RE-EDUCATION IN GREECE

The Greeks..."people they could understand"

They were fighting on our side (or we were fighting on their side, it didn't matter which), and they behaved like allies and friends. Unlike the Egyptians, and the gracious city-dwellers of Palestine, many of whom had fled from the terrorism of Nazi Germany, the Greeks didn't exploit and loot the soldiers whom chance (mischance, as far as the soldiers were concerned) sent among them as antagonists of Nazi Germany. Here were people the Australians could understand, here were people who talked the same language, even if they talked it in a different tongue. It was language of courage and decency and good faith.

The Australians did not have many days to spend in Athens. The Greek Army was still belabouring Mussolini's crack regiments in Albania, but the Shadow of Hitler's Wehrmacht was travelling fast through the Balkans and could not be long before the Germans would strike at Greece. The troops, as troops do, sensed what their leaders knew, and in Athens they snatched at every pleasure they were offered as a man might snatch at the delicacies of the table before he enters upon a fast. They drank deep of beer and ouzo and the resinated wine of Greece, they invaded the cabarets and flirted with the Greek "hostesses." 

They sang "Waltzing Matilda" in the blackout, and learned to like the sweet Greek coffee and to love and understand this strange, obstinate, unpredictable people who had suddenly shown themselves not mere keepers of fish-and-chips shops but men with soul and courage and the will to die in a good cause.

It was a lovely Spring in Athens, soft and clear and cool. The shadows were all of man's making. We heard from across the Mediterranean of the retreat in the desert-the Benghazi Handicap. Then, hard on the heels of that news, came word of the acceptance of the Nazis by the Jugoslav Government, then of the overthrow of the quislings by young King Peter's party, then of the collapse of organised Jugoslav resistance under the forward sweep of the Wehrmacht. Athens was a whispering gallery rustling with true and false reports, fact and fiction. Above it, the ruins on the Acropolis looked down, impassive as only old masonry can be impassive, heedless of this moment of time that was passing as so many other moments of time had

passed, leaving unchanged those weathered monuments of a dead age that can never die.

In April sunshine, the Australians moved out of Athens to take up their positions in the mountains of the north. The fields were bright with wildflowers. Blossoming trees splashed the way with color. The road was like a giant's switchback. It looped over dizzy mountain passes, threaded ravines, crossed echoing gorges on slender-seeming bridges, twisting in countless bends like the body of a tortured anaconda. The long convoys of military trucks passed lofty peaks, still white with the snow of winter, flashing and sparkling in the brilliant sunshine. They passed gangs of road-workers toiling on the -roads. Many a sturdy peasant woman or girl, her hair bound in a colored headcloth, stood among the men, swinging her pick or shovel, laboring like a man in order that her effort should release a soldier to fight in the front line. The road-workers interrupted their work as the convoys went by, hailing the Australians with welcoming shouts and the Thumbs-Up signal.

"Zeeto Australeer. (Hooray for Australia!) Zeeto Anglia! (Hooray for England!) " they called.

The Australians' hearts warmed to these men and women of a fighting nation whose spirit had never been shaken by the threats and sabre-rattlings of the Axis Powers, these people who had alone fought Italy for nearly six months and were now about to join hands with the British in fighting Germany also. The men-always old men too feeble to fight, or soldiers invalided home from the front-the women and the children, turned out of their homes and their shops to welcome the Australians in every village as the convoys rolled through. They lined the streets, shouting and waving. 

Many of the girls carried wildflowers gathered on the hillsides. They tossed the flowers into the passing trucks or thrust them into the outstretched hands of men who leaned out to grasp them. When a convoy halted in a village, the people always came forward with gifts of wine and bread. The Greek villagers are desperately poor, most of them relying on the overworked soil for their daily food, but many of them would accept nothing from the Australians in payment for what they gave. Many an Australian fumbled out his roll of drachmae only to stow it hastily away again in face of the hurt refusals his money inspired.

One silver-haired old Greek woman literally snarled seven or eight words at an Australian who offered her money for a gift of wine in one village.

"Cripes, lady, I'm sorry," he said, blushing to the ears.

An English-speaking Greek who stood near reassured him.

"She ain't sore with you, friend," he said (he had evidently learned his English in the United States of America) . "She's got four sons fighting and she only sounded sore because she was saying 'We'll make the Huns pay if they come. That will be different.'"

The journey to the positions in the north was a three-day haul for the big army convoys. The men slept at night rolled in their blankets on brackened hillsides and woke in the morning to find their blankets beaded with heavy dew. I remember one night I spent with a unit on the way to the line in an upland valley through which ran a wide, shallow river. The evening mist was folding down over the valley when we halted for the night and then, stripping ourselves naked on the flat, pebbly beaches edging the river, rolled in the clear, biting mountain water. Down the valley lights pricked the dusk here and there where cottagers were turning up their lamps for the night. It was a scene inexpressibly beautiful, inexpressibly serene.

After the evening stew, I heard half a dozen infantrymen talking to a small girl, aged nine or ten, and her brother, a couple of years younger, who had wandered over for a close view of the soldiers. The girl and boy each spoke enough English to make themselves understood, and after some talk the boy pointed down the valley to a dark old castle standing on a weather-beaten crag and told us:

"There . . . Mussolini."

We laughed, but the children were indignant at our mirth. The girl reinforced her brother's assertion. Yes, it was true. she told us, all true. Mussolini was held prisoner in the castle on the crag.

"You're kidding," a big Australian said. Then, seeing their expressions of puzzlement, he interpreted, "I mean, it's not true."

"Yes, true!" the girl said. "True! Mussolini there"

"Who told you?" an Australian asked.

''Papa," said the boy. "Yes," the girl insisted. "Papa told us."

We looked down the valley towards the old castle, hoping that their story was at least an intelligent anticipation.

Then one of the infantrymen heaved a deep sigh and, in a sentence, summarised at once our feelings about Mussolini and about Greece.

"All I can say is," he said'. "that it's too good for the bastard!"

The force of that observation continued to grow stronger as the Australians moved farther north, penetrating deeper into the mountains beyond Larissa and Ellason and Servia to their battle positions near the snow line. Here, the Italians had left their mark. Not the Italian Army. It had never managed to reach so far for all its swaggering confidence when the attack on Greece began.

Craters pitted the streets like open wounds. Buildings were ripped and shattered, windowless shops and houses stared blindly at the day like eyeless old men, smashed window-glass littered the ground. 

But the people  of Larissa were unshaken. They moved about their town with the hard, obstinate look of people who cannot be bombed or bullied into submission.

The mountain wind struck like a knife. The days were sunny, but cold; the air of the nights bit deep. The Australians settled down in the folds and hollows, then took their bearings. Snow-clad peaks shouldered around them, dizzy pyramids of untellable antiquity whose white caps glittered like fine brilliants in the light of dawn and in a hundred hues as the glow of the setting sun touched them at nightfall.

Here in the mountains war seemed far away, but tension was gathering over the green valleys and the high ridges. A spirit of unease was abroad. Battle is terrifying, but battle provides a compensating excitement that dulls fear as anesthetic dulls pain. Men do incredible acts in battle, not because they are supermen but because battle inspires normal men temporarily with abnormal courage. Waiting for battle is different. Waiting for battle is hard-especially when the enemy has the initiative as the Germans had the initiative in Greece and is able deliberately and calmly to choose the moment when the battle shall begin. It is waiting for the shock of battle that draws men's nerves taut and breaks them unless they are strong.

The Australians at large did not know in Greece that the battle was lost before it was begun. Nor did the New Zealanders or the Tommies know it. Their senior officers knew it, because they had seen this kind of thing happen in World War I - a boy sent to do a man's job, a small force moderately armed pitted against a large force superbly armed. It was the strongest force that could be provided at the moment, and it was equipped with the best arms that were to be had in the Mediterranean theatre, but the force was not big enough and the arms were not good enough for the tasks they had to do. It wasn't anybody's fault, it was just the way things were, the way things had to be.

Long afterwards, the brigadier who commanded the first Australian infantry brigade to take up its position on the forward lines in Greece told me:

"I went to Greece believing we would never get out. It was a miracle that two-thirds of us did get out. I found out later that every senior officer was thinking exactly as I was thinking then, and I believe that that was the only reason we did get out: Every one of us had so thoroughly digested his plans for withdrawal that the retreat went without a hitch."

Another brigadier - he is now a lieutenant-general and one of Australia's foremost fighting commanders dropped a remark in the early days of the German attack in Greece which made me realise then that the game was up at the outset.

I said to him, "How do you feel about things, Sir?"

"Oh," he replied, "quite happy." Then dryly: "Except, you know, you'd like to see a man or two about. And some equipment."

And another officer, an Intelligence man, told me one day before the blitz began, waving his arm airily to the surrounding peaks and valleys:

"Oh, yes, we've got men out there in the mountains. Of course, there are more mountains than men."

But the troops in general did not know these things. They did not know how thinly the mountains were held, how impossible was the task that had been set them. Perhaps it is as well that they did not know the whole grim picture, though I believe they would have fought in any circumstances ju3t, as willingly as they did fight.

The line was based on Katerini, Edessa and Veve. It was 75 miles long, and it was held by less than four divisions-two brigades of Australians, a division of New Zealanders, a British armored brigade and two divisions of Greeks. Nobody could ever doubt the courage or tenacity of a Greek, but the Greek divisions, even compared with the Australians and New Zealanders, much less with the Germans, were poorly armed. Wandering round among the Australians, I met men who said, "Why the hell are we fighting here? Why don't they pull us farther back on a shorter line and let the Jerries come to us? We'd stop the sods pronto farther back." 

They didn't know, they couldn't know, that the British High Command had wanted to defend a shorter line farther south, that it had been overridden by the Greek Government which was not prepared to withdraw its own troops to the south after the splendid victories they had won against the Italians. The Government held that a forward defence policy was indispensable for "political reasons." I suppose you look at a battle either with the eyes of a politician or with the eyes of a soldier, and if your eyes are a politician's eyes you can understand and applaud a sacrifice of blood for political reasons, but if your eyes are a soldier's eyes you think "To hell with politics!" I don't know about these things. I just feel that the mixing of battles and politics is wrong, because I have seen so many men die when politics and battles became mixed.

A new rumour blew into the mountains on every gust of wind, and the atmosphere grew tauter as the days of April crept on. Luckily the Australians were occupied with their preparations. They did not have much time for thinking and wondering and questioning. The brigade that had arrived first had found its feet and dug itself in, but the second brigade to arrive knew that time was short, that it had to move fast. It had been chosen to cover the Veve Pass, one of the vulnerable links in the defensive chain. The units had to scramble hastily into their positions. 

The last of the men reached the Veve area as the German columns were moving down from the north, and they had to race against time. One battalion in a day clawed its way eleven and a half miles on foot across cruel, rocky ridges and rugged gorges. Then the men, still aching from the climb, enervated by the atmosphere of the unaccustomed altitude, went to work to dig themselves in on the ridges that looked down over the rolling mountain peaks to the Monastir Valley beyond.

They worked all through the day on April 10. That night an enemy patrol, moving unseen in the darkness, surrounded one isolated party and captured it. Thus, the Australians met the Germans for the first time.

That was a bitter night for the men of Veve. Few of them had blankets. They had been able to carry little into their mountain positions except bare essentials. The darkness was freezing. And all night German patrols, seeking for points of weakness, nudged and prodded the Australians. Some 'men snatched a few minutes' sleep in the holes they had dug for themselves. Many men did not close their eyes at all. The cold and the thudding of the guns shelling the Germans and the consciousness that the enemy was moving in on them in the darkness kept them wakeful.

It was here that the Germans showed their quality as planners of battles. Some people called their methods treacherous (evidently on the ground that unorthodox methods are treacherous if the enemy uses them first) . A party of men moved into the Australians' lines in the dark. One was calling:

"Stand up, Steve. I can't see you. Where are you, Steve?"

The nearby Australians thought the party was a British patrol which had lost its way in the darkness. The speaker's English was flawless. They obligingly stood up and hailed the wanderers of the night. Tommy-gun fire ripped the night. Some of the Australians, unprepared for attack, were shot down. The rest of the section were made prisoners by the Germans before they could grab their arms, and marched away. The unkindest cut was the sardonic greeting they received from the English-speaking leader of the patrol:

"A very good-night to you, gentlemen."

The ruse was used by German patrols at other points along the line in order to obtain prisoners for identification and interrogation. It soon ceased to be of any value because after dark the troops acquired the habit of shooting first on any movement and challenging the prowlers later.

Dawn broke over the mountains on haggard, weary men. Now, in the early daylight, the cold grew more intense. The sky was grey. A blanket of silence lay over the peaks like a serene lake. Then snow began to fall. It fell gently at first, but soon it was swirling down in white torrents that hid the landscape. Many of the Australians touched snow that day for the first time in their lives. They looked about the formed the dark valleys and ridges like a magician's incantation. Surrounded by incredible beauty, they waited to open a battle which for many of them would mean death.

The real fighting began that afternoon. The Germans struck with tanks and crack troops. The men of Veve found themselves facing, among other well-drilled enemy units, the Fuehrer Regiment of Verfugungstruppe, Hitler's own bodyguard. These young Germans were hand-picked. They were Nazis to the core of their souls, savage and ruthless, but brave. It was men like these, fanatics bred by the New Germany, that had in France, according to report, advanced in mass formation with arms linked into concentrated artillery fire and died with the Horst Wessel Song on their lips. It was men like these that had overrun Poland, the Low Countries, France, the Balkans. They knew nothing but victory.

The German blows were turned and when night fell, the men of Veve still held their ground. But it was evident that the fighting of the day was no more than a preliminary trial of strength, that bloody hours and days lay ahead. The Australians were ordered to remain in their rifle pits between 9.30 at night and 5 in the morning and fire on any movement.

"You may be tired," the order continued. "You may be uncomfortable. But you are doing a job important to the rest of our forces. Therefore you will continue to do that job unless otherwise ordered."'

It was a hopeless fight. It had been intended anyway only as a delaying action, in preparation for a general withdrawal on the night of April 12 to the shorter Olympus Line, some miles farther south. The withdrawal began some hours earlier than the appointed time. The Germans, pressing against the Veve area with tanks and motorised forces, hurling fresh men and equipment into the battle from the reinforcements moving up along the Monastir Valley, broke through the thinly-held line. A desperate fight to re-form the front swayed savagely over the snow-covered ground, but by late afternoon the Australians were under fire from the flank and the rear. They were in danger of being cut off.

Some men did fall into the enemy's bag in those grim hours of fighting in the Greek mountains. One section of infantry was surrounded and Germans with fixed bayonets came surging across to the holes in which the Australians lay, calling on them to surrender. There was nothing for it. They stood up with raised 'hands and scrambled out of their holes in obedience to the menacing gestures of the German bayonets. All except one man, who was a little slower than the rest. A big German pounded over to the hole where an Australian crouched and poised his bayonet threateningly above him.

"Come, Englischer! Surrender!" the German growled.

The Australian sighed, slowly straightened up and brushed snow from his in hat, his shoulders and his knees with numbed hands. Then he gazed trustingly up into the German's face, twisted his cold lips into a pleasant smile and said: "Cold, isn't it?"

The German glowered at his prisoner, breathed hard, jerked his bayonet as though he would have liked to plunge it into this conversational Australian, then snapped: "Cold! Jal"

And the Australian whose courage was high enough to let him jest with death was led away.

It was a harsh withdrawal for the Australians who retreated from these positions in the mountains. They groped their way up steep ridges, clambered and slithered down precipitous defiles. Many of them ripped their flesh on jagged rocks. Many of them came out with boots and uniforms torn and shredded. The guns and the British tanks helped them to escape. Two batteries covered the southward movement, each leapfrogging back through the other in turn and holding the Germans at bay with fire directed over open sights.

The whole line was moving back. It was impossible to get to any point a hurry. The traffic cluttering the roads seemed endless-supply trucks, ammunition waggons, carriers, guns moving through the steep-walled passes. The wind, blowing off the new snowfields on the mountains, was as raw and tearing as a blunt blade. Military traffic policeman, stationed along the mountain roads, shivered in greatcoats and sweaters, with balaclavas swathing their heads under tin hats. Truck-drivers clung to their wheels with numbed fingers, their faces blue with cold.

They looked as tough as the soil that bred them.

They were the Greek equivalent of the Home Guard. Dumbly, patiently, standing in the cold of the mountain roads, they were waiting to give a Greek welcome to any paratroops the Germans might drop. 

Here and there, a battery of light guns, drawn by a team of muscular shaggy mountain ponies, went by. These were the Greeks' famous mountain batteries, their mobile, quick-moving artillery which had time and again turned the balance against the Italians in the battles in Albania.

Now the first retreat was really under way. It was the first of a series of retreats which was to lead back, stage by stage, to the evacuation beaches of the Peloponnesus. 

Many of the Australians who had crossed the Mediterranean flushed with confidence after their conquest of the Italians in the desert, were to die on the soil of Greece. Many others were to be taken prisoner and sent to captivity in Germany. 

It is the little unrecorded events of the retreat that are important because they shine a more revealing light on the Australian character, its fortitude, its steadfastness, its humor, than an)- victory could have done. These men had not known defeat before. They bad known only spectacular victory. Now in Greece they faced the severest test of character that a soldier can encounter. War imposes many

trials on the spirit, but it imposes none more cruel than retreat. At such a time, a word or a gesture can turn a retreat into a rout. Panic can run through thousands of men in a few seconds like a grassfire before the wind. The end of the campaign in Greece was tragic enough, but it would have been incomparably more tragic had panic arisen to unnerve the men who fought their way back to the beaches of the Peloponnesus. It did not arise, because of the toughness of their spiritual fibre-a quality that cannot be acquired by a people but must come to them as a gift of the Magi. It disclosed its presence in the Australians in episode after episode of the retreat in Greece.

A truckload of men from an anti-tank unit were moving south when they found a large body of German troops blocking the road ahead. A detour could not be made, because sheer cliffs rose on each side of the road. It was no time for hesitation. The driver accelerated and drove his truck into the midst of the Germans at sixty miles an hour. The nearer Germans scattered before its onrush, but those behind opened fire on the truck with Tommy-guns and light machine guns. The truck driver fell dead over the wheel, the truck juggernauted on a few yards then overturned. 

The Germans still poured bullets into it until every man appeared to be dead. All were dead, except one man who lay wounded by a bullet and dazed by the capsizing of the truck with the blood of his dead comrades wetting his uniform and face but clear enough in the head to reason that only by feigning death could he escape. He lay for hours until the Germans went their way. Then he crawled clear of the wreckage and the bodies and vanished into the mountains. Days later, tattered, bearded, hungry, gaunt, he overtook the Australian retreat. On foot and alone, he had travelled fifty miles or more through the mountains, in constant danger of falling into the hands of the Germans, with only the sun and stars for compass.

A detachment of Australian engineers were the central figures in another exploit. The lieutenant commanding them learned that twenty modern locomotives, a hospital train and other rolling stock were concentrated at a railway station in no-man's land. The Germans were advancing on it, and within a few hours the booty would fall into their hands. The lieutenant set out with his men and reached the station while the Germans were still some miles away. They wrecked the locomotives by driving them into head-on collisions with each other, then dynamited the ambulance train and a number of freight cars. The Germans were now very near. The engineers laid charges of high explosive in boxes of eggs, raisins and similar innocent-seeming goods loading the rest of the cars.

These charges were fitted with delayed action fuses, timed to reach the explosive simultaneously with the arrival of the Germans. The engineers then retired, with very little ground between them and the advancing German columns. They calculated that, in all, they had worked about a million pounds' worth of damage. Their only regret was that they never learned how many Germans went to the Nazi Valhalla with the charges hidden in the freight cars.

Truck drivers moving troops back along the blitzed roads performed miracles of simple courage. Some of them were driving for thirty hours continuously, plying back and forth along stricken highways menaced by aircraft, sometimes seeing trucks close ahead or behind bombed to fragments or riddled with cannon shells. No men of the retreating army in Greece had a more nerve-tearing task than these drivers and the "spotters" who travelled with them. It is difficult to hear the sound of an aircraft engine when you are crouched over the wheel of a moving truck, and all the trucks carried spotters, who stood on the running-boards to watch for the approach of enemy air formations and warn the drivers. It was a perilous post. Spotters were repeatedly shot dead by bursts from German aircraft which dived on them out of the sun; but no sooner did a dead man topple to the roadway than a volunteer sprang forward to take his place.

Men discovered a new selflessness within themselves in those dark hours when defeat had become inevitable and escape was their best hope. Two Australian gun crews fighting on the Thermopylae Line in the rugged mountains clustering about Mount Parnassus played a splendid part in delaying the German advance and giving part of the retreating force precious hours in which to move south. A bridge on the plain below the pass had been blown by the Australian engineers, and it was necessary, in order to prevent enemy sappers from approaching and repairing the bridge and opening the gate to the onrush of the German forces, to bring down fire on the road approaching the bridge. 

Two Australian guns went forward and took up positions on the face of the cliff looking down on to the plain. There, firing from that exposed slope, they held back the enemy all night and all the following day. Parties of German sappers tried time after time to work their way forward to the damaged bridge, but the steady fire of the two guns on the cliff above drove them back.

The enemy brought up guns which outranged the Australians'  25pounders. Shooting from emplacements beyond the limit of the Australians' fire, they bombarded the face of the cliff until the earth round the nests from which the two guns were firing was cratered and ploughed and sown with steel. The Australians refused to be driven from their positions. One gun was destroyed by a direct hit from a German shell and its crew annihilated, but the crew of the other gun continued to shell the approaches to the bridge

and hold the enemy sappers at bay. At last the German bombardment grew too heavy to be endured. The gunners would have committed suicide had they remained longer. It was only then that they limbered up and dragged their gun up the pass and over the crest and moved off in the wake of the general retreat.

It was strange, too, to watch those days bringing out the humanity in men. It seemed a paradox that these hardships, these bitter experiences which might have been expected to brutalise the men who lived through them, should instead have discovered unguessed gentlenesses beneath the armor that soldiers put over their finer feelings in time of war. When I have forgotten all else that happened in Greece I shall remember one small episode.

I was standing beside a track in a valley high in the mountains, and on the hillside above me I saw figures moving. They came scrambling and slithering down the steep slope. As they drew nearer through the trees and undergrowth, I saw they were Australian soldiers leading shaggy little mountain donkeys. Their battalion was in retreat, but they would not abandon the donkeys that had served them faithfully when they were fighting in a rugged sector of the mountains, inaccessible to motor transport, where only donkeys could clamber through with supplies. There was an old stone water trough at the side of the track. The water it held was green with slime, but the Australians led their thirsty donkeys to the trough and the little animals drank. I noticed one private, whose chin and cheeks bristled with a week's growth of beard. He looked like a brigand, but he was tenderly caressing a spot on the neck of the donkey whose halter he held.

"What's the matter?" I asked him.

"Some cow must have hit the poor little bastard!" he said.

From over the mountains came the steady rumble of enemy guns.

They came to the beaches, beaten in arms but with heads unbowed, in the last days of April. There could be no further retreat. South, the Aegean barred their way. North, the Wehrmacht was closing in on them, as steadily as a lake of flowing lava. The planes of the Luftwaffe were above them all through the hours of daylight and for most of the hours of darkness as they had been above them throughout the retreat. They held unchallenged control of the skies, they were able to do as they pleased. They were over the beaches almost ceaselessly, bombing and gunning the olive groves and scrub in which thousands of troops lay sheltering. Men scraped holes for them-selves in the ground and lay there. There was nothing else they could do. They did not fire on the strafers because they did not want to betray their positions. Anyway, it was a good chance to catch up with the sleep they had missed.

Somebody would say:

Plane just went over at twenty feet machine gunning."

"Did it?" the man in the neighboring hole would reply and promptly drop off to sleep again.

Their brains and bodies were as weary as that.

The Navy was the Army's hope now. And the Navy did not fail. This

comparable with it in the fires of courage it lighted and fanned in men's hearts. There. on the open beaches of the Peloponnesus the miracle of was a Little Dunkirk, not comparable in size with the real Dunkirk but Dunkirk was repeated, the miracle of that hour when "at the end of a lost battle, the rags and blemishes that have hidden the soul of Democracy fell away." The men of Greece fought on to the end.

On the last night of the evacuation by sea a strong party of Australians was marching through a village in darkness on the way to the embarkation quay. The rattle of machine gun fire suddenly clattered above the quiet shuffle of boot-soles on cobblestones. A few men fell wounded or dead. The fire ceased and in the darkness a man came towards the Australian troops. They could see only his outline in the dark. They could not see whether he wore civilian clothing or enemy uniform, but he held his arms upraised in an attitude of truce. Six men went forward. They were within a few yards of him when machine guns opened fire again from houses on each side of the village street. The six who had gone forward fell in their tracks, slain without warning. That made their comrades fighting mad. A force was improvised to clear a way to the quay. The only arms among them were rifles and a few Bren guns and anti-tank rifles. They went into battle in the darkness.

For four hours the approaches to the quay were a pandemonium of noise and mad confusion. These men were fighting for their liberty, and they fought like tiger cats. Germans were on the quay as well as in the village, and these continued to bar the way when the rest of the enemy force had been driven back. The arms which the Germans had should have enabled them to hold off their attackers indefinitely. They had three tanks, three armored cars and a sixty-pounder artillery piece - in opposition to rifles, Bren guns and anti-tank rifles.

"Come on, boys, let's get the bastards!" an Australian yelled.

To-day they still fight in Europe's armies of liberation, defying side by side with Greek, Serb, Croat and Slovene irregulars the Nazis' rule in the Balkans. Others who would not capitulate when capitulation seemed the only course for sane men to follow were more fortunate. One party which struck out on foot from Kalimata Beach the morning after naval ships lifted troops for the last time was typical of these-typical in the hardships it encountered, the difficulties it surmounted, the sheer guts that carried it through the hands of the enemy to safety.

It consisted of four or five officers and seventy or eighty men. They covered the first fifteen miles or so of their journey in trucks. Then the road petered out and they set off on foot over a goat track running along the coast. They did not know what lay ahead. They had been told the Germans were approaching from the direction in which they were moving. They believed they might meet enemy columns at any moment.

They reached a cove in which a ketch lay at anchor. The ketch was moored about four hundred yards from the shore, and the troops hid in the bushes bordering the cove while one of the officers stripped naked and swam out to the little craft. He found it was a solid oaken vessel of about 15 tons, with an auxiliary engine which had been disabled - no doubt intentionally, in order to prevent the ketch's being requisitioned by escaping troops - by the removal of a pipe. The officer signalled to the men on shore and they swam out to lend their aid in preparing the ketch to put to sea.

The sails were gone, but the engine was repaired by improvising a replacement for the missing pipe. It was decided that the ketch should sail at dusk. In the early afternoon some of the men were sent ashore to find water. The others hid below, as a precaution against attracting the unfriendly notice of enemy aircraft searching for fugitives. The precaution was useless. Three German planes appeared soon after the water-party had gone ashore and bombed the ketch, then gunned it. The wooden vessel caught fire. With bitterness, almost despair, in their hearts the Australians dived into the sea and swam ashore, escorted by the German planes which zoomed low through the pall of smoke from the blazing ketch shrouding the sea.

When they reassembled on shore some of the men were wounded, others too fatigued, still others too disheartened, to go farther, but the main party pushed on. Most of them had shed their boots and many, of them their clothing in escaping from the ketch, but they trudged doggedly on in bootless feet over ground which blistered and tore their naked soles, in scanty clothing through bushes which scratched and snagged their skin. They reached a village. The villagers overwhelmed them with kindness. They gave them food and wine. Weeping women handed them shawls to throw over their shoulders as protection from the sun, and rough cowhide sandals to cover their bleeding feet. The men staggered on, some barely conscious through weariness, others suffering the tortures of the damned with cut and bruised feet.

They slept that night in a chapel of the Greek Orthodox Church. Peasants guided them to it and gave them rugs and shawls as covering for the night. They woke in the morning to hear that enemy patrols were searching the country within an hour of their hiding place. Desperate, they asked if any boats were to be had. The villagers told them a whaleboat was hidden in a coastal cave a few miles distant. An officer and six men found their way to the cave, only to discover that the boat had been spirited away.

They worked their way back, keeping to back-tracks in order to diminish the danger of meeting a German patrol, to the village where they had left the main party. There, they learned that the Germans were steadily closing in about them. They held a council of action. There was not a dissentient voice when it was decided that they should not surrender without fighting.

Time was running short and two of the officers set out on a last search for a boat. They found a rowboat and pulled six miles out to sea in hope of sighting a naval ship. The horizon remained unbroken, and at sunset the watchers abandoned their vigil and returned to the shore.

Practically the last hope was gone now, but still these tough men who had striven so hard for liberty would not surrender the slender chance of salvation. A sunken boat lay on the floor of a small inlet, and a working party was formed and toiled late into the night in an effort to raise it. The boat was too badly holed to be salvaged, and when the Australians sank down to sleep on the beach that night they were almost ready to admit defeat.

They slept fitfully. It was about three o'clock in the morning when somebody said:

"Look! A light!". Eyes were strained into the darkness.

There was no mistake. A light winked in the night some miles out to sea. One of the officers shoved off from the beach in the rowboat. Steering on the yellow eye that snapped on and off in the darkness, he pulled out and came upon a British destroyer which had risked itself to return to Greek waters and search for just such resolute stragglers from the evacuation. The destroyer sent boats to shore and before dawn the men who had refused to be conquered were snatched from the groping hand of the Germans.

The Australians had suffered defeat, but their spirit was still victorious.

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Australian Soldier:  a 1940/42 portrait of the Digger's in North Africa