Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [281]
Her captain warned the exalted visitor that it might be necessary to disturb his tranquillity by firing the ship’s main armament in support of British ground forces. Churchill, of course, enthused at the prospect: “Pray remember, Captain, that I come here as a cooing dove of peace, bearing a sprig of mistletoe in my beak—but far be it from me to stand in the way of military necessity.” Shortly afterwards Macmillan, Leeper, Papandreou and Damaskinos boarded the ship. The spectacle of the prelate in full canonical dress, complete with black silver-knobbed staff, brushing past sailors in the ship’s companionways who were celebrating Christmas in fancy-dress, impressed the British as irresistibly droll.
Churchill was captivated by the jolly archbishop, who made plain his revulsion towards the Communists and the atrocities they had committed. The prelate, the prime minister told MPs later, “struck me as a very remarkable man1023, with his headgear, towering up, morally as well as physically, above the chaotic scene.” Colville wrote: “We are now in the curious1024 topsy-turvy position of the prime minister feeling strongly pro-Damaskinos … while [Eden] is inclined the other way.” The next morning, the visitors rose to survey the battlefield—what Churchill called “the pink and ochre panorama of Athens1025 and the Piraeus, scintillating with delicious life and plumed by the classic glories and endless miseries and triumphs of its history.” The shore was bathed in bright sunshine. “One can see the smoke of battle1026 in the streets west of the Piraeus,” wrote Colville, “and there is a constant noise of shellfire and machine-guns. We had a splendid view of Beaufighters strafing an ELAS stronghold.”
Osbert Lancaster, an artist then serving as press attaché at the British embassy, described the arrival the next afternoon of Churchill, once more borne by armoured car from the harbour through the drab, dusty, bullet-scarred streets. The prime minister wore the uniform of an RAF air commodore: “The change in his appearance1027 since I had last seen him at close quarters some three years previously was marked. His face seems to have been moulded in lard lightly veined with cochineal and he badly needed a haircut. But the sound of mortaring and rifle-fire, combined with the historic associations of the countryside through which he had just passed, were clearly already having a tonic effect and he was distinguished from all his companions by an obvious and unswerving sense of purpose none the less impressive for being at the moment indeterminate.” The latter intimation of confusion was unwarranted. The British had already convened a conference of all the warring parties, to meet under Churchill’s auspices but Damaskinos’s chairmanship.
The embassy resembled a besieged outpost during the nineteenth-century Indian Mutiny. Power was cut off, while gunfire provided orchestration. Some fifty staff, many of them women, had been subsisting for nine days on army rations in conditions of acute discomfort. The ambassador’s wife, whom Harold Macmillan found more impressive than her husband, directed domestic operations with a courage and energy likewise worthy of a Victorian imperial drama. Fortunately for the inmates, ELAS guerrillas had only small arms, so the British remained safe if they avoided exposing themselves at doors and windows. Between meetings with commanders, Churchill met and applauded the embassy staff, for whom he afterwards arranged an immediate issue of decorations.
At four p.m., representatives of the Greek factions assembled around a long table in the freezing, otherwise barren conference room of the Foreign Office. The rattle of musketry punctuated the proceedings, with voices sometimes drowned out by rocket and mortar concussions. Churchill seated himself in the centre, flanked by Archbishop Damaskinos, Eden and Macmillan. At one end were American, Russian and French representatives. The Greeks filled in around them, leaving space at a vacant end