Stronghold: Four Seasons in the White Mountains of Crete

During the Second World War, Xan Fielding served for two years as an officer in the British Special Operations Executive on German-occupied Crete, where he ran an intelligence network in co-operation with the Cretan resistance movement. Seven years later, Fielding returned to Crete to spend a year travelling in the island’s White Mountains (the stronghold of the title), revisiting sites of his wartime exploits and seeking out former comrades who had returned to their peacetime lives. His sojourn resulted in this remarkable memoir, a documentary-like record of days spent among Cretan peasants blended with history and literature – a travelogue like no other. The Stronghold is a blending of history and culture with experience, but one wedded to fidelity. Fielding never arrives; there is no great journey of self. There is just a question answered about the war and youth …he can’t shake Crete, as no man can shake the formative experience of his youth. – from the new foreword by Robert Messenger