Crete: The Battle and the Resistance Read Online Free PDF Page B

AND VERY PERSONAL
    The Jug
    (With apologies to Lewis Carroll)

    In Cairo where the Gypsies are,
    I sing this song to my guitar.
    ('Only I'm not going to sing it really,' explained
    Anthony kindly.
    'Thank you very much indeed,' said Jacqueline.)*
    In Athens, when I've met the Greek,
    I'll tell you what it is I seek.
    ('It'll be nice to know,' said Jacqueline.)
    I sent a message to the Jug, I told him not to be a mug.
    I said he must be badly cracked
    To think of joining Hitler's pact.
    The Jug replied, 'But don't you see
    How difficult it is for me.'
    ('It's difficult for me too,' said Jacqueline sadly.
    'It doesn't get any easier further on,' said Anthony.)
    I took a pencil large and new,
    I wrote a telegram or two.
    Then someone came to me and said

    The Generals have gone to bed.
    I said it loud, I said it plain,
    'Then you must wake them up again.'
    And I was very firm with them,
    I kept them up till 2 a.m.
    ('Wasn't that rather unkind?' said Jacqueline.
    'Not at all,' said Anthony firmly. 'We want Generals,
    not dormice. But don't keep interrupting.')

    * Lady Lampson, wife of the British Ambassador to Egypt, Sir Miles Lampson, later Lord Killearn.

    3
    Secret Missions

    Irregular warfare in the Eastern Mediterranean held a strong appeal for vigorous young Britons. A cynic might easily dismiss the phenomenon as a sort of adult version of Swallows and Amazons, messing about in boats and treating the region as an immense adventure playground. Although many of them exulted in this new life because it provided an ideal escape from peacetime routine or frustrations, the diversity of their characters should be a warning against too simple an analysis. They ranged from Philhellenic dons to well-connected thugs, with many variations in between including a handful of good regular soldiers, romantics, writers, scholar gypsies and the odd louche adventurer.
    The vast majority belonged to SOE, Special Operations Executive, created from the amalgamation in July 1940 of Section D and MI(R). (See Appendix A.)
    A process of selection, unusual in wartime, led to a preponderance of archaeologists and dons. Paddy Leigh Fermor later wrote of himself and other 'improvised cave-dwellers' that 'it was the obsolete choice of Greek at school which had really deposited us on the limestone. With an insight once thought rare, the army had realized that the Ancient tongue, however imperfectly mastered, was a short-cut to the modern: hence the sudden sprinkling of many strange figures among the mainland and island crags.'
    Those recruited into special operations seem to have sensed that these war years would be the most intense of their life. 'What a lot of material for autobiographies is being provided,' a friend said to the traveller and writer Peter Fleming, who had been recruited by MI(R) shortly before war broke out. He should also have mentioned fiction. Another early member remarked that the same people kept cropping up in unlikely places round the Mediterranean: 'The whole thing was just like an Anthony Powell novel.'
    Regular soldiers provided the original basis of MI(R). One of them, a sapper officer called George Young, was held at readiness in Cairo with a field company of Royal Engineers to move into Roumania to blow up the Ploesti oilfields. They were to be guided to their targets by Geoffrey Household, the author of Rogue Male and a more recent MI(R) recruit. Household travelled there with 'businessman' written in his passport, not author, because 'Compton Mackenzie and Somerset Maugham [both secret agents in their time] had destroyed our reputation as unworldly innocents for ever'.
    The fear of forcing the Roumanians into Axis arms eventually led to the indefinite postponement of Young's mission. Soon afterwards when MI(R) in Cairo was reorganized into SOE's embryo form, Young formed a commando in the Middle East. This was eventually incorporated into Layforce, and he took part in its rearguard action in Crete described in Officers and