TALES OF IEGEAN INTRIGUE.*
Mn. LAWSON'S stories of Intelligence work in the /Egean during the war are delightful ; they are light while informing, high spirited but scholarly, and they have a verbal resource equal to Mr. Lawson's diplomatic ingenuity in Crete and elsewhere. Some of our readers will no doubt remember his studies in modern Greek folk-lore. Having previously passed some time at the British School at Athens he was equipped for Intelligence work with a good knowledge of modern Greek. As he could also talk French, it was surprising that his offer of service was not accepted sooner. When at last he was invited to do Intelli- gence work the Admiralty and the War Office seem to have discovered his merits simultaneously and competed with one another in their desire to make use of him. Let it be remarked, however, that the competition was not financial. Mr. Lawson calculates that on the assumption that his daily labours as an Intelligence officer lasted 16 hours, his pay worked out at Sid. an hour.
In proud possession of a commission as a Lieutenant in the R.N.V.R., he was stupefied to find directly he joined the trans- port which was to take him to the Mediterranean that he was the senior officer and was consequently the Officer Commanding whatever troops were on board. He did not know how to give a single word of command. But his stupefaction was a matter of momenta. Beginning with that emergency, he developed for himself a philosophy of "carrying on" which he analyzes at length in several humorous pages. There was no subsequent situation throughout his varied career as an Intelligence officer in which he was not able somehow to "carry on." Really the type of scholar who adapted himself to any kind of adventurous work in the war would be well worth a literary study to himself. Probably Great Britain, much more than any other country, has produced men of this type. We will quote one example of how Mr. Lawson on board his transport compounded for ignor- ance with resourcefulness and the virtue of being able to keep a stiff upper lip:— " Enter one day Warrant-officer No. 3 to whom I had assigned not only the duty of doing the engine-room rounds on my behalf, the engine-room being his native province, hut also a share of watoh-keeping on the bridge. To this latter duty he objected, alleging that I had no right to order an engineer officer to undertake it, and proposing to write me a service- letter on the point. Now I was none too clear what a service. letter might be, or whether he was merely putting up a bluff, because it was too cold for his liking on the bridge. Moreover this was a point on which I could not seek the signal-boatswain's counsel, without asking him in effect to give away his fellow warrant-officer. I therefore pointed out to him that my order might or might not be irregular, but that it would be worse tno.n irregular, to wit a serious breach of discipline, if he should fad to comply with it. As for the service-letter (which I assumed to be some kind of formal protest against my conduct, and therefore proper to be passed on to some superior authority) I would deal with it at Malta ; meantime if he wished for my orders in writing (a vague memory of some yarn involving a question of naval discipline suggested this counter-bluff) he could have them ; but as the ship was short of watch-keepers,
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112s. Tod.add of &jean Intrigue. By 3.0. Lawson, London Chatto and WIndus. ed. I expected him, until we reached Malta, to 'carry on.' Which; being in fact a good enough fellow, he did, nor did we even exchange the suggested billets-doux."
He enjoyed that encounter, but being a man of sensibility he did not enjoy so much having to report on the efficiency of the Captain of the ship when Malta was reached :—
" I, forsooth, who had played the rile of 0.C. troops aboard a transport for the space of a fortnight and had never seen the war-time regulations, to report on the efficiency of a merchant captain who had occupied his business in groat waters these thirty years and more, and upon his compliance with the said regulations unknown !"
Mr. Lawson's experiences in Crete, where be "carried on" for most of the time, remind us at times of the reminiscences of that engaging traveller in Greece, Trelawny, who was the friend of Byron and Shelley. More than one Cretan chief of Mr. Lawson's acquaintance seems to have had a touch of Trelawny's Odysseus. There could have been no more ambiguous ground for an Intelli- gence officer to tread than was provided by Crete when Mr. Lawson arrived at Soda 13ay. It was not known at that time what the precise intentions of Greece were. The inclinations and the prevarications of King Constantine were obvious enough, but the 81.1C0e88 of Germany might not after all be sufficient to cause Constantine to cease to be equivocal. There was always the possibility that the vehemently pro-Ally M. Venizelos might get the upper hand in Greece. In these circum- stances the British Foreign Office waited to see which way the cat would jump. Some readers of this book may be inclined to say that it was bound to wait, and that Mr. Lawson's con. tempt for all the British hesitations and delays is unde- served. Be that as it may, Mr. Lawson found himself under the necessity of trying to thwart the unocasing intrigues of Germany in what was still officially neutral land without having adequate authority to deal with those Cretans who were the agents of the Germans. He tells us that nearly two years after the outbreak of war the British-owned Eastern Telegraph Company was accepting cypher messages from the German and Austrian Consuls at Coma for transmission to Athens or elsewhere. He suggests that the British Legation at Athens had all this time been nursing the fatuous hope of reconciling M. Venizelos and King Constantine. He considers that the British Primo Minister did great disservice both to the Crown and the country by assuring the House of Commons that the national movement led by M. Venizelos was in no way anti-dynastic. Mr. Lawson had good reason to know that the movement was necessarily and emphatically anti-dynastic in the sense that Constantino had to be removed. Though Mr. Lawson was not vested with enough responsibility, he never had the least compunction in assuming it. His moral courage was never at fault. He met intrigue with intrigue and insolence with boldness. He discusses in detail the ethics of intrigue as it may be conducted by an Intelligence officer, and his con- clusions seem to us very sound. He would never spoil a diplo- matic ship for a ha'porth of tar in war time, but he shows how fundamental unscrupulousness always defeats itself in the long run. He is careful of the prestige of his country, and he says that no single event in the /Egean did so much to raise Great Britain in the esteem of the Greeks as the fact that during the great fire at Salonica the British troops did no looting whatever. He himself was concerned in a pretty act of international courtesy and good faith when, having arrested two well-known Cretan merchants, he frankly admitted that a mistake had been made. The mistake was certainly justifiable, as the merchants were the victims of a complicated plot in which forged documents played a considerable part. But Mr. Lawson was perfectly right not to ride off on that excuse. We fancy that the diplo- matists of most other countries would have covered up their tracks at whatever injustice to the victims on the principle that it is fatal in diplomacy to acknowledge an error.
We must direct our readers to the book itself for the enjoy- ment of all the stories of plot and counter-plot, but we will suggest by a quotation the subtle manner in which Mr. Lawson was able to produce results under the most unpromising conditions. He suspected two Cretan Mohammedans of anti- British intrigue, but he had nothing tangible against them. One day one of the Mohammedans who was the servant of the other came on board Mr. Lawson's ship on a flimsy pretext. Mr. Lawson proceeds :— " I thought a little discomfort of mind was the best medicine that I could administer to them. So I sent for the man, and adopting the Oriental style of mystery, said ; 'Go, say to your toaster, "That which I went to seek, I found not, and that which I went to speak, remains unspoken. Yet bring I you a message for which you look not ; and the message is this : fire hath two uses, to consume and to illumine" '—but it is better in the Greek, vatketrqet Oteuepbeet, 'to make unseen (i.e. destroy) and to make visible.' I believe the message, which the emissary learnt by heart before I let him go, troubled his master, who certainly ceased from troubling me."
The most striking achievement of Mr. Lawson, however, was the support which he was able to lend to the Cretan Revolution. Ile was in fact one of the chief engineers of that revolution, for by means of propaganda he gave a great momentum to anti- German feeling. After a careful examination of the existing propaganda on both sides, he decided that it was poor stuff. He must make an appeal in some new way. He therefore decided to try to capture the Cretan fancy by disguising his propaganda under the form of a discussion of that endless Greek contro- versy, the rival merits of the dialect of the uneducated man and the artificial reconstructed, quasi-classical language of the politician, the journalist, and the professional man. His effort took the form of a Platonic dialogue which was a reply to a solemn German treatise about "the historical necessity" of a German victory. Mr. Lawson writes as follows of Hifi reply :— "The reply was a brief skit, in the form of a Platonic dialogue between a German professor and a humorous Cretan scamp aboard a steamship bound for Candia. The professor, who talks and mispronounces the stilted language of a leading article, turns out to have had as his pupil the author of the said German treatise. The Cretan, an ex-schoolmaster who now keeps a cook-shop which makes a speciality of snails, makes an effort to revert to the pedagogic style of speech, and introduces himself in such high-flown terms, to match those of the professor, that the latter mistakes him for a scientific specialist in conchology. In the conversation which ensues the Cretan makes fun of the German professor and his country, broken only by one tirade in the vernacular, some of which Is beyond the professor's comprehension. Finally he proposes to debate seriously the meaning of historical necessity ' ; gets the professor to admit that necessity means only the relation of cause and effect, by which is governed the evolution of the whole natural world, snails as well as men ; demonstrates that historical necessity is only that branch of natural necessity which governs the development of nations and men, in reference to whom therefore the two terms are interchangeable ; and then asks the professor what is the first and greatest necessity of men. The professor pronounces for systematic education end the assimilation of German culture. The Cretan apologises for having expressed his question badly, and suggests that even the children being educated in German schools need food first ; and food, not to mention certain other supplies, in the first necessity of their soldiers in the field. 'Where,' he asks, 'will you gat your supplies for your blockaded country / " We had made large provision before the war,' replies the German. A damning enough fact,' retorts the Cretan ; but even they will not last for ever. We have experienced a short blockade in Greece and Crete lately, and know what it means.' Our commercial submarines will bring supplies from America,' says the German ; 'haven't you read in the papers about those two?''flab!' retorts the Cretan, we had two smuggling caiques which ran the blockade here ; but they didn't save many of us from feeling hungry. Sea-power must starve you out too in the end. Sea-power always wins. It is a natural necessity." Excuse me,' says the German, breaking off the conversation and making hastily for the ship's side, the sea affects my stomach." The sea will affect every German stomach.'" If this delightful piece of fooling, which was also sound and valuable work, was Mr. Lawson's most original feat, his most daring coup was certainly his fabrication of a telegram from Venizelos—a coup justified by his own ethics aforesaid— which prevented the Cretan revolution from faltering at a critical moment.
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