"NOW SAFE"

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 212, 8 September 1941, Page 6

"NOW SAFE"

SOLDIER'S ODYSSEY

ISLAND TO ISLAND

The matter of fact official advice "reported missing, now safe'' covers a multitude of stirring stories when applied to New Zealanders and others who scattered and disappeared into the blue after having put up the gallant fights in Greece and Crete that halted the Nazi drive on the Suez region.

Missing the army transports, they contrived in units and tens their individual escapcs. Among them was Private Raymond Leslie Wilson, of Hamilton, who was with the Auckland Battalion. Second Echelon. A matter of 74 days after he had been reported missing, he and ten companions reported for duty again at official headquarters.

In letters to his home folk Private Wilson narrates his odyssey of the escape, first to an off-shore Greek island, where he and his companions were sheltered for ten days by friendly inhabitants who fed them from their scant rations, and even raised a sum of £20 to help them on their way after they had declined to be a burden any longer on the generous Greek community. Followed a night journey on a choppy sea, and a secret landing on another island a number of miles nearer the Egyptian shore.

They were nonplussed and not a little concerned, after having slept comfortably in an old shed, Dy the arrival of an old woman with a basket of food for them, and to find that their presence had been observed. however, their fears were calmed by finding that they were under a mantle of protective secrecy established by the native islanders, who led them to a spacious and sheltered hiding place, and put them in touch with an English Red Cross nurse. The nurse, speaking their own tongue and arranging for English books and magazines as well as for other things they lacked, came to them as an angel of mercy, wrote Private Wilson. "It was just like being at home." The New Zealanders were much intrigued by the disposition of the houses and the loop-holed buildings, relics of the days, they were told, when the island was a piratical stronghold. Thp on 1V nnrenn thoir nn oni i n

The only person they encountered who wanted money from them was a man with whom they had to bargain for shipping them in a fishing boat to the mainland. He wanted £450 for the trip, and they eventualty signed an agreement to let him have it when they reached a British consul. The story of that trip in the dark the writer left for his next letter. Whether the fisherman got his £450 or not, the writer did not know, but he knew he went to the consul about it. "This was our farewell to the beautiful islands of Greece," he concludes. "I left them with deep degret and a hope in my heart that one day very shortly ~I would be one of the men who would return to restore the rights of the Greek people."