The Stronghold. An Account of the Four Seasons in The White Mountains of Crete. With photographs by Daphne Bath and a splendid John Craxton dust wrapper design.

Secker & Warburg, London, 1953. Book. Very Good. Hardcover. 1st Edition. First Edition (first printing). 8vo. xvii, 317pp. Green cloth lettered and ruled in gold at the spine. With a photographic portrait frontispiece, map-illustrated endpapers, seventeen captioned photographs and a multi-panel folding map at the rear. Edges lightly spotted, and with a scattering of further light spotting to the margins of a dozen concluding leaves. Some toning and light spotting to the free endpapers. Handsome former owner bookplate to a blank preliminary leaf, and with the inked name of the same owner above. A very good copy in the splendid Craxton colour dust wrapper, non-price-clipped, but with some toning to the spine panel, and a little minor spotting and wear, and several small areas of loss from the spine panel ends (impacting the "The" of the title) and several corner tips. The author's first book, an uncommon account of his year-long return to Crete after the conclusion of WWII. Fielding was commissioned into the Cyprus Regiment in September 1940, joining the SOE after the fall of Crete. He teamed up with Paddy Fermor (who appears several times in the text) to build an intelligence gathering network which provided detailed information on the movement of Axis troops, and also arranged for the transportation of hundreds of Allied soldiers left behind after the evacuation..