The Vintage: A Romance of the Greek War of Independence

by E. F. Benson

The pain and relief of telling all the story to a man whom he trusted and loved had been too much for the boy, and he choked in trying to find his voice.

"There, there!" said Nicholas, soothingly; "but what is the matter with the young wolf? He has had good news to-night, has he not? and has he not seen the one he loves? There is no cause for this, little Mitsos. But this will I do: by the oath of the clan I swear to you that nothing shall stay me—not fever, nor wounds, nor booty, nor glory, only honor alone—from doing what in me lies to save her from all peril. Will that do, little one?"

Mitsos pressed his hand, but could not speak.

"But this you must promise," went on Nicholas, "that never again will you go out of the camp by night without leave. It leads with other men to ugly things, and to-morrow there will be one man the less in the army. The treacherous villain! But to-morrow he leaves the camp with disgrace and hissing, for he has made true the false slander of the primates, and brought shame on us all. And now go to bed, Mitsos. The service you have done in discovering this atones for your fault. Poor little cub, but it has been a hard time for you."

Next day Poniropoulos was publicly expelled from the camp, and afterwards Mitsos sought out Christos and in private told him that he was a better fellow than he had supposed, and that the lie he had told Nicholas to screen the captain found favor in his eyes. Christos was reasonably surprised that Mitsos knew of the falsehood, and relieved to find he was not disposed to quarrel with it, and the two went off and put away a quart or two of resined wine, for which Mitsos paid.

The news that Monemvasia had surrendered, and the details of its surrender, were bitter and sweet and tragic and absurd. Prince Demetrius, it appeared, defying the senate, in a fit of impotent rage against their perfectly proper opposition to his wishes, had insisted on signing the treaty of capitulation with his own name as viceroy of the country, effendi or lord of the country, and what not, and the Turks, opening the gates in order to go down to the ships and take their promised departure, found themselves met by a crowd of angry Mainats, who considered that the treaty as signed by the prince and not by the senate was null and void. A riot took place, and several Turks were killed on the point of embarking; but the better part of the Greek officers, seeing that the capitulation had been signed, and that whoever was to blame the Turks were not, soon stopped it, and let the embarkation proceed, but not before five men had been killed and several houses sacked. Monemvasia had surrendered—so much was good; but all the rest was bad. The fleet and the army distrusted each other, and the soldiers distrusted their commanders, who, thanks to the primates, were represented to them as having made private treaties with the wealthier Turks, and there was a fine quarrel as to who should set up the Greek standard on the fallen town. In one thing only was there unanimity, and that was in the feeling towards the prince. He had shown himself weak and indecisive before, and that had been forgiven him; he had shown himself dilatory and incapable, and the commander under him bore the blame; but now he showed himself, though with characteristic futility, evading and tampering with the recorded vote of the senate, in which he had acquiesced at the last meeting in Tripoli. The futility of his act was comic; his motive was warped and crooked. In a word, in that moment all the rags of authority which he had brought from the Hetairia were torn from him, and for all practical purposes his connection with the revolution may be said to have been over.

Without doubt the capitulation was hopelessly mismanaged, and the Turks got off without paying a penny towards the expenses of the siege. If the same terms were given to every fortified place in the Morea, the national treasury and the funds of the Hetairia would be certainly drained dry before half the country was evacuated; and though morally nothing can excuse the scenes of horror which were about to take place, yet palliation may be found in those two things—that without plunder gained from the Turk the war was impossible, and that the nation was a nation of slaves, long ground down by cruelty of all kinds, now in the first hour of its freedom. The despised but long dominant race was underfoot, and they stamped it down.

The Mainat corps was still at Monemvasia, where Petrobey was raising fresh recruits for the siege of Tripoli, and the prince occupying his leisure time, of which he had twenty-four hours every day, in trying to festoon the walls of the town with red tape, when news came of the fall of Navarin, a port on the west coast. Ypsilanti had sent there a civilian from his suite to represent the shadow of nothingness and the senate, one of the worst type of men, who, under the guise of patriotism, had got together a large band of freebooters, to plunder and seize all that he could lay hands on. Before the capitulation, which granted the besieged their lives and safe transport to Egypt or Tunis, had been concluded, many of the Turks had, under stress of hunger, escaped from the town, and thrown themselves on the mercy of the Greeks, with whom they had lived on friendly terms. But the town itself refused to capitulate till starvation compelled. Already for four days nothing could be bought, for a couple of sparrows or a half-starved cat represented a few hours' life, whereas a bushel of gold represented—a bushel of gold. One man the day before the surrender was found with a secret supply of food, on which he had subsisted for some days, the remains of which were seized from him by two starving savages and devoured before his eyes, after which they pelted him with all the money they had about them, telling him he was well paid. Perhaps some strange premonition of their fate induced the gaunt garrison to hold out; perhaps tales had reached them of what had been the fate of those who had thrown themselves on the mercy of the besieging army; and it was not till August 19th, just a fortnight after Monemvasia was taken, that the capitulation was signed.

For that day an eternal blot of infamy is black against the Greeks. Hardly had the garrison evacuated, giving up their arms, when the representative of the Peloponnesian senate thrust into the fire the treaty of capitulation, so that all evidence against him might be destroyed, and himself gave the signal for the massacre to begin. A pretext was easily found, and a blow given to a Greek by a Turk for insisting on searching the person of one of his wives for treasure concealed about her was enough, and in an hour no Mussulman was left alive. Women were stripped of their clothing, and rushing into the sea to hide their shame were shot from the shore; babies were snatched out of their mothers' arms and flung in their faces; others, remembering the fate of the patriarch, hanged men and women from the lintels of their own doors; others, it is said, were tortured before some one of their persecutors, more humane than his fellows, despatched them. Here, in mockery of the Turkish atrocities, a man was offered the choice between Christianity and death, and when he chose the former, was "baptized with steel" or crucified; a dozen or more were burned alive in a house where they had run for refuge. In an hour the infamous work was finished, and then arose quarrelling over the booty. Knives and rifles were brought in to settle the disputes, while in the mean time two Spetziot ships quietly went off with the greater part of the spoils.

Thus ended a day, the disgrace of which will only be forgotten when the glory of men like Nicholas has faded too. Dark and horrible in part as were the deeds which were to follow, no cruelty so cold-blooded and preconcerted stains the other pages of the war. Cruelties there were, and many black and shameful deeds, but deeds wrought in hot blood and in the drunkenness of revenge; and happily the massacre of Navarin is unapproached and unparalleled.