Moreover, in handling remains of imperishable antiquity in the Nile land, I learned to observe as an antiquary must. And some of his spirit was breathed into me; for when I went back to Egypt for a few weeks in 1897, I found myself regarding her ancient life more than her modern. But I was not to be won to Egyptian studies at the eleventh hour. Already designated Director, where I had been an unworthy student ten years before, I sailed for Athens, intending to take stock of the duties which were to be mine in the coming autumn, and to follow my proper trade by exploring a coast of Greek Asia. But temptation met me, and turned me out of the Antiquary’s path.
CHAPTER I.
AN INTERLUDE.
I found the representative of a great British journal in a difficulty. It was his hard task to gather news of several Balkan states, which one and all seemed determined to set about making history at the same moment. Crete was already ablaze; a Macedonian war was promised by Greece, and Bulgaria moved restlessly behind her frontier. Who knew what the others would hazard on flank and rear? I could speak fair Greek. Would I help him by undertaking Crete? It need not be for long. The Powers would soon make its peace, and deport the Greek soldiers who had just landed under the very guns of our ships. His actual correspondent, a Greek, was colouring his despatches to London white and blue. Would I replace him awhile? My temptation was brief. I had never been in Crete, and a scholar may rarely watch war.
I had not long to wait for it. As we drew to our anchorage inside the warships off Canea there were houses to be seen afire two miles inshore and rifles spitting up and down the slopes behind the town. The Turks had thought to revictual their threatened lines in peace during the hour of the Sunday office; but priests and people came out of church to fight. It was a small and desultory affair, from which less than a score of killed and wounded men were borne back at evening to the gates—patient Anatolian peasants for the most part, who had long served out their due time and fought without heat or reasoning why. Along with them came the corpses of two or three bashibazuk Cretans, Greek in feature and Greek in speech, Moslems by chance and all but ignorant of the faith which they had died to uphold. They were the first men slain in anger that I had seen.
I was to know Canea well in coming years; but that morning it looked very strange, with its mediaeval ways darkly shuttered and patrolled by smart marines of half a dozen nations and by slouching, thick-set Turks. The day might have been the morrow of a sack, so silent and desolate were the shops and houses about the quays, and so ruinous the inner streets. The great incendiary fires in the Christian quarter had been subdued only a day or two before, and the oil vats in the basements still smoked and stank. To this day, when I smell burning oil, I see Canea as I saw it first. As we ran up the harbour, the blackened shell of the Ottoman Konak on the heights to the left prepared us for what we were to see in the town. Our bluejackets and marines, we were told, had saved a part of the block, less with than despite the help of the frenzied Turks, among whom a certain grey-bearded Pasha had showed such erratic energy with a leaky hose, that it became necessary for our drenched marines to stay his zeal. Their commander called up his most respectable sergeant, and, pointing out the old gentleman as a person of consequence, bade his man wait a chance to withdraw the hose without offence. The sergeant saluted, wheeled, marched straight on the offender, and tapping him on the shoulder, remarked, with a genial but unprintable term of endearment and an even less printable counsel, that none of his sort was wanted there, and left him agape with empty dripping hands.
Canea was no pleasant abode at that moment. All inns, cookshops and coffee-houses, except the meanest, were burned or barred, and no cook or body-servant was for hire. The consuls, smoked out of Halépa a few days before, had broken into a deserted inn on the quayside, where their wives were setting before them such victuals as could be begged from the fleet. The journalists, who landed from every passing boat, lodged where and how men might in a ravished town, and a famous limner of battles kept life in him for the first few days with little but cauliflowers, oranges, and Greek brandy. Mine was a better fate. An old acquaintance of Cyprus days was commanding the Albanian police, and I found lodgment with him in the only tenanted house outside the walls, except one. In this last Chermside was living, who, like my host, sustained the British name for cool courage and quiet discharge of duty in those unquiet weeks. He showed me the lie of the land, talking of things Turkish as few men may talk, and franked me through the inner lines, where we found shoeless gunners with rags bound on feet and legs, stedfastly serving antique field-pieces with the slouch of woodmen who handle ox-carts on Anatolian hills.
The outposts lay fiercely beleaguered on a ridge further south, under the Sphakian summits—that dazzling background to the Venetian quadrilateral of Canea, which one sees from the sea like an embastioned city in a mediaeval illumination. Hapless outposts! They were the cause of all the bickerings between admirals and insurgents which it was to be my lot for three weeks to record. The Turks, too few to hold the outer lines in force, were not suffered by the Admirals to withdraw their pickets, lest the rebels, once on the crests, should shell the ships and the town. Yet no admiral would land his own men to support the defence and so lessen his fighting strength in the face of a faithful ally anchored alongside. So together and singly the leaders of the Powers held endless converse with bearded giants in broidered coats, and black-hatted men in sponge-bag suitings, who dubbed themselves captains and chiefs, and answered in halting French for the respect of the line; and Admirals vowed, in even less intelligible French, to shoot if the promises were broken. And broken they ever were, and once and again the Admirals shot, and Attic journals with inflammatory headlines, “Anti-Navarino,” or “England massacres Christendom,” egged on mobs to hoot the nameboard on the Grande Bretagne Hotel, and demand that the sanctuary of Hellenism on the Acropolis be closed for ever to the Barbarians of the West. Nor was Athens less than right according to her lights. True enough, it was we who led the shooting, and we who did almost all the blockading in Crete, for no other reason than that our gunners could shoot the best and our coal bunkers were kept full, and our crews did not mutiny for shore-leave where it could not be granted, and we alone had on the spot many war-craft of light draught and high speed.
A WRECKED MOSLEM VILLAGE OF CRETE.
But those bombardments ought never to have been necessary. With a few European bluejackets on guard at each blockhouse, the lines would never have been molested at all. The Admirals should have known Greeks better than to trust them on such vicarious parole as was given by caps and black hats, whether on the heads of chiefs or no. No Greek may answer surely for any other Greek, since individualism and intolerance of discipline are in the blood of the race. In the stormy history of Levantine religious warfare you may note one unvaried law of consequence. Where the Moslem has prevailed, the votaries of the two creeds have resumed peaceful life as of old, the Christian knowing that Moslems act under orders as one man, and that when Islam is triumphant its Gibeonites are secure of their lives. But if Christians gain their freedom, the Moslem leaves the land of his birth. For whatever pledges the new authorities may give, he knows for his part that, since Eastern Christianity supplies no social discipline, each Christian will act on occasion as seems best in his own eyes.