The Schirmer Inheritance

Monsieur Hagen smiled. “Of course, Mr. Carey. We are closer to these things here. Vafiades was a Turkish-born Greek, a tobacco worker before the war. He was a Communist of many years’ standing and had been to prison on that account. No doubt he had a respect for revolutionary tradition. When the Communists gave him command of the rebel army he decided to be known simply as Markos. It has only two syllables and is more dramatic. If the rebels had won he might have become as big a man as Tito. As it was, if you will forgive the comparison, he had something in common with your General Lee. He won his battles but lost the war. And for the same kind of reasons. For Lee, the loss of Vicksburg and Atlanta, especially Atlanta, meant the destruction of his lines of communication. For Markos, also faced by superior numbers, the closing of the Yugoslav frontier had the same sort of effect. As long as the Communists of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania helped him, he was in a strong position. By retiring across those frontiers, he was able to break off any action that looked like developing unfavourably. Then, behind the frontier, he could regroup and reorganize in safety, gather reinforcements, and appear again with deadly effect on a weakly held sector of the government front. When Tito quarrelled with Stalin and withdrew his support of the Macedonian plan, he cut Markos’s lateral lines of communication in two. Greece owes much to Tito.”

“But wouldn’t Markos have been beaten in the end anyway?”

Monsieur Hagen made a doubtful face. “Maybe. British and American aid did much. I do not dispute that. The Greek army and air force were completely transformed. But the denial of the Yugoslav frontier to Markos made it possible to use that power quickly and decisively. In January 1949, after over two years’ fighting, the Markos forces were in possession of Naoussa, a big industrial town only eighty miles from Salonika itself. Nine months later they were beaten. All that was left was a pocket of resistance on Mount Grammos, near the Albanian frontier.”

“I see.” George smiled. “Well, there doesn’t seem to be much likelihood of my being able to talk to General Vafiades, does there?”

“I’m afraid not, Mr. Carey.”

“And even if I could, there wouldn’t be much sense in my asking him about a German Sergeant who got caught in an ambush in ’44.”

Monsieur Hagen bowed his head politely. “None.”

“So let me get it straight, sir. In 1944 the guerrillas- andartes you call them, do you? — the andartes killed some Germans and recruited others. Is that right?”

“Certainly.”

“So that if the German soldier I’m interested in managed to get away alive after that ambush, it would not be fantastic to give him a fifty-fifty chance of staying alive?”

“Not at all fantastic. Very reasonable.”

“I see. Thanks.”

Two days later George and Miss Kolin were in Greece.

7

“Forty-five thousand killed, including three thousand five hundred civilians murdered by the rebels and seven hundred blown up by their mines. Twice as many wounded. Eleven thousand houses destroyed. Seven hundred thousand persons driven from their homes in rebel areas. Twenty-eight thousand forcibly removed to Communist countries. Seven thousand villages looted. That is what Markos and his friends cost Greece.”

Colonel Chrysantos paused and, leaning back in his swivel chair, smiled bitterly at George and Miss Kolin. It was an effective pose. He was a very handsome man with keen, dark eyes. “And I have heard it said by the British and the Americans,” he added, “that we have been too firm with our Communists. Too firm!” He threw up his long, thin hands.

George murmured vaguely. He knew that the Colonel’s ideas of what constituted firmness were very different from his own and that a discussion of them would not be profitable. Monsieur Hagen, the Red Cross man, who had given him the letter of introduction to Colonel Chrysantos, had made the position clear. The Colonel was a desirable acquaintance only in so far as he was a senior officer in the Salonika branch of Greek military intelligence, who could lay his hands on the kind of information George needed. He was not a person towards whom it was possible to have very friendly feelings.

“Do these casualty figures include the rebels, Colonel?” he asked.

“Of the killed, yes. Twenty-eight of the forty-five thousand were rebels. About their wounded we have naturally no accurate figures; but in addition to those we killed, we captured thirteen thousand, and twenty-seven thousand more surrendered.”

“Do you have lists of the names?”

“Certainly.”

“Would it be possible to see if the name of this German is on one of those lists?”

“Of course. But you know we did not take more than a handful of Germans.”

“Still it might be worth trying, though, as I say, I don’t even know yet if the man survived the ambush.”