“We never betray a secret!” Vasilios thundered, slapping the table.
“Never,” Yiorgos agreed. “That’s why the Germans never burned us. No betrayers, so they never knew.”
Once past the village, the band started up a rocky slope into the mountains. “In a flash,” Yiorgos said, “the mule jumped and threw the general, injuring his shoulder.” Yiorgos helped the general back up, but the mule threw him again, this time so badly the general needed a sling for his arm. “He didn’t like Germans,” Yiorgos shrugged. To this day, the Midnight Payback of the Patsos Mule is commemorated on Crete by the expression Tou strati gá to perasma—“A general can fall into your lap,” meaning “Even big shots get cut down to size.”
For the next three days, Yiorgos was the general’s personal escort as the band scrambled just out of reach of the search parties. The same night the kidnappers left Patsos, the Butcher’s men surrounded the village. “They searched it, and though they found nothing, they took 40 villagers hostage,” Yiorgos’s cousin, George Harokopos, would recall. “Fortunately, they were all released five weeks later after exhaustive but fruitless interrogation.” The Germans were getting dangerously close, but even more worrying, they were getting dangerously smart. Since the beginning of the war, Cretan men had been sleeping in the woods at night to avoid being surrounded in their villages before dawn. The ploy had been nearly foolproof—until the Germans, desperate to find the general, grew more cunning.
“The raiders used a new system,” Harokopos explained. “They hid at key points among the trees, in the cornfields and up trees. They even let the unsuspecting villagers leave with their animals in the morning to work in the fields and the village. When they approached, the Germans leaped out at them.” Every time the band thought it had a little breathing space, a scout arrived with a fresh warning. One night, the kidnappers were just tucking into a thickly wooded hollow when a shepherd burst from the trees.
“My friends, get up quickly!” he panted.
More than a hundred troops were heading right at them, storming down the dirt road from the mountains in trucks. Yiorgos and George Harokopos grabbed Billy Moss and the general and hurried them into a slit cave in the side of a ravine. The rest of the band scattered into the trees. Within minutes, machine-gun fire and grenades were exploding just west of their hiding place. Yiorgos and his cousin readied their weapons, but instead of drawing closer, the shooting drifted away. Local Resistance fighters had been shadowing the kidnap gang as an invisible escort, and as the troop convoy approached, they opened fire, creating a diversion and drawing the Germans in the wrong direction.
“Yasou,” Yiorgos said not long after they emerged from hiding. “Farewell.” He’d reached the limit of the countryside he knew, so it was time for a fresh mount and guide to take over. “Yiorgos Pattakos left to return east with the Kourkoulases’ wonderful mule, which had made our journey so much faster in spite of the General’s accident,” recalled his cousin, who remained on with the kidnappers. Within a few days Yiorgos had retraced his stealthy steps back through the German patrols and arrived home.
“If I can ask a question,” I said. “Would you do it again? Now that you’re ninety-one years old, looking back—the Germans were murdering entire villages. Was it wise to put your family at risk?”
Vasilios began translating, but erupted before he finished. “Everyone from this village was a patriot!” he simmered, outraged I’d suggest otherwise. But Yiorgos quietly raised a hand.
“It’s a good question,” Yiorgos said, and then gave an answer which stayed with me for a long time and, the more I thought about it, kept extending further and further—from the four of us around the table to the ends of that tiny village, all the way across this embattled island and back to my own home and family. “When you live in a place like this—small, by itself—you’re brought up to give help, not wait for it,” Yiorgos began. When your neighbor needs something, he needs you. The person he knows. Not the army. Not the police. You. And if you’re not there, someday you’ll have to look him in the face and explain.
Vasilios was listening so intently, Chris had to prompt him to translate. “The Germans didn’t know us, and they believed they could not lose,” Yiorgos continued. “They believed they’d never have to look anyone in the face and explain. They’d never have to pay for what they did. And I believe that is why we defeated them.” Because we have to answer to one another, and they did not.
Even Kreipe, who barely escaped the Russian front with his life and was now a prisoner in the wilderness, was still convinced Hitler would come out of this a winner. Kreipe told his captors exactly that: when Yiorgos’s cousin joked that Kreipe was the last general they’d have to kidnap, since the Allies were on their way to victory, Kreipe responded—quite sincerely—that Germany was unbeatable. “The ‘Wall of the Atlantic’ was unbreakable,” Kreipe said. “If the Allies tried to land in France or the Low Countries, they would be crushed.” Germany might get pushed back, but eventually the Allies would wear out and negotiate for peace—just the way the Butcher, at that moment, was wearing out Paddy and his kidnap band.
Certainly, Paddy and his Cretan friends had their moment of glory—“This Husarenstück,” as Kreipe called it, a “show-off’s prank”—but playtime was coming to an end. Every day, the Butcher’s men were getting closer. German soldiers were streaming down the mountains, they were lying in wait along the coastline, they had just missed rescuing Kreipe twice in the past few days alone. Kreipe could see Paddy was breaking down, and Paddy knew it himself. (“My right arm felt stranger and stranger; it was quite painless, but I found I could neither straighten it nor raise it very high,” Paddy discovered). The kidnappers were outgunned and outmanned, and it was only a matter of time until they were out of options. This little heroic fantasy, Kreipe knew, was about to come to its painful and inevitable finale.
It was around that time, Yiorgos said—around the very day we were talking, in fact, May 10—that Paddy returned from his undercover recon mission. Yiorgos’s cousin was there, and he could tell at a glance that something was up. “Late at night, Leigh Fermor himself arrived, astonishingly lively despite the distance of over 100 kilometers he had to cover in the last three days,” George Harokopos would recall. Paddy always knew how to make an entrance, and this time he had a reason.
Yasou, koumbaroi. We’re back, god brothers. And we may have something.
CHAPTER 37
If the Russian Peoples succeeded in raising their tired bodies in front of the gates of Moscow to set back the German torrent, they owe it to the Greek people…. The gigantomachy of Crete was the climax of the Greek contribution.
—SOVIET GENERAL GEORGY ZHUKOV
Gigantomachy: the struggle between the gods of Olympus and the demons of underworld
CHRIS AND I heaved our backpacks over the wire fence, then belly-crawled after them and into the final chapter of the chase.
Gunfire was crackling a few miles from this olive grove when Paddy and Billy’s band got here. In one direction, Paddy could hear so many villages being dynamited that “it sounded like a naval battle.” In another, Gestapo interrogators were going house to house in search of the man that, sooner or later, they always found: the one who said more than he meant to. A German garrison was less than an hour away over the hills, and the weird semi-paralysis in Paddy’s arm was spreading down his right side, making him wonder, privately, how much farther he could go.