Civil war civilities
C. M. Woodhouse
Memories of a Mountain War — Greece 1944-1949 Kenneth Matthews (Longman 0.50) Greece was in a state of virtually uninterrupted war throughout the 1940's: first against Italy, then against Germany, finally against a Communist rebellion supported by Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania. The civil war overlapped the enemy occupation and went on for most of five years after it was over. Mr Matthews witnessed those five years as a correspondent of the BBC a task for which his qualifications were exceptional. He had learned Greek as a schoolmaster on Spetsai before the war and, served as a war correspondent in the Middle East. More important, he writes very agreeably.
Although his memoirs do not purport to be history, they make many indirect contributions to it. His book is a conpulsively readable confection, often moving as well as entertaining, of dramatic adventures, personal tragedies, social and political gossip, and delicious interludes with various attractive girls. Every reader who knew Greece during and after the second world war will recognise the flavour of it, and for those who did not its authenticity can be guaranteed.
The prime attraction for most readers will be the episodes of adventure. Mr Matthews landed in the Peloponnese with the first liberating forces in September 1944, and indirectly witnessed the atrocities committed by the Communist guerillas under Ares Veloukhiotis. He was in Athens during the revolution in December. He attended the disinterment of hundreds of hostages murdered by the Communists. He foresaw and observed the beginnings of the civil war in 1945-46. He accompanied the first UN Commission of Enquiry in northern Greece, including its abortive attempt to meet the rebel Commander-in-Chief, and its brief visit to a Greek Communist camp in Yugoslavia. All these episodes are vividly and sympathetically described. Best of all is his star turn, when he was captured by the rebels at Mycenae and held in their mountain fastness for two weeks in 1948.
The Communists announced that they had captured Mr Matthews in order to " educate " him — a process which might later have been called "brainwashing." He already had some sympathy with their cause, though he regarded it as doomed; and he soon liked his captors better than their opponents. After the first few days of discomfort, exhaustion and fear, he was treated with great consideration. "I might have been dropping in on a friend for a casual drink and a midnight chat," he writes on his first meeting with a senior officer of the Democratic Army.
A few months earlier an American journalist who had been trying to contact the rebels ended up as a corpse in the bay of Salonika. Mr Matthews did not believe that his colleague was a victim of the Communists, but the thought of a similar fate was never far from his mind. He need not have worried, for his profession proved to be one of his safeguards. As a good journalist, he even contrived an interview (intended to be published, but duly suppressed) with one of his captors. He was finally released on the order of a rebel "General," Karagiorgis, himself formerly editor of a Communist newspaper, with whom he had been on dining terms in Athens. As a result he has been able to write the only first-hand account of life among the rebels by a non-Communist western journalist.
He is less reliable about events at which he was not present. It is not true that Ares took any part in the December rising in Athens. The Communist leadership deliberately kept him at a distance, fighting Zervas in Epirus. Nor was Ares later " dispatched by a unit of the national army ": he committed suicide. Nor was Matthews' friend Karagiorgis "mortally wounded" in the civil war. He survived to be expelled from the Communist Party in 1953, and died only in 1958. Most regrettable of all (at least to me) is Mr Matthews's error about the destruction of the Gorgopotamos railway-viaduct under the occupation. He says that it "blew an important German supply-route off the map for half a year." I wish I could support that claim, but in fact it was much less important to the Germans than we thought; and anyway a true estimate would be nearer to six weeks than six months. (I am afraid that is the sort of pedantry which leads Mr Matthews to call me an " austere historian ".
One is left wondering why he has waited nearly a quarter of a century to tell his uniquely fascinating story. Evidently the BBC and the Foreign Office have something to do with it. Perhaps, too, some of the bitter-sweet emotions (espedaily those connected with his jeunes lilies en fleur) had to await their hour of Proustian recall. But as he rightly says, the world he describes does not survive only in the memory. Demonstrations, strikes, riots, explosions, political murders, urban guerrillas—all are things of the past in Greece; but not in the British Isles.
C. M. Woodhouse, M.P. for Oxford, in 1943 commanded the Allied Military Mission to the Greek guerrillas in German-occupied Greece.
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