Alan Furst - Spies of the Balkans

A few minutes later, the driver stopped the car-there was nowhere to pull over-and, shoulder to shoulder, they all peed off the side of the mountain. It was a long way down, Zannis saw, a long, long way. As he rebuttoned his fly, the truck carrying the Evzones came chugging up the road, its engine laboring hard. When the driver saw the staff car, he swung around it and, passing close to the men standing at the edge of the mountain, and observing what occupied them, he blew a mighty blast on his klaxon horn, which echoed off the mountainside. Then it was the turn of the soldiers who, as their truck rumbled away, called out a variety of suggestions and insults, all of them obscene.

The driver, standing next to Zannis, swore and said, “Now I’ll have to pass them all over again.”

“Oh well,” the captain said, giving himself a couple of shakes, “the fortunes of war.”

Poor Mussolini.

He, like everybody else in Europe who went to the movies, had seen the Pathe newsreels. First a title, in the local language, flashed on a black screen: GERMANY INVADES POLAND! Followed by combat footage, the Panzer tanks of the Wehrmacht charging across the Polish steppe, accompanied by dire and dramatic music. Loud music. And the words of a narrator with a rich, deep, theatrical voice. The effect was powerful-here was history being made, right before your eyes.

Mussolini hated it, couldn’t get the images out of his mind. For he sensed that whatever made Hitler look powerful made him look meagre, but, fifteen months later, here came a chance to put things right-he’d had more than enough of being mocked as the conqueror of … Nice! Now he’d show the world who was who and what was what. Because he had tanks of his own, an armoured formation known as the Centauri Division, named for the mythic Greek figure called the centaur, half man, half horse. Shown always as the top of the man and the back of the horse, though there were those who suggested that, in the case of Mussolini’s army, it should be the other way round.

Mussolini paced the rooms of his palace in Rome and brooded. Was the lightning attack known as Blitzkrieg the private property of Adolf Hitler? Oh no it wasn’t! He would storm into Greece just as Hitler’s Panzers had done in Poland. And his generals, whose politics carefully conformed with his own, encouraged him. The Centauri would smash through the vineyards and olive groves of southern Greece; nothing could stop them, because the Greek army hadn’t a single tank, not one. Hah! He’d crush them!

Alas, it was not to be. The problem was the geography of northern Greece, massive ranges of steep jagged mountains-after all, this was the Balkans, and “balkan” meant “mountain” in Turkish. So Mussolini’s Blitzkrieg would have to attack down the narrow valleys, protected by Alpini troops occupying the heights above them. Which might have worked out but for the Evzones, one regiment of them opposing the Alpini division.

The Greeks, contrary to Italian expectations, fought to the death.

Took terrible casualties, but defeated the Alpini, who broke and fled back toward the Albanian border. Now the Greeks held the mountains and when the Centauri came roaring down the valleys two things happened. First, many of the tanks plunged into a massive ditch that had been dug in their path, often winding up on their backs, and second, those that escaped the ditch were subject to shelling from above, by short-barreled, high-wheeled mountain guns. These guns, accompanied by ammunition, had been hauled over the mountains by mules and then, when the mules collapsed and died of exhaustion, by men.

As the first week in November drew to a close, it was clear that the Italian invasion had stalled. Mussolini raged, Mussolini fired generals, Greek reinforcements reached the mountain villages, and it began to snow. The unstoppable Axis had, for the first time, been stopped. And of this the world press took notice: headlines in boldface, everywhere in Europe. Which included Berlin, where these developments were viewed with, to put it mildly, considerable irritation. Meanwhile, poor Mussolini had once again been humiliated, and now the Greek army was poised to enter Albania.

In Trikkala, an ancient town divided by a river, the snow-capped peaks of the Pindus Mountains were visible when the sun came out. Which, fortunately, the first week in November, it did not do. The sky stayed overcast, a solid mass of gray cloud that showered down an icy rain. The sky stayed overcast, and the Italian bomber pilots, at the airfields up in Albania, played cards in their barracks.

The Salonika communications unit was at least indoors, having bivouacked in the local school along with other reservists. They’d stacked the chairs against the wall and slept on the floor. Dry, but bored. Each member of the unit had been armed for war by the issue of a blanket, a helmet, and a French Lebel rifle made in 1917. The captain took Zannis aside and said, “Ever fire one of these?”

“No, never.”

“Too bad. It would be good for you to practice, but we can’t spare the ammunition.” He chambered a bullet, closed the bolt, and handed the weapon to Zannis. “It has a three-round tube. You work the bolt, look through the sight, find an Italian, and pull the trigger. It isn’t complicated.”

There was, that first week, little enough to do. The General Staff was based in Athens, with a forward position in Janina. But if things went wrong at Janina they would have to serve as a relay station, take information coming in over the telephone-the lines ended at Trikkala-and transmit it to front-line officers by wireless/telegraph. “We are,” the captain said, “simply a reserve unit. And let’s hope it stays that way.”

As for Zannis, his liaison counterpart from the Yugoslav General Staff was apparently still trying to reach Trikkala. Where he, if and when he ever showed up, could join the unit in waiting around. Yugoslavia had not entered the war. In the past, Greeks and Serbs had been allies in the First Balkan War in 1912, and again in the Balkan campaigns against Germany, Bulgaria, and Turkey in the 1914 war, and greatly respected each other’s abilities on the battlefield. But now, if Yugoslavia attacked Mussolini, it was well understood that Hitler would attack Yugoslavia, so Belgrade remained on alert , but the army had not mobilized.

Meanwhile, they waited. Early one morning, Spyro, the pharmacist-turned-wireless-operator, sat at a teacher’s desk and tapped out a message. He had been ordered to do this, to practice daily, and send one message every morning, to make sure the system worked. As Zannis watched, he sent and received, back and forth, while keeping a record on a scrap of paper. When he took off the headset, he smiled.

“What’s going on?” Zannis said.

“This guy up in Metsovon …” He handed Zannis the paper. “Here, take a look for yourself.”

TRIKKALA REPORTING 9 NOVEMBER.

WHY DO YOU SEND ME MESSAGES?

I AM ORDERED TO SEND ONCE A DAY.

DON’T YOU KNOW WE’RE BUSY UP HERE?

I HAVE TO FOLLOW ORDERS.

WHAT SORT OF MAN ARE YOU?

A SOLDIER.

THEN COME UP HERE AND FIGHT.

THAT WOULD BE FINE WITH ME.

LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING YOU.

Every day it rained, and every day long lines of Italian prisoners moved through Trikkala, on their way to a POW camp somewhere south of the town. Zannis couldn’t help feeling sorry for them, cold and wet and miserable, eyes down as they trudged past the school. When the columns appeared, the reservists would bring out food or cigarettes, whatever they could spare, for the exhausted Greek soldiers guarding the prisoners.

Late one afternoon, Zannis walked along with one of the soldiers and gave him a chocolate bar he’d bought at the market. “How is it up there?” he said.