Europe in the Looking Glass (15 page)

OUR DAYS IN ATHENS
passed with surprising regularity. The great moment of union was the midday meal at the Grand Bretagne, on which indeed the whole of business and political Athens was usually focussed. The Prime Minister and his wife might be lunching in a private room with its folding doors carefully thrown open. An Englishman in a white drill suit and butcher blue collar would rush in to say that the government had signed his contract; whereat a party of Americans at the next table would mutter darkly. Someone had seen the First Secretary at the –– Legation the night before with Ida Kazanowska. Simon was still asleep. Howe was coming in afterwards to show us his new lamp. David was unable to eat the chicken.

‘Michael, who is that woman?’

‘Good morning, Robert.’

‘No, a gin fizz for me, please.’

‘Wasn’t last night fun–’

‘Waiter!’

‘We must go there again.’

‘Waiter, I never eat things with bones in them.’

‘Hullo, Howe!’

and so on.

Owing to the tropical heat of the midday sun, these lunches were generally protracted from one hour to three. There was little inducement to go out, as all the shops were shut and the whole town deserted during the early afternoon. When at last the last grape was eaten, the last fizz drunk, our procedure was invariably the same. Filing out of the hotel bedecked with
towels and bathing-dresses, we would plunge down the furnace of the street to the bus terminus by the University, squeeze our way into either a clattering Ford van or a long tubular French vehicle, the final word in omnibus comfort and beauty; drive past the old Royal Palace, the English Church, and the Arch of Hadrian proclaiming with offensive ostentation that this was not the city of Theseus but that of Hadrian; down the long road between the round, green trees, past the Phix brewery and the aerodrome, and eventually arrive at the wooden pier leading to our bathing-cabins, whence it was possible to descend by a ladder straight from the floor into the sea.

The water, without being stuffy, was so warm that it was possible to lie about for hours without feeling cold. Howe and I, detesting aquatic frolics in which we are always within an ace of drowning, and preferring the cool, clearer water of the main current of the bay, used to swim out some two or three hundred yards from the shore, then turn, and gently treading water, contemplate the view: the Acropolis and Lykabettus rising three or four miles inland out of the bronze haze; and in front, fringing the distant shores of the bay, the long, irregular line of factories and hotels, broken now and then by a team of tramcars of all different sizes tearing noisily along the water’s edge, their white window-curtains flapping in the wind. Then an armada of jellyfish would come bearing down and terminate our reverie. Not far away a rocky islet, which had formerly been the swimmer’s favourite objective, was now the haunt of savage octopi.

When at last it was finally decided to emerge, the recognized procedure, as in all continental bathing resorts, was to lie half drowsing in the sun and slowly absorb the heat of its supposedly invigorating rays. Personally I find no pleasure in having an adhesive saline film baked into the pores of my skin. The scientific bather, however, spends whole weeks face downwards on a splintery board in quest of sunburn. The human body being only occasionally beautiful, under such conditions it becomes, so it seems to me, literally repulsive.

Think, for example, what a parade of all that beauty, wealth and fashion can produce, the word ‘Lido’ inevitably conjures up in the imaginations of those whose holidays are spent at Sheringham or Bexhill. Yet it would be difficult, when viewed impartially, it would be, one might say, impossible, to discover the whole world over any single spot with the exception of a leper island, containing a segregation of humanity so revolting to behold as the bathers upon that overcrowded spit of sand during the last three months of the summer season. The beach of the EI Dorado Hotel presents the appearance of a
charnel-house
: an infinity of bodies; men with stomachs to make Buddha blush, lie helpless as turned turtles in the effort to get brown. Women, rolling back their bathing-dresses, prostrate themselves to cook their vertebrae, already blotched with staring pink weals. Giant raw-beef Argentines, in doll’s pants, play tennis upon courts the colour of their limbs. Ordinary English mothers loose their hair and lie doubled up upon the beach in mauve bath-towelling pyjamas.

But it is the sand that completes the picture. Wet and adherent, a dull, mustard gray in colour, soiled with the soil of a million cosmopolitan bodies, it clings in scabrous patches to every particle of the human form, befouls the hair, clots the toes, coats the limbs, lodges in the teeth, cracks the fingernails, and finally invests the body with an appearance of filth and squalor almost unmentionable. Such is the Lido, that mirror of beauty, that mattress of temptation. At Phaleron we were at least spared the sand.

David and Michael used to bask for hours among the strange crowd of emaciated youths and inflated tradesmen that lay about in front of the cabins. We eventually came to know all the regular frequenters of the place by sight. I can recall a German sculptor’s model with a Greek body, Jewish nose and gold
eye-teeth
; a pendulous grey-beard in a straw boater; a youth named Toli who sported a monogram on his left shoulder; another in a black Phrygian cap of waterproof material, who always swam underwater; a crowd of insignificant men with Chaplin
moustaches and Greek profiles; and occasionally a family of Levantine Americans, whose accents were excruciatingly nasal. Apart from this miscellany, we made two friends who were, even before we knew them more intimately, most courteous and delightful. The first was named Constantin Komara, an athletic swimmer and diver. He was a financier. The other was named Sotiri Cartaliss. He was tall and upright, with soft eyes and a soft voice, well-dressed, -read, and -travelled, and on the International Finance Commission. One seldom meets anyone abroad who is not either a financier or a soldier. Cartaliss, however, had had a different history to most. He had been in Smyrna in 1922.

To the man in the street in England, the name of Smyrna, redolent of rugs and mosques and Lady Hester Stanhope, denotes little more than a ‘port in Asia Minor’ – where a slight fracas between the Greeks and the Turks took place just after the War. Perhaps most illustrative of the contrasting significance of the word throughout the Levant is the fact that people in those parts do not bisect their lives, as with us, by such phrases as ‘after the War’ or ‘up to 1914’ – but say instead ‘After Smyrna’, ‘Before Smyrna’. Western Europe is unable to realise that acid after-test of disgrace and disappointment that the name arouses in the Greek. Nor is it easy to estimate rejuvenescent symbolism, expressed in innumerable cheap designs representing Kemal and the Crescent trampling on the Greek Cross, that it conveys to the Turk, ever in need of political restoratives. On the day of my return to England I lunched with a judge, whose latter years as an advocate had been largely employed in proving to an insurance company that, as the damage occasioned by the Turkish entry into Smyrna was entirely accidental, they were therefore liable to pay full compensation.

‘Yes,’ he assured me between two mouthfuls of pheasant, ‘the atrocities were entirely imaginary’.

I sat silent, astonished at what I afterwards discovered to be a typical misrepresentation. Just as a murderer, called upon to
defend his life with the statement ‘not guilty’ presently arrives at as implicit a belief in that statement as in the colour of the sky or the king’s face, so everyone will more or less place his belief in the alternative that suits him best. But it would be painful to hear anyone, whatever his views, attempt to defend the invaders of Smyrna to a Greek. Even a judge would be made to feel that his remarks were not only absurd, but in bad taste.

Cartaliss’ parents had originally been wealthy: his father a banker, his mother a landowner in Epirus. We were discussing Smyrna one afternoon at Phaleron, and he stood looking out to sea. When we had finished he turned round, and with a metallic note in his soft voice, said:

‘You talk of it calmly – can you think what it was like? We drove down the quay to the North. In the back was my mother, her face green, her eyes starting from her head; my father chattering, myself the same. We drove full speed, over bodies and through blood. We pretended we were French, otherwise we should have been murdered. You don’t believe it. We got away in the end on a Japanese battleship.’

‘You should have seen the refugees,’ interpolated Howe, enveloped in a towel embroidered in pink crossstitch, ‘when they came off the boats at Piraeus. I met them all. Some were literally naked. Most had not touched food since they left Smyrna and were picked out of the water – and some of the boats had been delayed six or seven days. I remember you, Cartaliss, you–’

‘Well, I’m all right now,’ interjected Cartaliss, cutting short the reminiscence.

Many people talked to us of their experiences; and though each had a different story to tell, all agreed that the horror of the massacre had lain in its terrifying unexpectedness. It was universally known that the Turks were coming; but no-one foresaw the barbarities of a seventeenth-century sack. It was said at the time that the Royalist Party were anxious to see the army defeated, owing to its Venizelist leanings. In any case their chosen commander-in-chief was mentally unsound, and instead
of having been shot, ought later to have been exhibited in a cage by the Republicans. His favourite pastime was dressing up in female clothes. This example was emulated by the demoralised Greek Army, numbers of which, arriving in Smyrna in a state of panic, forcibly divested women of their garments, so that they might escape in them themselves from the fury of the pursuing army.

During the past months the Greeks had not behaved with outstanding tact to their newly-assigned subjects in Asia Minor; and the Turks had been promised liberty to sack, rob and murder, if and when they reached the town. Many English people refused to leave, expecting merely an innocuous two or three days’ occupation. The Turks entered in the morning. Everyone went about their ordinary pursuits. Then the streets gradually became unsafe. Men were asked for money and if they did not give it, were butchered then and there. The ignorance of the Turkish soldier was the salvation of some. Jews who had lately been speculating in German marks handed over worthless millions to the illiterate plunderers and made their escape. The money-changers were able to purchase drachma notes worth ten and twenty pounds, for a few piastres. Buildings displaying the Union Jack were left unmolested. On the other hand, bodies of English officers were dug from their graves in the cemetery for the sake of the supposed gold stopping in their teeth.
This task was officially entrusted to special units
. Then the firing of the town started. Meanwhile the English battleships in the harbour watched. A dinner-party was in progress on the
Iron Duke
and the band was playing. Three times the sailors sent up deputations to ask if they might intervene; and three times they were refused permission. Representations were at length made, but the British representatives allowed the Turks to keep them waiting on shore two-and-a-half hours, and then met with no success.

As the flames spread, the crowds on the quays were joined by others fleeing in terror from the burning area. Like buffalo at a precipice, the foremost were pushed into the sea. A Greek
described it to us. He had managed to send off his wife in a boat, while he was left. Unable to withstand the pressure from behind, he fell into the sea and swam on and on until he reached the side of an Italian warship. The crew of this pushed him back into the water. He became unconscious. The next thing that he remembered was awakening on a British ship. He found his wife again at Piraeus.

Thus it was with many. Some drowned, some reached boats. On shore the Turks were having the time of their lives. Sagacious politicians murmured that this was really a war between England and France and that France was winning. That night an Englishman told me how he had led his wife and child in from the country, stumbling over corpses as they groped their way. When it was all over, the British put their feet down and said that it must cease. The Greek quarter has since remained untouched – a charred and ruined wilderness.

It was the end of Constantine. They did not shoot him, because, as the English Legation pointed out at the time, he was already dying. His body is still waiting for permission to return.

But the most insoluble problem of the moment that faced the new government, was how and where to dispose of the million and a quarter refugees that had arrived in Greece, most of them in a condition of utter destitution. Proportionately speaking, it was as though ten million beggars had suddenly arrived in the United Kingdom: this, perhaps, gives some idea of the difficulties with which Balkan governments have to contend. The majority were spread over the country. The remainder, about a quarter of a million, were eventually established, with the aid of an international loan, in a large wooden town on the outskirts of Piraeus. Michael and I found time, one afternoon, to pay a visit to this settlement.

We went, of course, primarily to see Phyllis. Phyllis is one of those women, handsome rather than pretty, with a suspicion of a curl to the upper lip, who are always ready with some new story, that comes catapulted out upon the first breath of greeting; slightly improper, in the natural course of things, for English
people abroad always lose their hold on lingual proprieties; and inevitably funny. Her surname is Forbes-Johnson; and, having no money, she makes a living by drilling unemployed refugee women into a shed and setting them down to weave and embroider at her looms. At the moment of our visit, she had just sold a loom and borrowed a hundred pounds.

The journey to Piraeus is most comfortably effected on the underground railway. The only means of obtaining a seat, and that wooden, is by travelling third-class, as first is invariably crowded almost beyond the possibility of standing. As the train comes into the station, the mob on the platform begins to crouch, like cross-country runners awaiting the starter’s pistol. Before it has even come to a stop, the intending travellers have hurled themselves upon the doors like vultures on a carcass, kicking and cursing, now and then uttering shrill, bestial screams. When all is over, those who wish to emerge, do so.