In Europe

didn't stand a ghost of a chance. I saw that they, too, were pawns and victims. Why should we hate them, they got killed too, didn't they?’ Only in Myrtos does the retired schoolteacher refuse to admit Germans, not even German children, to his private museum. But then, the men on the square say as they shake their heads, he is suffering from a war trauma.
    For the Greeks the Second World War began on 28 October, 1940, when the Italians made a vain attempt to invade their country by way of Albania. Mussolini was increasingly frustrated, for he had hardly shared in Hitler's Western European successes. His radical supporters dreamed of the return of the Roman Empire, of the conquest of Egypt, of hegemony along the eastern Mediterranean seaboard, of an empire like Napoleon's. But he also wanted to take the wind out of the Germans’ sails, particularly in their attempts to seize the rich oilfields of Rumania.
    That October, he decided to take the initiative. Poorly armed, without sufficient supplies or winter clothing, the Italian soldiers marched to their defeat in the mountains. They advanced no further than about eighty kilometres before they were routed.
    In spring 1941, the Germans came to the Italians’ assistance. The Third Reich could not allow its eastern flank in the Balkans to remain undefended, especially if it hoped to invade the Soviet Union. In late March, therefore, Hitler presented Yugoslavia with an ultimatum: it had to join the Axis. On 25 March the country entered the Tripartite Pact, along with Germany, Italy and Japan; two days later, the government of Dragižsa ćetković was brought down by a coup. Hitler's response was to launch Operation Retaliation. On 6 April, Palm Sunday, most of Belgrade was bombed flat. Some 17,000 people were burned alive or buried beneath the rubble. Then Yugoslavia and Greece were hastily occupied by German and Italian troops; the Germans, after all, still had to prepare for the great push into Russia. As a result, tens of thousands of Yugoslav and Greek soldiers were able to escape into the mountains, where they immediately began a guerrilla war.
    Yugoslavia fell to pieces. The Italians moved into Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro. The Hungarians occupied Vojvodina. Their fascist Arrow Cross corps immediately began to massacre civilians in Novi Sad: 500 Jews and Serbs were shot or bayoneted. Croatia proclaimed itself an independent republic, led by fascist dictator Ante Pavelić. To make matters even more complicated, a thinly disguised religious war began between the Catholic Croatians and Orthodox Serbs. The Croatian
ustažsas
(rebels) commenced with large-scale ethnic purifications, including mass executions and death camps. Tens of thousand of Serbs were their victims.
    The partisan army consisted of Serbs, Croatians, Slovenians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Hungarians, Italians, Czechs and Bosnians. At the same time, however, a minor civil war was also being fought out within their ranks. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the royalist Chetniks began a life-and-death struggle with the communist partisans led by Josip Broz, otherwise known as Tito. The British historian Norman Davies summarised the situation thus: ‘The fierce determination of the Yugoslav partisans to kill the invaders was only exceeded by their proclivity for killing each other.’
    And so the Balkans and Greece went to war, pillaged, starving and poor, officially occupied by the Germans and Italians, but in actual factdominated at least as cruelly by hundreds of competing resistance groups.
    Seen from the air, Greece is mostly sea, little blue ripples with here and there an island grazed bare, a few grooves and lines in the yellowish-grey earth, at crossroads and along the coast a huddle of small white blocks, then the blue flats again, with a few fast-moving dots tying the whole thing together.
    Close to Ithaca, about 300 kilometres from the Italian coast, lies the island of Kefallonia. When we land at the little airfield, a violent summer storm is underway. The sea is covered in white horses, the olive trees bend beneath each gust, the water bursts across the breakwater dividing the bay at the capital of Argostoli. The island was hit by a major earthquake in 1953, most of the streets and villages were rebuilt, and now the razing and hammering is once again going on everywhere. My hotel, the Mirabella, looks out over a market square crowded with cafés. Yet it is not the British and