AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD.(Patrick Leigh Fermor)(Biography)

On the evening of April 26, 1944, an Opel staff car with slit hoods over its headlamps set off toward Knossos. To people who know Crete, Knossos refers to the myth-haunted remnants of the lost Minoan civilization on the northern shores of the island. It means Theseus and Ariadne, and the Minotaur brooding in his labyrinth. To the passenger in the car that night, however, Knossos meant home. His name was Heinrich Kreipe. He had recently arrived in Crete from the Russian front; he was shortly to be promoted from major-general to lieutenant-general in the German Army; he was now the commander of the 22nd Infantry Division, based near Heraklion, the principal city of Crete; and he lived close by, at the Villa Ariadne, in Knossos.

As the Opel, with its distinguished passenger sitting beside his driver, travelled toward Heraklion, it was waved down on a deserted bend. The time was half past nine. Two German corporals approached. One of them asked whether this was the General's car. "Ja, ja" was the reply. The darkness came alive. Doors were pulled open. Men rose from the ditches at the side of the road. The driver reached for his gun. He was smacked on the head with a cosh, heaved from his seat, and dropped on the road. Kreipe was moved to the back seat, with three Cretans to keep him company. A blade was held to his throat, but only one thing appeared to be troubling the General. He couldn't find his hat.

This was because his hat reposed on the head of the man who was now in the front passenger seat. His accomplice took the wheel, and the car moved off into the night. Ever nonchalant, the man in the hat lit a cigarette. The problem was that, in order to reach their destination, the kidnappers had to pass through Heraklion. The whole plan could be undone, with one cry from their prisoner, at a single checkpoint. What was troubling them was not a single checkpoint, however, but twenty-two separate checkpoints. Somehow, their luck held. At every post, the car was recognized and allowed to continue. When salutes were given, they were duly returned. At the West Gate of the city, the car was hailed and brought to a crawl by armed sentries. The two men in the front cocked their pistols. Loudly declaring that this was the General's car, they took their chance and sped on, crying "Gute Nacht" into the dark. They reached open country and off-loaded their prize. By mid-May, the Divisional Commander would be smuggled off the island in a motor launch and whisked away to Allied headquarters in Cairo.

The man in the hat had thus succeeded in his second impersonation of the night. First, he had dressed as a corporal, and then, complete with halting German, he had turned into General Kreipe. For the sake of the role, and with some reluctance, he had shaved off his mustache; without it, according to his comrade-in-arms, "he looked so much the dashing Teuton that beside him one felt uncomfortably close to the genuine article." Still, he was a man at ease with subterfuge, having spent the past seventeen months dressed as a shepherd in the spiny mountains of Crete. He was known as Mihali, and one account describes him as sporting "a finely embroidered Cretan bolero, a long, wine-colored cummerbund (into which were thrust an ivory-handled revolver and a silver dagger), a pair of corduroy riding breeches, and tall black boots." A blurry photograph confirms the image: one hand in a pocket, the other holding a cigarette, the face proud, sun-weathered, and suave. He looks like a hawk with a sense of humor.

But his name was not Mihali, and he was not Greek, any more than he was German. He was a major in the Special Operations Executive, a secret outfit established by the British to carry out clandestine sabotage, and to support local resistance movements, behind enemy lines. He was, and remains, an Englishman, with so much living to his credit that the lives conducted by the rest of us seem barely sentient--pinched and paltry things, laughably provincial in their scope, and no more fruitful than sleepwalks. We fret about our kids' S.A.T. scores, whereas this man, when he was barely more than a kid himself, shouldered a rucksack and walked from Rotterdam to Istanbul. In his sixties, he swam the Hellespont, in homage to Lord Byron--his hero, and to some extent his template. (He once hunted down a pair of the poet's slippers, "their toes turning up at the tip," in Missolonghi.) In between, he has joined a cavalry charge, played a game of polo on bicycles outside a Hungarian castle, observed a voodoo ceremony in Haiti, and plunged into a love affair with a princess. He has feasted atop a moonlit tower, with wine and roast lamb hauled up by rope. He has dwelled soundlessly among Trappist monks. He has built himself a house on the southern coast of Greece, where he still resides. He has written seven travel books and a novel, though which is which one cannot readily say, for the travel books pass from the fiercely empirical to the fantastic without drawing breath. The most celebrated, perhaps, are "A Time of Gifts" (1977) and "Between the Woods and the Water" (1986), which describe the first two-thirds of that footsore trek to Istanbul. Both have recently been reissued (New York Review Books; $16.95 and $15.95), raising once more the enticing prospect of a third and concluding volume. Long planned, it would take the author to the banks of the Bosporus and thus to the gates of the East. "I'm absolutely longing to get at it," he said to me. His name is Patrick Leigh Fermor--or, since the bestowing of a knighthood, two years ago, Sir Patrick. Or, as his friends call him, Paddy. He is now ninety-one years old, and if you think you can match him ouzo for ouzo, on a back street in downtown Athens, you'd better think again.

Leigh Fermor was born on February 11, 1915, in London. Soon afterward, he lost his mother. She didn't die, but she went to India, to join her husband, Lewis Leigh Fermor, who was later to become the director of the Indian Geological Survey. It was not uncommon for children of colonial parents to be left behind in England; abandonment was one of the sacrifices demanded by the maintenance of empire.

For the first three and a half years of his life, Leigh Fermor lived with a family in the county of Northamptonshire. There, by his own admission, he became a "farmer's child run wild," and that strain of the enfant sauvage has never quite deserted either the grown man or the work. After the end of the First World War, his mother and his elder sister, whom he describes as "beautiful strangers," returned to fetch young Paddy, who promptly ran away from them over the fields. "Those marvellously lawless years, it seems, had unfitted me for the faintest shadow of constraint," he writes in "A Time of Gifts." The fact that somebody so dapper and so disciplined should persist in viewing himself as unconstrained may be a ...