But even as this was in my mind a gun boomed out from a crumbling bastion and five little balls ran up five flagstaffs which I had already noticed standing all in a row on the uppermost ramparts and had mistaken, naturally enough, for some new form of Marconi apparatus. The five little balls broke out into five flags and the morning breeze caught up their folds and held them straight out as though for our benefit, so that we could make them out quite plainly. Four of them were old friends that I had known on many seas—the Union Jack and the Tricolour and the Saint Andrew's cross of Russia and the red-white-and-green banner of Italy—but the fifth flag, which flew somewhat higher than the others, was of unfamiliar design; but the blood-red square of bunting, traversed by the Greek cross and bearing in its upper corner the star of Bethlehem, told its own story and I knew it for the flag of Crete. And I knew that there was deep significance in the design of that unknown flag and in the position of the four familiar ones that flew below it, for they signalled to the world that the Turk had been driven out, never to return; that Christianity had triumphed over Mohammedanism, and that the cross had, indeed, replaced the crescent; that the centuries of massacre were now but memories; that peace, in the guise of foreign soldiery, had, for a time at least, found an abiding-place in Crete; and, most significant of all, that the new flag with its single star would be upheld, if necessary, by the mightiest array of bayonets and battle-ships in Christendom.
The island of Crete, which is about the size of Porto Rico, not only occupies a very important strategical position, being nearly equidistant from the coasts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, commanding every line of communication in the eastern Mediterranean, and being within easy striking distance of the Strait of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and the Canal, but it is also one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, or would be if the warring elements among its population would permit the rattle of the harvester to replace the rattle of the machine-gun. Ever since the Turks wrested the island from the Venetians, close on two and a half centuries ago, its history has been one of corruption, cruelty, and massacre. Almost annually, for more than seventy years, the island Christians rose in rebellion against their Turkish masters, and just as regularly the Turks suppressed those rebellions with a severity which turned the towns of the island into shambles and its fertile farm-lands into a deserted wilderness. The cruelty which coupled the name of Turk with execration in Armenia and Macedonia assumed such atrocious forms in Crete that finally the great powers were aroused to action, and in 1898 the fleets of England, France, Italy, and Russia dropped anchor in Suda Bay, the Turkish officials were forcibly deported, and a board of admirals assumed control of the affairs of the unhappy island. After a few months of martial government, during which the admirals squabbled continuously among themselves, the intervening powers proclaimed the island an autonomous state, subject to the Porte, but paying no tribute, and ruled by a high commissioner to be appointed by the King of the Hellenes. Though theoretically independent, it was provided that all questions concerning the foreign relations of Crete should be determined by the representatives of the powers, who would also maintain in the island, for a time at least, an international army of occupation. Recent events in the Balkans having resulted in bringing about an agitation in Crete for annexation to Greece, where a propaganda has long been vigorously carried on with that end in view, the protecting powers have definitely announced that the administration of the island will be continued by the “constituted authorities” (this should read “self-constituted”) until the question can be settled with the consent of Turkey. As things stand at present, the withdrawal of the international troops from Crete is about as distant as the withdrawal of the British garrisons from Egypt. To tell the truth, each of the protecting powers is exceedingly anxious to get the island for itself—England because it forms an admirable half-way house between Gibraltar and the Canal; France because its occupation would carry French influence into the eastern end of the Mediterranean; Italy because it would serve as a connecting link between the peninsula and Tripolitania; and Russia because it would give her the command of the entrance to the Dardanelles—and hence, though they will certainly never restore it to Turkey, they are far from anxious to hand it over to Greece, to whom, after all, it belongs historically, geographically, and ethnologically. As a result, the Cretan question will probably disturb the chancelleries of Europe for some years to come.
As I strained my eyes across the sparkling waters in vain search for signs of a hotel and breakfast, a boat flying the port-captain's flag and manned by gendarmes—splendid, muscular fellows with high boots and bare knees and baggy Turkish trousers, their keen brown faces peering out from under their fluttering cap-covers—came racing out from shore. As it came alongside the crew tossed oars with all the smartness of man-o'-war's-men; the white-clad officer in the stern, who was very stout and very stiffly starched, climbed the stairs gingerly, as though fearful of injuring the faultless crease in his linen trousers, and, after the exchange of ceremonious bows and laboured compliments in French, informed me that the High Commissioner had placed the boat at my disposal. There is always something peculiarly satisfying to the soul about going ashore under official auspices, not only because of the envious glances of your fellow-passengers who line the rail, but because of the powerlessness of the customs officials to annoy you.
Canea, which is the seat of government, is the most picturesquely cosmopolitan place west of Suez. It has a mild and equable climate; living is cheap and reasonably good; there is a large garrison of foreign soldiery; there are no extradition treaties in force; and trouble of one kind or another is always brewing. Like a magnet, therefore, Canea has attracted the scum and offscourings of all the Levant—needy soldiers of fortune, professional revolution-makers, smooth-spoken gamblers and confidence men, rouged and powdered women of easy virtue from east and west, Egyptian donkey-boys, out-at-elbows dragomans who speak a score of tongues and hail from goodness knows where—all that rabble of the needy, the adventurous, and the desperate which follow the armies of occupation and are always to be found on the fringe of civilisation.
The foreign troops are quartered for the most part on the massive Venetian ramparts which still surround the town, but all business centres along the narrow, stone-paved quay bordering the harbour, and in a straggling thoroughfare which, leaving the water-front through a fine old gate still bearing the carven lion of Saint Mark, serves as the vertebra for an amazing tangle of dim alleys and deafening bazaars, in which all the products of the Levant are bought and sold amid indescribable confusion.
Canea is at its best at sunset, for it is not until then that the town awakens to life. As the sun begins to sink behind the Aspra Vouna, the streets, hitherto deserted, become thronged as though by magic; the spaces before the cafés are packed with coffee-drinking, nargileh-smoking humanity of all shades and of all religions; the soldiers begin to appear in groups of twos and threes and fours; the clerks in the shipping-offices put on white drill jackets, and sit in chairs tipped back against their doors, and drink from tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them, and the muezzin, brazen-throated, appears on the balcony of his minaret, reminding one for all the world of a Swiss cuckoo-clock as he pops out to chant his interminable call to prayer: “Allahu il Allahu! Allahu Akbar! God is most great! Come to prayer! There is no God but Allah! He giveth life and dieth not! Your sins are great; greater is Allah's mercy! I extol his perfections! Allahu il Allahu! Allahu Akbar!”
It is such a scene as one marks with the white milestone of remembrance that he may go back to it in memory in after years. Picture, if you can, a stone-paved promenade bordering a U-shaped harbour. In the harbour are many craft—all small ones, for it is too shallow for the great steamers to enter. There are caiques with sails of orange, of scarlet, and of yellow; schooners, grain-laden, from Egypt and Turkey and Greece; fishing-boats with rakish lateen-sails and great goggle eyes painted at their bows to ward off the evil eye, and, so the sailors will tell you, to detect the fish. And along the quayside, where the human stream wanders restlessly, there are Greeks in tufted shoes and snowy fustanellas that make them look like ballet-dancers; swarthy Turks in scarlet sashes and scarlet fezes, wearing the unsightly trousers peculiar to their race; bare-kneed Cretan highlanders, descendants in form and feature of the ancient Greeks, swaggering along with insolent grace in their braided, sleeveless jackets and high boots of yellow, untanned leather; Algerians in graceful flowing burnooses and Egyptians with tarbooshes and Arabs with turbans—now and then a mollah with scornful, intolerant eyes and the green turban which marks the wearer as a descendant of the Prophet—and brawny, coal-black negroes from Tripoli, from Nubia, and from the Sudan.
And then there are the soldiers: British Tommies, smart even in khaki, boots shining, buckles shining, faces shining, swaggering along this Cretan street and flourishing their absurd little canes precisely as their fellows are doing all over the globe; French colonials, swathed in blue puttees from ankle to knee and in red cummerbunds from hip to chest, their misery completed by mushroom helmets so large that nothing can be seen of the wearer but his chin; chattering Italian bersaglieri, who strut about in cocks' feathers and crimson facings when at home in the Corso or the Toledo or the Via Vittorio Emmanuele, but out here must needs content their vanity with white linen uniforms and green hackle in their helmets; sad-faced Russians, uniformed as they would be in summer in Saint Petersburg or Moscow, flat white caps, belted white smocks, trousers tucked in boots, their good-humoured, ignorant faces stamped with all the signs of homesickness, for their thoughts are far away in some squalid tenement in the poor quarter of Warsaw perhaps, or in a peasant's cabin beside the head-waters of the Volga.
Though Canea is the seat of government, Candia—or Heraklian, the classic name by which the Greeks prefer to call it—is the largest and most important town on the island. Disregarding the advice of friends, I went from Canea to Candia on a Greek coasting steamer. No one ever takes a first-class passage on a Greek boat, for the second and third class passengers invariably come aft and stay there, despite the commands and entreaties of the purser, so a third-class ticket answers quite as well as a first. Fortunately—or unfortunately, as you choose to regard it—I had as fellow voyagers a company of British infantry, which was being transferred to Candia after three years' service in the western end of the island. The soldiers, who had managed to smuggle aboard a considerable quantity of rum, quickly got beyond the control of the boy lieutenant, just out of Sandhurst, who was in command, and who, appreciating that discretion is the better part of valour, especially where a hundred drunken soldiers are concerned, wisely left them to their own boisterous devices and retreated with me to the captain's quarters on the bridge, where we remained until we sighted Candia's harbour lights and our anchor rumbled down inside the breakwater.
Were it not for the massive Venetian walls which surround it, Candia would have almost the appearance of an Indian town, the similarity being increased by its dark-faced, gaily dressed inhabitants and by the British soldiers who throng its streets. A single broad, stone-paved thoroughfare, lined in places with shade-trees and surprisingly clean, winds like a snake from the harbour up the hill, past rows of blackened ruins—grim reminders of the latest insurrection—past square after square of white-walled, red-tiled houses; through noisy bazaars where the turbaned shopkeepers squat patiently in their doorways; past unkept marble fountains whose stained carvings would make many a museum director envious; past mosques with slender, graceful minarets and groups of filthy beggars grovelling on their steps for alms; past the ornate, twin-domed Greek cathedral, and so on to the ramparts where the British garrison is quartered in yellow barracks that overlook the sea.