Wimmel’s terms were made known. Eighty hostages were to be chosen at once. The rest of the men would comb the island, find the guerrillas, and bring them back—with the stolen weapons. It was not sufficient to produce the corpses of three brave volunteers. If we did this within the next twenty-four hours the hostages would be deported to labor camps. If we did not, they would be shot.

“I asked how we were to capture, even if we could find them, three desperate armed men. He simply looked at his watch and said, in German, It is eleven o'clock. You have until noon tomorrow.

“At the quay I was made to repeat in Greek what I had been told. The men all began to shout suggestions, to complain, to demand weapons. In the end the colonel fired a shot from his pistol in the air, and there was quiet. The roll of the village men was called. Wimmel himself picked out the hostages as they filed forward. I noticed that he picked the healthiest, the ones between twenty and forty, as if he were thinking of the labor camp. But I think that he was choosing the best specimens for death. He chose seventy-nine like that, and then pointed at me. I was the eightieth hostage.

“So the eighty of us were marched off to the school and put under close guard. We were crammed in one classroom, without sanitation, given nothing to eat or drink—die Raben were guarding us—and even worse, no news. It was only much later that I found out what happened during that time.

“The remaining men rushed to their homes—poles, sickles, knives, they picked up what they could and then met again on a bill above the village. Men so old they could hardly walk, boys of ten and twelve. Some women tried to join them but they were pushed back. To be guarantors of their men’s return.

“This sad regiment argued, as Greeks always will. They decided on one plan, then on another. In the end someone took charge and allotted positions and areas to search. They set out—one hundred and twenty of them. They were not to know that they were searching in vain even before they began. But even if the guerrillas had been in the pine forest I do not think they would have found them—let alone captured them. So many trees, so many ravines, so many rocks.

“They stayed out all night on the hills in a loose cordon across the island, hoping that the guerrillas might try and break through to the village. They searched wildly the next morning. At ten they met and tried to make up their minds to launch a desperate attack on the troops down in the village. But the wiser heads knew it could only end in an even greater tragedy. There was a village in the Maui where two months before the Germans had killed every man, woman and child for far less provocation.

“At noon, they came, carrying a cross and ikons, down to the village. Wimmel was waiting for them. Their spokesman, an old sailor, in a last vain lie told him they had seen the guerrillas escape in a small boat. Wimmel smiled, shook his head and had the old man put under arrest—an eighty-first hostage. What had happened was simple. The German themselves had already captured the guerrillas. In the village. But let us look at Wimmel.”

Conchis clapped his hands again.

“This is him, in Athens. One of the Resistance groups took it so that we should have his face recorded.”

The generator sputted to life again, the screen lived. A town street. A German jeeplike vehicle drew up in the shade on the opposite side of the street. Three officers got out and walked in the hard sunlight diagonally across the camera, which must have been in the groundfloor room of the house next to the one they were entering. The head of someone passing blocked the view. A shorter, trimmer man led the way. I could see he had an air of curt, invincible authority. The other two men existed in his wake. Something, a shutter or a screen, obscured the view. Darkness. Then came a still of a man in civilian clothes.

“That is the only known photograph of him before the war.”

An unexceptional face; but a mean mouth. I remembered there were other sorts of humorlessness and fixed stare besides Conchis’s; and much more unpleasant ones. There was a certain similarity with the face of the “colonel” on the central ridge; but they were different men.

“And these are excerpts from newsreels taken in Poland.”

As they came on, Conchis said, “That is him, behind the general"; or “Wimmel is on the extreme left.” Though I could see the film was genuine, I had the same feeling that films of the Nazis had always given me; of unreality, of the distance, enormous, between a Europe that could breed such monsters and an England that could not. And I saw that Conchis was trying to enweb me, to make me feel too innocent, too historically green. Yet when I glanced at his face reflected in the light from the screen, he seemed even more absorbed in what he saw than I was myself; more a victim of the past.

“What the guerrillas must have done is this. As soon as they realized their boat had been burned they doubled back towards the village. They were probably already only just outside it when Anton came to see me. What we did not know was that one of them had relations on the outskirts of the village—a family called Tsatsos. It consisted of two sisters of eighteen and twenty, a father and a brother. But the men happened to have left two days before for the Piraeus with a cargo of olive oil—they had a small caïque and the Germans allowed a certain amount of coastal traffic. One of the guerrillas was a cousin of these girls—probably in love with the elder one.

“The guerrillas came to the cottage unseen, before anyone in the village knew of the catastrophe. They were no doubt counting on using the family caïque. But it was away. Later a weeping neighbor arrived to tell the sisters the news of the killing and all that I had told the village men. By then the guerrillas were in hiding. We do not know where they spent that night. Probably in a cistern. Parties of hastily constituted vigilantes searched every cottage and villa, empty and lived-in, in the village, including the Tsatsoses', and found nothing. Whether the girls were simply frightened or unusually patriotic we shall never know. But they had no blood relations in the village—and of course the father and brother were safely out of it.

“The guerrillas must that next day have decided to split up. At any rate the girls started baking bread. A sharp-eyed neighbor noticed it, and remembered that they had been baking only two days before. Bread for the brother and father to take on the voyage. Apparently she did not suspect anything at once. But about five o'clock she went to the school and told the Germans. She had three relations among the hostages.

“A squad of die Raben arrived at the cottage. Only the cousin was there. He threw himself into a cupboard. He heard the two girls being struck, and screaming. He knew his time was up, so he leapt out, pistol in hand, fired before the Germans could move—and nothing happened. The pistol had jammed.

“They took the three to the school, where they were interrogated. The girls were tortured, the cousin was quickly made to cooperate. Two hours later—when night had come—he led the way down the coast road to an empty villa, knocked on the shutter and whispered to his two comrades that the sisters had managed to find a boat. As they came through the gate the Germans pounced. The leader was shot in the arm, but no one else was hurt.”

I interrupted. “And he was a Cretan?”

“Yes. Quite like the man you saw. Only shorter and broader.

“All that time we hostages had been up in the classroom. It faced over the pine forest, so we could not see any of the comings and goings. But about nine we heard two terrible screams of pain and a fraction later a tremendous cry. The one Greek word: eleutheria. You may think that we cried in return, but we did not. Instead we felt hope—that the guerrillas had been caught. Not long after that there were two bursts of automatic fire. And some time after that the door of our room was thrown open. I was called out, and another man: the local butcher.