Patrick Leigh Fermor, General Kreipe and Horace

When I was at school in the 1940s in Hungary, it was considered part of a good education to be taught the classics, or at least some of them, by heart. At the ripe old age of eleven I had a Latin teacher called Erno Szarka, who espoused the theory with particular vehemence. We learned all his favourite pieces by rote. I am now 94. My short term memory is appalling, but wake me up in the middle of the night and however befuddled I may be, I can still quote Horace’s Ode IX.1, which begins: ​Vides ut alta stet nive candidum… Evidently this beautiful poem was also known to classically educated people in the last century, not only in Hungary but in Britain and Germany too. This Latin verse will come up in the story I am going to relate.

Leigh Fermor, photographed by Dimitri Papadimos

Crete in the Second World War was an ideal terrain for a resistance group to develop. Dense forests, craggy mountains, freezing winds, impassable cliffs, determined Cretans and British assistance all contributed to the unease of the occupiers.  Crete  had been conquered by German paratroopers in 1941. The commander of the occupying troops was General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, a bloodthirsty Nazi, known as the Butcher of Crete. The Resistance with British help decided to capture him. The head of the kidnap team was a Major in the SOE (Special Operation Executive), Patrick Leigh Fermor. However, by the time the kidnap plan was worked out, Muller had been transferred to some other job and replaced in Crete by Major-General Heinrich Kreipe, a career soldier who received his decorations at Verdun in the First World War. He was a relative moderate, not a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi, and a highly educated man. The resistance was disappointed that they had missed Müller, but once the plans were completed they decided to capture Kreipe instead. The story of the kidnap was dramatically described by Leigh Fermor in his posthumous memoir: Abducting a General: The Kreipe Operation and SOE in Crete (2014).

The kidnapping team consisted of two British officers and four local guerillas. The plan was to ambush the general’s car at a T-junction when he returned, normally at night, to his home at Heraklion from his divisional headquarters. The operation had to be aborted four times, either because the weather was not right or the general returned home earlier. The fifth time was just right for a night ambush.

The British officers changed into German uniforms and halted the general’s car, demanding official documents — in fluent German. Once the car door was opened the attackers overpowered the general and tied him up. The driver was knocked out by a blow on his head. Fermor Leigh took over the role of the general, donning his hat, and the other Briton, Captain Billy Moss, took the driver’s seat. They managed to get through 22 checkpoints without ever being asked to stop. This was not just good luck. They were greatly helped by the reputation of the general for being impatient if held up at a checkpoint. They spent the night at a safe place in a cave in Mount Ida.  When General Kreipe saw the landscape he said softly, mainly to himself:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum,

Soracte nec iam sustineant onus…

Leigh Fermor finished for him the first stanza of Horace’s Ode IX.1:

Silvae laborantes geluque

Flumina constiterint acuto.

As it happened, Leigh Fermor knew by heart all five of the following stanzas and recited them to the astonished Kreipe. As Leigh Fermor notes in his memoir:

“For five minutes the war had evaporated without a trace.”

General Heinrich Kreipe

The kidnap took place on the 26^th April, 1944. The BBC without delay broadcast the good news. Unfortunately they made a blunder. Instead of saying The general has been moved to Egypt their report said: The general is going to be transported to Egypt. The result was a frantic search by all the occupying forces to liberate their commander. To avoid them, Kreipe was put on a mule and the kidnapping team was continually on the move. The local guides made sure that they were always kept far away from  the searchers. Again, after several failed attempts, on May 14, 1944 the whole team was picked up by a British motor boat and transported to Egypt.

Kreipe was kept for a while in Egypt, but soon after he was transferred to a prisoner of war camp in Canada. He was released in 1947.

Müller was captured in Germany in 1945. A year later he was extradited to Greece, where he was tried, sentenced to death for war crimes, and executed.

General F.-W. Mueller

After the war Leigh Fermor was decorated with the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his wartime activities in Greece. Apart from the kidnap operation, his fame rests on his travel writings. He inspired a host of modern-day travel writers, including Rory Stewart.  In the first of his travels in the 1930s at the age of 18, he walked across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul (described in A Time of Gifts). I knew of him as one of the very few men who walked through Hungary, stopping both at aristocratic families and gipsy settlements. According to Wikipedia, a BBC journalist once termed him a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene. His authorised biography by Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, appeared in 2012. A popular film, Ill Met by Moonlight, was produced in Britain in 1957 telling the story of the Cretan kidnap, with Dirk Bogarde as Leigh Fermor and Marius Goring as General Kreipe.

A liberal translation of the first stanza by Laszlo Solymar is given below:

See how Soracte is covered by fresh snow

How the trees groan under the heavy burden

How the mountain streams are kept prisoners

By the tight embrace of the glistening ice.

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