Alan Ogden > Quotes

“As Major Derek Dodson left Fillipaioi in early October 1943, he wrote in his diary: ‘Behind [me] the bare mountains were almost pink against the background of blue sky and pinkish clouds. Walking along in front of the guide I thought of home, of afternoon tea on a silver tray in the little garden, of the peace and rest and coolness of English summer. Crossing the valley there was great peace. We seemed in so remote a place with only the distant ring of the sheep bells to break the silence’.”
― Alan Ogden, Sons of Odysseus: SOE Heroes in Greece

“I could only bow my head. They had no great claims on life. They were not dreaming of marble halls or the glittering tinsel of victory. Their simple village lives had been disrupted by foreign invasions and their consequences. In response, they had given all that was best within them: their courage and instinctive guile, their refusal to submit, their intelligent and critical reserve about the motives of some of their leaders, their solidarity with their compatriots in Epirus and their readiness to sacrifice all they had in the cause of liberation.”
― Alan Ogden, Sons of Odysseus: SOE Heroes in Greece

“At the end of a brief tour in the spring of 1943, one officer, although reluctant to make generalizations about the Greeks, wrote ‘suffice it to say that I found generosity, cunning, dishonesty, curiosity, slackness oddly combined with impatience, a tendency always to be ready with an excuse, good manners and much simple kindness, and that the result was to me attractive.”
― Alan Ogden, Sons of Odysseus: SOE Heroes in Greece

“Major John Mulgan, always a perspicacious and sensitive observer, recorded that ‘the small mountain villages of Greece have an economy that is very self-contained. In small cleared patches among the pine forests they work with wooden ploughs and oxen and grow for themselves meagre crops of wheat and maize. They harvest wheat in June and maize in September and store it carefully for the winter, which is long, snowbound and bitter. Each household keeps a few goats, the richer ones run flocks of sheep. These give them milk and cheese in the spring months, wool which they weave themselves into thick, warm blankets and clothing, and even soft leather for slippers or saddles when the markets are denied to them. Eggs, chicken and meat are luxuries for Saints’ Days and Christmas-time. Wine and ouzo are luxuries too, but each house manages a little for party times. Dried beans and lentils are the last necessities and olive oil which has to be bought in by trade. This is a close economy which gives survival and not too bad a”
― Alan Ogden, Sons of Odysseus: SOE Heroes in Greece

“Kenneth Matthews confessed: ‘I may attempt to describe the Greek but I do not profess to understand him. He is a creature of a different blood, begotten under different conjunctions of the stars. His motives are often obscure to me, his actions romantic, excessive, preposterous and unpredictable.”
― Alan Ogden, Sons of Odysseus: SOE Heroes in Greece

“Over 450,000 Greeks died of starvation or related ailments during the Second World War, the vast majority civilians. The Jewish communities, some of the most ancient in Europe, were exterminated.”
― Alan Ogden, Sons of Odysseus: SOE Heroes in Greece

“The raw material was already in place for the mountains were full of men ‘outside the law’. Undoubtedly”
― Alan Ogden, Sons of Odysseus: SOE Heroes in Greece

“As one BLO noted, ‘when his house is burnt, a villager will temporarily move to his kalivi, a small hut in his field where he keeps his animals, implements”
― Alan Ogden, Sons of Odysseus: SOE Heroes in Greece

“They forget and forgive nothing but learn the lessons of failure.”
― Alan Ogden, Sons of Odysseus: SOE Heroes in Greece