should pillage Athens, than that Hellenism should become the laughing-stock of the world. The Powers may blockade us; they may bombard the Akropolis once more; they may occupy Greece. If necessary, we will bear all that. The Hellenic race is electrified to-day, and the spark cannot be extinguished. The Opposition will accord the Government a further delay of a week, or ten days at most, but then it will compel a declaration of war." As I have written elsewhere, "the responsibility for the war rests upon the Greek people. They willed it; they have suffered the results. It was their right then; it is their penalty now; it may be their salvation hereafter."

V

THE situation at Athens, the centre, being hopeless, I determined to see for myself what aspect it presented at the circumference, the frontier. The chief impression left, I may say at once, was that of the astounding enthusiasm of the people for war. Not only had I never seen, but I had never even imagined the possibility of, a national feeling at once so widespread and so profound. Never did reserves go to the front more willingly. Officers assured me that men left behind for garrison duty burst into tears. Women insisted upon all the men of their family, down to the last son, going to bear arms against the hereditary enemy. It was truly a revival of the spirit of the Spartan mother who gave her son his shield, saying, "Return with this or on it." In fact, hatred of the Turk is an ingredient in the blood of every Greek. An Athens banker was staying with his mother in the country, and mentioned to her that he was obliged to return to the city, as he had to call upon the Turkish Minister upon a matter of business. His mother looked at him with horror. "Surely," she said, "you would not enter that man's house!" I was dining one night with a wealthy Minister in Athens, and opposite to me at the table was a distinguished-looking, elderly man of great culture and charming manners. In the course of the conversation he casually remarked, "My father was hanged outside his own gate by the Turks, and my mother was sold as a slave by them." I was startled, but nobody else regarded the

remark as at all unusual, for almost every Greek family has some such experience in its records.

The little transport of six hundred tons in which I went north was stopped at Stylida to take on reserves. High-sailed feluccas came streaming out to us, with the swoop of albatrosses [p. 406]. Each was sunk to the gunwale with a load of shepherds from the mountains, who had left their wives and children in the charge of their big dogs-the same Molossian breed against whose attacks Œonus defended Heracles, and from which Ulysses saved himself by sitting down when he approached the fold of Eumæus and were boiling over with delight at the prospect of fighting. One and all declared every few minutes that if they were not allowed to fight the Turks they would never go home; they would go eis ta ẞovva—“to the mountains;" that is, they would become Klephts, like their ancestors. Magnificent fellows they were— "great, laughing, bearded children of the hills "--but discipline was the very last thing they thought of, and I pitied the officers who should take them in hand. They lay on the deck, heads and tails, like sardines in a tin, while the officers and ourselves spent the day upon the little bridge. Once a quarrel broke out over a bottle of wine-instantly, like the explosion of powder when a spark falls upon it, three or four men were at each other's throats before a couple of officers could fling themselves from the bridge and fight their way through the crowd. They threw themselves headlong upon the combatants and held them on the deck. One of these was so furious at being deprived of his revenge that he succeeded in wrenching himself out of most of his clothes and struggled for several minutes to throw himself overboard. I often thought of this incident when I read stories of indiscipline in the field. As for the lunatic notion of firing off ball cartridge-Government property-on the slightest provocation and in all directions, the uniformed soldiers indulged themselves to the full in the habit, and their officers had not sufficient control to try to prevent them, except by mild suasion. Later on, when I was standing by the Crown Prince on the royal yacht as it was leaving the Piræus, a bullet fired in this way from the shore whistled just over our heads.

One's progress to the frontier is neatly marked off by increasing dirt and dilapidation. Volo is a pleasant and well-built little town, with an admirable stone wharf nearly completed, a fairly good hotel, decent shops, and a tramway down the main street. A metre-gauge railway crosses the splendid Thessalian plain, the most fertile part of the kingdom of Greece, and, leaving Pelion and Ossa on the right, brings you to Larissa, apparently at the foot of the dazzling shoulder of Olympus itself. Thirtynine minarets rise among the flat roofs, and though the central portion of the town, the government offices, the parks, and the streets and squares, are the result of civilization, the back streets and the suburbs are still as the Turks left them; narrow, illpaved, dark and dirty. Of course the town was crowded with soldiers, and already it was impossible to get a bed there, even the corridors of the only hotel being filled with officers' camp-beds. There must have been 12,000 troops in the town, yet I failed to notice a single disorderly incident or a single individual the worse for liquor. The Greek peasant is notoriously a most temperate man, and certainly the insignificant pay of a private soldier would not permit him to indulge a taste for alcohol, if he had it. I mention this because the infamous slander was sent home by war correspondents with the Turks that before a fight brandy was carried round the line of the Greeks to stimulate the men. In a military sense, the frontier beyond Larissa was approached by three steps. Two hours driving along a straight road across the flat plain was Tyrnavos, in all respects a Turkish town. This was garrisoned by two battalions, with a little field and mountain artillery. Two hours farther on by horseback was the little mountain village of Ligaria, held by a company of Evzones-the "wellbelted ones," as their name signifies. A few kilometres beyond was the last Greek outpost, the little stone blockhouse on the summit of the Melouna Pass. The commandant at Tyrnavos was in charge of this part of the frontier, and, by telephone during the day and by flash signals at night, he was kept constantly informed of the movements of the enemy. I spent the night under his roof, and one picturesque incident of it I shall never forget.

At Tyrnavos were gathered together large numbers of insurgents, or irregular fighting men, Greek or Macedonian mountaineers, who spend their whole lives in guerilla warfare against the Turks [p. 404]. In bands of about a dozen, they cross the frontier by unfrequented paths, avoiding all villages and high roads, and, whenever an opportunity presents itself, descend quietly upon a Turkish Bey or a military post, shoot whom they can, take what they can find, and return as they came. These expeditions begin in the spring and continue till the autumn, occasionally lasting as long as three months at a time. One band is led by a woman, reckoned as determined a leader as any in Macedonia. The names of other leaders are household words in Greece, and strike terror into the Turkish authorities. Brufas is the most famous of all, but his adopted son, Demopolos, the young giant shown in my photograph, bids fair to rival him. Takes and Karvelas are almost equally famous. I noticed a crowd, one day, around a rather travel-worn man in national costume in the square at Larissa. I asked who he was, and was told he was no less a person than Takes himself. I said to him, "Are you Takes?" He replied, “I am.” "The famous Takes?" "You are good enough to say so." "Stand still a moment," I replied; "I want to photograph you." “That will not be a good picture," he said, "for I shut my eyes.' "Never mind, so long as you keep them open in Macedonia," said a bystander. Before these bands cross the frontier on a raid, each avrάpros stains his voluminous white petticoats with pungent black oil, with the twofold object of rendering himself less visible to the enemy, and, as he will not remove his clothing till he returns again, of preventing unwelcome visitors from taking up their lodging in it. These men are the modern representatives of the old heroic Palikars; and Commandant Alexandrou, telling some of the leaders that I was an English friend of Greece, asked them to prepare me that night a sucking-pig à la Palikar-that is, as they are accustomed to cook their lambs in the hills. They were delighted with the suggestion; he presented them with the pig, which was killed, disembowelled, sewn up again like a football, and suspended on a long stick thrust longitudinally through it, in almost less time

than it takes to tell. In the yard a wood fire was lighted, the staked pig was suspended over the hot embers on a couple of forked sticks driven into the ground; one man raked the fire together, one turned the spit, while a third ceaselessly basted it with a handful of feathers dipped in strong brine. The rest stood around and told stories and sang. The crackling meat, the dancing flames lighting up the grim, bearded faces of the native warriors, the weird melodies, the peals of laughter, the group of smart Greek officers looking on, the recollection of who these men were, how their lives were passed, and the wonder what their fate would be ere long, combined to form one of the most romantic scenes I have ever witnessed. There is a stanza in "Childe Harold " which shows how a similar scene had struck Byron's imagination:

Next morning- Sunday - when we reached Ligaria early, a similar scene (reproduced very inadequately in one of my photographs) awaited us. Two companies of Evzones, clad in coquettish tasselled caps, embroidered Zouave jackets, the spotless starched petticoats, which stand out from their waists like the skirts of a ballet-dancer, with their strong legs encased in thick woollen stockings, their leather slippers, with hob-nailed soles and scarlet silk pompons at the toe, were dancing [p. 406]. They form a huge ring, standing hand in hand; the leader starts a song telling of doughty deed of yore, then steps out, executing such pirouettes and flings as he can, and circles round the green, drawing the whole ring after him like a wounded snake. When his circle is completed, another takes its place, and so the curiously monotonous but not unimpressive dance goes on for hours. Lieutenant Tricoupis, who had been detached to accompany me, sprang into the ring, took his place at the head,

led off a fine old song, and showed them what dancing ought to be. These were the real fighting men of Greece, and it was easy to see that they would follow such an officer as willingly in battle as across the green that pleasant Sunday morning. In fact, it was they, and almost they alone, who held the Melouna Pass for two days against Edhem Pacha's army.

The powers of Europe, in their wisdom, refusing to Greece the limits assigned her at the Berlin Congress, had conferred upon Greece a frontier preposterous in itself and impossible to defend. The line runs across mountains and valleys, disregarding all topographical proprieties, and at one point a wedge-shaped valley, through which a river passes, projects down into Greek territory, the Turks having secured this for the sole reason that the mother of a former Sultan had been born in the village at its apex, and therefore it would have been an intolerable indignity to allow that spot to pass under Christian control. Every mile or so along the frontier there are a pair of little stone blockhouses, one Greek, one Turkish, with the entrances arranged en échelon to prevent rifle-fire reaching the inmates. Sometimes these are not more than fifty yards apart, and each is held by a lieutenant and a score of men. The men are only allowed outside by twos and threes, and they are changed secretly at night, so that the enemy shall not be able to discover their numbers. The Greeks in the Melouna blockhouse numbered forty, and were Evzones, exactly like those I had left at Ligaria. I learned, through the indiscretion of a Turkish officer, that in eight Turkish blockhouses there were one hundred and twenty-six men. The contrast between the two opponents was astounding. The Turkish lieutenant was a gray-haired man of fifty; his fez was filthy, his trousers, which looked as if he had worn them all his life, were tucked into dirty socks, a pair of frowsy slippers were on his feet; his tunic would have offended the senses of an old-clothes man

its buttons were mostly gone, and the string with which it was held together showed an undershirt in an indescribable condition. The men under him were little better. Their uniforms were of all shapes and colors; most of them wore old slippers,

nation, and after several minutes' reflection delivered himself as follows: "You say you are an English journalist and a private traveller. I do not know whether that is so or not. But I do know that you were accompanied to the frontier by a Greek military officer; that you did not come by the main road, where your papers would have been examined, and you would have either received or been refused permission to enter the town, but by the back way; that you have seen everything, and that you now desire to return to the Greek lines. I refuse to allow you to leave. You will have to await the return here of Edhem Pacha, the Governor-in-Chief, who will decide upon your case."

Now the situation was an exceedingly awkward one for all three of us. Mr. Berg was in Greece as the director of one of the largest arms-manufacturing firms in Europe, in negotiation with the Government for the supply of repeating rifles. Our dragoman Dimitri sank into such profound and obvious depression as to convince everybody who looked at him that we must be malefactors of the worst type. We begged him to at least smile, but he replied, with a catch of the breath, "Sir, how can I smile when I know that I have in my pocket two passports-one Greek and one Turkish, and that if they search me they will find them, and then I shall be made to serve in the Turkish army?" As for myself, my personality was for the moment unknown, but it was certain that if we were detained there a telegram would be sent to Constantinople reporting our names, and that there would be no little satisfaction at Yildiz to know that the author of certain letters about the Sultan, written in Constantinople a year before, had been arrested in a remote part of Macedonia with every appearance of being engaged in the pursuit of illicit information. If this once happened, we should assuredly not have been allowed to return to Greece, but the best that could have occurred to us would have been to be ordered to leave via Servia or via Salonica-that is, a fortnight's journey on foot, without an ounce of baggage, through the most fanatical and excited part of the Turkish Empire. The outcome of such a journey would be doubtful enough, even if the orders from Yildiz had not suggested that a

rifle might perhaps accidentally explode behind us. For myself, at that moment I would gladly have given a considerable part of what little I possess to have been across the frontier again. After prolonged discussion, conducted by Memduk Pacha with extreme urbanity, our last step was to make a joint formal protest. We rose together, opened our passports, held them toward him, declared that while, if he wished it, we were, of course, his excellency's prisoners, we protested as a British subject and an American citizen with their passports perfectly in order, with written official permission to cross the frontier, and coming with no improper intention into a Turkish town in time of peace

against being detained, and we added that we threw upon him the entire responsibility for his most unjustifiable action. We did not quite know what we meant by this last threat, but, to our intense relief, the shot told. Memduk sent for his chief of staff, and for a quarter of an hour they examined our passports and our private visiting cards, and then held a prolonged consultation. Then they returned, and the Pacha said: "You have acted in an improper manner, but as we have become convinced that you had no evil intention we have decided to allow you to leave. We shall therefore provide you with an escort of cavalry to the frontier."

Once upon those big horses, we did not draw rein until the Melouna Pass frowned once more above us. It was dark when we reached the top, and Lieutenant Tricoupis, wrapped in his cloak, field-glass in hand, was pacing the frontier in much anxiety. Curiously enough, the Turkish officer commanding our cavalry escort had been a fellow-student of his at a French military school. Therefore, in that high pass in the moonlight, strange recollections were exchanged between Greece and Turkey, and the bottle of raki supplied the wherewithal to toast such limited sentiments of good-will as could properly be expressed under the circumstances. The funniest part of the adventure was that on the brow-bands of the bridles of our horses were the two crossed cannon of the Greek artillery. Nobody in Elassona had been sharp enough to notice this, or the end of our adventure would have been of another kind, and one of the guns of No. 3 Bat