A Spectator's Notebook
()N TUESDAY MORNING the Cyprus Executive Council decided that Michael Karaolis and Andreas Demetriou, sentenced to death for terrorist activities in Cyprus, must be hanged; and the date fixed for their execution, according to The Times corre- spondent in Nicosia, was May 10. Forty years ago, on May 10, 1916, a letter appeared in a London newspaper over the Signature of Bernard Shaw. A man who takes up arms to achieve his country's independence, Shaw argued, 'is doing only What English will do, if it is their misfortune to be invaded and teuquered. The fact that he knows that his enemies will not respect his rights if they catch him, and that he must, therefore, fight with a rope round his neck, increases the risk, but adds in the same measure to his glory in the eyes of his compatriots, "1(1 of disinterested admirers of patriotism throughout the world. it is absolutely impossible to slaughter a man in this Position without making him a martyr and a hero, even though the day before the rising he may have been only a minor poet.' thaw was talking about his fellow-countrymen, and events were t0 Prove him right. The execution of the leaders of the 1916 b ng proved to be the beginning of the end of English rule 'II Ireland; Irish public opinion, which had been almost solidly against the rising, had a year later become almost equally solid g the English. To shoot a man in the back in cold blood t „41Id a fellow-countryman at that) is an odious way of taking 41) arms to achieve the independence of one's country; and of course there is no doubt that the law of Cyprus demands the math Penalty. But once more martyrs are being made whose ein°rY will work powerfully against us. Will we never learn? *
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