I MADE A TRIP TO DELPHI FROM ATHENS with some U.N.R.R.A. workers in August. The heat was the most stunning in decades. The U.N.R.R.A. people made me wear a sun helmet, and the American chocolate bars that we bought at the PX for the journey were immediately turned to syrup. No Greek ever understands setting out on such exploits at noon: they want to eat and go to sleep. So did we, as a matter of fact. Most things are uncomfortable in Europe; one does not often choose one’s company, and even when one has been able to do so, the springs of good humor and charm sometimes quickly dry up in the heat. But before we had gone very far, bumping and baking in the jeep, I felt that I had fallen by chance into a fortunate combination.
The sanitary engineer from U.N.R.R.A. who was taking me and who drove the car was one of those modest, soft-spoken, shrewd, amiable and very able men that we like to imagine representing us among the fevers and confusions of Europe, but comparatively rarely find. His interpreter was a young Greek woman, who expressed herself so well in both English and French that I was amazed when she told me later that she had hardly been out of Greece. She had seemed to me, when she joined us, the first really smart-looking woman that I had so far seen in Athens. I had been putting down the absence of chic—very striking when one came from Rome—to the non-availability of attractive clothes; and I tried to figure out whether Eleni, as she was always called by her boss—I had not caught her married name—had somehow managed to get a few things from Paris or whether a natural gift of style were carrying off inferior garments. She was slim, with bare arms and legs, so burned that they were partly purple, and she wore a simple dress of plain yellow, flat-soled sandals and a dish-shaped straw hat. She said that she had borrowed the hat, as she never ordinarily wore one and did not feel natural in them—she had lovely, slightly curly brown hair—but as she held onto the hat with one hand while she laid the other sideways in the crease of her lap to keep her dress from blowing, she would have done as a model for Vogue. She was a type of good-looking Greek woman that I was beginning to identify—I had already seen one winsome specimen in the young actress, Stasa Iatridou, at the Theatro Lyrikon. They have dark, very bright and alive but not enormous eyes, and small, round, rather recessive chins that do not challenge attention like Anglo-Saxon and Latin chins and may at first suggest weakness of character, as the eyes suggest extreme gentleness. But one soon feels that this impression is not correct and watches them with increasing interest, and I presently decided that Eleni was not only smarter but prettier than any other Greek woman I had seen. She had a pointed but not salient nose, and she seemed authentically and traditionally Greek in that she resembled—not the classical statues, which we always imagine fair—but the dark women with long hands and feet painted in black on the red clay Greek vases. Such a woman, however, gives a different impression when we see her alive and in all her dimensions. To an American—in America we have only the grin—the play of her eyes was enchanting: not the animated lifting of eyebrows that one finds in the Latin women and that has something of a routine coquetry, nor the quick narrowing of eyelids of the Slavs that suggests an animal wariness; but a marvellous sympathetic sensitivity, an instinct to respond and to please, that was always self-possessed and quiet, and a power to fascinate that was exerted so unobtrusively, so sweetly, that one felt it must be almost involuntary, as if it were a spirit that lived in her and that could not help looking out.
I was disappointed, however, by Eleni’s politics. We passed through a little town that was covered with crosses and crowns, painted in patriotic blue, and I asked her whether this really meant that the place was predominantly royalist. She replied, with childlike confidence, that it did, and added, after a moment, that she must tell her husband about this: it would please him because he was a royalist. She said she was a royalist, too. The town of Thebes, also curlicued with blue, was an abject and sordid place if one had expected a setting for Oedipus. We tried to decide which was the least forbidding restaurant—though without any invidious comment on the part of the U.N.R.R.A. man or myself, since Eleni, quite unlike some fine ladies in minor European countries, never apologized for accommodations or commented on the misery of the people. The glasses and decanters were dim with dirt, and most of the tableware showed traces of previous meals. We sidestepped the meat and got a lunch out of sliced tomatoes, boiled potatoes, sawdusty gray bread and a bottle of raw retsina. The tables were out of doors, and while we were eating, some diseased little children came in from the street begging. They were in rags and had sores on their faces. Eleni quietly gave them a good deal of the bread. She had two children of her own, she told me later. The principal feature of the lunch, however, was an English U.N.R.R.A. man whom the American had arranged to meet there. It is always a relief in Europe to find an Englishman who is not in the Army and who is trying to do something to help the people improve their own condition instead of to keep them from making trouble for the English. The most striking thing about such men, in contrast with most other exiled Englishmen, is a spontaneous middle-class cheerfulness which is inspired by the satisfaction of doing good and the excitement of seeing foreign parts. This man was reporting on the progress of a summer camp for Greek children in which U.N.R.R.A. had a hand. It was one of a large number of such camps that had been organized by the Greeks themselves in an effort to supply a ration of normal feeding and play to the starved and scared generation which had come into the world during the war. It was curious to hear this little man describing, with precise matter-of-factness and a kind of school-masterish humor, as if he had been talking of British Boy Scouts, the problems of such work under conditions that must have seemed to him abysmally uncivilized.
We did find the setting of Oedipus as soon as we emerged from the town: a row of black mountains, grim and simple, not rugged, not comparable, in the old cliché, to anything so human as the lifted heads of giants, but looking like thin flint blades against the pale and impoverished sky. I remembered that the Theban plague had been attributed to the incest of Oedipus, and reflected that we now even knew that malaria was not due to bad air but to a particular species of mosquito, and that the purpose of our U.N.R.R.A. expedition was to apply a scientific technique to the destruction of this mosquito. But in Greece such historical contrasts are not really felt as dramatic. The country has remained so primitive since the period of its great civilization that history does not show as a pageant. You do not look back on the landscape of Oedipus. You are right in it, and it is grand and uncanny. And those poor country people who were striken by the plague—working with distaffs and carrying clay jars—are still right there around you. They are nice, they are unusually courteous, but they are not at all “picturesque,” and it seems just as natural to an American to be trying to do away with their diseases as if they were sufferers from hookworm in Georgia.
We looped at a terrific rate along what the Guide Bleu for Greece calls “les lacets de la Voie Sacrée”—which also presents itself not as an historical sight but as an unsatisfactory actuality, full of dangerous hairpin curves with no fences to stop cars going over the side, bone-rattlingly rocky with ruts and bumps, and sometimes gnawed away in great chunks by explosions of bombs and shells. Saturated with dust like old carpets and lame and stiff from the jeep, we stopped at a café for a drink. It was several degrees worse than the one at Thebes. The waiter, in honor of Americans, produced a long-unlaundered tablecloth, stained all over with soup, egg and wine, that was dirtier than the top of the table. We picked out, among the people there, the men who looked as if they must be politicos and tried to figure out which parties they belonged to. Eleni told us which papers they were reading. I had been playing a game in Europe of trying to guess from their accents where the Americans I encountered came from. I hesitated, for the U.N.R.R.A. worker, between Missouri and Texas, and told him this but said I had decided on Missouri. “No, sir,” he said. “I was born in Texas, but I’ve been living in Missouri and I may have picked up the accent.” I hoped that Eleni was impressed by my feat, but it turned out that her ideas about America were extremely generalized and vague. She had not been able to understand why the Texan and I spoke differently, and she didn’t know what Texas was. “Texas is a state,” he explained to her, “that’s almost as big as the whole Balkans. It used to be a nation itself but we combined with the United States to help ‘em against the British.” This was not quite historically true, as Texas did not join the Union till almost the middle of the century, but it had perhaps a more general truth and may have reflected a preoccupation on the part of our companion, because he presently told me a story about a scandal in the American PX. In the earlier period in Athens, before there were any Americans, the British had put up a sign announcing that Canadians and Americans were excluded from buying at the British PX. Now that the American U.N.R.R.A. people and the airport personnel were there and the Americans had their own PX, the British had succeeded in obtaining something like fifty PX cards. They had been able to draw on these cards without revealing their nationality by having the supplies sent out to the airport; but the Americans had discovered this ruse and were calling in the cards. This U.N.R.R.A. man’s family name was the same as that of a famous frontiersman, and I asked him whether he were any relation. It turned out that he was a direct descendant and had the famous man’s first name, too.
Mount Parnassus and the Castalian spring, which we reached in the late afternoon, are gritty, gray and bleak affairs, quite unlike the poetical properties associated with their names; the great temple of the Delphic Apollo you cannot see at all from the road; and the town of Delphi, caught on this road like gobs of mutton on a shashlik skewer, has its center in a group of little inns, which have been turned into British billets and were crammed with soldiers off on holiday. Only the view below of the sweep of the Delphic valley, with its limitless olive orchard, made one expect some unimaginable mystery: all that the name of the oracle implies. No rooms, we thought, were fit for Eleni: the best thing that we could find was a primitive kind of closet, in a house full of British officers, that was imperfectly screened from the room next door to a partition that did not reach to the ceiling. So we drove on down to Itea on the water. The monotony of ruin in Europe becomes sickening and exasperating. Though one has already seen many such places, it comes as a shock to reach the Gulf of Corinth and find a quiet little seaside town in the same condition as Anzio and Naples. While the frontiersman went to see about lodgings, Eleni and I sat down on a bench and, fighting off the malarious mosquitoes, looked out across flat and dull water to where the hills, in the blue-gray air, were growing blurred like a Whistler nocturne, but more massive and more sullen. She had asked me whether Italy resembled Greece, and I tried to explain the difference. The Italian mountains were shaggy and the Italian country was planted. In Italy, there was too much color, too much flesh and too much smell, too many things sprouting and swarming; Greece was lean and bare but somehow on a higher plane. Yes, she said: it was just the difference between the Roman and the Greek Catholic Churches. The Roman Church proliferated madonnas and was preoccupied with sins and pardons, whereas the Greek Church went in for doctrine and tended to turn theology into metaphysics.
The U.N.R.R.A. man brought back a British officer: swarthy, with a dark cropped mustache, shoes and leather belt well-polished, and a smart lanyard, I think green, tucked into his left breast-pocket. His first name was Demetrius, as we saw from his trunk when he took us up to his room, and Eleni, who found that he did not speak Greek, thought that he had the look of an Egyptian; but he had mastered the British manner and practiced it with a consistency more relentless than the native English themselves. And he established the tone for our visit. He took us, with no comment whatever, through a small wooden door in a wall into a yard full of vegetables and chickens, where a mash made of tomatoes had been spread out to dry, and up a tiny outside flight of steps. Then, always with a dazed and indifferent air of not knowing whether he were going to do anything for us or whether we ought to be there at all, he produced a basin of water and—one cannot say that he showed or invited Eleni into a bedroom: she went in because it seemed the thing indicated. He left her with the curt injunction, “You carry on in there.” He was depressing: this English world of the war, with its apparently impassive front which actually masked resentment and weariness, I had been glad to leave behind in London, where anyone of whom you asked a direction would tell you to turn to the right and “carry on from there.” He continued to stand by detachedly while the U.N.R.R.A. man and I washed in the room across the hall. “How is it out here?” I asked. “Pretty boring?” “No: it’s all right,” he answered, and then, after a short pause, as if something more were demanded: “Most of the time is spent swimming.” I had already had occasion to note this use of the impersonal passive as one of their curious ways—like the use of “one” where we should say “I”—of suppressing the first person. So you will find A. N. Whitehead, in a brief autobiographical sketch for a volume devoted to his work in the Living Philosophers series, writing, “In the autumn of 1885, the fellowship at Trinity was acquired, and with additional luck a teaching job was added. The final position as a senior lecturer was resigned in the year 1910….” The trouble about this is that the effort at self-effacement is likely to become conspicuous and betray what the French call la morgue anglaise, of which, as a matter of fact, it is not really a corrective but a refinement. And the Lieutenant’s next remark seemed to me also characteristic (you had a good deal of time to reflect, because the gaps between remarks were immense, and my commentary expands in proportion): “The works are over there, I believe”—nodding to a corner of the yard which had a primitive and precarious W.C. “I never use it myself.” The natural thing to say, I thought later, would have been something like, “If you want to use the W.C., you’d better wait till we get to the mess. I don’t recommend the one they’ve got here”; but, though really, I think, a very good fellow, he was dominated by the British principle that you should never do anything for anyone without indicating a slight hostility.
Later, on the way to the mess, he told us, as if to back up his assertion that the British were quite happy at Itea, that they had been up to all hours the night before, had marched around the town singing, and had finally ducked the “padre” in the water as well as all the top-ranking officers. Coming into the mess from the crumbled town and the dull and stuffy darkness was startling and disorienting: it was as if one had found, in a provincial town, an unexpectedly competent revival of some vivid old period piece. With their red faces, their bright silk lanyards, their batman standing mute like a butler and vanishing in obedience to orders given without raising the voice or looking in his direction, their gin-and-bitters and their bottles of wine, their miraculously complete dinner, the London Times and the Evening Standard lying on the table behind them—these Englishmen had made for themselves a snug and self-sufficient little world that seemed more obviously anachronistic—because it was self-consciously historical: that is, because it represented the role of a certain nation accomplishing certain things—than the life of the olive-growing and goat-herding Greeks who were still nearly contemporary with Homer. And we did not fit into that world. I was surprised when the American told me later that he had made several trips to Itea and had already met these men. I said that they had all behaved as if they had never seen him before. “Oh, they always do that,” he replied, “but I just burst right in and start talking. They always treat me all right.” But though blank silence does not matter with men, it seems schoolboyish or boorish with a woman—especially so pretty a woman as Eleni (she had changed into a blue dress), who spoke English perfectly and was obviously a lady. Nobody talked to her or gave her a look; they went on with their own conversation. Only the major who was the ranking officer in the absence of the real C.O. and who had to preside at dinner made an effort to show some polite interest. “Hot drive?” he inquired. Yes. “No top on the car, I suppose?…Then why haven’t you got a big red beak like me?” One didn’t know whether this was self-depreciation, implying an indirect compliment, or whether the implication was that she had no business to look all right when the damned sun of her native Greece had so grotesquely disfigured an Englishman. Yet he was evidently the nicest of the officers: tall and lank, with long straggling mustaches, and with a touch of the Victorian innocence of Major Dobbin or the White Knight.
But it was only a question of moments before, from another quarter, the inevitable British attack on the unacceptable foreigner began. The young officer on my left and just across the table from Eleni, on learning that she was an Athenian, immediately proceeded to tell her that Athens was “an awful place,” and that the people there were lazy, untrustworthy, hard to get along with, inefficient and given to quarrelling among themselves. We Americans, I am sorry to say, allowed this rudeness to continue. We were a little in the situation that Hamburger had described to me from his trip to Trieste of being treated like captured enemies, and there was always the danger, between Americans and British, of exacerbated political argument. I had one at an Anglo-American party at the Grande Bretagne Hotel in Athens which culminated in my being asked by an aroused English correspondent what we Americans were doing “messing about in Europe.” But the young man who did not like Athens would not let the subject drop and kept going on and on, while Eleni, who had not, I imagine, ever encountered anything like this before, colored and did not reply. He was finally broken up by the chaplain, a sandy-haired little man sitting on Eleni’s right, who made some rapid comment in a voice so unassertive and low that I did not catch what he said. “Oh, the padre’s off on one of his tirades!” the man sitting next to him said sharply. “Yes, we all know that England has its faults, too!” But now the presiding major felt that some sort of intervention was needed. “We have no manners at this end of the table,” he said, with hardly a glance toward Eleni—putting an end to the unpleasant conversation but doing nothing to stimulate a better one.
Soon they were talking about water polo as if they had been dressing in a locker room. They had organized rival teams, which seemed to have become the chief interest of their exile. The U.N.R.R.A. man remarked that he understood that all the officers had been ducked the night before. “No officers were ducked,” said Major Dobbin. “Only the padre and the doctor.” (The doctor, it appeared, was Demetrius.) I asked the young man sitting next to me what else they did for amusement, and this started a new complaint. The women made things awfully difficult, he said; you couldn’t get a girl to come anywhere near you unless she brought along her mother and her father and her grandmother and her grandfather and her aunt. “Our chaps are livid about it!” he ended. There was, however, to be a dance that night—arranged by a Red Cross worker to raise funds for a local hospital—and they had thought up an ingenious device to detach the Greek girls from their chaperones. The parents had always made the girls sit down with them between dances; but for tonight the frustrated British had had built along one wall of the dance-hall a narrow forbidding bench and had had lined up at the end of the room several rows of more comfortable seats, and they were going to try getting the girls to sit down with them on the bench, where there was not room for many people and where their families might not want to join them.
After dinner, when the table was cleared and we were confronted by one another without the resource of food, conversation broke down completely. It was difficult to talk about England because the officers, apparently to a man, were opposed to the Labour government; and it was difficult to talk about Greece because you could not talk about Greece without “talking politics.” “No politics!” the major would say as soon as anyone grazed the subject. “Politics are taboo.” Demetrius, with the requisite casualness, asked the sanitary engineer about the American public-health organization that he had worked for before the war and wondered uninterestedly whether there were anything like it in England. Apropos of raising money for the hospital, he said that the medical situation was wretched in that part of Greece, and that it was odd that the local doctors had no confidence whatever in themselves and had the habit—though he’d only just been registered—of coming to him about the simplest problems. Finally we went to the dance. It was well enough attended and there were people gazing in through the windows, but—partly as a result of the heat, which made everyone exude water like sponges—it was not an exhilarating affair. The Englishmen did induce some of the Greek girls to sit on the narrow bench, but when they had got them there, it was very uncomfortable and did not especially promote better acquaintance. The major asked Eleni to dance. Every time when at the end of one of the dance tunes another was immediately to follow, the bandleader—in a voice that took the heart out of you—would order the dancers to “carry on.”
The next morning I went up to the temple. An English soldier drove me in a jeep. He maintained at first the same well-trained silence as the batman waiting on table—a silence which is a feature of their caste system but which always seems unnatural to an American. I asked him how it was out there. “Pretty dreadful!” he replied—he did not have to keep up face like Demetrius. It was impossible to get anywhere with the girls, he said; but he did not blame it all on their families. “They’re scared to death,” he explained, “to be seen talking to an English soldier.” I sounded him out on the elections and found that he was all for Labour. “Before the war,” he said, “the Conservatives didn’t have a very good record, did they?”
I got at Delphi my first intimation of the almost complete class line-up, on the issue of the Churchill government, between the English officers and the English troops. I afterwards talked with a great many English and I found no English soldier who had not voted for Labour and only one officer who had. Class-consciousness in the United States is likely to be sporadic or local: you do not find any social split that runs through the whole people like a fissure; and I was surprised by the uniformity of the class feeling of the British Army and the sharpness with which it was expressed. I had not realized how much Winston Churchill and the War Minister, Sir James Grigg, were disliked by the English soldiers. I learned that there had been some rather scandalous incidents on the occasion of Churchill’s appearances among the troops, and I asked one man why the soldiers were so bitter. “Why, Grigg’s probably an able administrator, as far as winning the war goes,” he said, “but neither he nor Churchill ever cared anything about the troops. They’ve always been treated like cattle, while the officers lived in luxury.” He expressed himself very strongly on the subject of Churchill’s cigar.
One factor in the situation which undoubtedly has been stimulating this sentiment on the part of the English troops is the contrast they have lately been making between the American soldiers and themselves. The Americans are better fed and they have more and better clothes. They are better taken care of. An officer who had been in Crete fixing up an old barracks for the American personnel of an airport told me that he was having an awful time because it was swarming with bedbugs and crab-lice, and they weren’t sure that D.D.T. would kill those things. “The English,” he said, “let their men be quartered in places like that. I’ve seen English soldiers living under conditions that would cause riots in the American Army. But we have to do something about it.” The relations between officers and men are more democratic with us—and more democratic than they were in the last war. Saluting on the street, in Italy and Greece at least, has virtually disappeared. I heard complaints about arrogant officers, and Mauldin’s observant cartoons are bitter about the officer who exploits his rank without taking its responsibilities. But such men are regarded as exceptional and their behavior as an obvious violation of the normal relations of life, whereas the whole technique of the Englishman in dealing with the men in his command is a traditional part of his system. Whether he is himself an insolent or an amiable man, his tone assumes class superiority. You see the whole situation in that British phrase “other ranks,” which, to an American, seems queer and offensive. We talk about “officers,” “noncoms” and “enlisted men”; they talk about “officers” and “other ranks.” In Athens, you see, for example, a sign on an inferior night club allotting it to “Other Ranks”—as who should say, “This is the place for the nobodies.”
What is most important of all, the American soldier is paid a great deal more than the British. This difference has evidently contributed to the extraordinary, the almost complete failure of the English and the American soldiers to establish any sort of relationship outside of their military duties. The Americans can buy more drinks, get themselves better girls and so forth, and this has made the English sulky. In general, they keep to themselves and have nothing to say to Americans. Once in Italy, when I had been visiting Herculaneum with a couple of G.I.’s and was separating from them to go back to Naples, one of them said to me, “There’ll be plenty of trucks coming along this road, but don’t bother with the British because they won’t pick you up.” When I asked him why not, he explained that they were like that. The Americans in the beginning had always picked up the British, but when the British wouldn’t reciprocate, we stopped. I feel sure that the resentment or envy of the English troops toward the Americans backfired in the soldier vote.*
As for the officers, many, of course, are simply Tories with all the old ideas. There are a few of the younger men that do not belong to the upper classes and have not been assimilated to them who tell you stoutly that they are backing Labour. I met a few at Labour meetings in England and was impressed by their sober air of knowing what they were about and being determined to put it through. They had nothing in common with the atmosphere of the mess that I visited at Itea, and they probably represent an emerging and important element in the contemporary English world.
But there are other kinds of motivations than the old-fashioned imperialistic ones which impel certain British officers who may once have been liberals or socialists to support the imperialistic policy of the continued occupation of Italy and Greece. A major whom I met in Crete seemed to me an example of these. He was a remarkably able man, well-educated, serious and active. He had been working in the underground in Crete before the Germans left and was on excellent terms with the inhabitants. He spoke Greek, and he had somehow found time to study the Minoan ruins. All this he had accomplished since he came, in, I think, the last year of the war, and he had become, it seemed to me, the Britisher in Crete most respected by both Cretans and Americans. He took me one day to a modest but very clean and decent house where we were given little glasses of ouzo with bits of watermelon, and where he talked at some length with the Cretan family in his exact and fluent Greek. When we were left alone for a moment, he explained, with a shade of a smile, that “an unfortunate thing” had happened: a car had been stolen from outside the house while they were having a party there. I assumed that he had come as an official to investigate the theft of the car. When we got back into the jeep, we were accompanied by one of the men with whom he had been talking in the house. He explained that he was taking him somewhere, and he drove him almost to the top of a hill, then dropped him when the road got too bad. The man walked up to some rudimentary houses that looked as if they were built of clay and contained only two or three rooms. “He wanted me to drive him all the way,” the Major explained, when we had turned around—with the usual faintly humorous attitude toward the childishness of the native—“but I didn’t want to risk it any further.” And he added, “People who live in the town in rather a sophisticated way like that usually come from houses like those.” Then he said something I did not understand, and I twice got him to repeat a word. “Of the girl I’m going to marry,” he said. “He’s the brother of my fiancée.” The old couple we had seen in the house were his prospective father- and mother-in-law. I distinctly got the impression that, in marrying a Cretan girl, he was settling down for a career in Crete. The completeness of his acceptance of Crete and his excellent relations with the inhabitants seemed to me at first surprising for an English officer abroad; but I learned later on that he was a Scotchman, which explained, I dare say, his willingness to ally himself with people from small houses. In Scotland, the serious world, the world of authority and learning, may have the but-and-ben close behind it. But he was typical of a whole group of officers that I met in the Mediterranean who seemed to be hoping to remain there as administrators. Conditions in England, as they have heard or seen, are not now particularly inviting: inferior food and clothes, life hemmed in by ration books, housing shortage, looming unemployment and a socialist Labour government which is not likely to try to solve these problems by letting up on the ration books. In Italy or in Greece, a British officer has the best that can be had, and he occupies a position of importance that he could hardly hope to find in England. Some of the younger men, like Bob Leigh in Rome, have spent five years in the Mediterranean immediately after getting out of Oxford or Cambridge and are better fitted for their present kind of work than they would be for anything else. (With the Americans, it is just the opposite: they are worse off, instead of better, in Europe, and practically all of them are frantic to get home.) As I say, these men are not all Tories. When I asked the Cretan major how he felt about the elections, he said, “It didn’t surprise me. If you followed the soldiers’ discussion groups, it was plain that the trend was that way. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It will give them a chance to show what they can do. They’ve been complaining about the government. Now they’ll have to take some responsibility.” But such people as this excellent major cannot afford to admit that these countries would be better off left to themselves.
I went one day to the British Army headquarters building in Athens to arrange transportation for a trip. I was told to go to Room 47, but when I got there I found the door locked. An English soldier stuck his head out of the door of the next office, and I explained my situation. “It’s just down the corridor,” he said, and, when I looked a little astonished, he added, with an hilarious cheerfulness, “Yes: we’ll inundate you with ‘em! There’s another 47!” I was so delighted by this—there is not much of Sam Weller surviving in bombed and rationed England—that I was still dwelling on it as I left the building. But as I passed out into the street, I saw something that affected me in a different way. There were two sentries guarding the entrance, standing rigid, heads back, eyes front, legs straddled apart and a rifle with a fixed bayonet gripped in the right hand and held out straight from the body as if by a marionette, with the butt planted on the pavement. Whenever an officer went in or out, these sentries, instead of presenting arms, would convulsively lift the rifle butt and bring it down on the ground, at the same time stamping one foot—as if they had been mechanical contrivances controlled, like the doors at the Pennsylvania Station, by photoelectric cells. If you watched them, as I did, for a moment, the effect was absolutely gruesome. It reminded me of the goose-step. They changed the guard there, I learned, with great pomp, every Sunday morning, completely stopping traffic on the street, which is one of the most important in Athens. An American in U.N.R.R.A. told me that he had asked an English officer why they persisted in doing this. “We do it at Buckingham Palace,” he answered. “But in London it doesn’t tie up the traffic,” the American pointed out. This made no impression on the Englishman. The truth is, of course, that, like the bayonets, this ceremony is intended to serve as a reminder and a threat to the Greeks. The mood of the good-humored fellow who talks about inundating the visitor with rooms numbered 47 makes no connection whatever with the automaton outside the door, nor have his feelings, his needs and his interests as yet been able to influence the latter’s acts.
* See Appendix A.