The Magus - John Fowles [183]
not to smile. The film was very fuzzy, jerky, amateurish. Another sequence. A file of men marching round the island harbour; apparently shot from above, out of some upper-story window. "That is Anton in the rear." He had a slight limp. And I also knew that I was for a moment watching the unfakable truth. Beyond the men I could see a broad quay, on which in 1953 stood the little island customs and coastguard house. I knew it had been built since the war. On this film the quay was bare. The beam was extinguished, the engine stopped. "There. I took other scenes, but one reel deteriorated. Those were all I could salvage. " He paused, then went on. "The officer responsible for 'stiffening morale' in this area of Greece was an S. S. colonel called Wimmel. Wilhelm Dietrich Wimmel. By the time I am now speaking of, Resistance movements had begun in Greece. Wherever the terrain permitted. Among the islands, of course, only Crete allowed maquis operations. But up in the north and over there in the Peloponnesus ELAS and the other groups had begun to organise themselves. Arms were dropped to them. Trained saboteurs. Wimmel was brought to Nauplia, late in 1942, from Poland, where he had had a great deal of success. He was responsible for the southwest of Greece, in which we were included. His technique was simple. He had a price list. For every German wounded, ten hostages were executed; for every German killed, twenty. As you may imagine, it was a system that worked. "He had a handpicked company of Teutonic monsters under him, who did the interrogating, torturing, executing, and the rest. They were known, after the badge they wore, as _die Raben_. The ravens. "I met him before his infamies had become widely known. I heard one winter morning that a German motor launch had unexpectedly brought an important officer to the island. Later that day, Anton sent for me. In his office I was introduced to a small, thin man. My own height, my own age. Immaculately neat. Scrupulously polite. He stood to shake my hand. He spoke some English, enough to know that I spoke it much better than he did. And when I confessed that I was half English by birth, he said, The great tragedy of our time is that England and Germany should have quarrelled. Anton explained that he had told the colonel about our musical eveflings and that the colonel hoped that I would join them for lunch and afterwards accompany Anton in one or two songs. Of course I had, _a titre d'office_, to accept. "I did not like the colonel at all. He had eyes like razors. I think the most unpleasant eyes I have ever seen in a human being. They were without a grain of sympathy for what they saw. Nothing but assessment and calculation. If they had been brutal, or lecherous, or sadistic, they would have been better. But they were the eyes of a machine. "An educated machine. The colonel had brought some bottles of hock with him and we had the best lunch I had eaten for many months. We discussed the war very briefly, rather as one might discuss the weather. It was the colonel himself who changed the subject to literature. He was obviously a well-read man. Knew Shakespeare well, and Goethe and Schiller extremely well. He even drew some interesting parallels between English and German literature, and not all in Germany's favour. I realised that he was drinking less than we were. Also that Anton was careless with his tongue. We were both in fact being watched. I knew that halfway through the meal; and the colonel knew I knew it. We two older men polarised the situation. Anton became an irrelevance. The colonel would have had nothing but contempt for the ordinary Greek official, and I was highly honoured to be treated by him as a gentleman and equal. But I was not misled. "After lunch we performed a few _lieder_ for him, and he was full of compliments. He then announced that he wished to inspect the lookout post on the far side of the island, and invited me to accompany him--the place was of no great military importance. So I travelled round with them to Moutsa and we climbed up to the house here. There