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By Root 14157 0

which I knew I should be longing when once more the miasma of Egypt had closed over my head. On the evening of departure the whole village turned out to give us the promised farewell dinner of lamb on the spit and gold rezina wine. They spread the tables and chairs down the whole length of the small main street and each family brought its own offerings to the feast. Even those two proud dignitaries were there — mayor and priest — each seated at one end of the long table. It was cold to sit in the lamplight thus, pretending that it was really a summer evening, but even the frail spring moon collaborated, rising blindly out of the sea to shine upon the white tablecloths, polish the glasses of wine. The old burnished faces, warmed by drink, glowed like copperware. Ancient smiles, archaic forms of address, traditional pleasantries, courtesies of the old world which was already fading, receding from us. The old sea-captains of the sponge-fleets sucking their bounty of wine from blue enamel cans: their warm embraces smelt like wrinkled crab-apples, their great moustaches tanned by tobacco curled towards their ears.

At first I had been touched, thinking all this ceremony was for me; I was not the less so to find that it was for my country. To be English when Greece had fallen was to be a target for the affection and gratitude of every Greek, and the humble peasants of this hamlet felt it no less keenly than Greeks everywhere. The shower of toasts and pledges echoed on the night, and all the speeches flew like kites, in the high style of Greek, orotund and sonorous. They seemed to have the cadences of immortal poetry

— the poetry of a desperate hour; but of course they were only words, the wretched windy words which war so easily breeds and which the rhetoricians of peace would soon wear out of use.

But tonight the war lit them up like tapers, the old men, giving them a burning grandeur. Only the young men were not there to silence and shame them with their hangdog looks — for they had gone to Albania to die among the snows. The women spoke shrilly, in voices made coarsely thrilling with unshed tears, and among the bursts of laughter and song fell their sudden silences — like so many open graves.

It had come so softly towards us over the waters, this war; gradually, as clouds which quietly fill in a horizon from end to end. But as yet it had not broken. Only the rumour of it grippe d the heart with conflicting hopes and fears. At first it had seemed to portend the end of the so-called civilized world, but this hope soon proved vain. No, it was to be as always simply the end of kindness and safety and moderate ways; the end of the artist’s hopes, of nonchalance, of joy. Apart from this everything else about the human condition would be confirmed and emphasized; perhaps even a certain truthfulness had already begun to emerge from behind appearances, for death heightens every tension and permits us fewer of the half-truths by which we normally live. This was all we had known of it, to date, this unknown dragon whose claws had already struck elsewhere. All? Yes, to be sure, once or twice the upper sky had swollen with the slur of invisible bombers, but their sounds could not drown the buzzing, nearer at hand, of the island bees: for each household owned a few white-washed hives. What else? Once (this seemed more real) a sub-marine poked up a periscope in the bay and surveyed the coastline for minutes on end. Did it see us bathing on the point? We waved. But a periscope has no arms with which to wave back. Perhaps on the beaches to the north it had discovered something more rare

— an old bull seal dozing in the sun like a Moslem on his prayer-mat. But this again could have had little to do with war. Yet the whole business became a little more real when the little caique which Nessim had sent fussed into the dusk-filled harbour that night, manned by three sullen-looking sailors armed with automatics. They were not Greek, though they spoke the tongue with waspish authority. They had tales to tell of shattered armies and death