Xan Fielding was a Special Operations Executive agent sent to occupied Crete in 1942 to organise resistance groups. He was later joined by Paddy Leigh Fermor but they only worked together briefly because they were in charge of separate halves of the island. Fielding had no active part in Paddy and Billy Moss's 1944 kidnap of the German commander (see below, Ill Met by Moonlight) save that the idea was originally his.
Fielding's account is different in tone to the gung-ho adventure of Billy and the selfdepracating narrative of Paddy. Fieldings believes that his mission to Crete was a failure and British Command let the Cretans down by not invading. Command also forced him to lie to his Cretan followers, which causes him profound shame.
Billy's account of the war in Crete is based on his diaries of the time. Paddy's was not written until the others were dead. Hide and Seek was written in 1954 after Fielding had revisited the island post-war. It is therefore a travel book as much as a war book. It was probably always how Fielding, the lifelong traveller, viewed it. Born in India, he was brought up in France by his French grandparents and - like Paddy Leigh Fermor, but separately, he walked across Europe from West to East as a pre-war teenager. When war broke out he was living and working in Cyprus. It was only the Cretans' vigorous response to the invasion-by-air (history's first) that persuaded him he might have a role to play.
One advantage Xan Fielding has over Billy Moss is that he is a much better writer, better even than Paddy Leigh Fermor who was, eventually, persuaded to accept a knigthood for his literary work. Paddy is fluent and imaginative, but seems always to be holding back, afraid to impose himself on his own narrative. That is the key to his friend Xan's superiority. He gets the balance exactly right.
Xan, who died in 1991, was in later life a translator from the French. He was the man who translated Pierre Boule's Planet of the Apes and Bridge on the River Kwai.
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