The Sword of Fate (45 page)

“
Wer ist denn dort?
” rang out a challenge, and as I pulled up a little group of Germans armed with tommy-guns ran towards me. I greeted them with a “
Heil Hitler
” and produced von Hentzen’s special pass. An officer was sent for, and for a few minutes I waited in the acutest possible anxiety to know if they would let me through or if they would search the car, find the uniform and have me shot; but to my intense relief the pass acted as a magic wand. The moment the officer saw it he handed it back to me, saluted politely and waved to his men to let me through.

I was stopped four more times within the next two miles, but each time directly someone in authority had seen the pass I was allowed to proceed and even treated with deference. As usual the German organisation was so good that all junior officers evidently had detailed instructions with regard to these special passes, so that there should not be a moment’s unnecessary delay in their agents or important fifth columnists who had such passes carrying on their work of bringing in vital ingelligence.

In the early hours of the morning I made much better going, and just as dawn was breaking I arrived outside the considerable town of Trikkala. It had been badly blitzed, but many houses were still intact, and there seemed to be a great deal of activity going on there. Some of the Greek townsfolk had been formed into labour gangs by the Germans and were at work on repairing roofs and clearing up. German troops swarmed everywhere and numerous Staff cars were constantly running in and out of the town while patrolling aeroplanes kept watch overhead; so it was evidently an important headquarters. I was challenged twice, but the magic pass still worked, and on clearing the town I settled down to do my last fifty miles to Ventsa.

In the country through which I was now passing there was
ample evidence of the desperate battle which had been fought across it and the terrific punishment that our men had inflicted on the enemy. Hardly a farmstead was left standing and round their shells there were almost always more German than British corpses. In one gorge the bridge had been blown up and the river was spanned by a temporary structure made by the German pioneers, and the enemy dead were lying in heaps where our machine-guns must have swathed them down just before the bridge was blasted; and in a wood on the south side of the Aliakamon I came upon a most extraordinary sight. It was the aftermath of a great tank battle. At least fifty wrecked German tanks were lying there, and as far as I could see only six of ours; so it looked as though our fellows had led the Nazis into a trap, luring them towards a spot where, concealed among the trees, we had had a number of carefully planted anti-tank guns.

During that last stretch I was very, very weary; not so much from many hours’ consistent driving, as I had had to pull up many times, often for considerable periods, since leaving Athens, but from cumulative lack of sleep during the past three weeks; yet I was buoyed up by the fact that, if my luck held, within an hour or two now I would have found Daphnis. At eight o’clock on the Saturday morning I re-crossed the river Aliakamon, which we had defended with so much blood and sweat, and by half past I was running into Ventsa.

As I did so my heart sank. It was not on account of the fact that the town had been blitzed, because nearly every town in Northern Greece had suffered that fate, but the place was practically deserted; except for five truckloads of German soldiers there was no one there and not a sign of a headquarters.

Halting the car I called a
Feldwebel
from one of the trucks over to me, showed him the pass and asked him the whereabouts of Marshal List’s headquarters. He told me at once that they had moved the preceding night and that he and his men were the rear party who had been left to clear up. Field G.H.Q. was now at Trikkala.

I was almost too tired to curse myself for a fool, but curse I did. Common sense should have told me that, now British resistance had virtually ceased, the German G.H.Q. would be moved forward more quickly than was allowed for in their original plans; and if I had had my wits about me I should have realised that all the cars and activity in the town through which I had passed just after dawn could hardly be anything else but Marshal List’s headquarters. Now I had to go all the way back there, and
through my stupidity in coming on to Ventsa without bothering to make any inquiry I had added many hours to my journey.

Having thanked the sergeant I turned the car round and pulled it up at the side of the street while I considered what to do. I would have given a great deal to be able to sleep again, but I knew that I dared not.

I had left Athens at five o’clock in the afternoon, whereas Mondragora had declared his intention of leaving it at about three o’clock the following morning. That should have given me ten hours’ clear start. But apart from shorter halts I had been caught in the traffic jam at Eleusis for an hour, stopped by the fire at Thebes for five, and had lost another two by coming on to Ventsa unnecessarily. That was eight hours of my lead lost already. True it was pretty certain that Mondragora would not get through the battle zone without meeting serious checks here and there; but I now had only two hours’ clear lead over him, and it was going to take me all of that to get back to Trikkala.

With sudden apprehension I realised that in the unlikely event of his getting a clear run he might arrive there before me, and that in any case it was going to be a neck-to-neck race. Flinging aside the cigarette, I let in the clutch and settled down to drive like hell.

As I sped south back across the battlefield I made better time than I had on my northward journey. All night long and through the early hours of the morning one-half of the road had been an almost unbroken column of German troop formations moving into Greece; but although there was little danger to them now from aerial attack, as a matter of routine the great majority of them had pulled off the road into the woods and narrower gorges to feed and sleep during the daylight hours. Shortly after ten o’clock I was back in Trikkala.

I parked the car with a number of others in a small orchard just outside the town, showed my pass at a police post which had been established at its entrance, and walked down the main street. I knew that I was now entering upon the really dangerous part of my undertaking. It was most unlikely that more than one in several thousand officers and men in the German Army happened to know the Baron Feldmar von Hentzen personally; but here, at Field Headquarters, it was a very different matter. Although comparatively few of the ordinary military police might know him, a good proportion of the Intelligence officers and German General Staff definitely would. Therefore to pose as him here meant taking my life in my hands.

Yet how else could I hope to find Daphnis but by making inquiries for Mondragora, and it was quite certain that no German officer or man was going to give a civilian any information unless he produced some form of pass. Another matter for acute uneasiness was that, although I spoke German fluently, I was extremely doubtful if my accent was good enough for me to pass as a German in any conversation which consisted of more than a few formal sentences.

On second thoughts I decided that I could do neither Daphnis nor myself any good by risking being shot to start off with, so I had better see how far I could get by pretending to be a Greek fifth columnist before burning my boats by impersonating the Baron.

Considering that the soldiers and N.C.O.s were less likely to be inquisitive and dangerous than the officers, I spoke to several until I found one who could direct me to the quarters of the Intelligence section, with which Mondragora would undoubtedly be working. It was located in a large private house on the northern outskirts of the town and no great distance from the place in which I had parked my car.

On arriving there I tackled the sentry on the gate, but he had never heard of Count Emilo de Mondragora, and he called up his N.C.O. The
unter-offizier
knew Mondragora by sight but said that he had not seen him for the best part of a week, and had no idea where he was or if he would return. He then demanded my papers.

I told him that I was a Greek who had been working with Mondragora and that I had arrived with information which I was prepared to give only to him; but that I had no papers as the filthy British had arrested me in their lines and taken my papers from me, after which I had only just managed to escape with my life.

I was led through the garden into the house, and put in a guardroom for half an hour, then taken out and led before a fat bespectacled captain, to whom I repeated my story.

“Mondragora left us on Tuesday,” he said at once, “and we’re expecting him back some time today. In the meantime you had better give me your information.”

This I refused to do, saying that only Mondragora and the Baron von Hentzen were in a position to assess the value of the information that I had brought, as this hinged entirely upon other data already in their possession.

The name von Hentzen evidently impressed the captain, as his eyes lifted quickly on my mention of it, and I thanked my stars that I had not been rash enough to pose as the Baron.
Before the captain had time to reply I added, apparently as an afterthought, that one other person who had the data was the young woman who had been acting as the Count’s secretary. If I might be taken to her I was willing to talk at once.

With a beating heart I waited for the reply, but the captain shook his head. “I know the young woman you mean. Mondragora got a special permit for her to accompany him on the campaign. But she is not here, and I have not seen her for some time—not since we left Monastir.”

I felt sick with disappointment; but I realised that my only chance of finding Daphnis lay in sticking to Mondragora’s trail, so I said that I would wait for him. I added that I was very hungry and desperately tired, so I would be grateful if he would give me a chit enabling me to buy some food at the nearest canteen and let me spend the time waiting for Mondragora in some place where I could get a sleep.

My mention of von Hentzen and Daphnis had evidently established my
bona fides
in the captain’s eyes, as, summoning an orderly, he told the man to take me to the Intelligence section canteen, where I was to have anything I wanted and that afterwards I was to be given a shakedown in the orderly’s sleeping-quarters.

In the canteen I made a passable meal and half an hour later, when the orderly returned for me, I told him that it was of the utmost importance that I should see the Count the moment that he arrived back. I then gave the man a handsome present out of Diamopholus’ money to be personally responsible for coming along to rouse me without delay.

That the captain had not seen Daphnis since the Headquarters had moved from Monastir was horribly disquieting, but Mondragora had said quite definitely in Athens that she was still working with him, so I could only hope that the captain was wrong and that she was perhaps actually quartered in one of the houses only a few hundred yards from me.

My own position was now extremely precarious, as if Mondragora arrived while I was sleeping and the captain sent him straight along to see me, or if I could find no way of evading being taken up to him, the moment we came face to face he would recognise me, and the fat would then be in the fire. I was a British officer who had penetrated into the German Headquarters by disguising himself in civilian clothes and posing as a Greek fifth columnist, so it would be a brick wall and a shooting-party for me without even the formality of a trial.

In spite of my new grounds for anxiety about Daphnis and my now considerable perturbation on my own account, I was so tired after my long journey that I soon fell asleep and I got in the best part of six hours. It was after six o’clock in the evening when the orderly came to rouse me with the news that Mondragora had just arrived and was now with the captain.

I said that as soon as he had finished with the captain I must see him, but in the meantime I’d be glad if I could have a wash to freshen myself up; so the man led me out of the back of the house to the stables, where some canvas troughs had been fixed up for the ordinary soldiers to wash in.

I was wondering agitatedly now if, in order to get free of the man, I would have to knock him out, but fortunately he saved me the trouble by saying: “When you’ve done you know the way up. You’ll find me in the passage, and I expect they’ll send for you when they want you.”

Immediately his back was turned I began to dry my hands, and the moment he had disappeared into the house I slipped out of the stable. Walking swiftly down a short path that was screened with bushes, I climbed out over the garden wall.

As he was a civilian and had a woman secretary travelling with him, I thought it unlikely that Mondragora would have quarters with the officers and more probable that a billet would have been allotted to him in one of the houses near by. There was at least a chance that Daphnis was already there, waiting for his return; so clearly my next move was to keep an unremitting watch on the big villa, where the Intelligence staff was quartered, and follow Mondragora wherever he went when he came out of it.

I found a good place among some bushes in the next-door garden from which I could just see over the wall without much risk of being spotted myself, and I settled down to wait there with such patience as I could muster.

My wait proved so long that although I had kept my eyes riveted on the front door of the house, I began to feel a rising sense of panic from imagining that somehow or other I must have taken them off it for just a moment while the Count walked out, or else that he had gone out of the back entrance and that I’d lost him. But I could only hang on there; and thank God I did, as at a little after eight he appeared on the porch, walked swiftly down the stone steps, across the front garden and out of the gate.

Cautiously emerging from my hiding-place I was about to follow when I saw him cross a small open space towards his car, which was parked under some trees. My own car was in the orchard, not very far off, so giving the sentry on the gate of the Intelligence H.Q. a wide berth I made my way as quickly as I could to the orchard. By the time I reached my car, Mondragora was already in his and just driving it on to the main road. He did not turn towards the town, but north towards the open country, and slipping in my clutch I followed.