The British in Greece
By C. M. WOODHOUSE
THE impending withdrawal of British troops from Greece, announced earlier this week in the House of Commons by the Under-Secretary of State for Forcign Affairs, is not quite such a striking event as it has been made to seem by some parts of the Press. For one thing, judging by the precedents, we cannot even be sure that it is really going to happen ; and even if it is going to happen this time, it should have come as no surprise.. Formal notification that British troops were to be withdrawn was given to the Greek Government by the British Chargé d'Affaires in Athens as long ago as August 5th, r947. Nothing happened then ; nor was even that the beginning of the story. It had already been officially announced on February 3rd of the same year that our forces' strength was to be cut by about 5o per cent. (from a total of approximately 16,000) ; and right back in 1945, when British Ministers were busy
pressing successive Greek Governments to proceed quickly to the conduct of elections and a plebiscite on the monarchy, one of their most strongly expressed purposes was to bring about conditions which would allow an early withdrawal of our troops. This week's announcement should therefore be read as no more than the long- awaited fulfilment of a long-declared policy.
Even if it is at last to be put into effect, it would be a mistake to strain the interpretation of its significance. We have Mr. Mayhew's assurance that it is not the result of our economic crisis. Whether the fact that the last announcement of the same intention coincided with our last economic crisis (in 1947) gives more or less credibility to the Under-Secretary's assurance is perhaps a matter of opinion. But at least we can be sure that considered internationally, as an incident in the " cold war," the withdrawal of our troops from Greece is of little significance. They were never numerous enough to with- stand an invasion from the north if it came ; they were expressly debarred from taking any part in the war against the Communist rebels, however nearly that might turn into a war against Greece's Slav neighbours ; and so far as the strategy of any future war might affect the Greek extremity of the Balkan peninsula, it was demon- strated by the campaign of 1941 in the last war, that a British Army might as well not be there in the first place as to be there only to be driven out. In either case the problem of " liberating " Greek soil from a foreign invader would eventually have to be considered ob &Olio. This is the hard fact which, on the melancholy hypothesis that Greece might again be attacked by an overwhelming enemy, our impending withdrawal has now recognised.
But need that melancholy hypothesis be accepted ? It has been suggested that our troops' withdrawal from Greece is part of a larger bargain between the Great Powers, as a result of which the U.S.S.R. has agreed to leave Greece unmolested. If. that is so, then Greece's friends can only hope that her Government will remember how many such bargains have been made in the past, and what became of them. Surely at least our own Government does not need to be reminded that all Soviet bargains have implicit in them the Vicar of Bray's tactical proviso " until the times do alter " ; nor do the Greeks need to be advised to think twice before accepting at its face value even Tito's transfiguration, from a " people's democrat " in the Soviet camp, into a "Fascist beast " in our own. Still more sceptically should we regard the assumption, if it has been made, that after Field-Marshal Papagos' magnificent victories in the north, Greece is now ready to stand on her own feet. Yet that assumption seems to be entailed by the coincidence of the American Government's proposals to reduce its military aid to Greece with the British Government's final withdrawal of our troops. It is too much to expect that Greece, which is only now free to begin the tasks of reconstruction that the rest of Europe began four years ago, should be able to maintain security and order with no more support than the efficient but small police and service missions which will remain.
But whatever the unpredictable outcome of these decisions, of one thing retrospect leaves no doubt: that is the wisdom and justification of the decision made five years ago to send British troops to Greece, even though they were not needed for the actual liberation of the country from the Germans. Five years ago this month, when ocr troops had just arrived in the great towns and ports of Greece„ by sea and air, on parachutes or bicycles, or on foot, there was only one thing on which all the newspapers of Greece—left, right and centre—could agree,•and that was to welcome them. At intervals they all variously changed their minds: left-wing papas after December, i944, when the British troops were very properly used to smash the Communist revolution in Athens ; right-wing papers in 1945, when they thought that British troops were being used to delay the restoration of conditions in which their side could win the election ; centre newspapers in 1946-47, when they believed that what was meaninglessly called " the monarcbofascist tyranny " rested on the reinforcement by our troops of the Greek organs of govern- ment. But it is safe to say that in none of these flights of fancy did the Greek Press carry public opinion with it. The man in the street, or at the plough, or by the mountain fireside, knew where he had a good friend to rely on. The British soldier did not take long to find out the truth of the words written by a former Greek Minister in London, commenting on a sonnet of Rupert Brooke's too famous to need quoting, "Greek soil is not foreign for the British."
This fact was the more remarkable because there were any number of possible causes of friction between hosts and guests in the years since the war, and not a few sly men ready to exploit them. On the one side there was the shortage of accommodation and services, accentuated by the presence of British troops in a land where some thirty thousand houses had been destroyed and almost every road and railway-line put out of use ; there was inflation, aggravated by the freer flow of money through the hands of British soldiers thai almost any Greek's ; there was for some the bitter memory of December, 1944, When not every man on the wrong side was a Com- munist or a criminal. On the British side, there were all the natural difficulties of strangers in a strange land, from which other more sinister strangers had only just been evicted. A British officer said sadly to me in 1946: " The trouble is, unfortunately, we just don't like foreigners." More simply, one of his private soldiers grtunbkd: " Can't make 'em ow, these Greeks: first flowers, then bombs, then flowers again. . . It says much for both sides that, in spite of occasional setbacks, the sympathy and understanding between Englishmen and Greeks have steadily mounted in the last five years, and are now never likely to fall back. As often before, the British soldier has proved his country's best ambassador.
Previous page
