"Isn't this an extraordinary change from ten days ago?" said Uncle Podger presently, with a great sigh of enjoyment. "The whole place looks as if it had never even heard of such a thing as war."
"It may look like it, Uncle, but you'd be nearer the mark if you said that it had never really known peace," the Lamp-post said. "Why, Mytilene, and the other islands round about here, have seen fighting all through history—history was made in these parts—right away from the year one—five hundred years before it, too, and they haven't known peace—not for any length of time—ever since. The Phoenicians, Athenians, Carthaginians, Romans, Persians, Syrians, Turks, and Greeks—they've all had a "go" at it—landed and killed the men, garrisoned the place for a few years, till they were "booted" out or killed by the next little lot to come along.
"I was only asking the Interpreter[#] this morning, and he told me that there are villages up there" (and the Lamp-post pointed across the harbour to the slopes of the hills) "which are full of Turks, and they daren't come down to the Greek villages except in numbers and in the daylight—nor dare the Greeks go up to them—for fear of being killed. He told me that the Greeks and Turks are always fighting on these islands, and on the mainland right along the coast to Smyrna. The Greek chaps get on their nerves; they work hard, are smarter business men, lend money, which makes them very unpopular; and there are so many of them in the coast towns that the Turks are really frightened of them, so they kill them whenever they get a comfortable opportunity and can raise the energy. Hereditary enemies they are, and vendettas go on just as they have done for centuries; but the Turk has generally got an old rifle, of sorts, so it's the Greek who gets killed in the long run.
[#] The Achates had a Syrian interpreter on board.
"You see," went on the Lamp-post, "all the Turkish soldiers who used to keep the peace—sometimes—in the villages and small towns have been withdrawn to Smyrna or the Dardanelles, and now they are away the Turks and Greeks are at each other's throats hammer and tongs. The Interpreter told me that there are more than thirty thousand refugees from the coast in Mytilene alone, and thousands more are trying to escape before they are killed."
"That's why the Greeks here are giving the Turks in the hills such a rotten time, I suppose?" the Sub asked.
"It rather spoils the picture," Uncle Podger said; "I wish you hadn't told us."
"Let us go, some day, and see the castle at Mytilene," the Lamp-post suggested. "The Interpreter says that it was started five hundred years B.C.—by the Phoenicians or someone like them, and has been added on to by everybody else ever since. He says you can see some parts which are Roman and some which the Persians built. I'm frightfully keen on things like that," he added apologetically:
"Come along, you chaps! Everything's ready!" the others shouted, carrying up the kettle of boiling water.
A grand tea they had, although the Orphan upset a good deal of the only tin of milk over himself. That did not matter much, for they managed to save most of it with spoons.