It was on such days that he exhorted me to remember the little Greek flag he had given me, and all that it stood for. On other days, when he was calmer, he took me systematically with him through the entire nine years of the Greek revolution, and by him I was carried through all its glorious battles.
He had fought first under the leadership of Marco Bozaris, and he entertained for this heroic chief an admiration amounting to worship.
“We were only a handful, mostly lads, at first,” he would say, with a happy smile on his saddened face. “Yes, we were mostly lads, and Marco himself a little over thirty. But how we did obey him, and how we did fight!”
Here he would lose himself in memory for a while.
“I can see Marco now, seated cross-legged on the ground, a crude map of his own make before him, we bending over him. ‘Here, boys,’ he would say, pointing to the map, ‘here is where we fight the Turks to-morrow, and by night time we shall carry our holy flag farther along. We do—or we die!’ Then the handful of us would kneel and kiss the flag, and swear by to-morrow to carry it farther along—or to die. And we always carried it farther along.”
He described Marco Bozaris so vividly to me, that when one day he showed me a picture which he had smuggled into Turkey for my benefit, I instantly cried: “Why that is the great Bozaris—your Marco!”
I believe that I never pleased him more in my life than by this. He actually kissed me.
Next to Bozaris, the man he admired and talked of most was the intrepid mariner, Constantin Kanaris.
“The Turkish fleet was blazing with lights,” he told me, “for the Kabitan Pasha was celebrating. One of the warships was filled with Greek maidens, ranging from twelve to eighteen years. They had been carried off that day without distinction of class or name. The daughters of the great Greek chieftains and of the commonest sailors had been herded together, and brought on this battleship to be made the victims of the night.
“Word of this had come to us. We sat gloomily around a rude wooden table, saying not a word. Then Constantin Kanaris spoke, his voice hoarse, his face terrible to look at: