Eleni (19 page)

Thirty-eight years later I learned their impressions when I tracked down one of the two captains, Philip Nind, by then the director of a foundation and the holder of the Order of the British Empire. He allowed me to read the journal he made of his first commando mission. Nind, who was twenty-five when he landed in Lia, the son of a British civil servant stationed in India, spoke fluent French and had graduated from Oxford University, where he excelled at athletics and became enamored of the political philosophy of Karl Marx. An explosives expert, he trained saboteurs outside London before being accepted as a commando and sent to Egypt. When he was air-lifted from Allied Headquarters in Cairo to the Mourgana mountains, Nind, like many well-born young Englishmen of his generation, viewed Greece in a romantic mist distilled from the poetry of Byron and Keats, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. He was quickly disappointed. “The area is a very poor one,” Nind wrote in his journal. “The mountains are particularly barren and the villages mean and dirty. But at this time it was strategically important and could have been the base for useful operations against the Germans … Our immediate task was therefore to weld the units of the two organizations, EDES and ELAS, into some kind of fighting force.”

With the two sides now under a truce, that seemed a simple enough task for an English officer with Philip Nind’s education and training, but his youthful ideals would soon be put to a hard test, and as he told me ruefully while we sat in his gentlemen’s club in London in 1981, more disillusionment was quick to follow.

As she studied the English officers in the village square, Eleni contemplated them with admiration and hope. They were representatives of one of the
world’s great powers and were there to protect the villagers from the Germans. She hoped they would also be able to prevent further unnecessary bloodshed between the rival guerrilla groups like the deaths of the two local boys in the battle against Zervas’ forces in Keramitsa. Like her son, she was reminded of her husband, with his naïveté and optimism.

The British received the homage of the villagers, apparently unaware of Prokopi and Spiro Skevis sitting nearby, their faces dark with anger. After the foreigners finished their beer and left the square, Prokopi Skevis stood and spoke to the crowd of peasants. He warned them not to believe everything the English said. “Remember, it’s the British sovereigns that are paying for the EDES mercenaries of the traitor Zervas,” he said heatedly. “Be polite to the English; they have the money, guns and supplies we need. But the ally who will win the war for us is Russia, not England.”

Chastened, the villagers nodded and resolved to curtail their enthusiasm for the British in the future.

The local ELAS guerrillas milling around the village square found more than ideological reasons to resent the Englishmen, as they watched the two Botsaris girls arrive every morning at the British mission, dressed in their clinging, pastel-colored Athenian dresses, their frayed cloth coats clutched around them. As she passed the guerrillas, who had been assigned to spy on the activities at the British headquarters, Angeliki always greeted them with a dimpling smile and a toss of her honey-colored hair. They stared after her with the eyes of a pack of starving dogs contemplating a slaughtered lamb on a butcher’s hook. Most of the ELAS guerrillas were young village men who had never had a woman. There was no opportunity in a place like Lia for sexual adventures. The only unions possible were in the conjugal bed with partners who had been chosen by one’s parents with much thought for dowries and little concern for compatibility. The married men among the ELAS group watched the way the thin fabric of Angeliki’s bright dresses clung to her ample hips as she walked. Her skin was soft and smooth as a ripe apricot, and she smelled of lemon blossoms. It was impossible not to compare her with their rough-skinned, sinewy wives who wore homespun and smelled of the stable even in bed.

Despite the atheism of their political movement, the ELAS guerrillas were subjected to sexual repression as strict as that of any monastery. “Your rod is only to piss with!”
Kapetan
Aris often lectured his troops. To lay a hand on a woman was to risk immediate execution by a firing squad. The Skevis men posted outside the British headquarters watched with feverish eyes as Angeliki and her sister Constantina smiled invitingly and moved in and out of the commandos’ quarters. They fantasized what went on between the shameless Botsaris girls and the British officers inside those walls, and the thoughts filled them with envy and hatred.

Within a week of Philip Nind’s arrival, the British commandos were galvanized by the kind of message from headquarters that they had been hoping
for. Ken stood up from the table, where he had been decoding the latest orders, and held out a paper with shaking hands. The Allies were going to land on Corfu in about seven days, it said, and Philip and Ian’s assignment was to gather local guerrillas and use them to dynamite the Yannina-Igoumenitsa road so that German reinforcements from the interior could not reach the island.

While Ian prepared the explosive charges, Philip begged first the Skevis ELAS group and then the nearest EDES guerrilla headquarters for men to go with him to the target spot, which lay inside territory held by the Moslem collaborators of the Germans. Both groups refused to give him any more than one man each to act as guides, and those two guerrillas slipped away as soon as they approached Cham territory. With only forty-eight hours left until the expected invasion, the frantic British officers found themselves without a single guerrilla to help in blowing up the road. They were saved by a last-minute message from Cairo canceling the whole operation. Much later they learned that the “Allied landing” had been a red herring, a smoke screen to distract Hitler and keep the Germans away from other fronts.

Ian and Philip had been taught a lesson: the local guerrillas could not be counted on in a crisis. They decided to ask for men from both guerrilla groups whom they would personally train for future missions. While the Skevis brothers refused them outright, the EDES forces based in Keramitsa agreed to let them have fifteen
andartes
.

A thunderous, window-rattling explosion made Eleni drop the plate of beans she was holding. It seemed to come from the eastern edge of the village and her first thought was of Nikola, who was playing outside. She found him in the nearby yard of Foto Bollis, with Foto’s small son Sotiris. Like his cousin Mitsi, Foto Bollis was a devout Communist. He came out and smiled at Eleni’s alarmed expression as she gathered her four-year-old son in her arms. The repeated boom of dynamite in the distance had set all the village dogs to howling. “It’s only the British, teaching a few EDES guerrillas how to blow holes in the mountainside,” said Bollis. “They think they can turn the fascist bootlickers into commandos.”

Eleni listened in astonishment. “There are EDES
andartes
in the village?” she exclaimed. “What does Spiro Skevis think about that?”

Foto Bollis shrugged and said sarcastically, “What does it matter to Spiro? Haven’t you heard, ELAS and EDES, we’re all friends now, under the kindly wing of the British.”

Shaken by the explosions, Eleni shooed Nikola home as she wondered what was beneath the mocking tone in Foto’s voice. She decided to visit her friend Alexandra Botsaris that evening to see if she could learn any more from her daughter Angeliki.

As Eleni was drinking mountain tea with the widow, she was startled to see Angeliki and Constantina escorted to their doorstep by the burly English
radio operator, with two fierce-looking dogs on chains and a rifle over his shoulder. The Englishman didn’t come in the door but disappeared into the darkness once the girls were inside.

Eleni looked at them curiously. First the explosions, then the news that EDES guerrillas were being trained by the British, she thought, and now the Botsaris girls coming home with a bodyguard. She asked Angeliki what was going on. The young woman sat down with a sigh and said, “If you ask me, the English have made a mistake bringing EDES guerrillas here, but they’re determined to train a group in explosives and Skevis wouldn’t give them any of his men. The English are too trusting; they shouldn’t take Skevis’ word that he’ll leave them alone.”

Angeliki told Eleni that from the first, Skevis had posted spies outside the British mission around the clock, and every night the ELAS guerrillas intercepted her and her sister on the way home to question them about what they had seen and heard inside. “I just smiled and told them I couldn’t understand a word of what went on,” said Angeliki, “which was the truth. We spend most of the time in the kitchen, anyway. But then they started searching us to see if we were carrying messages and money to EDES from the British. That’s when I complained to Captain Philip and he assigned Ken to escort us to and from work every day.”

Angeliki tossed her blond hair, and her cheeks reddened slightly. “I know what they think of us—they think we’re the Englishmen’s whores,” she said. “I hear the words they whisper as we pass by. The rest of the village is no better—everyone calls us ‘girls from the sweet water’ because we go into the British headquarters. They can call us what they like. All I know is that the British saved our lives and my mother’s too. Without the money they’re paying us, we’d never have survived the year. If they’d come earlier, my sister and brother might still be alive too. But I’m afraid for the English; they don’t realize that Skevis is planning trouble.”

Angeliki’s premonition proved to be correct. On the evening of October 12, only seven days after the British officers had begun training the commando unit, the borrowed EDES guerrillas and the mulatto interpreter, Peter, got cheerfully drunk, celebrating a new shipment of plum wine from Povla at Dimitri Stratis’ coffeehouse where their meals were paid for by the British. At about eleven-thirty they headed for the schoolhouse, where they were quartered, singing klephtic songs.

In the headquarters the British officers were startled by a burst of machine-gun fire and ran out the door to see their interpreter and their commando unit being pushed down the road, hands above their heads, while Spiro Skevis’ ELAS
andartes
prodded them with their guns. Captain Philip pulled the interpreter out of the line and with his help launched into a loud protest: hadn’t Skevis agreed to leave the commandos alone? Skevis coolly insisted that the men were his prisoners, although he would let the interpreter go. “I’m only acting on orders from headquarters,” he said levelly. “All EDES men are to be arrested.”

Captain Philip, with the interpreter in tow, steamed off on the three-mile walk to ELAS headquarters at Kouremadhi to demand an explanation, but as soon as he approached the town he heard the sound of gunfire and realized that Skevis’ actions weren’t an isolated incident. ELAS and EDES, defying the truce they had signed at the urging of the British, were engaged in an all-out civil war. Philip learned from the commanding officer at Kouremadhi that the ELAS leader, Aris, was moving to attack Zervas’ EDES forces near Arta. As for the British commandos, he was told, ELAS no longer recognized their authority.

Philip Nind returned to Lia in despair. A civil war between the two resistance groups was precisely what he and the other British commandos had been sent to the Mourgana to prevent. He sent a message to Cairo detailing the night’s events and within twenty-four hours received an answer advising all British liaison officers in Greece to “sit on the fence, grin cheerfully, and swallow insults” for the time being. In the morning the British sent their cook and the Botsaris girls out to round up supplies and withdrew into their small house to await the outcome of the battles on the hills below.

The British officers learned that ELAS had broken the truce because of a sudden movement by the Germans northward which made the leftist guerrilla army mistakenly think the Nazis were about to evacuate the country and that the time had come to annihilate the rightist guerrilla forces so that ELAS could remain in complete control of Greece after the Germans left. The attacking ELAS guerrillas were so victorious throughout northern Greece that EDES leader Napoleon Zervas ordered his men to run, saving themselves as best they could, melting into the crags and ravines of the mountains and returning to their villages to regroup six weeks later. The only spot where Zervas’ troops were victorious was in a small pocket at Keramitsa, six miles southeast of Lia. The EDES forces there were so cut off that they never got the orders to retreat and disband. Instead, they repelled the attacking ELAS forces, even though nearly all their officers died or were wounded in the effort.

The freak EDES victory so close to Lia decided Spiro Skevis to take his guerrillas out of the village for a while in case the rightist EDES forces moved from Keramitsa into the Mourgana mountains. As the local
andartes
pulled out, the villagers barricaded themselves into their houses. They had heard enough of Prokopi Skevis’ propaganda speeches to be convinced that the EDES guerrillas of Zervas were ruthless, bloodthirsty savages. Eleni Gatzoyiannis was as frightened as the rest, even though her father scoffed at Prokopi’s tirades.

On the day the EDES guerrillas marched up the mountain and arrived in Lia, the only inhabitant who was not locked indoors was the schoolteacher Minas Stratis, who, despite the frantic warnings of his family, publicly welcomed their commander, Major Theodoros Sarantis, to the village. Sarantis took up headquarters in Lia’s schoolhouse along with his
bodyguards and sent the rest of his men on to Babouri to find quarters.

Once the villagers of Lia discovered that the EDES guerrillas did not burn, rape and pillage, despite the Skevis brothers’ predictions, they emerged from their houses. Most of the Liotes kept their distance from the EDES guerrillas to show their sympathy for ELAS, but a few inhabitants began to enjoy their presence.

The men of Skevis’ leftist guerrilla band had been forbidden to drink or play cards, prohibitions which Zervas’ rightists did not share; and the British officers as well as the schoolteacher Minas Stratis enjoyed convivial evenings with the urbane, bilingual Major Sarantis. Kitso Haidis, who had returned from the mill he rented in Kefalovriso to take over his turn at running the family mill in Lia, also enjoyed socializing with Sarantis, who shared his royalist views. When the EDES officers held a memorial service on November 7 in the main church of Babouri to honor their comrades who had fallen in the recent battle, Kitso and Minas Stratis made the twenty-minute walk to the neighboring village to attend.