CHAPTER XV.
THE TOWER OF SEGRETI.
The next day happened to be the festival of a very important saint, and it was of course out of the question that any drill should take place. A burst of heavy firing early in the morning suggested that the Roumis were presuming on the piety of the insurgents to make an attack in the belief that they would not fight, but Wylie was able to reassure his friends when he came to breakfast.
“Nothing but powder-play,” he said. “Simple wicked waste of cartridges in honour of St Elijah, or whatever his name is. I have put a stop to it, of course, but the men are very sick. The Assembly is summoned for noon, Prince, and I’m afraid we shall have a long job.”
The Assembly was held by desire both of Maurice and of the men who had taken part in the capture of Ahmed Pasha. He wished to impress upon the whole body of insurgents the humanitarian principles held in such high esteem by the Powers, and the heroes of the assault were eager to defend themselves and claim the applause and support of their fellows. They had not taken at all kindly to the indignant lecture Maurice bestowed on them after his interview with the envoys from the fleet, and it was evident that Prince Romanos sided with them in his heart, though the sentiments to which he gave utterance were the most civilised possible. There was a great deal at stake, and Zoe, who had listened attentively to all the discussions beforehand, sat waiting anxiously in the shadow of the gateway to hear what was decided. The deliberations of the Assembly were unusually brief on this occasion, but it was past five o’clock before she saw Wylie coming up the hill.
“Well?” she asked him eagerly.
“Oh, horribly unsatisfactory,” he replied, taking a seat beside her. “Your brother and I simply lammed into the fellows about their methods of barbarism, but they don’t see it a bit. Of course it’s perfectly natural from their point of view. None of them would dream of asking for quarter from a Roumi, and they have no idea of offering it. Why, then, should they give quarter if a Roumi so far forgets the rules of the game as to ask for his life? As to killing the wounded, they themselves are just as dangerous wounded as sound—or rather more so, since down on the ground they might escape notice—and the Roumis are the same. And suppose they humoured your brother’s incomprehensible scruples, what should they do with prisoners if they got them? There was a wild ray of hope that he might wish to torture them for the sake of extracting information, and they were ready to promise any number, but that soon faded away. The idea of keeping them safe and treating them kindly, merely for the sake of letting them go again, struck them as sheer lunacy, and they insisted that there was no question of the exchange of prisoners, because the Roumis never took any—or got any; I don’t know which they meant to imply. It was no use whatever appealing to them on the moral side, for they declared in all good faith that Roumis were not human beings.”
“But Prince Romanos?” cried Zoe. “He seems to have such influence with them, and he can’t believe all these absurd things.”
“I fancy there’s a good deal of the original Archipelago pirate left under the Parisian poet,” said Wylie incautiously. “Not that I would say a word against him,” he added hastily; “he stands in with us in this like a man, whatever his personal views may be. As it is, your brother has had to go in for simple expediency, very much against the grain, but perhaps it made it easier for Prince Christodoridi to back him. To turn the neutrality of the Powers into active hostility appealed even to our children of nature as foolishness, though there was some disposition to receive the warning as they did Admiral Essiter’s on board the Magniloquent. But we got to a working compromise—nominally, that is. I fear it only means that our fellows will be more careful to finish off any wounded Roumis before we appear in the neighbourhood.”
“But they don’t seem to have an idea of discipline,” said Zoe despairingly. “How can you expect them to obey an order they don’t like?”
“Ah, that is where our Sikhs will come in—when we get them. At present the best we can do is to maintain order among the Slavs with the help of the Greeks, and among the Greeks with the help of the Slavs, so keeping the old sore open all the time—and with the risk that at any moment Greek and Slav may come to the conclusion that they dislike us rather worse than each other, and combine against us. Your brother spoke his mind strongly on the refusal of quarter and the killing of wounded men, and vowed that any man concerned in anything of the kind after this should be shot without benefit of clergy, but that’s a thing easier said than done. There’s hardly a man you could depend upon to help arrest another in such a case, and if it came to shooting—why, two revolvers are not many against a whole crowd with rifles. The fact is, physical force is the only thing that appeals to these fellows at their present stage, and your brother is coming to see that they can’t be ruled by reason.”