THE PATIENT MEN OF GREECE

In the craggy hills of Crete this week there was fighting between German and Italian garrison troops. Warned by a special BBC broadcast that their hour had not yet come, Crete's guerrillas stayed out of the fight. But how they have prepared for their hour is reported in this dispatch from Cairo by TIME Correspondent Harry Zinder:

Manolis Batouvas is about 50 years old. He is thin almost to the point of emaciation, but his body is hard, and his jet-black eyes, set in a hawklike, bronzed face, burn with the fierceness that is characteristic of all the Cretan guerrillas. Batouvas cannot be more than 5 ft. 6, and he walks like a spraddled duck. His khaki shorts are too big for him, flapping in the mountain winds, and his khaki shirt emerges at several places from his pants. He is nobody's ideal of a hero. In fact, before the Germans invaded Crete, Batouvas was a quiet, easygoing merchant in a Cretan town.

All that was changed when the Nazis descended on the island. Batouvas fought just as anyone else might for the Main Street of his home town. When it became obvious that the Nazis were winning, he ceased resistance and returned to his store and house.

To the Mountains. When he could not stand Nazi domination any longer, Batouvas joined other Greeks in Crete's mountain fastness and turned from a mild, slightly paunchy Greek into a hardbitten, tough guerrilla warrior. He grew lean, learned to live on one solid meal daily; he began to develop a consummate hatred for Germans and Italians. At first he was just a guerrilla among many hundreds. Then his head for business asserted itself. Today Manolis Batouvas is one of the three main guerrilla leaders on the island. Of course Batouvas is not his real name, just as George Petrakis and Manolis Mantakas are not the names of the other two leaders. The Nazis know their real names and have learned to fear them.

Cretans are a patient lot. Since 1941 they have bided their time. They have suffered hardships, intenser than the hardships suffered on the Greek mainland because Crete never was self-sufficient. The Gemans have been constantly robbing the people of their porridge, bread and olives. After taking their "official tithe," they come roving around in small bands, forcing villagers and townsmen to give up more at pistol point. The stuff they steal or wangle from the Cretans is not enough, so that on occasion you get German soldiers, and even officers, entering homes and begging for scraps of food.

The Nazis have been taking all able-bodied men between 16 and 60 years of age, forcing them to work on the island's defenses, building roads, rolling airfields, making concrete breastworks and pillboxes. The pay is poor, amounting to about two pounds of bread for nine days' work.

Little by little labor gangs have been reduced in ranks as young men and old slipped away to join the guerrillas. There are many thousands in the hills now. Not all of them are armed, because arms are hard to come by. There are some women among them--the famed Amazons who fought so valiantly during the Crete battle. They are not fighting--yet. The guerrillas maintain steady communication with the Greek mainland and with the Mideast by couriers who slip in & out.

George the Courier. One such courier is my friend George, a Greek boy, who told me Crete's story. I will not even try to describe him for fear of giving him away to the Nazis. Intelligent and educated, George carried good news, orders, communiques and bulletins from XXX to ZZZ. "We need arms," George tells me in his jerky, nervous way. "We need much more now if we are going to be useful in sabotage." George speaks solemnly of the great number of Cretans who were shot out-of-hand as hostages. "The Germans always pick professors, doctors and lawyers--upper-class groups--as hostages, so they are slowly exterminating what cultural elements remain on the island. Others, many others, are dying by stages of hunger."

When the British pulled off their little raid last month (TIME, July 12), the Cretans thought their day had come, but at the request of the British they held their hand. They stolidly watched a minor engagement between the island troops and the raiders. They saw precious supplies go up in smoke as the British fired dumps. They gloated inwardly at the damage to airfields and roads. They knew what it meant in the end--more hostages shot at dusk and buried in a common grave at the edge of a village. But they had gone through that many times. When the British forces evacuated the island in 1941, many remained behind, unable to get away; the invaders shot hundreds of Cretans in a vain attempt to find their hiding places. When illegal pamphlets are distributed or a newspaper slips up and prints favorable Allied news, more are shot. It has been going on now for two years. "But." George says, "we're a patient lot. We can go on for a while longer because we know our day is approaching. When the time does come, the Germans will experience a Saint Bartholomew's Day that will ring long in Crete history. We've got them all lined up."

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