In Greek Waters: A Story of the Grecian War of Independence

by G. A. Henty

“You have comfortable quarters here, indeed,” Captain O’Grady said when Mr. Beveridge had introduced his officers to him and his companion. “Sure I would like nothing better than to travel about in a craft like this. It is like taking a floating palace about with you.” But if the officers were surprised at the fittings of the cabin they were still more so at the excellence of the dinner. Up to the time the dessert was placed on the table they chatted as to the incidents of the voyage; but when the wine had gone round Mr. Beveridge began questioning them.

“Of course you hear everything that goes on on the mainland, Captain O’Grady.”

“Everything, do you say? It is well content I would be if that was all I heard; but the thundering lies that are told by those Greek rapscallions are enough to take one’s breath away. To hear them talk you would not think that such valiant men had ever lived since the days of Noah; and yet, with the exception of a little skirmish, all that they have done is to starve out those unfortunate heathens the Turks, and then after they have surrendered on promise of good treatment, to murder them in cold blood with their women and children.”

“I hope that there has not been much of that,” Mr. Beveridge said gravely.

“It depends upon what you call much of it. At the very lowest estimate there have been thirty thousand murdered in cold blood since the troubles began; and some accounts put it much higher. There has not been a single exception; nowhere have they spared a Mussulman. The poor beggars of farmers and villagers were killed; man, woman, and child, in hundreds of villages the whole of them were destroyed without resistance; and it has been the same in all the large towns. The Greeks began the work at Kalamata, which surrendered under a solemn promise of their lives to the Turks; but every soul was slain. And so it has been all along. In the district of Laconia there were fifteen thousand Mussulmans, and of these two-thirds at least were slain. At Missolonghi there are not twenty Turks alive.

“At Navarino every soul was murdered. Tripolitza surrendered only a week ago, and I saw by a letter from Colonel Raybonde, a French officer, who commanded the Greek artillery during the siege, that forty-eight hours after they entered the city they collected about two thousand persons, principally women and children, and drove them up a ravine and murdered them there; and altogether eight thousand Mussulmans were killed during the sack. I have heard of massacres till I am sick of listening to the stories; and though at the beginning I hoped that the Greeks would drive the old Turks out, faith I have come to think that if I were to hear that the whole race were utterly exterminated I should feel more comfortable in my mind than I have been for some time. Not content with murdering the poor creatures, in many cases the villains tortured them first. I have heard fellows who came over here boast of it. One Albanian ruffian who told me that he had done this, told me, sir, as if it were a thing to be proud of. I had the satisfaction of taking him by the scruff of his neck and the tail of his white petticoat and chucking him off the pier into the sea. When he scrambled out I offered him the satisfaction of a gentleman, seeing that he was a chief who thought no small beer of himself. There was a deal of difficulty in explaining to him how the thing was managed in a civilized country, and I never felt more satisfaction in my life than I did next morning when I put a bullet into the scoundrel’s body.”

A wet blanket seemed suddenly to fall over the party in the cabin as Captain O’Grady was speaking. Horace saw that Miller, who was sitting opposite to him, was undergoing an internal convulsion in restraining himself from bursting into a laugh; and Will Martyn, who was facing Mr. Beveridge at the bottom of the table, looked so preternaturally grave that Horace felt that he too was struggling to repress a smile. The doctor nodded, as if to signify that it was exactly what he had expected. Mr. Beveridge looked deeply concerned.

“I have heard something of this in England, Captain O’Grady, though of course the Greek agents there suppress all news that would tell against their countrymen, but I did not think it was as bad as this. Yet although I do not for a moment attempt to defend such atrocities, you must remember how long the Greeks have been oppressed by the Turks. A people who have been in slavery for hundreds of years to strangers, aliens in blood and in religion, and themselves in a very primitive state of civilization, except in the cities, would be almost certain in the first rising against their oppressors to commit horrible excesses. The same thing happened, although, happily, on a much smaller scale, in your own country, Captain O’Grady, in ’98, and that without a hundredth part of the excuse that the Greeks had.”

“True for you, Mr. Beveridge,” Captain O’Grady admitted. “There’s no denying that you have turned the tables on me there. It is mighty difficult, as you say, to hold a savage peasantry in hand.”