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¶Gramatikakis Panayotis, a Spartan lawyer, told how a band of extreme right-wing X-ites* broke into his house last May. "We were dining at about 11 at night, when five or six men came into the house. They killed my brother, who was a royalist though I am a leftist, broke my sister's arm, my mother's arm, wounded me in the leg, wounded another sister in the cheek. Now we live with relatives, six in one room."
¶Said the mayor of a village in the Tempe valley: "For months I have been trying to bring peace to the village. Not long ago I organized a big feast in the square. Everyone shook hands and said that henceforth they would live in peace. But in the middle of our feast, eight gendarmes walked up to the table and told all royalists that, if they did not leave at once, they would be considered traitors. So they left. Two nights later, the Communists attacked the gendarmerie post and shot all eight of them. Three days after that, a rightist band came across the river in boats, attacked the town, killed 16 people, and burned their houses. But when they started back across the river, the Communists were waiting for them with machine guns and killed about 60 out of 100."
"British, Go!" Who could bring peace to a land thus split by doubt and fear and bordered by its neighbors' militant hatreds? The British, who had come to Greece as liberators, had failed. The presence even of a friendly, homesick, token-size British army hurt Greek philotimo (the kind of sensitive self-esteem that makes a Greek waiter deliberately dawdle if he is harshly addressed, and a Greek day laborer feel equal to his King). Others besides Communists hummed the popular Communist ditty: "British, Go from Our Land!" In Athens last week, a fashionable young lady remarked: "It is fashionable to dislike the British."
The British failure to put Greece back on its political and economic feet was inevitable. All the British ever had a chance to do, or ever tried to do, was to maintain a minimum of order until the Greeks found leaders of sufficient wisdom and moderation to govern. The roster of current Greek political figures holds little hope for the future.
On the right, which is more reactionary than conservative, the chief figures are: Constantin ("Dino") Tsaldaris, an apoplectic, Egyptian-trained lawyer who heads the Populists, largest right-wing party (151 seats in Parliament) and General Napoleon Zervas (National Party, 24 seats), who fought well against the Germans, though he has a somewhat shady reputation (his party headquarters are in a gambling club).
The Greek Communists have not earned the reputation for successful cunning that crowns their colleagues in other lands. The senseless excesses of EAM terrorists have long held Communist gains below what they could have been. Best known Red bosses are: George Siantos, wartime Secretary-General of Greece's Communist Party, whose mustache (which he carefully brilliantines) is as trim as ever, but whose political strength is dropping; and Niko Zakhariades, present Secretary-General, a Moscow-trained' veteran party organizer who once shot a man in an Athens square. (Zakhariades claimed that his victim was a Trotskyite, but since the Greeks were not then using the Moscow ground rules, Zakhariades went to jail for nine years.)