RAWDON CRAWLEY SURPRISES BECKY SHARP AND LORD STEYNE.-Vanity Fair, Chapter XVIII, Vol. II. "She began, trembling, pulling the jewels from her arms." SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE VOL. XXII OCTOBER, 1897 NO. 4 THE WRECK OF GREECE I Evzones of the Palace Guard, Athens. I helplessness of Greece produced the impression I have described. Sometimes the spectacle became unbearable, and I well remember that on one occasion, stifled by the oppressive political atmosphere, I fled from the city, climbed to the Akropolis, and sat me down on the steps of the Parthenon to try and escape, through the influence of the remnants of the immortal past, from the misery of the present. The scene was as beautiful as when the Athenians flocked to gaze, in delighted awe, upon the latest Pheidian incarnation of their goddess. Lycabettus pointed, as then, to a "shadowless, keen ether," the slopes of "flowery hill Hymettus were as purple, and still "there the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds; the fields and orchards toward Phaleron were as green, and in the groves T is just possible that among the readers of this magazine may be a gray-haired pioneer whose fate it has been to see a fellowcreature tortured to death by Red Indians. If so, that reader can form an adequate notion of the state of mind of any lover of Greece and student of international affairs who spent the months of March and April of this year in Athens. The Concert of Europe and the Turk were the torturers; Hellas was the victim. As the situation developed and the telegrams and now, as then, werefrom the different capitals arrived each day, the effect to the sympathetic onlooker was that, day by day, a fresh hot iron was applied to the living flesh, another sliver driven under the finger-nail. I do not mean to imply by this simile that the guilt was all on one side and the innocence on the other-far from it; but the ruthless might of the Powers and the the Attic bird Trills her thick warbled notes the summer long; mountains and islands inviolably Prankt on the sapphire sea. The city below told of triumph. Half a century before it was a wretched Turkish village-a single street of dilapidated wooden sheds. The now well-wharfed and teeming harbor of the Piræus was Copyright, 1897, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved. then but a few planks running out into the water. There was no Greece except in the hearts of a few patriots and in the words of the Church which had kept the lamp of nationality burning secretly during the long night. Half a century is a short time in which to emerge from the deadly stagnation left by many generations of Turkish oppression, yet what has Greece done in that short time? Athens is the finest city of the Balkans. Her museums are superior-not only by their contents, which goes without saying, but in their arrangement and the intelligence by which they are employed to aid research-to most museums in the world. Her university is educating the Hellenic youth of Europe and Asia. Railways, telegraphs, electric lighting, tramways, are familiar symbols of progress. I heard an old traveller declare that one of the hotels of Athens was the most comfortable in Europe. The people of Greece have grown very rapidly in numbers; they are fairly prosperous and contented so far as the material things of life are concerned. The worst of her political mistakes was not beyond mending. She had, a year before, revived that old Greek festival of which it has been said that no other human institution approached the regularity and the chronological importance of a solar phenomenon. All this and more has she accomplished in that short half-century. Yet as I sat there I knew she was in imminent peril of a fall greater than her rise had been-that the wind was gathering which might extinguish the lamp of Hellenism, perhaps forever. And any attempt to help her was like fighting a conflagration with a fan. Not thirty tyrants now enforce the chain, But every carle can lord it o'er thy land. Shortly afterward the blow fell. It was a harder and a more crushing one than had even been feared. Its final effects are still incalculable. Will Greece emerge from her ruin? What is the truth about her downfall? Is Hellas really dead and gone this time? I have hesitated long to put pen to paper in answer to these questions, and indeed they are not to be answered by anybody yet. But there is much that has not been told, and as I was in intimate relations with the King of Greece and the Greek Government during the fateful two months that preceded the outbreak of war, I may try to tell some of it which bears upon these points, vital in their interest to civilized mankind. II ATHENS was already seething when I arrived there, about the middle of February. Prince George, with his torpedo squadron, had just sailed for Crete amid the greatest enthusiasm that an excitable people had ever displayed. Col generally with the two words NIKH ANATOΣ, "Victory or death," and they marched by a roundabout way, through as many streets as possible, to the palace, where they cheered the king, and shouted for war, and then away to the barracks beyond the town, where they were huddled into uniforms and provided with rifles, which most of them had forgotten how to use. Besides the reservists, hardly a day passed without the arrival and procession of a group of volunteers from one of the Greek islands, from Turkey, from Bulgaria, from Egypt, or even from a foreign. country. As one of my photographs shows, they presented an extraordinarily diversified appearance. Some of them were dressed in the ordinary slop suits of the Balkans, made chiefly in Vienna; others wore the tattered clothes of the very poor; others the national costume in all its various forms; and in every batch there were some of the splendid shepherds Major Sontzo, "the best cavalry officer in Greece." onel Vassos, with his 1,400 men, had taken possession of Crete in the name of King George. Prince Nicholas had left that very day, with his battery, for the Thessalian frontier. Bands of reservists, called to the colors by royal edict, were arriving by almost every train. Each of them had its own big, home-made flag, a blue cross on a white ground, inscribed |