. Call me a coward; just don’t call me “Sir.”