Baird looked at him narrowly and wondered why it was that he must be permanently in revolt. He missed one of the common pleasures of community — that of participation. “Well,” he said slowly, “I suppose you would defend yourself by saying that you were a coward but not a complete imbecile. But apart from the moral justification for the war — and partial as it is — I think it justified within the narrow frame of reference. People will be happier if we win — in the long run. Apart from that, perhaps the difference between you and other people is that you have a sensibility to look after and work to do with it, while a great number of us are still looking for ourselves, and some of us might even find ourselves in this war, through it.…” He broke off in some confusion, for Campion’s cynical impertinent eyes were upon him. “So you’ve sold out,” he said. “The English artist, with the load of sentiment, as ever.…” For a moment he seemed to be looking for a phrase. “You ought to do well,” he said. “They are looking for war-poets to help me to justify their messy little rodent-conception of life. The how-bravely-we-are-suffering-school. What a shameful disgusting business. One can only hope the whole lot of them meet in the obituary columns of The Times Literary Supplement.”
“Well,” said Baird, angered by this sally, “that is neither here nor there. I dare say most people’s behaviour is pretty questionable even in peace-time. The test is whether you are happy.” Campion folded his arms. “Ah, yes,” he said in a small voice, “Ah, yes. And I have never been happy, I don’t think. Not once in my life. Or perhaps only when I was a child.”
It was odd the next morning to find oneself struggling on the wet grass of a Cretan hillside with a parachute harness. Baird thought of Campion often during the first few days of his mission in Crete. He had forgotten to ask him about Alice; but perhaps it was just as well.
Baird found himself sharing the command of a small group of guerillas with one other young officer and the Abbot John, that venerable old figure, whose resistance to the Germans during their occupation of Crete was widely written-up in the Press of two continents. The Abbot John was an imposing figure, with his massive patriarchal head and its tufted eyebrows, curly beard and ear-rings. Having renounced brigandage in 1923 and retired to the Monastery of St. Luke, he found a sudden invasion of the island not entirely uninteresting. It enabled him to revert to something of his old life. Things had been very quiet of late, and he welcomed a diversion from the relentless quest for holiness. Like all Greeks, he was without difficulty able to combine the mystic and the man of action. In his Byzantine belt, with its square iron studs, he carried not only several hand-grenades and a pistol, but also a tiny prayer-book attached to the buckle by a chain. He was at first so gruff as to be almost rude, and Baird was beginning to repent of his decision to accept the Cretan assignment, when a small incident suddenly made them firm friends. The Abbot John had a tame raven, an amusing and impertinent old bird called “Koax”. It was the life and soul of the headquarters in which the Abbot lived when the weather was too bad or the omens unpropitious for a sortie into German-held territory; “Koax” hopped about all day in the large caves which marked the entrance of the labyrinth, making itself as much of a privileged nuisance as any court jester. It could swear mildly in Greek, and was now learning to do the same in English. It was always picking up scraps and hopping off into the shadows with them, and even managed to build itself a ramshackle nest high up in the roof above the natural vent which served them as a smoke-stack. “Koax”, however, suddenly became extremely ill, due no doubt to something it had eaten in a greedy moment, and was only nursed back to life by the united devotion of the company; but to Baird fell the happy thought, when the bird seemed about to die, to feed it on brandy in a teaspoon. After one dose “Koax” rallied, and after a couple of days was back in his old form. This made the Abbot a firm friend. “Say ‘thank you’,” he would tell the bird as it flew up on to his shoulder, “Say ‘thank you’ to the officer,” And “Koax” would give a little shriek and clap his wings.
The little group of saboteurs lived for almost two years in a comradeship and humour that was never tested. Baird learned the Cretan dances, and studied the particularities of the Cretan wines. His particular task was to build a small guerilla army, and to this end he devoted all his energies, backed by the hard-swearing Abbot. They operated from the mouth of the labyrinth, above the village of Cefalû, where later Axelos was to make his discoveries, and where the darkness was to dose down on Fearmax, Campion and poor Miss Dombey. Despite its uglier moments, the life was at first merely tiring in the physical sense, in every other way there was the exhilaration to be enjoyed of freedom (the solitude of these immense white mountains in winter and autumn) and remoteness of control over his own actions. War, in terms of ambush and bluff, was something new and it taught him concentration and spareness without touching the springs of a nature already formed in an unreflective soldierly automatism. It was only after a considerable length of time that the strain began to tell. “I’m fed up,” he told the old man one day, “my ten days in Cairo did me no good at all. I’m going to find another job. I’m getting numb.” The Abbot John regarded him keenly from under his bushy eyebrows. He nodded. “I know how you feel. It is always the same. After a long time one gets sick of the killing. One feels nothing — neither hate nor pity. It’s like the soul getting pins and needles.”
It was indeed something like the failure of experience itself to register; he killed now with a numbness and abstraction that passed for strength of mind; but it was as if he were acting in his sleep. As if he were a somnambulist leading his small parties out to ambush patrols or to examine installations. Now it was out of all this that Böcklin’s death arose; and yet at first it was simply a term in a crowded life based on animal values — fear, cunning, lice, damp blankets, snow.
Böcklin was the remaining survivor of a German mission visiting the island, which had strayed into an ambush laid for them by the Abbot. He was a rather self-conscious, almost effeminate figure, and he showed a quixotic expectancy of death when he was captured that made the Abbot, who was usually merciless to Germans, stay his hand. His English was almost perfect, and Baird discovered that he had been educated partly in England and partly in France. A Bavarian, his gentleness of manner and politeness completely won over the old man. “Since we did not kill him at the first rush,” said the Abbot looking slowly round the little group of huddled figures which had fallen among the stacked leaves round the olive-boles, “we cannot kill him now, eh?” It was not a decision to be approved easily. If he should escape.…