German subs were about to close the sea-lanes, so Xan hopped a boat to a tiny island off the coast of Greece owned by his old friend Francis Turville-Petre—the world-famous archeologist, sexual adventurer, and, of late, wild-haired recluse. Francis made history when he was fresh out of Oxford by uncovering “Galilee Man,” one of the first Neanderthal skulls to be discovered outside of Europe. But Francis was soon spending more time partying than digging (one fellow archeologist wrote home in disgust about “the empty whiskey bottles that were tossed out of Francis’s tent and the Arab boys who crawled into it”), and when a bout of syphilis sent him to Germany for treatment, he decided to abandon the deserts of Palestine and switch his specialty to “sexual ethnology.” “Der Fronny,” as he was known, became such a legend in the Berlin boy bars that he inspired both the musical Cabaret (by way of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories) and W. H. Auden’s play The Fronny. Then, abruptly, Francis vanished. Word got around that he was in seclusion on a Greek island, sleeping till dark, wandering by night, and surviving on a diet of brandy and bread fortified by a weekly cup of Bovril.
By the time Xan arrived, in 1939, the once bright star of British archeology looked like a shipwreck survivor. “Long straight Red-Indian hair framed a sad sallow face so lined that it was impossible to guess its owner’s age,” Xan would recall. “Below it an emaciated body, always clothed in bright colors, stretched six feet down to an almost freakishly small pair of sandaled feet.” But Fronny’s mind was as keen as ever, and during their long moonlit hikes together, he shared the secret of how he beat the world to the Galilee skull.
Early in his career, Francis realized that when it came to archeological knowledge and geological mastery, it would take him decades before he could compete with senior scientists. He needed a short cut, so he began hanging around the villages, sipping tea and trading chit-chat, soaking up scandals and dialects and ghost stories. Legends have long tendrils, Francis believed, that eventually twine back to solid earth. If kids believe a patch of woods is haunted, they may really have seen spooky shadows … which, with a little investigating, could turn out to be goatherds taking shelter for the night in a cliffside crevice with an invisible entrance and terrific campfire ventilation. A warm snug today could have been just as cozy in the Stone Age, which means that in a vast desert with thousands of caves, an afternoon spent listening to old wives’ tales could help you eliminate false leads and point you straight to the find of a lifetime. Francis’s nose for gossip eventually led him to some chatty Bedouin traders who tipped him off to the cave where the Skull would be found.
“The companionship and conversation of a man like Francis did much to dispel my increasing sense of guilt, so that the report of the evacuation from Dunkirk and the account of the Battle of Britain caused me no more than a passing twinge of conscience,” recalled Xan, who wasn’t gay but regarded Francis as “one of the most stimulating and rewarding companions” he had ever known.
Xan spent his days painting landscapes and practicing Greek with Fronny’s six servants, waiting for his night-stalker host to awake at dusk. Together they’d huddle around the radio and listen to evening war news from the BBC.
Shouldn’t we be ashamed? Xan wondered. Maybe it’s time to do our duty.
Francis snorted. “What good do you think you could possibly be?”
Hitler took the choice out of their hands. Xan and Fronny got off the island ahead of the German invasion and reluctantly went their separate ways. Fronny opted for Egypt; he had a taste for erotic adventure, and wartime Cairo was sizzling with sexual intrigue. Fronny soon reclaimed his throne as master of back-alley revels, but collapsed within a few months. By age forty—“bored with love, with sex, with travel, with friendship, even with food,” as one friend recalled—the man who’d inspired Xan with his genius for learning secrets from the past was dead.
Xan returned to Cyprus, where he found an even better way to hide from the war: he joined the army. Xan got a commission as a junior officer in the 1st Cyprus Battalion, the biggest joke in the Mediterranean Theater. “The Cypriots had never had a military tradition, and it soon became clear that they were not going to break a habit formed before the first century by taking kindly to soldiering in the twentieth,” he observed. Many of Xan’s fellow officers were disciplinary problems who’d been chucked out of other details, or pacifists and shirkers desperate to avoid action. “Our unit, then, was understandably free from any sense of regimental pride.”
Since neither officers nor enlisted men had any interest in engaging one another, let alone the enemy, they agreed to stay out of one another’s way: the troops spent their time in Nicosia’s brothels, while the officers lingered in the casinos. Within a few weeks, new recruits were less combat ready than the day they arrived. “The incidence of venereal disease among the men rose to a height that was only surpassed by the officers’ drunkenness,” Xan admitted.
Xan’s official assignment was to visit fake platoons. The Cypriots figured their best defense was trickery, so they built a bunch of phony barracks to make it appear as if the island were jammed with troops. “All those phantom units,” Xan would recall, “were represented only by myself.” He roared around all day on a motorcycle delivering messages to these invisible brigades in the hope that, somehow, Hitler would believe Cyprus was too heavily fortified to attack. What a delightful surprise war turned out to be! Military service on Cyprus, Xan would later acknowledge, was “one of the most carefree periods of my life.”
Until refugees from Crete began to arrive. “The island was expected to surrender in a day,” Xan noted, but when it didn’t—when reports came through of shepherds and farmwives and village priests defending their island with barn tools and rabbit guns and, in one case, an old man’s walking stick, when these peasants and a battered rank of British troops somehow held off Germany’s fiercest fighters until the sun had set on Hitler’s deadline and rose again on another day—Xan began feeling a strange sensation: envy.
“I felt that if I had to fight, the least ignoble purpose and the most personally satisfying method would be the purpose and method of the Cretans,” he’d recall. The Cretans weren’t taking orders and wearing uniforms; they were thinking and fighting for themselves, using their own skill and ingenuity and natural weapons to defend their homes and families. No one had to train them or tell them what to do; their own traditions had prepared them all their lives for this moment. “My own position as a member of an organized army,” Xan recalled, “became increasingly galling.”
Xan began haunting the Cyprus waterfront, greeting refugees from Crete as soon as they arrived so he could get firsthand news about the Resistance. Word of his interest must have spread, because one morning a stranger came looking for him. He gave Xan directions to a building in Cairo and said if he was serious about Crete, he should go to Egypt at once. Xan would find out more—maybe—once he got there. Soon, Xan was touching down in Cairo and hailing a taxi.