George murmured vaguely. He knew that the Colonel’s ideas of what constituted firmness were very different from his own and that a discussion of them would not be profitable. Monsieur Hagen, the Red Cross man, who had given him the letter of introduction to Colonel Chrysantos, had made the position clear. The Colonel was a desirable acquaintance only in so far as he was a senior officer in the Salonika branch of Greek military intelligence, who could lay his hands on the kind of information George needed. He was not a person towards whom it was possible to have very friendly feelings.
“Do these casualty figures include the rebels, Colonel?” he asked.
“Of the killed, yes. Twenty-eight of the forty-five thousand were rebels. About their wounded we have naturally no accurate figures; but in addition to those we killed, we captured thirteen thousand, and twenty-seven thousand more surrendered.”
“Do you have lists of the names?”
“Certainly.”
“Would it be possible to see if the name of this German is on one of those lists?”
“Of course. But you know we did not take more than a handful of Germans.”
“Still it might be worth trying, though, as I say, I don’t even know yet if the man survived the ambush.”
“Ah, yes. Now we come to that. The 24th of October ’44 was the date of the ambush, you say, and it was near a petrol point at Vodena. The andartes might have come from the Florina area, I think. We shall see. So!”
He pressed a button on his desk and a young Lieutenant with horn-rimmed glasses came in. The Colonel spoke sharply in his own language for nearly half a minute. When he stopped, the Lieutenant uttered a monosyllable and went out.