MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
MANDRE MICHALOPOULOS, until recently Greek • Minister of Information, has published this week a collection of his speeches and addresses under the title of Greek Fire (Michael Joseph, Jos. 6d.). It amines me that so sedate and Scholarly a man as M. Michalopoulos should have chosen an incendiary title for his exhortations and diatribes. The expression " Greek Fire " suggests all manner of nephitic combustibles, such as naphtha, quick-lime and sulphur. The Crusaders believed that the Byzantines possessed some secret weapon or Flammenwerfer known as the " Wild Fire" or the " Sea Fire " of the Greeks, with which they were enabled to set the multitudinous seas on fire by squirting liquid through a hose. The expression "Greek Fire " again came into common currency during the Greek War of Independence when Kanaris and Miaoulis sought to destroy the Turkish armadas by sending swift qaiques among them to drop and fling flaming baskets formed of tow and resin and tar. M. Michalopoulos, during the glorious but terrifying nights of April, 1941, would go to the Athens broadcasting station in the Zappeion Gardens and send messages of resolution and despair to the British public. In his firm Oxford accent he would recount to us from Athens the catalogue of mounting disaster. On April 8th the Germans entered Doiran and on the following day they were in Salonika ; on April 13th the British troops and the Anzacs fell back upon the Olympus line ; on April 18th the Greek Prime Minister committed suicide ; on April 23rd the Greek Government and the King left Athens for Crete ; on April 27th the Germans entered the Greek capital ; on June 1st the Allies evacuated Crete. Night after night M. Michalopoulos, after a heavy day's work, would walk down to the Zappeion Gardens and confront the microphone. And now, when disaster has ended and victory begun, he has been able to recover his "Greek Fire " from the monitoring service of the B.B.C. and to publish in cold, calm print the brave and bitter words that he then used.
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He tells us in this book how he escaped from Athens before the Germans entered. Having said goodbye to his wife and children, he embarked upon a tiny yacht and set sail for Crete. During the first day they hid under the shelter of an uninhabited island, Polyaigos in the Myrtoan Sea,—the island of many goats. Suddenly the drone of engines reached their anxious ears ; two German bombers circled above them and swooped down upon the yacht, which they machine-gunned and destroyed. The little boat split into two parts, and those of the crowded passengers who had not been killed by the explosion were flung into .the sea. The German machines returned and swooped over the survivors at sea-level machine-gunning as they swung past. " We gathered on shore," writes M. Michalopoulos, " marooned and helpless. Before us stretched, ageless and lovely, Homer's vast unvintaged sea, bearing in its bosom its countless myths and legends. One more had been added to the score. Lurid, indeed, and as a full moon rose over this scene of human misery, the foul, disgusting grin of those young Nazi savages fixed itself forever in my mind." In the night they were rescued by fishermen from the neighbouring island of Kimolos. Four days later a calque arrived from Crete with an English military doctor. They were taken to Santorin and finally to Heraklion. And then followed the appalling drama of the evacuation of Crete. It is not surprising that M. Michalopoulos, remembering his own adven- tures, recalling the fury of the enemy attack, reflecting upon the sufferings which have since been endured by his family and country- men, should not write or speak in a mood of Christian forgivingness.
Appeasement evidently is not for him. _ . * * * * What is so amazing about these Greeks is that never for one moment do they regret that hopeless gesture of defiance which brought upon them all this misery. M. Michalopoulos describes how one night, walking back to the Lycabettus from the Zappeion Gardens after his broadcast to London, he realised that, now that
the Italians had been defeated, the Germans were sure to come. "How many days more," he thought. " Ten? Only a week, perhaps—then they would be here." " It was inevitable," he writes, " that the Germans should come. But this stern necessity was no excuse for burning our gods--on the contrary, because of this grim fatality which has pursued us so often in our long history we had to stand firm, to keep faith, and by enduring the inevitable to overcome it. As I now walked up the 'slopes of Lycabettus, between the white houses casting sharp blue moon-shadows obliquely across the pavement, I felt an extraordinary elation, a pride of race stirring in me. , I realise that these .concrete thoughts which had come to me through the conscious medium of a classical education were the reflexion of the spirit of Hellas." I think we in this island can understand the elation which inspired M. Michalopoulos that moon- lit night when the Germans were at Doiran and Salonika. It is a feeling, such as we had in 5940, of some sudden integration with one's own past, a feeling of identity with all that in one's own history had been most powerful or heroic. A sense of unexpected pride. And we in this country can tape a vicarious delight in the poetic justice which is meted out to others. With what pleasure have we read of the capture of Corsica by French soldiers and French civilians, and how warmly we share with the Greeks their delight that the Greek destroyer Kanaris ' should have received the surrender of Augusta!
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In reading the speeches and addresses which .M. Michalopoulos has delivered since his escape in the United States and in this country, one does, I feel, catch some spark of this Greek sense of destiny. " You take your war calmly," he said in an address in the United States. " You are confident in the steady unrelenting growth of your striking power. You know that you will in the end win. You will never be faced with the tragic and superb predicament having to sacrifice everything—country, village, fields that you have 'tilled for years with your own hands, home, family, life itself—in the knowledge that only thus the cause, in which you believe more than in the uninterrupted enjoyment of these legitimate advantages, may be saved for the generations to come." It is this " faith and fortitude in the face of inevitable disaster " which renders Greece so shining an example. They never expected to defeat the Italians, and their Epirote victories came to them as a delicious surprise. They knew that they could never defend themselves against the Germans, and their. subsequent destruction seems for them but an element of that Necessity which is above the gods. But it is a fine thing in the modern world to find a country which can face such suffering with open and unflinching eyes.
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M. Michalopoulos in his addresses does not, however, rely solely on heroics. He utters warnings. He is not at all optimistic about the fruits of victory: he knows well that many of these fruits will be sour and that some of them will already have been eaten by worms. He foresees that when we liberate Europe we shall find Europe sick, suffering and distraught. " The greater democratic nations," he writes, "if they cherish their greatness and fully wish for peace, must become the physicians rather than the judges of their sick brethren." You cannot expect the Greeks, for instance, to feel much goodwill towards the Bulgarians, who in the village of Doxaton alone massacred three thousand people in a single night. Much hatred and dissension is bound to survive. And Greece itself which has achieved such glory in, this war, may well fall back into what Herodias called " that ancient malady of the Greeks—internal discord." This prospect of anarchy among the liberated nations must, in M. Michalopoulos's opinion, " be faced as a pathological possibility and treated as such." The hour of liberation is rapidly approaching ; we are achieving increasing competence by land and sea and air ; but what of the physicians who are to cure these deep political malidies? The physicians are not even agreed upon the nature of the disease.
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