CHAPTER XXXVII
THE BLOCKADE OF GREECE
I took possession of my double charge of the (to me) most interesting of all foreign lands, Greece and Italy, at a moment when affairs were quickening for new troubles in the former, where demagoguery had again taken the upper hand. Comoundouros was dead, and Tricoupi, who had succeeded, as I had long before anticipated that he would, to the lead in Greek politics, had fallen, as he had foretold, on the question of taxation. The new successor to the bad qualities of old Comoundouros, Deliyanni, in his electoral programme had promised to relieve the people of all taxation, and had, of course, been elected, and I found Tricoupi still at the head of the opposition. I had stayed at Rome only long enough to take possession of my place and have a conversation with the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, General Robilant, as to the course which Italy would follow if there were troubles in Greece, and received his assurance that Italy would stand with England, whatever might happen.
Robilant was one of the ablest ministers of foreign affairs Italy has had in my time, and, if not the most conspicuous occupant of that position in intellectual qualities, he certainly was so, with one exception—that of Baron Blanc—in sound common sense and a large and comprehensive perception of the situation of Italy amongst the powers, and her true affiliations. To him, more than to any other individual Italian, was due the entry of Italy into the Triple Alliance, a measure which has probably been very largely instrumental in keeping the peace between the European powers ever since it was formed. Simple and reserved in his manner to a correspondent, he was entirely frank and courteous in communicating what could be communicated, and quietly silent beyond. Always the butt of the most savage hostility of the Italian radicals, he resigned the year after, though supported by the majority in the Chamber, rather than expose himself longer to the vulgar and brutal partisan insolence of Cavallotti and his allies in the Chamber. As individual, as soldier, and as minister, Robilant was the type of the Italian at his best. Very few of the extreme Left in the Italian Chamber made any pretensions to a comprehension of the nature of a gentleman, and the vulgarity of the outbreak which provoked his resignation—it was on the occasion of the disaster of Dogali—was of a nature which only a hardened politician could adapt himself to. It was my first experience of the indecencies of Italian parliamentarism, and, when he left the Chamber under the unendurable insults poured on him in language adapted only to street broils, I said to a colleague that he would never appear again in the Chamber. I was right, for, though the ministry obtained a vote of confidence, and he was urged to withdraw his resignation, he refused. In his charge the foreign policy of Italy was at its best.
I found affairs at Athens in a critical condition. Deliyanni was trying the game of bluff which had succeeded in the hands of Comoundouros, but with quite a different measure of competence. With Deliyanni it was an evident sham. He had promised war without the least intention of preparing for it, in the childish expectation that Europe would oblige the Sultan to make some concession which would save his credit in the country and enable him to continue in office. But circumstances were different; Greece had on the former occasion a valid claim, admitted by the powers, while on this there was only the pretension that Greece should receive a compensation for betterments acquired by Bulgaria. In the former, the Treaty of Berlin had sanctioned the cession; in the latter, there was only the bare impudence of Mr. Deliyanni to move the powers. The ministry called out class after class of the reserves and sent them northward, but made no effective preparation for war; the men were ill-clad, worse provided, and everything was lacking to make them ready for a campaign. The casual observer could see that war was not intended, and that Deliyanni was silly enough to believe that the agents of the powers did not see through his sham, and thought that he could frighten them. The men on the frontier finally amounted to about 45,000 men, kept there as a scarecrow to the powers at an expense, ascertained from the safest authorities, of 1000 deaths per month. The powers insisted on demobilization. Deliyanni replied by waving his torch and threatening to set fire to Europe if they did not give him a province; and meanwhile the Turkish government was gathering a solid force of about 40,000 men on the menaced frontier, and preparing silently to march on Athens.
The common people of the city, ignorant of everything connected with war, and inflamed by the jingo official press, conceived that nothing was needed but to set the Greek army in motion to insure a triumphant march on Constantinople, and were shouting for the troops to cross the frontier. Deliyanni had never had the least intention of making war, but he dared not withdraw for fear of his own people and the war fever he had inoculated them with. The worst feature in the position was that he had armed and provided with large quantities of ammunition the entire population of the Greek frontier, and the irregulars so formed had no discipline and obeyed no orders, but began each on his own account to harass the Turkish outposts. The Turks, obedient to their orders, contented themselves with repelling these minute stings, keeping their own side of the frontier, and waiting till the attack developed to take up a solid and thoroughly prepared offensive. The summons came from the powers to demobilize, or the Greek coast would be blockaded. This was Deliyanni's only escape from a terrible disaster to the country, or the personal humiliation of withdrawal he would not submit to, with the added risk of violence on the part of the mob of the city, fired to a safe and flaming enthusiasm by the reports continually coming in of new victories on the frontier, each little skirmish with a picket being invariably followed by the withdrawal of the Turks to a position well within their own territory, according to the general order to accept no combat under actual conditions, so that the least skirmish was magnified at Athens to a new victory. The summons to demobilize was met by a point-blank refusal, when the fleets of the powers—Russia and France excepted—entered on the scene, and the blockade of the Greek coast was declared. This saved the credit of the ministry with the country; and Deliyanni, protesting against intervention as a measure on behalf of the Sultan, and hostile to Greece, resigned, but gave no orders to his commandants on the frontier to withdraw, and the skirmishing went on. The King in this crisis behaved well, and put Deliyanni in the alternative of demobilizing or resigning; and, when he chose the latter course, the King called Tricoupi to form a ministry.
Tricoupi's position was difficult. He protested against the blockade as an unwarrantable interference with the freedom of action of Greece, as he considered that the government should have been allowed on its own responsibility to make war and take the consequences, as the only method of teaching the Greeks how to fulfill their international obligation. But the withdrawal of the diplomatic representatives of the great powers, whose fleets were blockading the coast, had left him without any channel of communicating with the powers, either for protesting or for yielding, and the fighting was increasing in extent if not in intensity. On the day, too, on which Tricoupi accepted the charge, the Turkish commander had received his orders to cross the frontier on the next day and march on Athens if the annoyance were not stopped. A great extent of the frontier was not provided with the telegraph, and the chosen partisans of Deliyanni were in command, and determined to force a conflict. The blockade prevented Tricoupi from sending officers by sea to take over the command, and there was not time to send them by land. General Sapunzaki was the only general officer on whom the minister could depend to obey orders, and he could reach only a part of the line on which the fighting was going on. There was no subordination and no general plan in the offensive; but each detachment of troops on the frontier made war on its own responsibility, and the Turks contented themselves with repelling attacks.
I went to the telegraph office to get the late advices in the afternoon of the last day of the fighting, when it had become very general all along the frontier. Tricoupi had sent imperative orders to cease hostilities, but the telegraph had been cut, probably by some one who wanted the war to ensue, and when I found Tricoupi at the telegraph in the afternoon in conversation with Sapunzaki over the wire, he turned to me with an expression of intense distress, exclaiming, "They are fighting again all along the line, and if it cannot be stopped at once we are lost." "Can I do anything?" I asked. He replied, "I should be glad if you would go to Baring" (who had been sent to take charge of the legation, but with no diplomatic powers or relation with the Greek government) "and tell him the position, and ask him to telegraph to his government to urge Constantinople to send word to Eyoub Pasha that the Greek government had given stringent orders to stop the fighting, and ask him to coöperate."
It was an intensely hot day in the end of May, and the streets of Athens, deserted by the population, were an oven; not a cab was to be found on the square or in the streets. I ran to the British legation, fortunately found Baring there, and explained the position, saying that Tricoupi, in the absence of any diplomatic relation between them, had begged me to present myself personally to urge intervention. Baring was convinced that Tricoupi, as well as the late premier, was bent on war, and would not at first believe that his request was sincere, but finally, overpersuaded, did telegraph to London. I then flew to all the other legations, except the French and Russian, which had been supporting Deliyanni, and repeated the request to the secretaries in charge, winding up with the Turkish minister, whose ship had not yet arrived, and who was therefore still in Athens, pending its arrival, and gave him the fullest explanation of Tricoupi's position and the difficulties of it, and begged him to telegraph Constantinople to order Eyoub Pasha to withdraw from the frontier far enough to leave the bands no outlying detachment to attack. I succeeded in convincing him that Tricoupi was sincere in his efforts to keep peace, and the good fellow said at once, "If Tricoupi is sincere, I will not stand on diplomatic etiquette, but will go to see him at once." He did so, and found the Greek minister at the war office, as he had taken that portfolio with the premiership, and they arranged between them that the Porte should be telegraphed to, requesting Eyoub Pasha to put a sufficient distance between him and the attacking bands of Greeks to make a conflict out of the question; and before nightfall the white flag was flying along the frontier, and communication established between Eyoub and Sapunzaki via Salonica, and peace was secured.
Eyoub's orders to cross the frontier with his solid column of thirty to forty thousand men, and march straight to Athens if the attacks persisted another day, were peremptory, and there was no force or dispositions of defense to prevent his triumphal movement. There were no defensive works, for the jingo Greeks ridiculed the idea of needing a defensive preparation against an invasion of the Turkish army, which they were confident of annihilating ten to one. There was no lack of personal courage on the part of the Greek population, but there was no efficient organization even of the so-called regular army, and there was really nothing to prevent a Turkish walk-over as far as the old frontiers of Greece, and even there there were no earthworks.
The sequence was disgraceful and humiliating. I wrote at the time that "The wounded are not yet all in the hospitals when the attacks on Tricoupi for having ordered the demobilization already begin in the Chamber and the press. His happy arrival at the moment of danger has saved Greece from, a disaster which, now that it is averted, the Greeks in general will never believe to have been so near, and will not accept as a lesson." And for the trifling part I had taken in the final negotiations I was afterwards insulted in the streets of Athens as having "prevented the Greeks from marching to Constantinople." They got their lesson years after, when they were far better prepared for war than on this occasion. But Tricoupi was right when he said that the blockade was a mistake, and that the powers should have allowed the Greeks to take their own course and learn their lesson. Undiscriminating Philhellenism has been the worst enemy of Greece.
The flurry over and quiet restored, the heat, the excitement, and the hard and unremitting work and anxiety of that month of May told on me, and I broke down with an attack of nervous prostration and acute dyspepsia, by which I was quite incapacitated from movement. Taking the first steamer to Naples, I passed the rest of the summer at Rome, disabled, until the heats had passed, for any considerable exertion. But, contrary to the general superstition regarding Rome, it is a city where one may pass the summer months most agreeably if not very actively. The English ambassador of that time, Sir John Saville Lumley, afterwards Lord Saville of Burford, to whom I owe many delightful hours in that and subsequent years, used to say that he knew no city where one could pass the year so delightfully as in Rome. By strict diet and an activity limited to the hours of the early morning and afternoon I weathered the summer, but each return of the heats during the succeeding six years brought me a relapse, so that on the whole I paid a long penalty for my participation in Greek politics.