The Schoolboy Who Kidnapped a General

At eighteen, expelled from school for holding hands with a greengrocer's daughter on a pile of apple-baskets, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked out of the Hook of Holland in December 1933 with a stick, an army greatcoat, the Oxford Book of English Verse, and a Loeb edition of Horace. He arrived in Constantinople thirteen months later.

Eleven years on, he was in occupied Crete, dressed as a German military policeman, with a plan to steal a general.

On the night of 26 April 1944 he and Stanley Moss ambushed Major General Heinrich Kreipe's staff car outside Heraklion. Fermor put on the general's gold-braided cap, sat in the front seat, and was saluted through twenty-two checkpoints while smoking the general's cigarettes. They left a Cunard luggage label and an Agatha Christie novel in the abandoned car.

Then came eighteen days marching the captive over Mount Ida with thirty thousand German troops combing the island for him.

One dawn, watching the snow on the summit, Kreipe murmured a line of Horace. Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte. As luck would have it, it was one Fermor knew by heart. He completed the remaining five stanzas in Latin. The general looked at him for a long time.

Ach so, Herr Major.

They had drunk, Fermor wrote later, at the same fountains.