Hide and Seek: The Story of a Wartime Agent

by Xan Fielding

"One of the great books of the Second World War"—Antony Beevor " Hide and Seek , first published in 1954 and unavailable for many years, is surely among the best wartime memoirs. It is narrated in a vivid close-up style…by a man who spent two years in caves and other hideouts in the White Mountains, venturing to the coast only to guide a supply submarine with flashing torch, or to smuggle endangered or exhausted colleagues to safety in Cairo…It is remarkable that he lived to tell the tale; that he does so with such modesty, grace and humour is extraordinary."—James Campbell, Times Literary Supplement "Xan Fielding was a gifted, many-sided, courageous and romantic figure, at the same time civilized and Bohemian, and his thoughtful cast of mind was leavened by humour, spontaneous gaiety, and a dash of recklessness. Almost any stretch of his life might be described as a picaresque interlude."—Patrick Leigh Fermor In January 1942, Xan Fielding landed on German-occupied Crete with orders to disrupt the resupply of Rommel's Afrika Korps and establish an intelligence network in cooperation with the Cretan resistance movement. Working with bands of Cretan partisans, he succeeded magnificently. In this memoir of his wartime exploits, Fielding presents a portrait of the quintessential English operative—amateur, gifted, daring, and charming. From the new foreword by Robert " Hide and Seek is a classic of British war literature, an understated account of a man's coming-of-age thanks to the sudden shouldering of great responsibility. Fielding is deprecating about the dangers and his own achievements. It is typical of the quiet and reticent man who preferred to live outside the limelight and wrote matter-of-factly about the war rather than with a gloss of adventure or heroism. There's a scene, late in 1943, when Fielding and a group of partisans study the German's list of 'wanted' men. He notes 'with regrettable but only human pride that the entry under my local pseudonym, which outlined in detail my physical characteristics, aliases and activities for a period of eighteen months, took no less than three-quarters of an octavo page in closely-set small-point type.' The Germans had surely measured his worth." Xan Fielding (1918–1991) was a British writer and traveler, and a lifelong friend of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who served with him in Crete during World War II. (The introduction to Fermor's A Time of Gifts is written as a "Letter to Xan Fielding.") Fielding also translated many novels from French, most notably, The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Planet of the Apes . Robert Messenger is the books editor of the Wall Street Journal .

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War, Memoir, Biography, World War II, Espionage

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Major Xan Fielding DSO was a British author, translator, journalist and traveller, who served as an Special Operations Executive agent in Crete, France and the Far East during World War II.

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book to be an enormous disappointment and if it hadn’t been so short, I expect I would have abandoned it. As it is, it’s taken me over 6 months to read 188 pages. I first became aware of Fielding’s memoir of his time working as a covert operative primarily in German-occupied Crete, but later in occupied France through an internet search while reading his translation of Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge on the River Kwai. I liked the style of that book and the basic outline of Fielding’s wartime experience sounded fascinating. Additionally, I wanted to learn more about Crete and what happened there during World War II after reading Christopher McDougall’s Natural Born Heroes. I also thought this might be a nice precursor to Antony Beevor’s larger Cretan World War II history. Unfortunately, Fielding’s style (why write 10 words when 50 will do?) and determination to come across as the quintessentially droll British gentleman adventurer along with his many unexplained references (which probably made perfect sense in 1954) bogged me down. These combined to imbue the book with a kind of dull inaccessibility. Consequently, I’ll never read anything by Fielding again, but might try his translation of Boulle’s Planet of the Apes.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wartime memoir of one of an extraordinary band of Englishmen who, thanks to their otherwise largely useless classical education, were very much at home in Greek waters, and performed unforgettable heroics on Crete and elsewhere in the area. Fielding was a good friend of Patrick Leigh Fermor, another peerless memoirist, and they worked together on Crete off and on during the war. The story is shapeless, thanks to the quotidian nature of real war, but full of excitement, daring, courage, heartbreak, and humor, and is not to be missed. I'm sorry to think of this generation of heroes slipping away into that good night -- they must have been very good company indeed. Fielding is modest about his achievements, given that in the end the war passed Crete by (it wasn't so much liberated as left). But he has no need to be. He had an extraordinarily good war, as they say, and war is quotidian. What he did do he performed with so much pluck that in the end it is his character that shines through and draws you to him.

[Jameson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1998, stockbroker Paul Dry decided to walk away from a successful career at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and become a book publisher. Thank God he did.
The publishing racket, just like the movie racket, has undergone a significant metamorphosis in the last thirty years or so, with giant mega-companies swallowing up small independents like a whale swallowing plankton. The result is the plankton—the small, independent book publishers and film-makers—who choose and create books or movie projects based on quality, as opposed to potential boffo-box-office-smash-NY-Times-runaway-bestseller financial success, can these days be counted on the toes of one hand. Almost every new book you might think of buying today is published by an imprint of a subsidiary of a publishing conglomerate that is part of an umbrella company wholly or primarily owned by a German media monolith named Bertelsmann, and I can’t even begin to count all the politically incorrect jokes I could make out of that.
Fortunately, with publishers and movie makers both, there are still a few stubborn mavericks who insist on quality over profit. Paul Dry Books is one of those publishers.
Paul Dry Books specializes in reprinting long out of print and out of mind books, the kind that were “caviare to the general” even back when they were published and would be totally forgotten today but for a tiny handful of eccentrics like Paul Dry. And read by a few oddball readers like me. To this collection from the past, Paul Dry has in recent years started adding contemporary books that may not have wowed the Deutsche Mark-counters—excuse me, the Euro-counters—at Bertelsmann, but will wow the handful of people who still cherish good writing and compelling yarns.
Last September, I reviewed Tattered Banners, by Paul Rodzianko, a very personal memoir of the Russian revolution and its effect on the wealthiest, best educated, most creative aristocrats in the world. (Yes, it was a rigid and hierarchical society, with the standard ratio of good to bad, generous to selfish, caring to cruel, but it was a hell of a lot better than the grasping, bloodthirsty socialists who replaced it, and none of the royalty or aristocrats deserved what the communists did to them sophistically in the name of “the people.”) It’s that kind of intriguing and overlooked book that Paul Dry Books specializes in and Xan Fielding’s Hide and Seek is in the same vein.
How can one describe a man like Xan (Alexander) Fielding to readers in today’s world? If men like that even exist today they’re doing an excellent job of keeping a low profile, but during World War Two there appear to have been a large number of highly educated, high-spirited, urbane, multilingual, creative, courageous, imaginative adrenaline junkies, men and women both, who thrived on danger and risking their lives in appalling circumstances, and then going right back to living and partying just as hard as they could. Swashbucklers is the best word for them, male and female alike. Theirs are names you’ve never heard of: Bill Stanley Moss; Christine Granville; Patrick Leigh Fermor; Charles Henry George Howard, the 20th Earl of Suffolk; Jeannie Rousseau; Francis Cammaerts; Marie-Madeleine Fourcade; Andrée de Jongh, countless other Polish, Czech, French, Belgian, Norwegian, and Dutch resistance fighters and spies, all the unnamed and unknown men and women who risked and sometimes lost their lives fighting the greatest evil the world has ever suffered from. Xan Fielding was one of them.
The difference is that Xan Fielding (and a few of the others as well) could write (he also translated the French novel that became the basis for the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai), and Hide and Seek is his account of his time impersonating a peasant shepherd on Crete (he spoke fluent Greek) as he led a handful of resistance fighters, intelligence gatherers, and saboteurs in a deadly cat-and-mouse game against the might and brutality of the Nazis.
(And right now would be a good time to give a shout out to the Greek people. When I was thirteen, only fifteen years after the war, my father allowed me to go on an epic adventure, camping and hitchhiking with a fifteen or sixteen year-old German friend from my home in Germany, down through Austria and what was then Yugoslavia, through Greece and eventually to Crete. My friend was German; I looked German, spoke German, and wore German clothes. The Greeks and the Cretans had suffered greatly from the brutality of the Nazis for four long years, but everywhere my friend and I went, peasants, men and women both, would call out to us, “Germanski? Germanski?” and when we replied in the affirmative, they invariably invited us into their whitewashed cottages and plied us with food and drink, music and courtly hospitality. (In Crete, that hospitality and the drink included my first taste of retsina, the potent Greek wine. The results were unfortunate; I have learned little since.) But I wonder, knowing now what I didn’t know then about the murderous and ferine cruelty of the Nazis, if I would have been as kind and generous to citizens of the country that had invaded my homeland and murdered so many of my countrymen. They had nothing, those long-ago farmers and shepherds, fishermen and bakers, but they shared what food they had with us and treated as if they were delighted to have us in their homes.)
On Crete, Xan Fielding was able to pass himself off as a local peasant/shepherd so successfully that he took pleasure in brushing shoulders on the streets of villages with the very Nazis who were looking for him, knocking back drinks in taverns as SS officers sang patriotic German songs, taking the savage delight of the born risk-taker in flaunting himself under their noses.
But as wild and carefree and able as he was, one gets the sense that he was not a born warrior. In one poignant incident, he recalls for the first time hearing in one of those taverns the haunting and heartbreaking song, Lilli Marlene, “Outside the barracks, by the corner light, there I will stand and wait for you at night…” and recognizing the humanity in soldiers who were doing inhumane things. His description of having to execute a young German soldier who stumbled onto his tiny group is harrowing, harrowing and redolent of the unnamed aftereffects men were not supposed to have in those days, aftereffects he does not discuss.
And more: throughout the book, with only two exceptions, one Greek and one British, he is consistently diplomatic in his account of the men who were running the brand-new, ultra-top-secret (and greatly despised by MI6 and the regular British military Intelligence Corps) commando branch elliptically named Strategic Operations Executive (SOE). It was so hush-hush very few people even knew of its existence and those that did referred to it as “the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” And that was the problem: it wasn’t nearly ungentlemanly enough. The British had no one who knew of or could even imagine the disgusting, draconian, ruthless cruelty of the Nazis, and that, coupled with the ridiculously erroneous British belief that a good pedigree and a good club membership were more important than a good brain, meant that many of the field agents and almost all the leaders were unrealistic amateurs playing by Marquis of Queensbury rules in a no-holds-barred back-alley brawl against seasoned street fighters. Couple that with the normal ineptitude of any military and you can understand why the attrition rate of SOE agents across Europe was appalling. Xan Fielding himself, on a later mission in France, was caught because he had been given papers with out of date stamps on them, and by having been issued money in the form of brand-new bills with consecutive serial numbers. What could possibly go wrong with that? He was saved, literally as he waited to be marched out to be executed, by the skill and daring and sheer chutzpah of one of the most legendary of all SOE officers, a Polish lady who was once accurately described as “the bravest of the brave.”
And this would be a good time to give a shout out to the Polish resistance fighters who were the most ferocious, most dedicated, most persistent, best organized, and most successful of any in Europe. Without the courageous Poles, it is very possible Great Britain would have been overrun and the war might have had a very different outcome. The Poles’ extraordinary and highly successful efforts were repaid at the end of the war by Churchill and Roosevelt turning their back on them and allowing over 200,000 people to be slaughtered and the ancient, historic city of Warsaw to be razed.
There were countless other courageous resistance fighters in France, Belgium, Norway, and other countries, and yes, the British and American armies performed extraordinary feats of heroism when they finally moved into action, but in the early days, no country had an army anywhere near up to the task, and it was the resistance fighters and the spies and the saboteurs who bought the desperately needed time. Xan Fielding was not the least of them.
It is axiomatic that military blunders are the norm, and that subsequent frantic efforts to cover up those blunders or assign blame are also the norm, but even taking that into account, Britain’s insistence on recruiting their so-called “intelligence” officers, even for the revered MI6, from the right schools and the right clubs and above all from the right families, resulted in catastrophic loss of life and very nearly in the loss of the war. For a hair raising account of the elite upper crust arrogance, stupidity, incompetence, ineptitude, and unwillingness to even consider a better way of doing things, read Lynne Olson’s account of the Nazi Abwehr’s Englandspiel (Nazi Military Intelligence’s “English Game”) in her book, Last Hope Island. Hell, just read what happened to over fifty SOE agents, most of them Dutch resistance fighters, sent from London to Holland to be tortured and murdered. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is not the definition of insanity; it’s the definition of stupidity. Truly, the courageous and gallant young men and women of the SOE were lions led by donkeys. Even Xan Fielding, who wrote Hide and Seek shortly after the war and long before any of this had come to light, and who really believed in the myth of the British Intelligence Service’s brilliant infallibility, even he recognized the imbecility of many of the officers in the Cairo branch that was running things on Crete, and they were geniuses compared to the pompous twits in London.
In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde has Miss Prism say, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”
Only Hide and Seek is not fiction.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review contains a few spoilers.

Continuing my theme of reading about SOE (the Special Operations Executive), I have now read my third book about their activities during the German and Italian occupation of Crete 1941-1945. This book, Hide and Seek, was written by Xan Fielding, a young man who was running a bar in Cyprus and, being a bit bored and feeling that he should contribute to the war effort, volunteered to become a British officer with SOE. In 1941 the only theatre in which to really engage with the enemy was the Mediterranean, and as he was intelligent and spoke both Greek and French, they accepted him as potentially useful.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Fielding did not consider himself a fighter or a dashing heroic figure; rather, he was happy to stay in the background. His role was to organise local Resistance groups, gather intelligence about what the Axis forces were doing and report back to Cairo HQ on a regular basis. He was accompanied by a succession of radio operators, a very dangerous job, as was his, because the Germans were well aware that British agents were operating in Crete and often tried to root them out. Luckily for Fielding and his companions, Crete is very mountainous and the mountains are riven by innumerable gullies, re-entrants, valleys and other topographical features that made searching for people a difficult and tiring job.

Life was difficult for the agents, however, so they hardly ever had good quality rest or food. They mostly lived in shepherds’ huts or damp caves, which were cool in summer and freezing in winter. Even when they hid in villages, they often slept out of doors in case the Germans conducted a dawn raid, which were quite frequent. They were usually ridden with lice and/or fleas. The Cretan people were tough, patriotic and brave, so Fielding had no shortage of volunteers to help him, including George Psychoundakis, whose book The Cretan Runner I have also reviewed.

To keep safe they had to move location frequently, covering huge distances over steep and dangerous terrain, often walking 20 miles a day, while avoiding German patrols and risking continual death or capture. They would be desperate for an air-drop of shoes/boots because they walked so much their shoes wore out and fell to pieces. They were disguised as shepherds and became so confident of their cover that on at least one occasion they deliberately visited someone’s house who was entertaining German officers, and drank with them. They also had to negotiate German checkpoints and document checks when they visited Canea. This took great nerve considering that if Fielding or his companions had been taken prisoner, the local Gestapo would have tortured him before he was shot.

Fielding is very honest in his account – he admits to mistakes he made, poor decisions he took and to feelings he had of which he was ashamed. He also admits to the killing of a German ‘deserter’ who they suspected was a ‘plant’ to find out where they were hiding. The book is full of exciting moments of adventure, daring and danger, and the way they lived was so tough it makes one wonder how they did it. Their plan was to build up a Resistance movement of trained and well-armed men and women, supplied by air-drops, who would be ready to encourage a general uprising of the Cretan people and fight the enemy once an Allied landing was imminent.

This hope was dashed because once Italy capitulated to the Allies all eyes were on preparations for the Normandy invasion a year later, and the Mediterranean Front diminished in importance. Fielding had been building his forces and making promises of British help to the Cretans for three years and felt that he could not look them in the face once he knew the truth, which he learned while on a rare period of leave in Cairo, so after his leave he transferred to a different department and was dropped into Vichy France, in the south-east of the country.

He was not there for long before he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned. He was interrogated but not tortured, though he was convinced he and his companions were to be executed within days. The Allies were just about to invade the south of France so he was worried they may be shot out of hand if they suddenly got close, even if the Germans were not planning to shoot them just yet. That did not happen but I will not describe how he survived, so you’ll just have to read the book.

This is a well-written and fascinating account of true-life action, bravery, derring-do and hard living, warts and all. It is honest and its author deserves high praise.

[Misty Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to describe this book...The "Guns of Navarone" vacation journal, perhaps. A nostalgic's travelogue to wartime Greece and surrounding areas. A memorium in prose to a British soldier's one-time colleagues in mayhem and mischief.

Xan Fielding has the grace, the debonair aloofness and the sophistication of the perfect British spy for any film. And yet his story is entirely true. "Hide and Seek" follows him through his time spent in Greece during the war, and after, detailing various missions and unexpected events. It reads less as a note by note accounting of specific plans, and more of an "I was bored, so I had the men do this" kind of journal, at least in the beginning. Then, as time goes on, and the war comes to the door with more pressing urgency, our refined and elegant soldier becomes more cynical and a bit more jaded. He returns to Greece following the war and all its atrocities, and details yet one more of his own, properly assigning the blame for that offense where it belonged.

Thanks to Goodreads giveaways for the opportunity to read this fascinating accounting.

[Maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic

[Budge Burgess · Rating 5 out of 5]

I agonised, briefly, over whether to award 4 or 5 stars - it's not 'great' literature, but it has a quality which raises it significantly above the average, enough to warrant my description of this book as definitely significantly above the average (3 stars) and, though flawed, definitely due a more appreciative evaluation that simply describing it as 'very good' (4 stars). It has that je ne sais quoi.
Of course, there's a personal 'backstory' to my reading of this book. Xan Fielding translated from the French Pierre Boulle's two famous novels (filmed as "Planet of the Apes" and "Bridge on the River Kwai"). I was intrigued to learn that Fielding had been in Crete for much of the Second World War (he spoke Greek, German, French) helping organise resistance against the Germans, and had been a colleague of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Stanley Moss whose abduction of the German general, Kriege, featured in the film "Ill Met by Moonlight", a film I've loved since childhood.
I wanted to know more about Xan (pronounced Zan) Fielding.
"Hide and Seek" describes Fielding's time in Crete and France during the War. First published in 1954, his memories were still fresh, he'd obviously spoken with a number of his former colleagues, he'd checked what was available for checking.
The memoire starts, I feel, a bit clumsily. It's overwritten - he's striving to be 'writerly' rather than to write an accurate account, to pursue some sort of literary cachet rather than simply tell the story. However, this quickly gives way to a more natural writing style, understated, simply describing the exhausting life of being a guerrilla in Crete, constantly on the move, climbing mountains, evading Germans, dependent on the local people, exposed to excess of weather and shortage of food ... struggling to learn how to do the job, struggling to cope with the bureaucracy and petty mindedness of officials back in Cairo.
There's no room for heroism or heroics - it's an aspect of the job which is taken for granted. It's very human - Fielding doesn't disguise the mistakes, is matter of fact about the fear, the violence. He meets some worthy people, he meets some bastards, there's an undercurrent of English public schoolboys playing games, there's an obvious affection and respect for the common people of Crete upon whom he relied 24/7.
He doesn't disguise the fact that they were making it up as they went along - they didn't have a degree in 'Organising Resistance', there wasn't a manual to which they could refer. This was Fred Karno's Army custard pies and banana skins rather than Brigade of Guards precision. But the camaraderie is obvious ... and inspiring. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy in Cairo demonstrates the Peter Principle in operation a quarter of a century before that term was coined (people in a bureaucracy rise to their level of incompetence).
Indeed, that's the conclusion of the book - Fielding's wonder at what they were fighting for. The world would be left plunged into Cold War, the bureaucrats and the grey men who'd hidden out the war would emerge to take charge in many countries around the world, many risen beyond the levels of their incompetence ... there's a real sense of anti-climactic betrayal, the concluding paragraphs are tragic - the heroic can be submerged in the squalid, it's difficult to emerge from any war feeling optimistic, feeling anything but haunted by memory ... .
A fine read, a book which will make you think ... a book which will leave you thinking.

[Mark Seemann · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wartime memoir of an English secret agent operating in Crete during 1941-1944 is surprisingly dull. Not that I doubt that it must have been dreadful and debilitating to live under hardship in enemy-occupied territory, but nothing much happens in the book.

There's the occasional episode, but nothing that comes across as noticeably dramatic, with the only exception being the last chapter that takes place not in Crete, but in France.

[Sneezewort · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting read, I had difficulty following the Cretan peoples names, but thats me, not a reflection on the story.....

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a barn burner. but, reading it reminds me of certain people I know.

[Spiros · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I had been asked a couple of years ago whether I would have read three first hand accounts of guerrilla and commando warfare during World War II in Crete, I probably would have responded that I was no longer in junior high school; and yet, this joins the shelf, right next to The Cretan Runner and Abducting a General, and I wouldn't bet against me picking up a copy of Billy Moss' Ill Met By Moonlight sometime. This in addition to Rick Stroud's rehashing of the Kreipe operation, Kidnap in Crete. So what does Xan Fielding add?
Quite a lot, as it happens. In many ways, Fielding was the opposite of his great friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor. He was much more introverted, much more thoughtful, much less likely to hare off and capture a German general. His writing can be deeply affecting, especially when he considers what it actually takes to pull the trigger on another human.

[Lori · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book because I've read other WWII accounts and loved them. Xan Fielding's writing style was much too dry and the book read as if he were telling his story to people who already knew the places and people involved.

I salute everyone who served in WWII and fought for the Allies. I have great respect for them, no matter how large or small their personal contribution was, and I thank them with all my heart.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paratroopers will appreciate the descriptions of jumps

Grand adventure story with superb descriptions of the reality of military life on Crete in WWII, France, the agony of “liberation”

[Permittivité du Vide · Rating 2 out of 5]

I definitely love spy stories, but this was more of a droning history class, or the report you give to your superiors where you downplay everything that happened to you in the field.

Sent to me by Goodreads after winning the Giveaway.

[Patty Simpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's really 3.5 stars rounded up. Worth reading if you're interested in Crete during WWII, but his style isn't really all that gripping or compelling.