Blood of Honour

‘Reinert, I want you to go back,’ he told the corporal. ‘Tell Mohne that we’re about to assault these buildings, and get the men the other side of the wall ready. Try to find Schulz. Rohde, you attack from the front, and I’ll take five men to the back.’

Reinert nodded, and hurried across the road. Balthasar watched him disappear safely, then divided his men and told Rohde to wait one minute before attacking. He led his group back along the road, keeping close into the shadows until they reached a narrow paved street. Turning into it, he was relieved to find a small alleyway off it that evidently ran along the back of the row of houses. Hurrying along, they rounded a bend and saw men moving from the alley into the rear of the building. Balthasar immediately opened fire, Greek soldiers screaming as they were cut down. He ran on, urging his men to follow. Pausing by the doorway at the rear of the building, he signalled to two of his men to take out grenades.

They unscrewed the caps and, at Balthasar’s gesture, threw them through the open door. As they exploded, the men turned and entered. Almost at the same moment, there were explosions from the front of the building too. Balthasar allowed himself a grim smile of satisfaction, then grabbed two of his paratroopers and said, ‘Stay here and guard this back door. Shoot anything that moves.’

Having given one an encouraging slap on the back, he stepped into the house.

Inside there was pandemonium. Dazed and coughing, Greek troops floundered through the smoke only to meet a burst of Schmeisser fire. Above, Balthasar heard a machine-gun clattering, so he hurried up the staircase. The stench was overpowering, but as he glanced up he saw a Greek soldier half aim a rifle at him. Before he could respond, the man had fired, the bullet grazing Balthasar’s upper arm. Cursing, he opened fire himself, the soldier tumbling down the stairs. Balthasar pushed him out of the way and continued upwards, two steps at a time. The MG was still pounding, so he took out his last grenade, lobbed it inside the room and, when it had exploded, emptied the rest of his magazine. The machine-gun stopped firing.

Cautiously, Balthasar stepped inside. Sulphurous smoke filled the room, rasping at the back of his throat. One man lay slumped over the machine-gun, his arm and side shredded. Another lay flat on his back, his face hideously disfigured by the grenade blast and his chest torn open. Two more lay under the window. One was groaning, so Balthasar took his Sauer pistol and punched a single bullet into the man’s chest. Blood was spreading across the stone floor, a darkening slick that was now seeping around his boot. He looked down at the MG. It was wrecked – annoying, but that could not be helped. From the back of the building came another burst of a sub-machine-gun but the rest of the house was now quiet.

‘We have it,’ said Rohde, from the doorway.

‘Well done,’ said Balthasar. ‘Now let’s get the rest of them across.’ Cautiously he moved to the window. Across the road, men were already clambering over the walls. ‘Quick!’ he shouted, then looked back along the road and saw more men streaming down the stone steps from the wall house.

‘Come on,’ he said to Rohde, then hurried out of the room and back downstairs over a number of Greek dead to the street below. There he paused and touched his arm. It stung and there was blood on his fingertips, but he was lucky the wound was no worse. He wiped his brow, suddenly aware that he was perspiring heavily. Fighting was hot work.

My God, we’re in, he thought. They had achieved the hardest part. Even so, as Balthasar was well aware, there was still much to be done before the town was theirs.

Captain Alex Vaughan had been with Pendlebury in a kafenio next to the Canea Gate when the shooting had begun. Already it had been a long afternoon, organizing Cretan raiding parties, helping Greek snipers pinpoint targets and distributing the booty taken from dead paratroopers. And this on top of several days of feverish activity in which he had had little sleep. He felt exhausted.

Vaughan was one of the very few people who knew that Pendlebury was not only vice consul but head of the Special Operations Executive on the island, the wing of British intelligence set up specifically to carry out clandestine sabotage against the enemy. Although Vaughan had a natural gift for languages and could hold his own in Greek, Pendlebury was almost a native. He spoke both ancient and modern Greek fluently, the latter with the Cretan patois, and having spent so many years at Knossos and excavating other ancient sites on the island, he knew the place intimately; indeed, he had walked and traversed the island more than most Cretans.

Pendlebury had established a network of informers that stretched all the way to the mainland, and three days earlier had received word from one – via a trip across the sea – that the German invasion had just been postponed but was still imminent. Over the past months Pendlebury, along with Vaughan and his fellow SOE officers, Jack Hanford and Terence Bruce-Mitford, had devoted much energy to organizing the local kapitans into guerrilla forces should the invasion come. Vaughan, if he was honest, had always questioned the value of Crete to the Germans, but Pendlebury had insisted the enemy would invade, and for that, he argued, they needed to be prepared. He had been proved right that afternoon and, thanks to him, they now had arms stashes all over the island, but especially in the mountains, from where Pendlebury hoped the fight could be continued should the worst happen and the British be defeated.

The previous day, Hanford had left Heraklion to organize the guerrillas in the mountains, but Vaughan had remained behind with Pendlebury to help defend the town. ‘I’m sure the Greek regiments will fight,’ Pendlebury had said, ‘and so will the British. But the ones who will fight hardest are the Cretans. It is their island, after all.’ Therefore he had armed as many as he could, and while many of the guerrillas – or andartes, as they were known – had remained in their mountain villages, some had joined him in Heraklion, men like Alopex, the village patriarch of Sarhos, a village on the lower slopes of the Ida range, and the head of an influential family olive-pressing business.

Alopex had known Pendlebury for years, helping with his digs before the war and with organizing the planned resistance since the latter’s arrival back on the island the previous year. It was from Pendlebury that Alopex had learned English. Vaughan had recognized that this had been a smart move: Pendlebury was universally admired by the Cretan patriarchs, and Alopex’s close ties to this eccentric but beloved Englishman had only enhanced his own standing.

Alopex had also been at Pendlebury’s when the paratroopers attacked, and so too had Satanas, the most influential kapitan of them all. Satanas was from Krousonas, a large mountain village higher in the Ida Mountains than Alopex’s home. As Vaughan had discovered when he had first visited Krousonas, Satanas was the unquestioned village patriarch and a legend on Crete as a man who had fanatically fought the Turks more than forty years before. It was said that he had survived so many Turkish bullets that he must be the devil himself; that, Vaughan had been told in awed tones more times than he could remember, was why everyone knew him as Satanas.

Vaughan could only guess at Satanas’s age, but tall and broad, with a mass of thick white hair, a luxuriant moustache, and dark unblinking eyes, he was an imposing figure. Pendlebury had done well to win his affection; in Satanas he had one of his most trusted collaborators. And with Satanas and Alopex beside him, Pendlebury’s efforts to unite the townsmen of Heraklion against the invader had been made that much easier. Satanas was also respected by the Greek commanders in Heraklion. There were three under-strength Greek battalions holding the town, around fifteen hundred men in all, and thanks to Pendlebury’s urging, with Alopex’s and especially Satanas’s influence, the Greek commanders had agreed to line the walls with snipers. It was funny, Vaughan had reflected, that although there were Greek colonels and majors in Heraklion, it was Pendlebury and Satanas, both barely trained in soldiering, who were most assuredly in command. Some people, he supposed, were natural leaders of men.

Their leadership skills would be tested again now that the Germans were launching an attack. In the bar, Pendlebury had smiled and pushed back his chair. ‘We mustn’t dally here.’

Vaughan had rubbed his face and eyes, finished his coffee and raki, and followed him outside.

That had been twenty minutes ago, and although they had held off the attackers successfully at the Canea Gate, they had then heard increasingly heavy fighting just over a hundred yards to the south. Vaughan had hurried off to see for himself what was going on. At the Alpha Company, the 3rd Greek Battalion, headquarters there was heavy fighting and as he hurried along the street he heard machine-gun fire from outside the walls and from within the 3rd Battalion building. There were already a number of dead, and then he saw a squad of paratroopers, half hidden by the shadows, crouching along the edge of the street and about to storm the building.

He wondered where the hell the rest of the battalion was. Clearly, reinforcements were urgently needed, but most of the 3rd Greek Battalion was already strung out manning the walls as far as the sea. Battalion HQ was in the Bethlehem Bastion, another two hundred yards further along the west wall of the town, but there was no sign