The Imperial Commissioner having concentrated and reorganized his troops at Bondapoulo, a village of the plain of Keramia, transferred his base of operations to Kalyves, on the sea and at the mouth of the river which drains the Apokorona, and as soon as the change was effected commenced his march toward Krapi, the main pass of Sphakia. The troops were first opposed at Stylos, the first of the natural positions of which the country affords so many, and were repulsed in a first attack. The vanguard were of Egyptians, who were in this campaign systematically put foremost and encouraged in every brutality and ferocity, in the hope apparently of making them good troops, their natural temper being unfavorable to that end. Though the result of this treatment certainly did show that nobody is so brutal and devilish as a coward, and the fellahs eminently distinguished themselves in devastation and killing of defenceless people, they never succeeded in exciting any other feeling than hatred and contempt in the Cretan. At Stylos, as in other places, they were beaten with ease, and it was only on the following day, when the Cretan positions were flanked and the irregulars sent forward, that the insurgents evacuated their strong positions. In this affair the Egyptian general, Ismael Pasha, urging his troops to retrieve their disgrace at Vrysis, was mortally wounded. The troops attacked the position of Campos, which was abandoned by all combatants, the remaining inhabitants being put to death, and the insurgents relinquished all the country as far as Vafé to the Turks, who ravaged it in the most thorough manner, with the extreme of barbarity and atrocity to all the Christian inhabitants who were unfortunate enough to fall into their hands. In the neighborhood of Kephalá there are numerous grottoes, partly natural and partly excavated, as places of refuge from immemorial times, some of them celebrated in the traditions of the island for the sieges they had maintained. Into these many of the Christians retreated, taking with them their effects. In one of these about two hundred villagers, mostly old men, women, and children, had taken refuge, and, refusing to surrender, were stifled in the cave.[G] A woman came, one day, to my house to obtain protection and charity, having been brought a prisoner to Canéa, and narrated to me the circumstances of her capture. She was, she told me, on her way from her village to a larger one in the Apokorona to purchase bread, and was in the company of eleven men, all Christians and unarmed, going with the same intention. They were stopped in the road by a party of Seliniote irregulars, who deliberately beheaded the men and piled their heads in the path, taking her with them to headquarters to extort from her information as to the places of concealment of her compatriots. Giving no desired indications, she was about to be beheaded, when two Egyptians whom she had sheltered and fed after the defeat of Vrysis recognized her, and, stating her kindness to the Pasha, she was released and sent to Canéa.
The consequence of this severity was not what Mustapha Pasha expected it to be, to intimidate the Cretans into submission, but to drive them into the high mountains, where hundreds perished from hunger and cold. As children as well as adults of both sexes were welcome game to the fanaticism called out by the first taste of Christian blood, and no partial submission was accepted, the cruelty being the means to an end quite characteristic of Turkish policy and the nature of the Albanian, who years before had earned the title of the "butcher of Crete"; and as the submitted had no power to induce the submission of the more resolute insurgents, there was no possible safety to any portion of the population except in the mountains, where a large proportion of the weakest died, leaving the men unencumbered for vengeance. Every step of the Turkish authorities was a blunder. Submission being useless unless complete, and complete submission out of the power of any one to enforce, there remained only complete insurrection, and this the commissioner succeeded in exciting, with a renewal of all the old religious animosity, and a desperation natural to men to whom surrender brought no protection, and submission no guarantee.
[CHAPTER VI.]
No resistance was after this offered until Vafé was reached. Here about two hundred Greek volunteers and a thousand Cretans, under the command of Hadji Mikhali, of Lakus, and Costa Veloudaki, of Sphakia, were concentrated. The Cretan chiefs were opposed to any regular fighting, and counselled a retreat into the ravines, where they could entangle the troops and attack them without serious risk to themselves, while a pitched fight was not only not in the way of the islanders, but, if lost, as they considered it must be in view of the overpowering Turkish forces, it would discourage the movement greatly. Zimbrakaki, the commander of the volunteers, with the most of his men, wished not to abandon so strong a position, at which they had, moreover, constructed a strong redoubt, without fighting, and it was decided to make a stand. The majority of the Cretans, however, recognizing no authority but that of their captains, withdrew before the fight, which, had Mustapha been a commander careful of the lives of his troops, might have been decided by flanking movements without firing a shot, as his army was composed of ten thousand regulars and fully three thousand irregulars, Albanian and Cretan, while the Christians were hardly five hundred. No forces the committee could have assembled would have made the stand a prudent or justifiable one under the circumstances, and its result was what the Cretan chiefs had foreseen. Mustapha, as usual, opened with a direct assault of Egyptians, which was repulsed with heavy loss; but, in the meantime, a body of Albanians were engaged in climbing the heights which protected the flanks of the position, and so nearly succeeded in surprising the Greeks that they only saved themselves by precipitate flight. A few gallant fellows, indifferent to the odds or the certainty of defeat, were killed, taken prisoners, or escaped by suicide. The committee, with the Hellenes, retreated to Askyfó, and made the best preparations to defend the ravine which their demoralized forces permitted; and so formidable was the position that Mustapha decided not to attack it, but to be content with the moral advantage of the victory at Vafé, which was nearly fatal to the insurrection, in spite of the triviality of the losses of the Christians, which did not surpass thirty killed of both Hellenes and Cretans. The latter had attributed invincibility to their allies, and to find them defeated so utterly at the first encounter paralyzed the insurrection for the moment; and, if the Turkish commander had moved energetically on Askyfó, it is not probable that any serious defence would have been made, and, as there was then no other centre of resistance, the taking of Askyfó would have left the movement without any power of forming another nucleus of moral force. The committee must have dispersed, and the thousands of families assembled in Sphakia must have surrendered.
But Mustapha, remembering his former disaster in the defile of Krapi, hesitated, waited at Prosnero and in the Apokorona, while the Sphakiote chieftains craftily negotiated, and made their calculations on the amount of assistance they could get from Greece, the measure of concessions or personal advantages they could hope for as the price of submission, and prolonged the practical truce until the reaction from the effects of the late defeat began. Hadji Mikhali, with his Lakiotes, went back to Lakus and Theriso, entirely abandoned by the troops, and resumed his old policy of little and incessant raids to harass the Turkish commander and keep his own men from the despondency of inaction.
The immediate salvation of the insurrection was, however, the arrival of Col. Coroneos, the ablest by far of the Greek chiefs, and the only one, it would seem, who was capable of adapting his plans to the kind of material he had to work with. He arrived too late either to prevent or assist in the battle of Vafé, and, seeing the danger the insurrection was in of dying of despondency and the dissidence of its chiefs, moved at once into the central provinces, and, collecting together such Cretans as he could find, surprised and cut off two small Turkish detachments, and with unimportant advantages reawakened the enthusiasm of the fickle and excitable islanders, gained for himself the prestige of victory, and rapidly recruited a considerable force.
At the same time, slight advantages were won by Hadji Mikhali near Canéa, and by other chiefs in the eastern provinces, where an Ottoman detachment had been disastrously repulsed in an attempt to penetrate into the Lasithri district. Coroneos, with a small body of volunteers, established his headquarters at the old fortified convent of Arkadi, a building of Venetian construction of such size and strength as to be a fit depot of supplies and place of refuge as against anything less than a regular siege. From here he harassed the detachments which issued from Retimo, and kept alive the movement in the district between Sphakia and Mount Ida, and on several occasions menaced the city of Retimo, which is fortified by a low wall, almost unprovided with artillery. Mustapha, after nearly a month of indecision and negotiation, in which the Cretans showed a diplomatic ability and duplicity quite worthy the antique reputation of the race, found himself compelled to act against the new dangers which Coroneos had conjured for him. He moved with great rapidity from Episkopi, where he had made his headquarters in order that he might watch both the great passes into Sphakia, Krapi and Kallikrati, to Retimo, and thence to the attack of Arkadi, which had been left with a small detachment of volunteers and about one hundred and fifty Cretan combatants, including the priests. Besides these, there were about one thousand women and children, whom Coroneos had made every attempt to dissuade from remaining, but, on account of the opposition of the Hegumenos, who would not consent to the expulsion of his own relatives, the rest could not be induced to leave a place of traditional security, well provisioned and adequately defended against any attack they could conceive of. Coroneos only persuaded about four hundred to return to their villages. The Greek commander, with the main body of his forces, had been watching Mustapha after his taking position at Episkopi, and followed his movements to prevent, if possible, his investment of Arkadi. Taking the circuit of the hills, he only reached the convent after Mustapha's vanguard, which he engaged until nightfall, when his men mostly withdrew to the mountains, and Arkadi was necessarily abandoned to its fate.