O Aghelastos

(See Cover)

Carnival time brought no carnival to Athens last week. The people did not, in the fashion of happier years, cavort through the streets behind the gaitanaki (mock donkey formed by two clowns). The season brought only reminders of the fact that Greece was one of Europe's unhappiest nations.

At Athens' Acropole Palace Hotel, a U.N. commission was hearing witnesses on Greece's imbroglio with her northern neighbors. From Washington came an Olympian statement from Secretary of State Marshall, welcoming Greece's new coalition Government but warning that it must put Greece's chaotic house in order before it could expect more U.S. help.

In his sand-colored marble palace in Athens, a short (5 ft. 2 in.), stiff-backed gentleman was having a lonely lunch of a simple entree and fruit. George of Schles-wig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, King of the Hellenes, was suffering from a stomach ulcer, and a heavier meal, combined with all his worries about his realm, would have been inadvisable.

Cradle & Key. Greece, though it was tiny and poor and quarrelsome, was worth the world's worry. Under its deep blue skies people had first achieved the reasoned rule they called democracy. The Greece of 1947 was a strategic spot in democracy's worldwide, defensive struggle.

Greece is a key to the eastern Mediterranean and to the Dardanelles (which Russia wants). It is the only Balkan country still outside the Iron Curtain, and its frontier with Slav lands to the north (Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania) is in fact a frontier between two worlds. The U.N. commission was in Athens last week because Greece charged that Russia's allies were trying to push that frontier south.

Well-trained guerrillas from Russia's satellite states infiltrated into Greece's northern provinces, fanning Greece's chronic civil war. By diverting the energies of the Greek Government from the desperate domestic situation to the fighting in the north, the Communists were constantly worsening that domestic situation and gaining supporters among Greece's disgruntled, hungry people. The exasperatingly slow and petty testimonies before the U.N. commission did not tell the real story of Greece's tragedy. Outside the Acropole Palace's heavy brown curtains the streets of Athens told far more.

The Feast of Peace. On the walls of the working-class district beneath the Parthenon, scrawled slogans gave a chronology of Greece's sorrow.

One said: "Hurrah for the Allies, Death to Hitler!"

A second said: "EAM" (National Liberation Front, the leftist anti-Hitler organization which became an instrument of Communist terror).

A third said: "Erkhete"--He [the King] is coming.

The streets were crowded with refugees driven to Athens from the countryside, where the bitter forces behind political slogans whipped up a violence that made reconstruction impossible.

Two samples from refugees' stories:

P:Gramatikakis Panayotis, a Spartan lawyer, told how a band of extreme right-wing X-ites* broke into his house last May. "We were dining at about 11 at night, when five or six men came into the house. They killed my brother, who was a royalist though I am a leftist, broke my sister's arm, my mother's arm, wounded me in the leg, wounded another sister in the cheek. Now we live with relatives, six in one room."

P:Said the mayor of a village in the Tempe valley: "For months I have been trying to bring peace to the village. Not long ago I organized a big feast in the square. Everyone shook hands and said that henceforth they would live in peace. But in the middle of our feast, eight gendarmes walked up to the table and told all royalists that, if they did not leave at once, they would be considered traitors. So they left. Two nights later, the Communists attacked the gendarmerie post and shot all eight of them. Three days after that, a rightist band came across the river in boats, attacked the town, killed 16 people, and burned their houses. But when they started back across the river, the Communists were waiting for them with machine guns and killed about 60 out of 100."

"British, Go!" Who could bring peace to a land thus split by doubt and fear and bordered by its neighbors' militant hatreds? The British, who had come to Greece as liberators, had failed. The presence even of a friendly, homesick, token-size British army hurt Greek philotimo (the kind of sensitive self-esteem that makes a Greek waiter deliberately dawdle if he is harshly addressed, and a Greek day laborer feel equal to his King). Others besides Communists hummed the popular Communist ditty: "British, Go from Our Land!" In Athens last week, a fashionable young lady remarked: "It is fashionable to dislike the British."

The British failure to put Greece back on its political and economic feet was inevitable. All the British ever had a chance to do, or ever tried to do, was to maintain a minimum of order until the Greeks found leaders of sufficient wisdom and moderation to govern. The roster of current Greek political figures holds little hope for the future.

On the right, which is more reactionary than conservative, the chief figures are: Constantin ("Dino") Tsaldaris, an apoplectic, Egyptian-trained lawyer who heads the Populists, largest right-wing party (151 seats in Parliament) and General Napoleon Zervas (National Party, 24 seats), who fought well against the Germans, though he has a somewhat shady reputation (his party headquarters are in a gambling club).

The Greek Communists have not earned the reputation for successful cunning that crowns their colleagues in other lands. The senseless excesses of EAM terrorists have long held Communist gains below what they could have been. Best known Red bosses are: George Siantos, wartime Secretary-General of Greece's Communist Party, whose mustache (which he carefully brilliantines) is as trim as ever, but whose political strength is dropping; and Niko Zakhariades, present Secretary-General, a Moscow-trained' veteran party organizer who once shot a man in an Athens square. (Zakhariades claimed that his victim was a Trotskyite, but since the Greeks were not then using the Moscow ground rules, Zakhariades went to jail for nine years.)

Between the implacable and inept extremes are Greece's tragically feeble centrists, chief among them Liberal Themistocles Sophoulis, 86, a former archeologist who has proved vacillating despite his deceptively brisk voice and snapping black eyes (Greek cartoonists usually picture him rushing off to the men's room), and Themistocles Venizelos, bridge-playing, insignificant son of Eleutherios Venizelos, Greece's last first-rate politician (he was forced to resign in 1935. died in 1936).

Since real leadership and unity were obviously not coming from that job lot of office seekers, Greece's hopes inevitably turned to King George II,/- a neat man with icy blue eyes and a rigid face, in whose name (and against whose name) most of the fighting has been done in Greece.

George's coat of arms bears the picture of two Herculeses, both with clubs; but so far he hasn't harmed a Hydra. A product of German governesses, Potsdam Military Academy and the British Court, he sincerely tries to do the "right thing," once remarked sadly: "There are no gentlemen in Greece with whom I could make friends." During his years in exile he apparently felt quite at home in the limbo of throneless royalty, where frayed memories of grandeur are brushed and brushed again like aging cutaways. He dresses well--perhaps a little too well: he was once mistaken for a headwaiter in a London restaurant. He has shot tigers in Nepal, tried his hand at writing movie scenarios, was once offered (but declined) a job selling real estate in Florida.

King of the Kitchen. His passionate people sometimes wish that he were a crook or a Casanova, a gambler or a drunk --it would be better than his correct futility. But George drinks mineral water with his meals, dislikes cards, is circumspect with women. At 31, he married beautiful Princess Elizabeth of Rumania, whose domestic accomplishments (embroidery, watercolors and cookery) distinguished her from her flamboyant mother, the late Queen Marie. Nevertheless, George's marriage ended in divorce in 1935 (Elizabeth now lives in Rumania and reportedly has grown very fat). A minimum of gossip has attended George's relationship with his British mistress (said a friend last week: "She really feels more like a mother than a mistress towards him"). Not even a whisper of gossip attended George's friendship with International Lawyer Fanny Holtzman. The redoubtable Fanny once heard it said that she had cooked a meal for George. She bridled: "The King of Greece knew where the saucepans were. When he came to see me, he broiled his own chops."

George's soldiers have rendered the most devastating verdict on him. They call him O Aghelastos--he who does not laugh. Once, at the Oxford Union, he achieved an epigram: "The world is too full of bookworms and blue stockings, long-haired men and short-haired women." This was in 1928, and not new then; no subsequent wisecracks by George are on the record.

Moment of Greatness. In 1936, he courageously sacked his own supporter, crooked Minister of War George ("The Thunderbolt") Kondylis, declared an amnesty for anti-royalists, and instituted a liberal Cabinet. For a while George was so popular that his subjects took to wearing monocles, in his fashion. But the spell did not last long; when the anti-royalists became difficult, he permitted the late, pro-German John Metaxas to form an iron dictatorship which lasted till World War II. It was then that George had his moment of greatness. When the Greek people inspired the world by fighting against Italy with Thermopylaean courage, George found stirring words to lead them (before he had to flee the country): "All together, men, women, children of Hellas, rise up, clench your fists, stand at my side to defend the country . . . soldiers in the vanguard of that freedom which has sprung from the sacred bones of the Greeks. Forward, sons of Hellas, in the fight for body and soul!"

When the Germans pulled out and Communists' excesses had revived waning royalist sympathies, the Greeks, by fair and overwhelming vote, asked George to come back from his wartime exile. But they have heard no inspiring words from him since his return last September. For days after his restoration, George paced the floor of his sparsely furnished, silk-paneled study, trying to find a way of broadening Greece's rightist Government under Dino Tsaldaris. When Tsaldaris and the centrists refused to compromise, advisers urged the King to intervene. But at this point, "he who does not laugh" was back in character. Said he sadly: "Ohi--no. I am a constitutional monarch. I can do nothing." The civil war continued, the people remained afraid and very hungry.

The Stones God Threw. In Athens last week, the people were retelling an old story: when God made the world, He poured all the earth through a sieve and put down some good soil here, which was one country, and some there, which was another; then He threw all the stones over His shoulder, and that was Greece. Through the centuries Greeks managed to compensate for their hard lot (only 15% of Greece's land is arable) by organizational skill, trading talent and unflagging enterprise.

But the old ability to make two drachmas grow where one grew before seems to have sputtered out. An economist in Athens last week declared that the only new business enterprise he had heard of was a bar opened by a bartender who had quarreled with his partner.

When former New Dealer Paul A. Porter, ex-OPAdministrator, arrived in Athens last month as head of a U.S. economic mission, the only Greeks who did not welcome him were the Communists. The general attitude was summed up by one Greek who said in careful English: "We certainly could use a little loan here and a little loan there." But Porter was not yet ready to grant any loans, wanted the Greeks to put themselves on the road to orderly recovery.

Porter chalked up his first (minor) success by getting the Government to slash the number of its proliferating ministries from 43 to 15. Mark Ethridge cleared the decks for action by the U.N. commission (which had so far been bogged down in endless, petty testimonies) by obtaining unanimous agreement to limit witnesses' time to one hour, and by sending field teams to the troubled northern border. Greece at last had a coalition Government. The new Premier, in place of Tsaldaris, was frail, ailing ex-Banker Demetrios Maximos, a nonparty ex-royalist. The new Government, promising to review the case of all political prisoners, made a start by releasing women & children. But civil strife, which had slackened after the U.N. commission's arrival, flared up again, this time farther south than before; Communists boldly raided the Sparta prison, freed 200 prisoners.

Suspended Judgment. The people had not entirely given up hope that their King would pull them together. When George left the seclusion of his palace last week to attend a requiem service at the Metropolis Cathedral for a distant relative, Sweden's Prince Gustaf Adolf (recently killed in an airplane crash), the crowd lining University Boulevard neither cheered nor booed; they clapped politely. The people were still willing to withhold their judgment on their King--but not for much longer. Said one Athenian indifferently as the King's grey-green Rolls-Royce passed by: "Oh, I suppose he will go to England after the next plebiscite."

The people did not smile at the King; the King did not smile at the people. In fact, there was not much to smile about.

*Rightist hatchetmen whom their pro-German leader, Colonel Georges Grivas, designated with the algebraic symbol "x" (for reasons known only to himself).

/-George has no Greek blood in his veins, is part Danish, part German, part Russian. When Greece achieved independence from Turkey in 1831, the day's Big Three (Britain, France, Russia) decided that she needed a king, surveyed Europe's better princelings. They chose Otto of Bavaria, one of the highly unstable Wittelsbachs, who took 30 years to get himself dethroned. Next choice was a 17-year-old Prince of Denmark, who reigned 50 years, but was assassinated; his son Constantin was twice exiled, his grandson Alexander died after being bitten by his pet monkey; and his grandson George II has been in exile twice to date (1923-35, 1941-46).

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