"Billy Goat!"

Premier Nicholas Plastiras, the strong man of shaky Greece, found his strength as futile as the walls of Troy. Ulyssean guile, as effective as in the days of the wooden horse, turned him out of office.

The rightist Hellenikon Aima quietly printed a confidential letter written by General Plastiras during the Italo-Greek War of 1940-41; in it he had urged German mediation. The leftist press decried this crafty revelation as a "royalist plot," warned that royalist officers were planning an armed coup and were using the letter to get Plastiras out of the way.

Although he swore that he would not resign, the General had lost more face than he could spare. Finally he stomped in to see the disturbed Regent, old Archbishop Damaskinos. Behind closed doors, angry voices grappled. The bearded Archbishop, who in his day had wrestled men as well as souls, would not be thrown. The General screamed: "Tragos!" ("Billy goat!"). Then he stomped out and resigned.

The Archbishop named an old Navy man, tubby Admiral Petros Voulgaris, Commander in Chief of the Greek Fleet, as the new Premier. In World War I, the Admiral was a stout supporter of the Allies, a follower of the late great Eleutherios Venizelos. In World War II he made his mark by breaking last year's leftist mutiny aboard Greek warships in Alexandria harbor. Then, as now, he had British forces behind him to help keep Greek from fighting Greek.

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